ButchA

Good point, Yano... From what I have heard, PA is in bad shape. 1.3 million hunters and thanks to Gary Alt (I think that's his name), the deer are becoming scarce up there.

Thanks for the comments on my very first deer!

Butch A.

keyshunter

Congratulations on your deer Butch. A hunter's first deer is an important milestone.

I have hunted Pa. for over 50 years. In the early years, it was not unusual to hunt all day and not see a deer. Then the population grew to a point that it was almost imposible for a hunterNOT to see deer.

Most of the current flap in Pa. is not about antler restrictions. It is about the slaughter of does to reduce populations.

yano

Which was implemented to make room for the increased population of bucks as a result of what?

srwshooter

personally i'd rather have hunters taking young bucks for food than see trophy hunters that could care less about meat. i've lots of trophy bucks that were hauled around till they spoiled. where we hunt on farm land the landowners will want you to take a as many deer as you can. they only let you hunt to thin the population because of crop damage. there are plenty of va. trophy bucks. fact is the state is producing better bucks every year. i live 1 mile from the shenadoah national park ,and there will never be any shortage of deer or bear here and with so many people complaining about the crop damage they just ,must be killed. we don't kill every small buck we see ,but we do kill what we want to eat. and i process all my own deer, i wouldn't even think of letting someone else do it.

the pressure that has been put on young hunters to kill trophy racks eveytime you hunt ,is in lots of ways hurting our sport. we hunt for the fun of the hunt ,not the kill and if a trophy comes along ,thats fine. but if not i'll eat the little ones. i've seen young hunters stop hunting because of this pressure. i just not right ,this trophy thing will kill our sport in the long run.

there are plenty of land management programs on land near us. they are growing bigger bucks, but most hunters here are not trophy hunters.

i would guess that half of the trophy deer killed near me are not killed legal anyway. they either die at night or over bait. and now with the new callin game checking you can kill them a month before the season and nobody will ever know.

keyshunter

Actually, it was implemented to reduce the overall deer population. A large percentage of the "does" that are killed, are button bucks. This, of course, does nothing to raise the population of bucks.
That said, Pa. has a very large number of licensed hunters (read dollars), and because of this, and the fact that the Pa Game Commission purse strings are controlled by the legislature,wildlifeprograms often tend to be politically influenced.

yano

Your are correct at least about the political part, that's exactly why PA's AR/HR program was implemented simultaniously. AR was the carrot for HR; there weren't two seperate selling video's done for AR and HR.

Bottom line is here are the current results, of PA's joint AR/HR progam. I guess you must want Virginia to have similar results. Not only is their buck harvest down, but so is the number of general tags sold (which will translate into a future license increase).

Year total buck # of tagsSuccess/general tag
1998 = 181,449 / 1,071,205 ======== 16.9%
1999 = 194,368 / 1,033,315 ======== 18.8%
2000 = 203,221 / 1,038,486 ======== 19.5%
2001 = 203,247 / 1,047,820 ======== 19.3%
2002 = 165,416 / 1,017,154 ======== 16.2%
2003 = 142,270 / 1,018,248 ======== 13.9%
2004 = 124,410 / 1,013,866 ======== 12.2%
2005 = 120,500 / 964,158 ======== 12.4%


I know several successful farmers, but I don't know of any that ever got that way by killing off their prize bulls.

keyshunter

I could be wrong, but Iseem to recallthat AR in Pa was first implemented in 2002 or 2003. Idon't have a good handle on this date, because, although I hunt Pa every year, I shoot only does and/or mature bucks.One would logically expect the total buck kill to decrease with AR in effect.

Also, the general idea is not to kill off the "prize bulls". Deer are not barnyard animals, and anyone who has hunted extensively knows thatmature bucks are not that easy to kill. The idea is to perpetuate their genetics and allow time for these genetics to surface intheir progeny. But, it you want to use the cattle analogy, killing off young bucks is like your farmers sending their young bulls to slaughter before they have a chance to prove themselves.

yano

AR was implemented in PA in the Fall of 2002, and the Good Doctor claimed that the buck harvest would return to nomal after one year.

Now we are getting somewhere, VA only is only 4k sqmi less in size than PA, has roughly 60% hunters fewer hunters, and is ranked 7thof states in total deer population. That should result in plenty of mature buck to go around, thus proving that AR really isn't needed in Virginia at all.


I'm done for today, I have to go and try to bust a few Yotes to do my part in trying to get VA to #6 in Deer population.

ButchA

Ding! We have a winner... But, yet AR shouldbe up to the hunter to ensure a spike buck grows to be a nice mature 8 pointer. With VA's deer population, AR isn't really needed. It should be left to the hunter to choose what he wants to do (let the li'l guy walk, or bag him).

Butch A.

chr103yod

I lived in VA for five yrs and killed two pretty nice bucks, and a couple small bucks. I always seen deer when I hunted. I think AR's would be a great idea. I grew up in PA and moved back two yrs ago. I have hunted in PA for 20 yrs and the last two yrs have totally sucked. The AR thing is fine the problem is they give out 20-50 thousand doe tags per management area and open doe season for two weeks during buck rifle season. The first three yrshunters killed everything. Gary Alt the genius biologist told us all that we were doing the deer herd a huge service by shooting as many doe as possible. Now there's hardly any deer left on state land. Private land is better. PA really screwed up by killing off all the doe and making the rules the same for public and private land. If they stop the doe massacre things will be better in a few yrs.