Negative ghostrider…………A trend downward is a potential indicator that there is less deer to be killed……To explain this lets use a hypothetical example and let’s say that over the next 10 years we trend upwards until we are killing a million deer per seasona………Now, you might look at that number of one million and say damn we’re killing all the deer…….but in actuality what that says is that in order for use to be able to kill a million year in and year out then there must be a base population of “X” number of deer to sustain that harvest rate…..Maybe like 3 million total.

Soooo…….when we trend downwards then its potentially telling us that are base population is shrinking. I say potentially because there are of course other factors that might possibly be influencing the situation like hunter’s choosing not to shoot as many or possibly terrible weather for any one given year….and the reason you go off of multi-years trends and not any given one year…… but for the most part the change in deer population is at the top of the list of reasons the numbers might fluctuate….I’m suspecting that we are gonna run a downward trend for a while due to baiting being legalized.