
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
Post: 19 September 18:47