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It really is a complex subject with a lot of considerations going down to even very small geographic areas in some cases. Part of it is to avoid over hunting, part safety, part sportsmanship, part for state revenue, and part for whatever crazy law got lobbied (ie in Virginia in some places you couldn't, even still I think, hunt fox with a gun because horseback fox hunters lobbied local governments against it, or maybe less crazy in a historical context, blue laws still apply some places). For over hunting you have concerns over what sex or age a deer may be, time of day (more vulnerable at night), time of year (you don't want to kill a doe while it's pregnant or taking care of a fawn), and of course total count/limit. For safety. Night hunting can be pretty risky, some locales don't allow rifles due to how far the round can travel, some require a certain distance from homes, etc. For sportsmanship and ethics, things get a little more weird, because you're potentially pitting morals against each other. It's it ok to spotlight and take down 10 deer at a time? Maybe if you purely hunt for food for your family and this was the one time of year you planned to do it, but that'd get taken advantage of quick broadly. Even weapons are hotly debated in the hunting community, bow and arrow seems fair due to having to be real close, but your chance of missing or worse, only wounding the animal, is significantly higher. I could go on for a while on all the above, but from my understanding, your premise is generally the original intent of conservation laws. They were to create a baseline of how many deer are taken a year. What happens though is people find loopholes they exploit, leading to overly broad, complex, and sometimes conflicting laws created to counter the problem. What's wild about this case is Pennsylvania seems to want to make it hard to recover a potentially suffering animal, where many states have laws to protect you in recovery of the deer so it doesn't die suffering or needlessly go to waste. Many states make the distinction between recovery and hunting and have laws that apply to each separately. Pennsylvania in this case seems draconian and counter intuitive, which is frankly unsurprising from what little I knew about their hunting laws before. |