39 Years Later, Vermont Resumes Doe Hunting During Gun Season

Vermont’s no-doe hiatus, which began after the 1987 gun-deer season, will end at dawn Nov. 14 when roughly 77,000 deer hunters hit the woods for opening day of the gun-deer season. The state’s Fish and Wildlife Board voted 7-5 in July 2025 to reopen antlerless hunting during firearms season this year. The delay allowed the Department of Fish and Wildlife to assess antlerless quotas and success rates for the state’s 21 deer-management units and publicize the changes early to reduce confusion.

Although other states occasionally restrict their annual rifle/shotgun deer seasons to buck-only in some regions, only Vermont imposed a statewide doe ban for nearly four decades. Vermont, however, has offered either-sex bowhunting during archery season since 1955, and it has issued antlerless tags during its muzzleloading deer seasons since 1993.

Nick Fortin, Vermont’s deer and moose project leader, said he’s pushed for antlerless hunting during gun season since taking the job 11 years ago. Fortin said milder winters, declining hunter numbers, changing land practices, and less hunting access made it increasingly difficult to control deer herds in some areas with arrows and muzzleloaders.

“We’ve struggled to harvest enough antlerless deer in our more productive areas,” Fortin told MeatEater. “Most of our board members saw the old system not working the past few years, and that message is getting through. It’s been a long, slow process changing the program, but we think we can better apply hunting pressure where it’s most needed by issuing antlerless tags to gun-hunters.”

In fact, since Vermont first regulated deer hunting in 1912 with a three-week firearms season, only three times—1979, 1980, and 1981—has its statewide antlerless harvest exceeded the buck kill. That happened after Vermont’s Legislature surrendered its regulation-setting authority to the DFW in 1978 after the state’s herd boomed during the 1970s.

From 1971 through 1978, Vermont’s growing deer herd generated an average kill of 9,515 bucks and 1,073 antlerless deer, a 9-1 buck/doe ratio. Further, the annual buck kill ranged from six to 16 times larger than the antlerless kill. The 1971 tally was 7,871 bucks, and 480 antlerless deer (16-1); while the 1978 total was 7,430 bucks, and 1,336 antlerless deer (6-1).

Controversial Change

When the DFW took charge of the antlerless quotas and regulations after 1978, the buck kill increased even further but finally fell short of the antlerless deer kill for the first time in modern deer hunting’s history. Even then, the combined archery/firearms deer kills weren’t lopsided:

1979: 6,921 antlered bucks and 9,591 antlerless deer (1-1.4) 1980: 10,219 bucks and 15,708 antlerless deer (1-1.5) 1981: 8,601 bucks and 11,636 antlerless deer (1-1.4)

But after a brutal winter in 1977-78 and other harsh winters in the 1980s hit the herd hard, the Vermont Legislature rescinded the DFW’s deer-regulations authority after the 1987 hunting season. Deer numbers had declined in the mid-1980s, and hunters blamed the DFW—not harsh winters—for killing too many deer. Lawmakers sided with hunters, even though the annual antlerless kill from 1982 through 1987 never exceeded the buck kill, averaging 6,641 bucks and 4,240 antlerless deer annually.

Even so, Vermont lawmakers reclaimed control of antlerless quotas in 1988. The Legislature also forbid the DFW from issuing antlerless tags during November’s 16-day firearms season, a hunt that generates 93% participation rates by the state’s deer hunters.

From 1988 through 2025, Vermont relied entirely on bowhunters and muzzleloader hunters to shoot antlerless deer. The state’s archery season attracts 43% of Vermont’s deer hunters, while December’s muzzleloader season attracts 39%, and October’s muzzleloader season draws 24%. But not once in the past 39 years did Vermont’s antlerless kill exceed the buck kill statewide, and nothing in the data suggested that system would ever manage the state’s deer herds.

Still, Vermont’s bowhunters and muzzleloaders tried to make it work. Harvest data for the past 20 seasons (2006-2025) show muzzleloaders shot 4.4 antlerless deer for every buck they harvested, including a high of 5,059 antlerless deer and 1,146 bucks (6,205) in 2018. Likewise, Vermont bowhunters arrowed three antlerless deer for every buck they killed from 2006 to 2025, including a high of 4,877 antlerless deer and 1,292 bucks (6,169) in 2020, a 3.8-1 ratio.

Unfortunately, muzzleloading hunters typically filled only 14% of the available antlerless tags each year. Further, few Vermont deer hunters (all weapons) shoot more than one deer annually. In 2025, for example, 80% of all successful hunters (11,241) shot only one deer, while 15% of them (2,185) shot two deer, 4% (528) shot three deer, and 1% (152) shot four deer.

Fortin said the Vermont DFW will take a cautious approach with its restored authority to regulate the deer harvest. He said his predecessors in the late 1970s used an aggressive plan to reduce deer numbers, which “possibly worked too well.” Though smaller herds in the late 1970s and early 1980s helped habitats and browse conditions improve, and bucks produced phenomenal antler growth and body measurements, the biological data didn’t convince hunters to stay the course. And thus began Vermont’s nearly 40-year run of buck-only gun seasons.

Conservative Quotas

Meanwhile, as the new century unfolds, Vermont is seeing fewer severe winters to control the herds, and deer-license sales have tumbled 30% from 174,281 in 2000 to 121,961 in 2025. License sales have stabilized a bit, but the DFW thinks it isn’t enough to control herds in many areas without help from gun-hunters filling antlerless permits.

Fortin said the DFW will keep permit levels conservative this year, gauge the state’s new harvest rates, and adjust accordingly in 2027. “We’re easing back into it,” he said. “We’re trying not to repeat the early 1980s.”

Fortin also said the DFW will monitor how hunters respond to a new regulation that allows them to “earn” a second buck tag in some areas by killing an antlerless deer and a buck with at least three points on one side. The second buck, however, must be taken in a different, later season than the first buck.

Fortin expects more hunters to support the DFW’s new opportunities for increasing antlerless kills, but he knows it won’t be unanimous. “Most of our younger hunters are aware of the importance of hunting antlerless deer,” he said. “But among our hunters over 60, there’s still a big chunk who are dead-set against antlerless harvests. In general, if they can remember the mid-1980s, they adamantly oppose these changes no matter what we show them.”

A researcher who studied Vermont’s deer hunters 20 years ago understands that opposition. In his 2009 book, “A Matter of Life and Death: Hunting in Contemporary Vermont,” Marc Boglioli, an anthropology professor at Drew University in New Jersey, discussed his visits with hunters at several Vermont deer camps. Boglioli wrote that weather and deer regulations dominated all discussions about the deer herd’s size and health.

What topic seldom arose? Boglioli wrote, "What always surprised me was the extent to which habitat does not come up in these conversations. Indeed, the hunter who describes habitat as a key determinant of the health of the deer herd is a truly noteworthy informant. On the other hand, in my conversations with Fish and Wildlife personnel, habitat conversion and fragmentation are considered the most important factors influencing the deer herd.”

Boglioli thinks little has changed in the 17 years since his book’s release. “I checked in with my brother (who lives and hunts in Vermont), and his feeling was that people still don’t think the state knows what it’s doing,” he told MeatEater.

And when Boglioli contacted a local hunter he knows for his thoughts on the new regulations, the hunter responded, "We're still blaming Fish and Wildlife, lol. I improved my habitat a lot, though. The deer hunting was just starting to get good, it seemed, and they’re now going to allow doe hunting. Gonna wipe them out again.”

Boglioli wasn’t surprised by those responses. “This is what I was hearing 25 years ago,” he said. “Even when people see how better habitat improves their own area, their ‘big picture’ thinking is that doe seasons are a bad idea.”

Conclusion

DFW commissioner Jason Batchelder acknowledges that antlerless hunting with rifles and shotguns remains contentious, but he sees no way to avoid it. “The Board’s vote (7-5) to approve these changes was a nail-biter,” he said. “But ultimately, they supported Nick Fortin’s position. Nick’s a thinker and a pragmatist, and he has a goal for the herd that we won’t reach without modern firearms.

“Wildlife managers don’t have it easy,” Batchelder continued. “Theirs is the only profession where you go to work every day knowing someone will say you’re wrong. If you’re a mechanic and you tell customers their car’s struts are shot, they don’t say, ‘No, it’s the brakes.’ People typically trust their professionals in everything except deer management.”