For generations in Vermont, the regular fall hunting season has been devoted to the pursuit of legal bucks. While the size and points on a set of antlers vary in different parts of the state, for a hunter to harvest a deer with a rifle or shotgun, it has to have antlers.
That may be about to change.
“I apologize for the blasphemy,” said Nick Fortin, a wildlife biologist and deer specialist for the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department, as he introduced a new rule proposal to the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board. “But, we recommend allowing antlerless permits to be used during the regular season.”
In other words: The department suggests that the board allow hunters to kill does with a rifle or shotgun, which are methods only permitted for killing bucks.
It’s a significant departure from the existing rules and cultural mores that restrict the harvest of antlerless female deer to hunters using bows and arrows or muzzleloader guns, both of which require more skill and training to be effective and are permitted for use outside of the roughly two weeks of the regular hunting season.
The state allows hunters to take four deer each year — one of which can be a buck. During the regular rifle season, individuals are only allowed to take their one, permitted buck, while during archery and muzzleloader season, people can fill any of their four permits. The Fish & Wildlife Department would like the same to be true of rifle season come 2026.
The proposal is an attempt to “manage a healthy, sustaining deer population, (and) healthy, resilient forests,” interim Commissioner Andrea Shortsleeve said.
Department biologists said that increased frequency of mild winters has led to more deer surviving the season as changes to land use patterns have also put more areas off limits to hunters. The result has been a surge in the deer population size, meaning more animals are competing with one another for food and habitat space.
Booming deer populations can also diminish forest health, Shortsleeve said. In older forests, deer may eat saplings and younger growth, which then prevents the ecosystem from replenishing itself with the next generation of plant life, she said.
“There are too many deer for the habitat that we have available,” she said.
‘This sort of stigma’
Fortin framed the department’s proposal as sacrilegious because there is a contingent of longtime hunters in the state who bristle at the idea of killing female deer with rifles, despite the state’s allowance to do so with muzzleloader guns or bows and arrows, he said.
Most every other state in the country issues permits to kill antlerless deer with a rifle, Fortin said.
“It’s this weird cultural thing that is unique to Vermont,” he said.
From 1979 to 1981, the state issued permits for hunters to kill female deer with rifles, and “the department was too aggressive,” Fortin said, allowing a large number of hunters to kill a deer in the two-week regular fall season. Then, Vermont saw a series of acutely intense winters, and the deer population decreased dramatically.
“It created this sort of stigma against killing antlerless deer during our regular firearm rifle season,” Fortin said. That led the Legislature to ban taking does in the regular season, though in 2015, the option returned, as rulemaking power went to the board.
Rodney Elmer, a taxidermist and hunting educator in Northfield, sees the roots of this aversion reaching even further back to the 1950s when more hunters were dairy farmers and prized their female cows as “sacred.” Elmer said he thinks they carried that over to the way they treated female deer.
“It’s not a simple or small thing to kill a deer. It’s a big deal, and it’s hard on your heart,” Elmer said. “It’s easier to shoot that great big buck because fewer people will be upset with you. There’s a cultural pressure that goes with it.”
But Elmer said he believes that allowing does to be targeted during the regular season is the most humane way to curb deer populations. Removing a mother from the landscape removes not just the individual, but her reproductive potential — female deer most commonly give birth to twins.
“You’re actually doing the most amount of good with the least amount of killing because when you kill just one, you effectively take out three,” he said.
‘Handcuffed’
In 2020, the Fish & Wildlife Board revised deer hunting regulations to create a new season for muzzleloader hunters in October exclusively for antlerless deer permits. It was a similar attempt to curb population sizes by reducing the number of does on the landscape.
“That essentially didn’t amount to anything,” Fortin said. There was no increase in the number of deer killed, so the department began to look at the regular season.
Though the state could see a similar absence of interest, given the cultural hesitation toward killing does, Fortin said that were this rule to pass, he is optimistic that a generation of newer and younger hunters would take to it.
Shortsleeve said she hopes the change can create more opportunity for new hunters to get into the woods, since the easiest way to get started hunting is to use a rifle.
Fortin said he is apprehensive about whether the board will embrace the proposal.
If it doesn’t get approved, “then we are handcuffed,” he said. “Then we are in a situation where we cannot manage our deer in some parts of the state because we don’t have the tools we need. Hunting is really the tool we have to manage deer. There really aren’t other options.”
If the proposal does fail, Fortin would see a need to come back to the board again and try proposing other ways to reach the same outcome “one way or another.”
If recreational hunters are unable to manage the deer population, the state might hire professional hunters to cull deer, which would cost additional taxpayer dollars to do something recreational hunters currently pay the state to do, Shortsleeve said.
While Protect Our Wildlife does support the department’s need to manage deer populations, the wildlife advocacy group points to other ways that it could reach those goals beyond hunting. Namely, the department could work to reintroduce deer’s natural predators back onto the landscape, according to Brenna Galdenzi, the organization’s president.
“Another tool in the toolkit would be for Vermont Fish & Wildlife to consider, how do we change our policies to make our landscape more hospitable to wolf recolonization?” she said. “Hunters and trappers were responsible for the extirpation of Vermont’s apex predator species like wolves and mountain lions, and it has had rippling effects on biodiversity.”
Even with some apprehension from old-guard hunters, the proposal is beginning to see support from hunting groups.
“If it is the department’s recommendation to the board that we consider expanding the season, then we would be 110% behind it,” said Chris Bradley, the president and executive director of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs.
“The scientists, the biologists, the experts in Fish & Wildlife, they digest the data, take a look at what’s going on on the landscape, so when they make a recommendation, it is absolutely in the best interest of Vermont game species and for all Vermonters,” Bradley said.
The public comment period on a full set of proposed new rules — related to a wide range of hunting and fishing practices — opens Wednesday, Feb. 26. Individuals can email comments or attend in-person hearings in mid-March and early May.
The proposal is scheduled to undergo a preliminary vote in June and a final vote in July or August, and if approved, would take effect in the 2026 season.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Fish & Wildlife Board considers adding does to the regular deer hunting season.