I agree the DNR mismanagement of the deer herd is very frustrating. "hey Frank lets let people shoot 5 deer a piece for 5 years straight." "Yeah good idea Bill" says Frank. 5 years later..."WTF there are no deer left Bill!" exclaims Frank. "I wonder why?" Bill says. (To be clear, I never took part in the 5 deer slaughter. We didn't have a population to support it. Not even close.)
Now this is a good question to ask the MN DNR is how many people did harvest multiple deer and how many per hunter?
I asked the local meat processor about intensive harvest and he said a lot of people took advantage of it the first year and not much after that. The people that process their own deer are the wild card, but they get tired of cutting deer up as much as people get tired of eating too much venision.
Speaking for my immediate area only. There is one party of up to 40 people that took full advantage of the 5 deer thing. If it was brown its down. Didn't matter whose land they snuck on to fill their tags either. And I've heard from more than one guy, whose got a friend or two in that bunch, that they threw out more venison each year than they ate. Their own land borders my uncles and we caught them driving all the deer off my uncles to their land well before daylight. When confronted, the elder of the group said "we didn't think you minded because we do this every year"
After 5 years of that it didn't take long to decimate a deer population that couldn't support a 5 deer limit in the first place.
The deer hunter does not notice the mountains
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve" - Isoroku Yamamoto
There sure are a lot of America haters that want to live here...
