ORIGINAL: Sylvan
IF in your particular area there is an over abundance of doe....lets call the ratio 8 to 1..
then if its in your legal means, kill all the doe you can! And try to persuade everyone else to do the same.....
What do you mean by 8 to 1. 8 doe to 1 buck, 8 mature doe to 1 mature buck, antlerless to antlered? Also WHEN do you mean? All of these ratios change rapidly and by a lot during the hunting season so again WHEN in the cycle are you talking. Antlerless to antlered ratios of 4 to 1 can easily become 20 to 1 in heavily hunted ares but just before hunting season it is not mathmatically possible to have any of these ratios that high if we assume normal birth and fawn mortality rates. Just saying 8 to 1 means almost nothing. Also what if your area only has about 8 or 10 deer total per square mile. Do you still want to shoot all the doe you can when total population is so low and that particular habitat can support twice or 3 times that numer?
Sylvan, those are EXACTLY the reasons I would rather put my faith in the F&G biologists to know their job and set the seasons/limit CORRECTLY. I do not have those answers, the data to get those answers or the education to make sense of the data. F&G biologists DO. They should set the season, then we as stuards of the herd, do what is required by the biologists for the HEALTH OF THE OVERALL DEER HERD. The overall health should come first, that is what QDM is about, somehow it gets mutated into monster bucks.