Bluebird you are indeed delusional. With the exception of a flawed study from Mississippi, the experts position is quite the opposite. Including but not limited to:
Dr Kroll
Dr Samuel
Dr Rosenberry
Dr Alt
Charles Alsheimer
Virtually every officer, biologist and member of QDMA

ORIGINAL: bluebird2


All of those experts ,except Alt ,prefer a spread restriction to a point restriction. They also support not shooting any 1.5 bucks or culling bucks before they are 2.5 or 3.5. In PA we are reverse culling our bucks in all age classes ,which is the exact opposite of what those experts recommend.

Actually ALL of these experts favor a spread restriction including Gary Alt. Gary Alt characterized the point count as a less preferable but more workable compromise when instituting the, then revolutionary, changes to a state with 900,000 hunters.

They also all agree that instituting part or thier principles are better than none as we are now doing in PA.

ORIGINAL: bluebird2


So are you saying that they all agree that implementing APRS which result in decreased antler size ,is a good idea?

If Alt preferred a spread restriction he would have tried to implement it, but he didn't. Instead he choose APRs and lied about their effects. He mis represented the results from the research done in Miss, which proved ARs caused a decrease in rack size and make ridiculous claims abot the number of buck that would be saved and how it would double or triple the number of 8 pts.

The Miss results are flawed at best and have virtually no relevance in PA. Miss was haervesting less than 2 does PSM during the study period under significantly different density and habitat than Pennsylvania.

ORIGINAL: bluebird2

The part of the Miss. study that was flawed were the computer models that predicted that high grading would not occur either in Miss. or PA. The results from the statewide harvest surveys proved that the computer model was flawed and rack sizes of 2.5+ buck decreased statewide. Dr. kroll's study also confirms the results from Miss. since spikes develop at a slower rate than Y's, which would produce smaller 2.5 buck than in a non-AR herd.

Few have studied the antler restriction issue more than Pennsylvania ’s Dr. Gary Alt. His conclusions led to a statewide antler point restriction in 2002.

“What we are trying to do is have a more natural antlered-buck-to-adult-doe-ratio and a more natural breeding ecology. We feel that reducing the number of adult does and increasing the antlered buck population is in the best interest of the deer resource,” he explains.

“Scientists told us that to fix our Pennsylvania problem we needed to save half of our yearling bucks. This is why we collected information on 73,000 bucks in the four years prior to antler restrictions. We learned that in order to save half of the yearling bucks, the majority of counties in Pennsylvania needed to restrict the harvest of bucks with fewer than three points on a side. Had we not done the research on our yearlings, we wouldn’t have known this.”

“Prior to antler restrictions, only about 50,000 Pennsylvania bucks survived the state’s annual deer season, and just one in one hundred survived to age four. With antler restrictions, we’ve been able to save 75,000 to 100,000 bucks the first year.

“Launching 75,000 to 100,000 bucks into the next age class tripled the number of bucks age two or older,” notes Alt. “This tripled the number of bucks with eight or more points in just one year, so a by-product of antler restrictions is that hunters have been able to see more and bigger bucks. To offset the killing of less bucks we knew we needed to harvest more does by the same number and we’ve tried hard to accomplish this.”

At this point, IMHO, it would make sense to go to a spread restriction but even now, 6 years after AR, I encountered an out of state hunter proudly dragging a 2x2 out in 2F on opening day this year. The oh sh!t look on his face when I told him his buck was illegal shows that there are still hunters out there that have difficulty handling any AR let alone able to judge a spread measurement. (BTW, he seemed sincere when he agreed to turn in the mistake and pay his $25)