I grew up hunting the hill country around Bandera. Lots of sheep and goat ranchers back in the day, and we never heard coyotes, or saw them. One rancher hired trappers when he found some sheep missing and evidence of a kill. Even cats were scarce. And all the ranchers and their ranch hands carried rifles. You could go into town and the pickups outnumbered the cars and every pickup, and I mean every pickup, had a gunrack with two to three guns in the rear window. You could tell when a city slicker showed up they didn't have a gunrack.
The hillcountry just has a lot more for the deer to eat, not only in acorns, forbs, but various browse and berries, persimmons etc. not to mention the fact that every sheep and goat rancher had several plots to plant oats. Pretty much year around, but like stx mentioned not a lot of high protien to grow big bodied, heavy antlered bucks, consistently being the key word.
Back in the early 60's we used to go into town to see and look into the coolers at the lockers to see what was brought in. Most of the deer were in the 60# to 90# range, with very few every breaking 100# mark dressed weight.
The racks were mostly on the small pencil horned variety with a real monster occasionally brought in that would break 18" width, which was a real trophy.
Times are different with better bucks brought in both weight and antler size these days. All because of better management and hunter awareness of how to improve the herd. The numbers are still high, but that's the hill country, and probably will never change which is good for those hunters who like to see deer and put some meat on the table.