30+ years as a practicing forest ecologist managing over 10,000 acres in multiple parcels in Connecticut, an advanced degree in silviculture, a manager of 45 hunting permittees, and I know nothing about forestry. OK.

Here are a few science facts for you, not that your mind will ever change:

The "old growth" percentage in CT is far < 1% of standing forests.

There are some old trees but no true old-growth habitat left in CT. The last virgin stand was felled in 1912.

Sugar maples and oaks can live to over 600 years, eastern hemlock to over 800 years. Since we are "overrun" with OG forests, please tell me where to find forest-interior trees half this age.

The native landscape-scale fire frequency here is about 1200 years. In Connecticut, fire systems are rare and typically limited to pitch-pine summit balds of which there are only a handful.

Non-native invasive plants, their spread caused by/accelerated by forest disturbances like clearcuts and other silvicultural systems, are compromising forest food sources while supporting massive tick populations. Both of these outcomes affect the deer that you like to kill.

Proper silviculture, by every single science-based measure, mimics local disturbance regimes. Here, such disturbance is single to multiple tree-falls. Clearcutting is completely inappropriate in the Northeast and best deployed in fire-tuned systems like the jack pine forests of Manitoba where the native landscape-scale fire frequency is 60 to 120 years and fires of up to 10,000 acres are not uncommon.

Old-growth forest harbor the full range of age classes from seedlings to centuries-old stands. They regenerated black cherry and white pine, two examples of light-requiring species that could not grow in your vision of the OG forest. Patch disturbances open up the canopy in what is known as the fluid mosaic of the forest. That's why our forests were so diverse before the chainsaw.

Etc. etc.