Think about this for a minute. We have heard that the deer are being wipe out here or there since the first bonus tags came out. Yet the annual kill continues to rise. Wouldnt it stand to reason that the kill would have to crash if the doomsayers are correct?
If you did a little reading instead of just relyng on what Alt tells you and your opinionns ,you would know that the harvests have decreased dramatically in the areas where the herd has been reduced. The harvest in Elk Co. dropped from 7,328 in 1995 to 5120 in 2003. At the same time the buck harvest dropped from 3,255 to 1920. Is it any wonder the hunters in 2 G aren't happy!
Im talking about the total kill. The buck kill is down due to AR, the fact that some are now taking a doe and then thye're done etc.
Don't you even understand the most simple concepts of deer management and AR. The 1.5 buck saved during the first year of AR and become 2.5 buck that replace the 1.5 buck that are saved the second year,so as Alt said the buck harvest should return to normal in the second year of AR.
Furthermore , the total harvest is not an accurate indicator of the PS population,since the anterless harvest are determined by the number of anterless tags issued rather than by the OWDD. Even if the herd had been reduced from 1.6M PS deer to 1.2M PS deer there would still be somewhere close to 1M PS anterless deer for the hunters to choose from If hunters harvested 33% of the 1 M PS anterless deer the harvest would be 330K. So it simply doesn't follow that a smaller herd means smaller total harvests ,at least in the short term.