The Armory Life: Deer Hunting with Model 2020 Redline - Featuring the MFT Chest Pack
Feb 4th 2025
The deer herd in the great State of Texas is currently estimated at 5.3 to 5.6 million animals, but it wasn’t always that way. The Depression was a fiasco of the first order for all of this country — even more so in the Southwest where there was so little rain that the area become known as the “Dust Bowl”.
My Dad and his family were sharecroppers back then. Dad had to quit school for a year to pick cotton just so they could make it. His recollection of the weather was that “it was so dry out there that in Noah’s Flood, San Angelo got a quarter inch.” (San Angelo is a small town in West Texas where the cotton was). Maybe that gives you an idea of the conditions.
That kind of situation is incredibly hard on game populations. Not only did most of the young fawns die from lack of water, what did survive frequently wound up in some subsistence hunter’s stew pot long before they had a chance to reproduce. By 1940, the deer herd in Texas was down to 300,000.
Thanks to some sound game management efforts and support, those numbers are up to where we have them today. Part of good game management requires that populations be maintained in accordance with what current resources can support. One of the methods used to do so is a well-staged cull hunt.
My son, son-in-law and I have been privileged to take part in such a hunt for the last several years at a ranch that covers several thousand acres west of San Antonio, Texas. The flora and fauna are both somewhat challenging in this arid environment. The local comment is that “If it don’t bite, sting or scratch, it don’t grow there.”