You have to take the area and amount of feed available as a factor concerning the taking of does. If you have several hundred deer and only 5 are bucks, you will have over a hundred does that will not get bred and produce. But those barren does are eating the available feed that could cause a die off of the fawns during a bad year or two. That means little bucks that will never grow up. This has happen in numerous areas at one time or another. On the other hand you have several good weather years and plenty of feed, what is the one thing you see with deer, does with twins. If you have 3-5 good years back to back, you have a deer explosion in population. You need to thin those does back at times like this, because mother nature is going to throw a curve ball and a severe winter will kill off the fawns and other weak deer first.
What you have to be careful about is not giving out too many doe tags during good years to rake in more money, shoot too many does, then a bad winter, and the deer herd will drop too low in population. I have seen Wyoming do this in the late 80's.
Most biologists will tell you that doe hunts are a control tool in many areas due to less habitat and too many deer for that area to support. Or you have the CA. problem. You go out and hunt and some areas only have 7% harvest rate because 93% of the deer you see are does and most of them are barren does with no fawns. But what I have seen is that the admin. in the game & fish departments will listen more to so called amateur conservation groups, who are anti hunting, or their own greed instead of their game biologists and you have problems with your game herd.
RELH
