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October 04, 2024
By Game & Fish Staff
This project started with a simple question: What’s the best whitetail-hunting state in the country? Along the way, over the course of several months, we discovered that determining an answer to this question is anything but simple.
Our original plan was to use data in seven categories to ascertain our rankings: Total Whitetail Tag Sales, Nonresident Whitetail Tag Sales, Whitetail Population, Hunter Success Rate, Trophy Potential, Public Accessibility and Season Length. We tasked Game & Fish contributor and whitetail geek Darron McDougal with mining the data, which involved countless emails and phone calls to wildlife biologists and hours upon hours spent poring over spreadsheets, analyzing reports and crunching numbers.
In the end, our goal of basing the results on the seven categories mentioned above proved unfeasible. For starters, not every state sells deer tags (Alabama and Mississippi, for example, sell “All Game Licenses”). Second, and perhaps most shockingly, more than a quarter of the states were unable or unwilling to provide us with whitetail population numbers. Third, while most states provided their deer hunter success rate as a percentage, others provided deer-per-hunter or deer-per-hunter-per-day figures. Converting those numbers to reliable percentages in order to provide an apples-to-apples comparison proved impossible, so we ended up scrapping Success Rate as a category.
Categories Our rankings are based on the following four categories.
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This is each state’s total number of Boone and Crockett Club record book entries from the past 10 years. (It should be noted that we intended to also include Pope and Young Club entries, but that organization was unable to provide us with a full set of statistics.)
This is the total public-land acreage open to hunting in each state, including both state and federally operated lands.
The total number of days that some form of legal whitetail hunting is allowed over the course of the state’s deer season.
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A 5-year average of total whitetails killed per year.
We feel these categories, combined, paint a fair and impartial picture of the quality of the whitetail hunting in any given state. After entering the data for each state in a given category, the states were ranked. We then averaged the four categorical rankings to determine the overall ranking. Each category is weighted equally.
WHY 37 STATES? You might be wondering why we didn’t include Western states with huntable whitetail populations like Colorado, Montana and Idaho, or whitetail subspecies like the Columbia whitetail or Coues whitetail. The short answer is this effort is centered on determining the rankings of the states where the whitetail deer is king among big-game species.
Our hope is that you will find our rankings both useful and informative, and that they will inspire many deer camp debates across the whitetail’s range this hunting season.
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