An essay criticizing "quality deer management" is resonating among hunters on social media, but its premise is faulty and misguided.
The essay was originally published at rusticman.com. It is titled, "You Have Permission: Shoot Small Bucks!" The subhead asks, "Is Trophy Management Ruining Deer Hunting?"
In summary, the essay avers that state wildlife management agencies are discouraging new hunters from entering the sport by managing deer with the objective of producing trophy antlers. As someone who was once skeptical of progressive deer management, I certainly understand the perspective, but time and facts have discredited it.
In 1997, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission enacted a new regulation that defined a legal buck as having at least three points on one beam. Hunters did not embrace it at first, for the same reasons this essay articulates. Now that we have nearly 20 years of biological data in the books, we can accurately say that we don't practice "quality deer management" in Arkansas. Just call it "deer management." Quality is a result of managing correctly.
A "small" buck as defined in the essay is an "immature" buck, the kind a hunter is most likely to see and thus the easiest to kill.
It is wise to preserve yearling bucks and shift hunting pressure to 2- to 21/2-year old bucks for many reasons, including the fact that it extends a buck's contribution to the breeding pool.
Many Arkansas hunters didn't like the three-point rule at first because it required hunters to be more discriminating in what they shot. This was especially hard on people who hunt with dogs because the fast nature of shooting a deer being pursued by dogs increased the probability of killing a sub-legal deer. Requiring a hunter to ascertain a buck's legality also discourages taking snap shots of partially obscured deer ghosting through a thicket.
This led to more responsible and more ethical shooting. In our state, it has helped improve the image and acceptance of deer hunters and, by extension, deer hunting. This is one reason why, according to Responsive Management, that public acceptance of hunting is at an all-time high.
Some deer management zones have more specialized antler requirements. Instead of a blanket three-point rule, a legal buck in some areas can have an inside spread of 12 inches or at least one main beam of 15 inches. Other areas have a 15-18 rule. This allows hunters in those areas to kill mature cowhorn spike bucks and mature 4-pointers. I wish we had a 12/14 inch rule in Zone 12.
Critics say this puts too much responsibility on the hunter, that it's too hard to field judge antler dimensions and that it takes the fun and spontaneity out of hunting.
The facts do not support these claims.
In its annual booklet of hunting regulations, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission includes diagrams explaining how to field judge antlers.
Since 1998, hunters have killed very few bucks that were younger than 2 1/2 years.
For the first time in the era of regulated sport hunting, hunters also killed more does in 2013 than bucks. Hunters killed a record number of deer in 2012 (213,487), an 11 percent increase over the 2011-12 season. We killed nearly 97,000 bucks, a 14 percent increase over the previous year. The 2012-13 kill was only 288 fewer than the previous year, essentially a statistical tie.
So, antler requirements have not reduced the number of deer killed, nor have they reduced the number of bucks we kill. The bucks we kill are older, and thus have bigger and better antlers, than the average deer killed before 2000.
If you just want to kill a deer, as the essay promotes, opportunities abound in Arkansas. You can kill as many as six does. If your land is enrolled in the state's Deer Management Assistance Program, you can kill considerably more does than the statewide limit.
Many hunters use their DMAP doe tags to host youth hunts, mobility impaired hunts and Wounded Warrior hunts to provide opportunity to those who don't have access to quality hunting land. That, along with the large number of deer that live in the wilds of Arkansas, translates to more hunting opportunities to attract more hunters, not fewer.
In Arkansas, deer hunters are more sophisticated and more knowledgeable than before we implemented modern deer management strategies and techniques. Our deer hunting is better than ever, and it gets better every year for more people.
"Deer management" has not taken the fun out of deer hunting in Arkansas. By improving it's quality, it has made it even more fun for more people.
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Sports on 12/28/2014