High fences came about long before all this big-buck-breeding garbage. The deal is that it's not just, "Give me all your money and come shoot a monster buck!"
First you hook up with Mr. Banker for some 10K or 20K acres, plus Oh-My-God dollars per foot for high fencing around it.
Pastures are improved from re-seeding with native grasses, herbs and forbs. Remember, a lot of this land was once overgrazed or farmed. Water supplies are improved via wells and stock tanks. That's bulldozed dirt tanks as well as any small sheep/goat-sized water troughs. Phreatophytes such as cedar and mesquite are reduced in quantity, if not eradicated; this allows creeks to once again flow as in the distant past. Mesquite got replanted northward as those oh-so-romantic trail herds headed toward Kansas, and when the Indians quit setting range fires. Cedar, like greasewood and sage brush, is a replacement growth from overgrazing.
Okay: Now you have a place that's a deer's smorgasbord. If you don't have high fences, guess who comes to dinner? Yup. All the deer from the surrounding ranches where improvements haven't been done.
Next you get into the management thing. You shoot a certain number of does. You shoot "garbage" bucks: Mature spikes, or scraggle-horned bucks. You don't shoot six- and eight-point bucks, but only the fully mature critters. After some years of paying priincipal, interest and taxes, you wind up with deer on your place that look like what your grandfather talked about--if and only if you can keep the other deer off your land.
The feds don't do any of that on "our" public lands. WYSIWYG.
So there's a short course in land management and restoration. Or you can say, "To Hell with it!" and have a bunch of low-fence, rocky, over-goated junk land where coyotes and buzzards carry rations to get through or over. IMO, once you're west of Sonora, Texas, on I-10, you're looking at a bunch of "ruint" country, all the way to Phoenix, Aridzony. Or US 90 from Castroville to Van Horn, except for some of the grasslands around Marathon, Alpine and Marfa.
, Art