All the efforts of depleting the herds in areas like that has proved ineffective to stop the "spread of cwd" in every instance yet the mindless fools who make those decisions keep making the same wrong decisions. Hopefully it won't be the case in your area.
The folks at MN DNR who are dealing with this know what they are doing. It's a disservice to them, and all of us to state otherwise. Unfortunately there are only 2 options, do nothing or kill deer. WI is a great example of what happens when you do nothing, so please read the article I linked in my last post. CWD has spread from an area less than the size of a county to 1/3 of the state in 15 years, and it keeps spreading. IL on the other had went with more testing and hot spot treatment (culling) which has managed to dramatically slow the spread. It's important to note that the science hasn't changed since CWD was found in WI in 2002, everything we thought about CWD has only been further verified. The WI experiment is a complete failure, and pretty much guarantees CWD will spread to all the eastern whitetail herds in due time. It's likely why it ended up in MN.
So IMO the blame for the current CWD situation is on the outgoing WI governor, his political allies in the state legislature all who claimed to be for sportsmens rights; captive cervid (deer and elk) "farms" and a gun rights organization who supported them and the agricultural lobby who embraced them as one of their own; lazy hunters, corn farmers and gas station owners who wouldn't let the DNR ban baiting; but most significantly all those blaze orange rednecks sitting on barstools who refuse to believe the biologists and think it's all a conspiracy.
The only options available to the MN DNR trade between short term and long term benefits. At this point I'm not saying one option is better than the other because there is 100% certainly that CWD will have a major long term impact on deer hunting no matter what we do. Even if a miracle cure is found the geographic distribution of CWD right now would make any treatment cost prohibited if not outright technically infeasible. Five decades of CWD research has indicated that a future with CWD will mean much lower deer populations, perhaps even too low to allow hunting. It also means few if any deer would live past 3 years of age so there won't be anymore bucks like Angus around. The sad irony is history will note that hunters and the hunting industry ended up causing the demise of our favorite sport, not anti-hunting groups.
For more info including a great CWD timeline:
http://cwd-info.org/A long but very informative overview of CWD:
http://www.apwildlife.org/publications/
Topic: A 5 Pines Farm Giant (Read 42775 times)
