re: My only Hunt so far this year.

Just an fyi, I've shot more bucks than I remember over 8 pts. There's a pile of racks in my garage that I don't even remember where they all came from. Many of which even you might consider trophies. In my later years, I shot does for meat a hell of a lot more often than I shot bucks and I let bucks walk or just took pictures of them that most people would have shot simply because I had decided they weren't old enough to shoot yet and I wanted them fricking more does.

I do know where you're coming from on this.

And it's from the perspective that more, bigger racked bucks is better.

And while it's definitely cool, it's not an indication of a healthier herd. Because if it was, you could just fence off an area, kill off the local deer with all their inherent immunities, fill it with known good horn producing stock and viola! Superior herd! Of course those get devastated by disease fairly often but we'll just ignore that little outlier because look the horns on this skull I found!

A healthy herd is a local, wild herd with enough food and water and predators to keep it down into that population range for that area to sustain.

Horns ain't in that equation anywhere.

Is this still going on?

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and taking animals with bad gentics will help the overall heath and wellbeing of he herd.

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So if your too good to shoot anything less than a trophy, how do you cull?

You are never going to get it perfect, but you control what you can...and that is what bucks will be breeding the does.

Yeah but you may just be fooling yourself there. That buck you're looking at that you think should be a 'breeder' may also be passing along a gene that makes his progeny more susceptible to disease.

Horns are just pretty things we wish they all had more of.

Take into account that buck and doe has the genes of a buck and a doe in each of them. As did they. As did they. Etc etc. That buck's horns may not breed true and may simply be a fluke. They may not take precedence over the dominance of the does 'horns gene'.

If you're selecting from a wild herd by just killing off shitty horned bucks, mathematically you are chasing a result you likely won't live long enough to actually experience herd wide. And holy shite are you gonna have to kill a lot of does to do it. Each of which is just a coin flip as to whether you're actually working against your goal or not.

Very nice size

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gene that makes his progeny more susceptible to disease.

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That buck's horns may not breed true and may simply be a fluke.

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You come up with a lot of scenarios that I would argue are more often the exception than the rule. Yes this stuff happens, but you can't really argue with the overall results when you compare a place with an active management program to one that doesn't.

Depends on what you're calling an active management program.

If it's don't shoot young bucks and try to get to 50/50 buck doe ratio, you're going to have measurable results in three years for better racks but you're going to bumping up against the limits of the local herds genetics. Some places just have better horn genetics than others.

If it's that you want to make monster horned deer and you're managing by high fencing and basically starting over with select stock, then it's irrelevant. You can grow whatever you like consistently as long as you can afford it.

But the idea that you can take a wild population, and only shoot 'inferior bucks' and see any big improvement in genetics is fooling yourself. The math doesn't work. And the main reason is what I said about the does. Every doe you take, you have just as much chance of working against your goal as you do of working toward it.

If it's a perfect system and everyone there agrees on what will and wont be shot and you have no other competing predators, you might eventually get there, but it's going to be a multi generational effort to get there.

No because you keep refering to me shooting only throphies. I don't think I have said anything about only killing throphy deer.

I said our goal should be to take mature deer out of the herd.

So no you don't get the point.

Not what I said. I think people should try to take mature deer. I understand your point about swamp deer vs tx, but if people were shooting less small deer in the swamp, there would be more mature deer running around. I feel sure that you and everyone you hunt with would rather shoot bigger bucks if given the option. Am I wrong?