The Long Game

There is still no cure for CWD, and unfortunately, the short-term outlook isn’t positive. Yet CWD won’t seriously affect herd numbers until a sufficiently high percentage of deer contract it, and that just hasn’t happened yet in most places. Each summer, I get excellent trail camera photos of outwardly healthy whitetails meandering through the hills and valleys of our farm, masking the CWD issues at hand. We still have high deer densities and mostly healthy looking whitetails, with no signs of a population decline. I asked Sumners when we might see whitetail populations decline in southern Wisconsin. “In areas like that, with such a large population of deer, the proportion of the population that will have to die from CWD for the average hunter to see a visible decline would have to be significant," he said. "It’s a numbers game, and we haven’t gotten to the point of the disease where population decline is occurring.” Still, knowing what we know, we’re torn about how to properly manage our land. In the short-term, my family plans to harvest plenty of does each season and fill our buck tags if we can. I don’t plan to kill a slew of 1.5-year-old bucks because I am looking for a bigger challenge, but with CWD tied to our landscape for the foreseeable future, it will be hard to pass on anything of age knowing there’s a 50-50 chance the buck already has CWD. The disease has established itself, and it’s largely up to cooperating private landowners to listen to the experts such as the ones mentioned here and do their part.