And also, the laws mean that harvest numbers will be lower. It lets the state sell MORE licenses and tags than the number of deer they want to be actually taken, so they make more money. It's the same reason gyms want your membership, but don't want you working out :)
States are different though, some places have real population problems and will give ya a fistful of tags for cheap. My state isn't that way, they want the revenue and our game population would never support 100% success rates.
Ahh, this is the kind of answer I was hoping for. Thank you.
Recently, there are more activists joining my state's DFW, which is trying to subvert the original goal of preserving the balance between us and natural resources. Those people can go piss up a rope, because their naive understanding of the natural balance of these ecosystems is trumped by ideology. But in a perfect world, I'm happy to give the state a few hundred bucks that goes to preservation even if I don't have success during my hunts, because it's a worthwhile goal.
For over hunting you have concerns over what sex or age a deer may be, time of day (more vulnerable at night), time of year (you don't want to kill a doe while it's pregnant or taking care of a fawn), and of course total count/limit.
For safety. Night hunting can be pretty risky, some locales don't allow rifles due to how far the round can travel, some require a certain distance from homes, etc.
For sportsmanship and ethics, things get a little more weird, because you're potentially pitting morals against each other. It's it ok to spotlight and take down 10 deer at a time? Maybe if you purely hunt for food for your family and this was the one time of year you planned to do it, but that'd get taken advantage of quick broadly. Even weapons are hotly debated in the hunting community, bow and arrow seems fair due to having to be real close, but your chance of missing or worse, only wounding the animal, is significantly higher.
I could go on for a while on all the above, but from my understanding, your premise is generally the original intent of conservation laws. They were to create a baseline of how many deer are taken a year. What happens though is people find loopholes they exploit, leading to overly broad, complex, and sometimes conflicting laws created to counter the problem.
What's wild about this case is Pennsylvania seems to want to make it hard to recover a potentially suffering animal, where many states have laws to protect you in recovery of the deer so it doesn't die suffering or needlessly go to waste. Many states make the distinction between recovery and hunting and have laws that apply to each separately. Pennsylvania in this case seems draconian and counter intuitive, which is frankly unsurprising from what little I knew about their hunting laws before.
From an outsider's perspective, hunting is important to keep animals afraid of humans, and off of roads. I don't really care how it's done. There's a target amount of deer that we want, and there's the amount of people who want to hunt deer. Figure out a price per deer that keeps the population close to the target. That's the simplest solution that provides me (the outsider) the benefit I expect.
But the laws are far more complicated than that, so there must be some sort of rent-seeking, or honor culture, or some sort of historical baggage that I'm missing.