[QUOTE=river scum;3351017]oh now, i wouldnt say its over. they just need to cut back the doe "quotas". we have the lowest harvest numbers since 03 they say. the herd would bounce back in a couple years if we stop shooting the baby makers.

you didnt see any deer in the 60s, then look what happened! there is always hope! but not without change.[/QUOTE

DNR will never cut back on the doe tags as several years ago,2 state legislature reps had 2 bills written up and both would have gutted the,deer in Indiana. The,worst bill was something like "buy,a license a day and shoot a deer 365 days a year. Anyhow, DNR was mandated by State legislature to,take the deer herd down and the 2 reasons was insurance companies and farmers organizations like Farm Bureau had lobbied the state and the hunters lost out. It was all,hidden and kinda covered up, politics won out and so you take out the does and the herd decreases. Also, in the early 70's, Red timber wolves were released to control deer in a specific area of central western Indiana and DNR didn't admit that, but between us locals killing a few, parvoviruses got the rest. I live half mile from the Crane Weapons Center fence. In the early 80's I told a friend of mine that was a DNR biologist, the state was releasing bobcats on Crane, They released the turkeys there first also. He commented there was no bobcats in Indiana, I got him to come down, we crawled into a abandoned horizontal coal mine shaft and I showed him the tracks, fur, Scat, and finally admitted we had bobcats, but they will never admit to anything. Now in my yard at nite the bobcats set my motion detector lights off all nite long following deer. Daytime we see the baby bobs in pairs and threes with momma and they just walk down the driveway every now and then. You can sit in a tree stand and see one almost every day. Time to control the cats as our turkey population is sad also. Same for all small game as it's now gone and the cats constantly hunt my 40 as I used to quail and rabbit hunt it and still have a few, but the cats have to eat and better the wildlife that our pets. Ask Wisconsin what the grey wolf is doing to their deer herds as they released them. Predator management is something they think about even tho they don't admit it. I said this one other time, and it's a statement from a former retired head of DNR, and his quote was, Our DNR has lost the real purpose of their mission and that is the mission of conservation, not politics.