DEER HUNTING’S PARADIGM SHIFT

Yeah, I know that probably sounds like the typical spin you’d expect from a wildlife manager. Hear me out, because I’m about to explain something I don’t take lightly. In fact, I’ve been studying this topic and how it relates to whitetailed deer populations for well over a half-century.

If you’re reading this magazine, you obviously love deer. And you probably like seeing them when you’re hunting — a lot of them. In that regard, how could maximum sustained yield be bad? I completely understand that question, because I said the same thing many times when I first started out in this career (I’m now retired).

As a graduate student in wildlife ecology in the late 1960s I was taught that maximum sustained yield (we will abbreviate this to MSY for the sake of this article) was a pillar of wild-game management. The “father of wildlife management,” the late Aldo Leopold, stated in his 1935 “Game Management” book (which we used in the classroom) that the science of wildlife management was “… the art of making land produce sustained annual crops of wild game for recreational use.” Leopold also