Lets just assume for a minute that 30 large property owners have gotten together in Bullock Co and we have 50K acres under a doe management cooperative for the county going into next season…….Right now the majority of folks are reporting populations being WAY down from what they used to be so the cooperative has decided to completely shut down doe harvesting until populations get back to a level where folks want them……

So there’s the question…….Where do we want them???.....What is the cooperative going to use as the gauge or metric for when we’ve reached a more ideal population range??.......I’m guessing ideal for hunters and managers is at a point where we have the maximum amount of buck fawns being born the habitat can produce with the fewest amount of does producing them…….That gives everyone in the county the best possible starting point for buck numbers and herd quality….What its eventually going to come down to is determining a target weight range for adult does in each county along with a corresponding “stable” range for the county doe harvest totals where that occurs……

I’m just throwing out some numbers here but basically in our hypothetical test county…..we’re gonna drive down the total doe harvest in Bullock Co from 2100…….. to maybe 1500 does or less next year……and hold it there…….and watch for the population to start growing until our average adult doe weight trends below lets say the 110-120 lb range…….Once it begins to drop to 105 then that will be our trigger for the cooperative to start back shooting a few does until the weight trends back up slightly into our target range……115 being the sweet spot…..Again just numbers for an example that most certainly need tweaking but you get the point........ this would begin to show you where your lower “bounds” fall out as far as total doe harvest numbers go……It would tell you that at a 110 lbs average we need to shoot roughly 1800 ish does to remain stable……If we really wanted to we could keep trending up with harvest until average doe weight increased to 120 and find an upper bound to the harvest…..That’s where our 1800-2200 target range for Bullock county came from with my original example…..That’s our wiggle room so that we’re not trying to cut hairs but rather just keeping it between the yellow and white lines ……Maybe its 1900-2100......Right now we’re barely keeping it out of the ditches in some places though……