[Mr. 16 gauge]

Adam;
I can't speak as to the problems with the PGC & it's deer management. I did hunt with a PA deer hunter down in NC several years ago, and he voiced similar concerns....said that they wanted to turn it into a "turkey hunting state".
I will say that I feel MI has similar issues; we have long gone past the days of no shootin of does and a 18-20% kill rate per hunter. I think that the days of issuing "over the counter" licenses is (or should be) long gone, and that managing a deer herd based on county boundries is a poor way of doing it. I think that the eastern states should take a lesson from the western states, and base the number of buck, doe, and fawn licenses on the ACTUAL number of deer, not some hypothetical model (I didn't realize until a few years ago that the Michigan DNR didn't have an accurate count as to how many deer are harvested, it is just a WAG (wild assed guess). They also need to do away with crop damage permits, and encourage people with actual crop damage to allow RESPONSIBLE hunters on their property to harvest deer. They need to base the number of tags on a geographic region, the amount of public vs. private land in said region, ect.
It's sad....I started hunting deer in 1975 and if you saw a deer, ANY deer, it was a big deal. Antlers were required ONLY to identify sex, as does were off limits. You were allowed one deer/year....you could take it with a bow or gun, but only one deer was allowed.
........then we had too many deer! We would see 50-60 deer in a day, but they were all does and no one was allowed a doe permit. Then the DNR finally caught up after some severe winter die offs.....then it was management for antler size, as now we have a whole new generation of deer hunters that grew up watching videos and match their hunting prowess by the number of points a rack has, not how much effort it took to get there.
....and we have a highly vocal group of bowhunters that feel that THEIR way to hunt is the only way to hunt (sanctamonious A-holes), so god forbid we should do anything different to help the herd, like SHORTEN THE BOW SEASON!!!!
I don't deer hunt in MI much anymore......just not worth the confrontations; had one A-hole tell me last muzzleloading season that I should have let the spike I shot go to "grow bigger". (I had one day to hunt). The whole idea of protecting spikes so they will "grow bigger" has some merit, but I shot a buck in NC a few seasons ago that was more than a 2 1/2 year old deer; he had a grey muzzle, worn teeth, and antlers not much bigger than an inch and a half. That buck probably NEVER had a decent rack, and was passed over (to spread his genetics) in order to "let him grow".
Makes me wonder how many of his offspring will not grow decent racks, either.......

"Cookie cutter" deer management has to go! It needs to be done on a smaller, local level, much the same as the Scottish gamekeepers do it on the estates in Scotland.