Actually Shadow isn't that far off, except his hypothetical numbers are way too high IMO.
The theory behind the spike tags and the stats have been pretty accurate in post season counts, is that they estimate 10% of the yearling bulls will survive the spike hunts, grow and mature into whatever they may become in their futures. If there are 100 spike bulls in a unit and 10 live, that will be 10 bulls added each year to reach maturity.
But here's a twist.....out of those 10 bulls, 5 die of natural causes between the ages of 1.5 and maturity which is about 8 years old. Now out of those remaining 5 bulls, 1 bull actually makes it to an acceptable "trophy" size that an LE hunter harvests and the remaining 4 just eat, breed and do elk things, then eventually die a horrible frozen death in the winter (hypothetical scenario of course).
Each year there are a small number of spikes that survive and fill in the gap's between "trophy" and "yearling" that aren't touched, yet it keeps adding bulls to the herds.
The issues I have seen, especially on the Wasatch, is they have allowed WAY too many cow's to be harvested and we have now have lost a huge number of the yearling future crop as compared to about 5 years ago. And also, with all the exceptional outfitters these day's pursuing the "High Dollar" trophy bulls, we have literally skimmed the cream off the top of the herds.
Having said that, it's easy to understand why our elk herds numbers and quality have plummeted in the last 3 or so years to where we are back in the days where a 350" bull is a "Trophy Bull" and a 380" is a "Monster".
We have cut both the top and the bottom right off, simple as that.
We Utard's got spoiled rotten in the early 2000's when we were harvesting a dozen or more 400" bulls on several of our LE units......now we are back to "reality" :-(
Ok, kick my a$$ on this and tell me how wrong I am ;-)