While I agree somewhat with this Jeff, this is an audience that MUST be targeted at some point on the trigger control issues. Most times they are the ones bitching the loudest, yet they just keep shooting because the DNR just keeps issuing tags. They absolutely have a vested interest if they want to return to the days when they could hunt public ground and see multiple deer per day instead of per season. Trigger control is a matter of personal choice and if you are the one complaining, then you must step back and evaluate why you are no longer seeing the deer you once did, regardless of the number of tags the DNR issues or how many deer the DNR says needs to be killed. They need the education as much or more than anyone. If you even reach 20% of these guys, that is a huge start. If they start laying off the does and doing some personal harvest management, they will start to spread the word on their own and will give the greedy guys all kinds of $h!t if they continue to overharvest the antlerless deer. This is where peer pressure falls into play. We had guys in the past that we no longer allow to hunt with us because they were told over and over to quit shooting every doe that walked by and they couldn't find it in themselves to comply with that request. These are the guys who would shoot 7 or 8 deer between the dad and 2 kids because they "need all that meat" and then were giving away grocery bags full of freezer burnt, half-a$$ed processed venison in May the following year because they were sick of it and then bitching at the top of their lungs to anyone who would listen in November that they weren't seeing as many deer as the years before. Sayonara buddy, have a nice life! Now they shoot far less deer on there own. Most Fudd's don't even realize that the DNR issues 3 to 4 times the amount of tags above the number that they actually want killed, due to hunter success rates in the 25% to 35% range. Given that fact, the DNR wants 4,000 antlerless deer killed in a certain zone, they issue 12,000 to 16,000 tags to achieve that kill. The DNR doesn't issue 16,000 tags because they want 16,000 deer killed(even though they probably wouldn't care if it happened), but the Fudd's don't have a clue, because they know nothing of success ratios or herd dynamics. Just because they are allowed to harvest 4 deer doesn't mean they should harvest 4 deer and that is the message they need to receive and understand. The Fudd's don't understand that localized herd densities can be severely affected for years by the overharvest brought on by only a handful of guys in that local area, while the overall densities within the larger unit remain above goal and then that forces the DNR to issue the same amount or more tags the next year to try and get the numbers down in the rest of the area, at the expense of having the local area overharvested again and again. Our DNR issued unlimited amounts of tags for many areas for many years, this doesn't mean that they thought killing every deer was a good plan, they were relying on the few guys who would take the opportunity to kill multiple deer to reach their goal, knowing that 2/3rds of all the hunters wouldn't even kill 1 deer, let alone 2 or 3. This is why they must be educated and assimilated.
You used to throw rocks at hornet's nests as a child didn't you?
j-bird, as much as I hate to say it, you might be WAAAYYYY more $cr#w#d than the rest of us. Your DNR doesn't even know the total numbers of hunters in your state, much less the actual harvest numbers. Until that all changes, you will have no chance whatsoever of getting your DNR to do anything but spew their kill-em-all rhetoric, because they have no clue about any of the rest of it. You want data on carrying capacity and density numbers, outside of you hiring your own personal deer biologist to come out and tell you what those numbers might be on your own property, you aren't going to get anything on a larger scale. That information can only really come from your DNR. They must already have the trained deer biologists to make those determinations, they just choose not to for whatever reason. I was going to ask what your DNR does with the license fee moneys, but since you only charge half of the hunters in your state a fee for hunting deer, it probably isn't much. You will need some legislative changes across the board on a huge scale that will pi$$ off more folks than anyone ever dreamed possible in Indianapolis. The free ride for landowners has went on so long that you will likely never get that to change. Some type of mandatory licensing for all deer hunters, whether they be charged a fee or hunt for free, is the first step in getting the data you desire. You need to know total hunter numbers. Secondly, a mandatory harvest registration for each kill would be the next thing to putting that info to use. Until you get that very basic information, it looks like you are on your own, obviously so as far as the state DNR is concerned. No other numbers could even be deemed slightly accurate until you know that data. Hopefully the guys in the Facebook group have considered all that. Good luck!
There might be a few guys(600,000 give or take) to the east of you that could give a lesson or 2 in what you speak of. We still need a ton of work over here, but we have at least gotten the DNR to be transparent with their data and have forced them into having a legitimate stakeholder process that dictated antlerless quotas to the DNR based on that data, not DNR numbers dictated to the hunters based on rhetoric.
I think things will change when CWD hits the areas with core membership. Also when they realize how deer numbers have dropped. We all ready hear many complaints about coyotes.
