Ghostfarm wrote: I don't think many would disagree with that statement but as they always say, "the devil is in the details". Where the disagreement will arise is in everyones perception of what it means to have a balanced deer herd and in the question of how close to the carrying capacity do you manage to.

Because there is such a wide range of goals as individual hunters, there will never be total agreement on what is the best herd scenario let alone the question of how to achieve it. There are hunters that absolutely focus on the meat side of hunting and and will take 5 or 6 deer a year if they can. They literally look forward to filling the freezers with venison to suppliment the cost of feeding their families. They don't give a damn about what sex the deer they take is or how big the antlers are on a buck, they just want to get the meat with as little time spent as possible. A great year is one when they can fill all of their tags in the first couple of days of shotgun season. I also know hunters that are pure trophy hunters and won't even eat a bite of the meat. A perfect season for them would be to kill 1 monster on the last possible day of the season after spending countless hours in a treestand and passing on dozens of smaller (but still big) buck. They might understand the need to trim doe from the population but would rather somebody else did it. They will shoot a doe only out of a sense of "it's the right thing to do" to improve their chances of killing a big buck in the future.

This of course describes 2 ends of the spectrum but it sort of puts in perspective the task the DEC has of trying to make everyone happy. It isn't hard to accept that herd management philosophies for the opposite ends of this spectrum would indeed be very very different. So what to do?

I for one would like to see a philosophy that targets more to the middle here and AR is absolutely not in the middle. AR is a management philosophy that is clearly skewed to the trophy side of the equation. Just look back through the posts or notice in conversation how the AR advocates talk about it. To steal a slogan from one of the president's campaingns... "It's about the horns stupid!"

But it shouldn't be just about the horns. It isn't change to AR or don't change anything. There are many ways to change here in NY without a focus on big racks. I've proposed a couple. Other states have different ways as well. We should all consider the alternatives before jumping on the AR bandwagon.