vtbuckrulrss

hey grnmtn, i agree, i don' t want a pissin contest either. but, let' s look at a couple of things here. yes, i agree, somehow, i think, regardless of what the dept. says, we could use some habitat help, but i don' t know how to accomplish it. about does, i don' t have a problem with shooting them, either, especialy when it is down to the last ten min of legal time in dec, like last year.( nice too, went 112.5, not huge, but decent.) as for your buck, just curious, do you think he was in rut? i have read that they could lose something like 30%( or was it lbs?) of body weight easy, which would explain the lack of fat, and mistaken body size. my 6 went only 116.5, last year, but had an equal amount of fat on him compared to the doe the following weekend( 5 min. before end of season, how' s that for cutting it close! girlfriend and i were arguing who was gonna shoot him for at least ten min when we first saw it. stupid deer). now, just wondering, if we had had your deer in a zone where qdm was in effect, would you have still shot? it would have most likely have been legal, you said it was 2+ years, an age you were looking for, and also, would you have shot it if you were not going to penn? the thing is, you made a concious choice to shoot, without having a state-mandated restriction,; by the sounds of it, you have been hunting long enough to be able to pass on a deer if it isn' t what you wanted. all i am looking for is to make that decision for myself, without having someone in the dept deciding for me. also, just for a twist, because there are always exceptions to the rule, how would you feel, if say you saw a deer, which you judge to go almost 200 dressed, yet was only a spike or four, and had to pass on it? that would eat me alive. i know my dad got one years ago, 187, yet was only a four point. can you imagine passing it up? i know, those kind of deer aren' t an everyday occurance, but the point is, they are still out there. so then what it boils down to, are we, as hunters( all does aside for the moment) still in it for the meat, or have we evolved into trophy hunters, i think that is the biggest issue of qdm, what is our true intention behind our state' s interest in qdm. i get the feeling that in todays society, where everything seems to be bigger is better, that this is spilling over to hunting in the form of the bigger the antlers, the bigger my ego gets. hunting for the freezer( again, not counting does here) doesn' t seem to be the main reason to hunt, or for the joy of it, which is what hunting should be about, when one hunts under a qdm plan. it seems to be all about one' s ego.

old-time

I would be cautious when reading the states reports. I have no faith in our Biologists competancy. That being said, I believe one of the biggest problems I see is that we are harvesting too many button bucks and male fawns in bow season. Maybe we should limit a person to one buck per year. If you shoot a fifty pound buck fawn then no more hunting for you. This would encourage people to use better judgement when harvesting a deer.