headed out in an hour ....friends there say the deer are moving and the pigs are now back on the feeders.......seeing alot of spikes though...4 total in 3 hunts.....all different...

what is the boards thoughts when there are many spikes....thin them out I would think... do we have any current/former biologist opinions???

We shoot everyone we see. By that I mean if you have a spike on one side, or 6 inch spikes you are dead.

KILL EM ALL!!!!!

This is a highly debated topic. We won't shoot one unless it is 2.5. Although if someone shot a yearling spike, it wouldn't really be a big deal.

IMO, you should only shoot yearling spikes on good rain/forage years. This way, you don't shoot a potentially good buck that didn't grow much his first year due to lack of nutrition.

from a management perspective, this isn't smart.

Go to the link in my sig.

The two in my pics are no doubt!!

The spike that Jasb has looks like it needed to be weeded out. That buck is at least 2.5 and the rack is not developing. If he were to keep mating then you would have a lot of poor quality bucks. Thank goodnes we have 2 tags for bucks this year.

Yes sir and I didn't have to shoot any of em!

I shoot a lot of spikes.

As a general rule we will shoot spikes, but it is based on the year in question. This year spikes are a larger percentage of the 1.5 YO population, and antler development in general is not as good as normal we believe because of the dry summer conditions (conditions are good now, but not during antler development). Even though we feed protein, nature has to do its part. Long way of saying spikes are not high on our list of culls for this year, it is based more on relative antler development in each age class. A 2.5 YO spike will be shot.

IMO..... I will not shoot spikes unless they are 2.5+....... reason being their mom may have not given much milk and it also depends on the vegetation available.

I don't shoot a spike unless I think its at least 2.5 yrs old. If someone shoots one thats 1.5 year old no big deal. You just don't want spikes to make up much more than 10-20% of your buck harvest cuz typically these are younger bucks, typically.

Other things you have to consider where you hunt is: Is the sex ratio balanced??

Is the deer density too high limiting nutrition, thereby limiting antler development??

Of what quality is the forage provided?? and I'm not talking about corn and protein pellets

If any of these three are limiting, then weather compounds the problem. So with that if you don't have a properly managed herd shooting spikes won't do a thing for you. Because they'll be replaced by more spikes in high deer density and low quality nutrition situations.

even on the well managed south texas places we hunt at, the majority of yearling bucks are either spikes or have a spike..if we killed them all we would lose close to an entire age class.

unless it has been a good year rain wise, we hardly ever shoot spikes at 1.5 years of age