[Griff]

Okay, so here's my lame defense of deer hunting. I took about twenty years off from it because it really didn't please me to kill, for no good reason. In that twenty years the Pennsylvania Game Commission continued their mismanagement of the deer herd to the point where the doe to buck ratio in my area approached 20 to 1 and the deer density increased to the point where the introduction of Chronic Wasting Disease from West of the Mississippi could be catastrophic. The high doe / buck ratio results in late breeding because the few buck can't service all the doe in a timely manner. This produces late fawns who go into the winter undersize and if they survive are scrawny and unhealthy, ripe for disease. The played out bucks also fail to carry weight into the winter setting them up for health problems like the late fawns. In Pennsylvania the anti-hunting ethic has a firm foothold due to anti-science enviromentalism imposed by teachers on their students, so we have fewer hunters and the slob / respectful hunter ratio is out of wack. We could solve our problems by re-introducing mountain lions but thats a rant for another day involving questions of what really constitutes a wild system and its stability/ sustainability and I've been reading Poul Anderson Sci-Fi and he was a genius.

Oh yah, I love venison.