Vanilla,
Funny how you avoid the numbers when I put them out there. Do you really believe we should issue more tags than actual bucks we have in the herd. When he have no control over the other factors that kill bucks. Predators, highways, weather snow and drought, lose of habitat, disease.
You’re telling me we should ride that line without control of those things that close? Say the number is off by even a little. Or how about this…how many of those 335,000 deer including 50,000 bucks live on private unhuntable land during the season. Say it’s 25% , that puts your total number of bucks that are huntable at 37,500, and we are issuing 65k tags? And success rates are near 50%. That’s gonna leave only 5000 bucks …with factoring in the losses from the things listed above that we can not control. Damn all this time it looks lucky that some private is actually managing and leaving some bucks the breed come Nov or us have nots would have NOTHING.
Implement antler restriction
Primitive weapon only units
Limit technology
Study elk impact
Shorter seasons
Shutdown some areas and create rest zones for deer. (Huge factor according to USU biologist, he’s done the studies they are ignored)
Most of these options give a path to maintain or even increase tags yet the DWR will not support them. And the public that you are asking to raise up only pays attention for a split second of each year.
Well, hell. All the listening, watching, you've done, has there EVER been a season that went the way you just said?
How about last year? At the end of deer hunts, were there only 5-6k bucks left? Is that really what all your knowledge wants to put out there?
Also, so? How many fawns did those 5000 bucks carry to full term?
Did we go from the 1.5 million deer you claim to 330k because we shot that many bucks? No.
As usual, the smoke an mirrors are just that.
The DWR CANNOT control housing development, freeways, fire suppression, aged sage, ATV/snowmobiles, weather.
They can control predation, and elk.
But elk hunters ain't going to go along with giving up more tags so Wade Heaton can commercialize deer.
Look at the absolute meltdowns dudes had over bait.
Look at them freaking out over a scope.
Here's the real dirty "secret".
The issue isn't the amount of bucks. Sure, we all want more. The issue, in Utah, is concentration of hunters.
With CWMU expanding yearly. And LE units, the remaining portion of the state, has too many hunters on too little habitat.
We are where we are not because of opportunists. It's because of trophy hunting. Incorporate all the acreage from LE, and the public encapsulated by CWMU, and the concentration of hunters is dispersed.
We cut, and cut, and cut, yet, we are nearly identical to where we were in 1993.
I will grant rest areas are a good idea.
I would favor rotating BLIND resting.
AFTER tag draws, close a unit, randomly, refund money for that unit. Doing so prior to draws, simply hotspots other areas.
And yup, include LE and CWMU in those closings. I'm sure Heaton would welcome doing so to save the muledeer