The thing is that most of these areas that are seeing tag cuts are in a multi-year drought, but many of these places have also had EHD and other disease issues. So the local populations are already below population objectives (aka well below carrying capacity, even during drought years).

If the units were at or above objectives coming into this you would have seen tag increases during this drought to reduce pressure on the habitat.

Sure, other states may reduce tags to prevent overhunting when conditions don't support larger populations. They will also increase tags when the population gets too high in order to reduce overpopulation. It is how game management works.

Someone should teach the fools at TPWD how this works with dove/turkey in some areas.

If there isn’t any food, shouldn’t they increase tags to lower the population?

No, because the issue isn't that there is NO food. It is that food is much more limited.

Also, the opposite of that usually would not be true then either, lowering the number of tags to increase the population when there is way too much food (unless responding to a population crash when that actually make sense).

Also, if the population is in decline due to stresses like limited resources, you don't want to speed up the process by increasing the number of tags.

Right now, the populations are being stressed. Stress, temporary or cyclical, can be a very good thing from a population perspective. It helps weed out (kill off) those that are weak, sick, or biologically ill adapted to handle the stress. In other words, it kills off a chunk of the population that isn't apt to be able to contribute well to the benefit of the population.

Hunters tend to try to get the best whatever they are opting for, when hunting for meat or trophies, right? How many meat hunters go after the scrawniest most sickly looking deer they can find? How many trophy hunters look for an undersized buck with a poor rack? So with the population stressed, percentage-wise, hunters are going to take a disproportionate amount of the best game available - the very ones that the population wants to survive to keep the population healthy So, the lower the number of tags gives some of the best, most fit game a better chance at survival and passing on genetics to future generations. This happens while the stress even is killing off many of those individuals you definitely don't want passing on genes to the next generation, the very game hunters often will pass on if given a choice.

I come from a farming/ranching background. In a drought, we sold cows. Hopefully before everybody else did. When graze is sparse, it can get over eaten and take years to return. Animals suffered and if there were too many, it could take a lot longer time to recover.

I think they are doing it all wrong. But, I’m not on the ground there.

This makes the most sense. If you are going to lose deer due to starvation you might as well harvest them. If you have enough feed for 100 deer and have 1000 you may end up with fewer than the 100 you should have managed for. A real problem Wyoming has is sheep. They eat the sage almost right down to the ground in many areas. In those areas deer and elk are pretty thin in number. Interestingly nothing is ever said about reducing the level of grazing sheep do. It seems presently Game management is not what it should be.