As a preface to my comment, I’ve worked in forestry and still get my paycheck through industry. We have hammered the hell out of the country, look at the current age class distribution, road density, fragmentation, and increasing pressure due to atvs, side by sides etc. Combine this with the beetle and related salvage logging, there are fewer and fewer places for deer to hide out from predation, human or four legged. There are definitely issues related to increases predation on mulies and pred populations associated with whitetail populations as well as inter breeding of mulie does by whitetail bucks, but I don’t think these are the main issues. I thinks it’s habitat and escape cover that was provided by a land with more older age stands and less roads. If we are talking drybelt fir, the historic stand structure after fire was a lot different than the current post logging structure. We’ve pushed them into smaller and smaller areas and predator and hunting success has probably increased. Stress on the deer would be higher as they get bumped from place to place which takes an incremental toll from a caloric/energy perspective. For critters in the bush the auditor never stops keeping track of what went in and what’s coming out. One good reason to have a second thought about shed hunting. If we keep applying more pressure, we are going to be left with a land of whitetail that can take it and much reduced mulies.