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deer management programs

bowmaker

Member
I know that I can get very opinionated on here but I need to express my feeling about a tv program I watched. This was taped off the Outdoor Channel and was about a deer management program on a ranch in Texas. I don't even remember the name of the show, but it talked about the poor quality of the deer herd in 1999 on this ranch. The buck doe ratio was like 20 to 1 and the deer were small bodied. They began to take large numbers of does and decided to kill any bucks over 3 1/2 years old with 8 or less point racks. They also began feeding 150 to 200 tons of a patricular pellet product out of feeders. The deer would cluster arround the feeders and the owners would film them to help decide what bucks to kill. These became known as "management bucks". While I do agree with taking does to improve that ratio and some other things, what really bothered me was how much this resembled a cattle operation. The deer came to the feeders at regular times of day and were being fattened up and given minerals for larger antlers. There was a sort of selective breeding program going on, and some very nice deer were almost considered trash that had to be removed. The images of 15 or 20 bucks milling arround a feeder bunk was disturbingly like what we see here with a group of herfords or angus. I really hate the term "management buck" also because of the way it was used over and over to describe bucks with a funny horn or broken tines that should not be breeding, We condem many of the high fence opperations for many of these same practices so what makes this any different? While this all started as an effort to improve deer hunting I wonder how far it will be allowed to go. How much longer will it be until we have hormones and steroids added to deer feed products, or harvest geniticly superiour sperm all in order to improve the deer herd. Where should we or where will we draw a line and stop our tampering with things and get back to hunting?
 
I may subject to myself to criticism here but I'll just say what I've said before. In 1993 Milo Hanson shot today's current world record typical whitetail. It will be the last non altered wild whitetail deer to be a world record. It lived its life eating farmer's crops, not ones planted for deer, and chewing on the brush that is present in the Biggar area.

By altered I mean, fed minerals topromote antler growth, fed high protein foods specifically designed for deer.

I think eventually we may go to far, will in the future the next world record be open to the same speculation that Barry Bonds and baseball is under. Not all that unlikely and very much similar in a totally different subject area. I don't know if any of this makes sense but it's friday.
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