A common topic among landowners is whitetail gene pool management.   When talking about the management of a deer herd’s genetics there are basically two schools of thought.  One is the genetics management strategy developed and championed by TPWD and their research station on the Kerr wildlife management area.   This strategy, based on half a century of controlled environment research (their only test subjects have been deer who literally spend their entire lives in a small pin), emphasizes the importance of killing all spikes- no matter what.  Their reasoning for killing spikes stems from research showing that if two deer are born in the same year and one is a spike and the other is a 4 point the spike will always be inferior to the 4 point, which is true, with pin raised deer. 

The other school of thought comes from one of the, no, the greatest deer manager of all time, Al Brothers.  In a time when deer populations were managed like cattle and shooting does was thought to be a cardinal sin, Mr. Brothers applied his real world experiences from the field and co-authored a book called, Producing Quality White-tails, changing the way we look at deer management today.  His management strategy was based on 3 principals: letting bucks grow old, planting food plots, and keeping buck doe ratios as close to 1:1 as possible.   What Mr. Brothers strategy has over the archaic dogma that TPWD is now using to set harvest regulations in parts of Texas, is that his strategy can actually be applied by ranchers, hunters, and deer managers to create deer populations with more bucks and bigger racks.  Until the day that deer walk out from the woods with their age, weight, and a record of what they have been eating and will eat in future seasons tattooed on their backs, the indiscriminate killing of young deer, thought to be inferior, is not practical for managing deer genetics, unless of course these deer live their entire lives in a variable controlled pin, living off an ample ration of pedigree.  If you are managing an average Texas lease, between hunter error and environmental variation, there are just too many variables too implore the Kerr WMA’s harvest strategy on your ranch. 

 I could go on about this debate for days and actually have interviewed Mr. Brothers and the staff of the Kerr wildlilfe management area on this topic, but I’ll save some of my rant, maybe for a full length article to be posted on the wildlife resources section of texashuntfish.com.  If you guys have any interest in this topic or would like to suggest another topic for a feature length article let me know.

By John Schwarzlose of Texas Wildlife Unlimited