Man you must not read many of my posts especially on this subject. For several years now I have been preaching about the same thing, and I have advocated shooting spikes or young bucks to help slow down the deer population decline. Perhaps 5 or 6 years ago I posted a very long post entitled "Are we killing off the cash cow" and the moderators were kind enough to put it on the main page for a couple of weeks. Earlier in another post I put up lots of facts from the IDNR page about the declining population and harvest numbers and asking hunters to not harvest as many does. I do think it is unrealistic and counter productive to tell inexperienced deer hunters to not shoot ONE doe if that is their only chance to harvest a deer, or to make them feel guilty for shooting a doe instead of passing on it to hope for a buck of some kind. I know what shooting a doe does to the next couple of years population and have broken that down several times with birth rates and survival rates and ratios between buck and doe fawns for several years into the future in posts on here and other boards. Almost every thing that I predicted several years ago have come to pass based on what I saw then as over harvest of does.
It is not like shooting one hen pheasant at all because hens are not legal game, where as female deer are legal game, at least for now! I rarely get defensevie about my posts here, but at least at first this one set me off a little.
Now that I have thought it through a little more I do understand that the goal of all of us is to improve or at the very least maintain our deer hunting, but that there are differing opinouns on how to acomplish it. We all need to continue expresing our ideas and sharing our experiences and maybe we can help each other at least a little. :way: