Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting Deer Breeders Pissed--Walk Out of TP&W Commission Meeting

Power. Have you ever hunted a hf ranch or spent any time around someone who has one or has a breeding operation?

Not really, deer breeders chose to start a business with a product that is heavily regulated now, and the rules changed.

No different than opening a paint and body shop using solvent based paint and then having to use water based paint.

Or opening a shop that caters to AR-15's, it's a business decision with risk.

Frankenbucks have no place in hunting. Wish they'd pull down the fences, also.

Fences are sometimes meant to keep poachers out as much as game in. miles

Fences are generally as much to keep out non welcome breeding bucks that for some reason others let live, with inferior genetics, as much as to keep theirs in and to keep poachers out.....

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So one should risk the up to 5 million wild deer population here? Because some folks don't want to test and make less income vs none at all?

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Really?

Why do you respond to posts you don't bother reading?

David [/quote]

David, no flame intended, but read the following

With the commission’s unanimous vote on Monday, deer breeders will have to comply with increased regulation. There will be limited movement of breeder deer across the state, increased postmortem testing for chronic wasting disease and more live testing for the disease, too.

I don't see a problem with any of this at all. It comes with regulations and if you didn't regulate, then why risk our other 5 million or whatever the current pop is of deer here that are wild?

If you are referring to anything else please let me know. I have no other idea what I missed in all this?

BTW if it was the 4 million or so current population, my memory tells me we've been as high as over 5 million in the past... it was a number I recall as a max, hence the wording, up to....

I'm assuming deer should be doing well in Texas with all the rain, yes?

The other reason people's put up high fences. Say you own a 5000 acre ranch. People buy small ranches on your border. Then they kill way more game than their ranch will support, everything that jumps the fence. They get hoggish and they get fenched out. Hasbeen

Hmmmm - You haven't read anything else I posted, not sure I should bother a third time.

Oh well, why not....


The new regulations don't go nearly far enough. Commercial deer farming needs to be completely eliminated - nothing less will protect the wild deer population.

The small deer breeder operations that got pissed and walked out didn't cause this. This is a result of bad policy from TPWD from the start. Their foolishness is wiping out life savings and hurting small businesses. Businesses that were started based on TPWD's prior bad policy decisions.

I don't have to be "pro deer farming" to feel bad for small business owners wiped out by TPWD's prior failures. Small businesses that would never have been, life savings that wouldn't have been risked if it were not the prior stupidity of the TPWD. TPWD isn't the hero here - they're bumbling fools finally correcting a problem that they created.

I don't know how to be any clearer than that.

David

No fences here except maybe a 5 string barbed wire, but I have a neighbor and friend that hunts with me that will not kill one of these buck that badly need killing. I keep explaining to Him that killing them and letting the better ones walk for a while will pay dividends, but He will wait on a really nice one every time. I will give Him credit that He lets a lot of bucks walk past, and He hunts near every day of season, but a little help with the culling would be welcome. Other than that, a really good friend and neighbor. Should mention that we are allowed 2 bucks a year, plus several does. miles

If they are anything like Arkansas Game and Fish, they are long on classroom theory and short on experience. miles

I think a good policy change would be to not count culls against buck tag limits. I think they should count as either an antlerless tag or make up special cull tags, especially in areas where only one buck can be taken.

It's been maybe 2 decades now since CWD was found here, and the ensuing genocide that followed has definitely still impacted Deer and Deer hunting here,

I still don't think the DNR knows exactly what CWD is, what causes it or how to contain it.

The breeders that walked out may have had a point, they wanted a decision based on science, not guesses.

Winters Quarters, New Boston, MO will not be happy if that happens!

Our rules are so screwed up that you can't even kill a 3 year old spike unless you are under 16 years old. 3 pts or better on at least one side to be legal for adults. I watched a spike that reached 4 years old before he disappeared. Hope he was killed, but do not know. His horns looked like a good buck except there was just a main beam and no other points even brow tines. I put a kid where I had been seeing Him a lot, but the kid killed a nice 6 point. Happy for the kid but wished that the spike would have been killed. I saw him chasing does a lot of times and expect that he bred a lot of them.
That old bigger buck doing the breeding does not hold water, as I killed a small racked 7 pt, right after I saw him breed a doe, and I know there was several better bucks in the area. I also watched a nice 6pt breed a doe 5 times one afternoon, and I had seen bigger bucks in the area before and after that day. miles

Even our rules don't totally cover how I want to manage what I have access to.

And so you then end up having to handle management a different way.

I'm not going to let a genetic cull live to breed if I can help it. I actually enjoy taking those out more than looking for the biggest buck out there.

The results in the deer I see in the last 10-15 years are nothing short of amazing compared to what was out there. We used to see a deer a few times a year, maybe a couple. I killed the second deer ever on our place in 2005.

We now have a legit chance at seeing a 160 plus inch buck on any given day that they have hard antlers.

None of that happened by accident.

At least they do let us shoot spikes. But I"m not at all convinced that all spikes are trash, but I do go after the older ones, IE if they hit 2.5 and are still spikes, they are toast. In fact I have 1.5 year 10s now and then and almost all 1.5 year olds now are around 10-12 inches wide and typically 75% are at least 7-8 points.

How big a place are you managing post? IME, on smaller acreage whitetail ground, it takes a team effort of the landowner and a significant number of his neighbors to make it work. All this considering no high fences.

Hard to get a bunch of neighbors on board with anything here. miles

You are going to bust a gut. 100 acres. BUT I have appx 500 around me thats none hunted and another package of about 300 that manages the same, plus a parcel of about 600 thats fairly well managed.

It helps when most folks are on the same page.

It will only take one new to them landowner to quickly ruin all this.

And I should be clear, i don't have any 160s.... but they are around, I've never seen one, but have seen harvested ones within 2-3 miles of us. But going from praying you saw a legal buck for many(I refused to shoot when populations where that low) to now watching multiple 10s of the 130-140 class almost every day from the kitchen window makes me grin.

I'm just curious and not being argumentative, but I had a biologist look at our whitetail ground in the TX Panhandle which is 4000 acres. I wanted him to lay out a mgt plan as best he could considering it's a one buck county, and only recently allowing much doe killing.

His response surprised me. He said since mature whitetail bucks will roam 5-10 miles or more during the rut (this is nature's way of spreading genetics he said), unless you have a large expanse of property (including all the neighbors being on the exact same page) we would be wasting our time.

Obviously you can have more mature bucks around by shooting the inferior culls, but once again everyone has to be on board with the program. We are going through this management objective/program on our mule deer ground as we speak, but since it is 100 contiguous sections it should work.