My theory on why nothing has changed: Your big money hunters and people with influence still primarily spend their fall weekends in the high population areas in Southwest AL. They have no first hand experience of what its like to hunt a property with great habitat and see 1 deer all season. They (including Sykes) don't empathize with the hunters in low population areas and dismiss their complaints as if they need to spend more time building habitat. Or, even worse, you get the common response of "well stop killing does, no one is forcing you." With the small acreage tracts that dominate outside of SW AL, you don't individually have the power to control the doe killing over an area of several square miles. One guy on 10 acres can wipe out the doe population in a square mile tract.
Bingo. If you have 12,000 acres in Dallas or Bullock county, you do need to kill more does. And that's where the rule-makers hunt, and always will.
Yep. In counties mostly made of secluded 1,000+ acre tracts the best approach is to have relaxed doe laws and let the property owner or club decide how to best manage the herd. In counties where the average wooded tract is 100 acres you need the state to manage the herd (the only reason DCNR exists) and actually enforce basic, common sense laws to guide individual owners to share a common management plan. The fewer and less complex the laws are, the better. Restricting doe killing to a few weekends a year (or eliminating it altogether) in counties where you know the herd is struggling is not a complex law and anyone who has ever been around a cattle farm can understand the logic of it.
Show me a county with low deer numbers but decent habitat (anywhere with rotational logging operations has good enough habitat) and you could have a great deer herd that is enjoyable to hunt in 4 years with just a few deer hunting rules: Only hunt in season, no night hunting, no road hunting, no trespassing (including hunting dogs), no doe killing. You wouldn't even need an app on your cell phone.
The vast majority of hunters in low population counties would support not shooting does as long as they felt like their neighbor had to follow the same rule. Instead the low population counties are where the most valuable does have a higher chance of being shot. When the average hunter hasn't seen a deer all season and a young doe walks into the plot at dusk, it is getting shot, especially if the hunter thinks their neighbor 300 yards away will shoot it anyways.
