I disagree BGG but I do appreciate you taking the time to explain it. I think a high percentage of the deer hunters would still take to the woods, because they do not hunt anything else. I also think they would be forced to use does to fill their freezer. That is my belief, but I could be wrong. I do agree that it would be unpopular the 1st year, but extremely popular the 2nd.

Football Hunter and Redblood -

Closing off the hunting of bucks would be a very bad management move that, in my opinion, would do more harm than good. First and foremost in this argument is sheer numbers of deer that would NOT get killed. As a general rule of thumb, to keep a population stable (which is what we need to do in most of Tennessee), about a one-third of the deer must die each year. For the past few years we have been estimating (guessing) our deer herd to be about 700,000 - 750,000 animals. Now keep in mind, we've been killing between 160,000 - 180,000 deer each year. In literal terms, this makes "hunter harvest" the leading cause of death for deer in Tennessee. When hunter harvest is added to natural mortality, road-kill, poaching, non-compliance, and wounding loss, we can very much see where about one-third of our deer population dies each year allowing us to keep the population stable. By eliminting the buck harvest all together, we're looking at about 90,000 bucks that would not get killed. This would be a huge burden on the habitat to support the extra mouths to feed and would not be a "no harm" situation.

Also, I think that regulation would be extremely unpopular and I believe we would see a very significant drop in numbers of deer hunters (especially for that year). This would result in less does getting killing, compunding the above mentioned problem. I agree there would be a lot of "excited" hunters two years after that move, however, I think the damage would already be done and we'd then be striving to fix our mistake.

In short, that's how it would hurt.