CNC most of the hunters I know and talk to don’t want to kill does. They do it because they think it’s necessary. IF limiting doe harvest is something that needs to be done, I don’t think it would take much to convince them to stop. Not sure they would trust what the DCNR says, but a private biologist might could. Just got to undo the “QDMA 1 doe per 200 acres each year” line of thinking that has been engrained into everyone. Myself included. Maybe Matt could do a few tik toks for you and get them to go viral.
If someone would show us the annual number of deer/vehicle collisions for the state of Alabama for the last 30 years it would be really helpful in having a better perspective on where we sit right now in relation to carrying capacity. As you push populations closer to the limits of carrying capacity deer begin expanding outward more and more during lean times which increases road mortality…….that’s true in reverse as well……the lower the population in relation to carrying capacity the less outward push and road mortality goes down. Being able to look at that rate over time would give you a lot of insight into what populations are doing currently statewide. Having it put into a GIS map showing where each collision occurred (the density) would be even better…….Somebody will say that they saw a bunch of dead ones last year but without any historical reference to the last 20 or 30 years then we don’t know what “a lot” really looks like.
We could stop shooting does tomorrow and the result would be that populations would grow until they started spilling out into the roadways more and more…….road mortality would sky rocket and take our place as second to coyotes in buffering population growth…..generally speaking anyways across the broad picture. One of the main reasons we shoot does is to reduce that outward push that occurs from “growth” and the ensuing large numbers of insurance claims that would come from 50, 60, or 70,000+ deer dying in the skreets each year. We killed something like 93,000 does this year. Imagine if a bulk of that was all being done by cars on the road instead of hunters.
I think we’re a long ways off from that end of the extreme though. We’re way down on the other end of the spectrum saying “Hey we need to go back that other direction, at least some.” There IS a balance there that should be considered long term(with farming too)…..but we’ve likely reduced growth down to the point in most areas that road mortality isnt really even a blip on the radar. I believe that was even Ikillbux’s exact words. You really need there to be something like a “tolerable threshold” that’s used as an indicator of deer populations doing well…..with hunters keeping levels pushed back to that threshold and not back to “nary a blip on the radar”.
So yeah I think there’s some room for bumping population numbers up as part of the solution to some of these issues we’re talking about.
