>>2295823>just kill more deerFucking idiot. That's not how deer mgmt works. If states feel they have too many deer, they will absolutely relax restrictions to increase harvest, but they'll increase harvest on does. Like I said, hunters generally don't like harvesting does.
https://www.deerassociation.com/dwindling-doe-harvest/>>2295825If your state prioritizes male harvest, it's because they want more deer. Keeping does alive means more fawns which grows the pop.
But how many hunters there are and how many deer they kill is irrelevant to the wolf discussion. Wolves don't drastically suppress deer pops. If a pack has a territory of 100 mi2 and eat 1 deer per week, that's 52 deer killed per year in that area. Take Idaho, which has ~550,000 deer. That's 6.7 deer/mi2, which means a wolf pack has access to 670 deer and takes only 52. With 3.5 hunters/mi2, that same area would lose at most 350 deer. So ~370 of the 670 deer would survive the year. If that's a problem, given that hunter harvest far exceeds wolf depredation, the solution would be to limit tags, not kill wolves.
Wolves aren't valuable for controlling deer population sizes; they're valuable for controlling deer behavior. They keep populations moving. They don't let prey stay in one spot and eat the vegetation away. Wolves instill fear in their prey populations, which alters prey behavior, which benefits ecosystems generally.
I did a bunch of research that ended up not being relevant, but here's some info I found interesting about hunters.
In 2020, there were 2,897,271 license holders in the 17 western most contiguous US states (starting with ND, SD, NE, KS, TX). Those states also cover 1,807,211.05 mi2 of land (not including water). That's roughly 1.6 hunters/mi2. Compare that to the eastern most US, which has 31 states with 10,153,433 license holders and 1,147,569.76 mi2 of land (also not including water). That's about 8.8 hunters/mi2. 1.6 hunters/mi2 in the west and 8.8 hunters/mi2 in the east.
