Let me start by saying first off I am a meat hunter, to me a big rack is a bonus.  I hunt because I love the taste of Venison, I love to be outside in nature, I love the brotherhood in a hunting camp,  I love to see all the other creatures while I'm hunting, and lastly I believe nature takes care of her self with the natures law of survival of the fittest.  Who decides at what point are the antlers big enough to be taken and why?  From a natural selection standpoint wouldn't it be better to shoot all the small spikes etc.? My theory is you should take the smaller rack deer and leave your trophy breeders out in the gene pool. Doing the reverse appears to be a road to nowhere.  I have not heard of a cattle farmer telling the ranch hands to leave all the smaller cattle and to just take the big steers out of the herd to the slaughterhouse.  I would think it's a lot better to let the big bucks go so they can breed more big deer. Being a meat hunter I am not opposed to shooting a doe, however 1 doe produces 1-3 fawns,  while 1 breeding buck will breed many, many does to make more deer.  Shooting does reduces the herd much quicker, and shooting only the big bucks leaves the spikes and smaller bucks to breed.  With survival of the fittest, it's the bigger stronger bucks that do most of the mating with the does, but they can only do this if those bigger bucks are left in the gene pool to do their job. Trophy Deer Management appears to work on a private controlled preserve where the breeding, food, & health can be controlled.  However, very few preserves can control things to that point.  So what ends up happening is you put increased pressure on the big bucks and then you remove them from the herd, which leaves bucks that very possibly have inferior traits for big antlers to breed, and in the long run you aren't improving the good DNA like you thought. There are trophy management plans where the biologists push for shooting the smaller bucks, and only taking a limited number of the big ones. That works, but you have to leave big ones to grow and breed, or you won't accomplish the objective.