Pennsylvania State Senate

The Pennsylvanian said:

Whole heartedly disagree. Archery hunting by nature does not make you a trophy hunter. Using generalities in claiming most is what invalidates your argument to those who may not agree with you.
Now, why do semantics matter of why someone chooses to shoot a deer or not? Why someone chooses to shoot or not doesnt matter.

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I never said anything about being a trophy hunter and I specifically wrote deer to include does. I myself am highly selective on what deer I take and had multiple opportunities on young bucks and does during archery and shot none of them, they weren’t the deer I wanted to shoot at that time.

In archery you have weeks of relatively patternable deer and good weather, you have the option to be selective as you have weeks to work with. Doesn’t matter if you want to shoot the first deer you see, the big doe that snorts at you, the giant 9pt on your camera, that funky looking one with a spike on the right and 4 up on the left or the piebald doe that showed up one time and was never seen again. You can hunt all of the fall archery season and even if you don’t see a deer well there is always rifle season to fall back on.

It’s not like rifle where the season is so short with so much pressure you may only get a couple of opportunities and have to choose which ones to capitalize on. If you don’t hunt the late season then any deer you pass up my be the last one you see for the year. That adds a certain amount of pressure to every encounter that isn’t present in archery because “there is always rifle season”.

But to your original point, I was referring to the harvest difference between archery and rifle not being solely due to the efficiency difference between rifles and bows. Archery hunters overall are more selective than rifle hunters and that’s not my opinion, that’s what the harvest numbers show. Archery kills does to bucks on a 1 to 1 ratio compared to rifle which is much closer to 2 to 1. I don’t have the age data but I would venture to say that they are also killing more larger older does as well.

If archery hunters were killing deer at the same rate as rifle then the archery harvest numbers would mirror the same 2 to 1 doe to buck ratio or a blended number between the two. The fact that they are not shows that deer are more selectively targeted during archery than they are in rifle season even if it is the same hunter in both cases.



So to make a long story less long your statement was

The Pennsylvanian said:

That's not correct, rifle is king and will be king for some time. It takes archery hunters the 11 weeks to even approach what rifle does in the 2 weeks.
It's pretty obvious that they wanted to provide more opportunity where they can in the current model of conservation pa has.

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The point I was trying to make was that if archery hunters were less selective and shot deer the same way rifle hunters do, button bucks and yearling does included, then they would have a significantly higher harvest much closer to if not overtaking the total rifle harvest in the first 6 weeks.