I will reiterate what several have posted about Alabama. It is so different from Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, etc that you cannot look at what those states have done and apply it here. Those states have large properties that are intensely managed to raise the age structure and health of deer. Supplemental food (for nutrition and bait) and cameras have been a huge aid in saving bucks that need a few more years to reach their potential.Alabama has such an intensely high level of competition between adjacent landowners that these things can certainly be detrimental to the local deer population..In most areas, it is kill em before the neighbors can. I should add that we are so far behind those other states in deer management that a 3.5 year old 10 pt here is considered a deer of a lifetime and shot without a second thought. It's hard to argue with that as the neighbors will certainly do the same.
No one in our club or the surrounding 10k acres thinks a 3.5 year old deer is a deer of a lifetime. I don’t know any of my friends that hunt in Alabama that think that. A decent buck? Yes. A shooter buck? Some do some don’t. But none think it’s a deer if a lifetime unless it is a 160” 3.5 year old 10 point.
And I was mainly talking about Mississippi as an example. They are not vastly different. Mainly CNC and I were talking about baiting. Which to a large extent has been going on in Alabama since I was a kid. So about 40 years. Now I know it wasn’t happening at the level it is now but it was happening on a large scale level. Cell cams are a different story. The technology is only a few years old so there is no history of them being used in other states.
But, even if those states you mentioned are very different from Alabama, deer are still deer. And if baiting was going to cause a big problem in Alabama, I think it would have caused a big problem in those other states as well. I’m not talking about what the states did to manage the deer herd. I’m talking about what did baiting do to the deer herd. Some people seem to think baiting is going to be detrimental to the deer in Alabama, when it wasn’t detrimental to the deer in other states. I meant we been baiting deer with green fields forever. Just because we changed the bait from grass to corn it’s gonna hurt the deer?
