I know Ohio has no AR. Don't think many if any provinces in Canada do either. None of these states have AR's do they?

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Points About Points
Each year more states are looking at harvest restrictions based on antler points, but will these controls have negative effects on the long-term health of our deer?
By Jill J. Easton

"The high harvest of younger bucks limits the breeding stock to the smarter, faster and genetically superior animals."
he deer calmly meandered the sandy path down to the stream. It was a big-bodied whitetail, but at 80 yards in the twilight I couldn’t see whether it was wearing antlers or not. Since it was the last day of the White River National Wildlife Refuge either-sex hunt, whether it was a buck or doe didn’t make much difference. I shot, and seconds later the deer dropped nearly at my feet.

On examination of my trophy, it was obvious he “weren’t quite right,” to use an old southern expression. He sported only spindly five inch spikes and was a testicle shy of a full set. A day later, field dressed, he pulled the scales to more than 130 pounds. By no means a small deer, but not one that anyone would want as the father of future generations.
Since Arkansas has a statewide three-point-on-one-side legal buck standard, in any place other than the White River Refuge, I would have been a game law violator. According to Arkansas regulations, he wasn’t a legal deer outside the Refuge and possibly would never have become one. This buck would have remanded in the breeding population until he died of old age, most likely passing on his defective genes to generations of whitetails.

Can one-size-fits-all-deer management work? Do regulations that work in mountains effectively apply to deer that live in farm and forest deltas? Will harvesting the best and the biggest eventually lead to degeneration in deer herds where it’s illegal to harvest genetic misfits? If game management agencies don’t make the right decisions, will there be die-offs from diseases like foot and mouth, black tongue or chronic wasting disease, or will herds end up starving? There are many unknowns and unanswered questions about maintaining the health and size of the growing deer herds all across the United States. Each year more states are looking at harvest restrictions based on antler points, but will these controls have negative effects on the long-term health of our deer?

Today, only two states (Arkansas and Mississippi) have a statewide point restriction on bucks. Other states manage on a regional, wildlife management area or other basis. Alaska has 26 game units with varying regulations. In Florida and Georgia, some areas are open for taking any deer while other areas have point-restriction rules for trophy bucks. Pennsylvania is in the process of altering its regulations and attempting to lower the doe-to-buck ratio; eventually they hope to work set their point regulations by geographical boundaries rather than on a county-by-county basis. Finally, states like Texas manage deer herds on a ranch-by-ranch basis and the landowner’s considerable input on what deer can be harvested.

Mississippi’s Experience

Mississippi, was the first state to put point regulations into law. The Legislature voted in its two-point-on-each-side restriction in 1995. Now, Mississippi hunters are almost universally in favor of regulations that prevent the harvest of spike bucks. Seven years into the program, hunters are seeing more big deer and bucks with better looking antlers.

“Hunters are jumping backflips,” said Larry Castle, Deer Coordinator for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Fisheries and Parks. “We’ve had an 85% approval rating since the law went into effect. They are seeing an older age class of deer, and for most hunters bigger is better. The hunters are happy, the taxidermists are happy and the average age of bucks harvested has risen from 2.1 years to 3 years old.”

The legislative change was accepted by hunters because the MDWFP worked very hard to educate and maintain a partnership with residents of the state before and after the new regulations were adopted. Biologists and conservation officers traveled the state holding meetings promoting sound deer management, perhaps as a result of this education effort, the legislature voted in the four-point rule.

During the middle part of the last century, Mississippi, like most states, was almost deer-less, so hunters in the state became strong believers in bucks-only harvest and leaving all does for seed. Now that the state deer population has climbed to nearly two million, doe hunting has been legalized because the male-to-female ratio was seriously unbalanced. Old beliefs die hard, and many hunters still refused to take a doe. After the four-point rule went into effect, more does were harvested and young bucks walked, the buck-doe ratio settled into a better balance.

“The antler restriction is a good first step in improving our deer herd,” said Castle. “It’s gotten the hunters thinking about deer populations.”

Seven years later, however, there are growing concerns that the quality of the deer herd will become degraded if inferior bucks, (like the one I took in Arkansas) are protected and allowed to breed.

A study conducted by Mississippi State University found that better bucks survived to breed in a random harvest rather than under the current four-point rule.