Report: Recreational hunting alone will not control CWD
Members of the Natural Resources Board gave very close attention to a recent report by Bryan Richards, CWD project leader for the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison.
It's a report that should be heard by every person who has an interest in deer in Wisconsin.
Some hunters and landowners naively believe that efforts to reduce deer populations, and CWD, have been too intense and need to back off.
Richards, who has no direct responsibility over Wisconsin deer herd management or CWD management programs, was very clear that more effort is needed. He said that:
** CWD spreads and prevalence increases.
** In Wisconsin, CWD poses significant long-term problems.
** Effective CWD management will require dramatic and sustained efforts.
** Recreational hunting alone will not control CWD.
Richards, who works for the U.S. Department of the Interior in Madison, stressed that several reasons to be concerned about CWD are the many positive effects deer have on the economy and hunting heritage. Big game hunting in the U.S. is a $10 billion industry each year with 11 million participants. Wisconsin has 600,000 deer hunters who provide a large stimulus to the economy.
But deer populations also have negative effects, including causing more than 35,000 vehicle/deer accidents per year in the state, causing agricultural damage and limiting forest regeneration.
"CWD spreads and prevalence increases," Richards said. "This should be obvious, with a contagious easily transmissible disease, but it is one of the most contentious items. There are constantly challenges that CWD spreads, and the only absolute way to prove it is to test every animal on the landscape."
Richards referred to patterns of CWD on the landscape in several states, where it appears the disease started at a core and dispersed out from the core. In a study of male mule deer in Colorado the prevalence reached over 40 percent, and in Wyoming two out of every five adult female white-tailed deer in one study area had the disease.
Surveys have shown that as prevalence increases, people won't want to hunt deer. Declining hunters means higher deer populations, and more deer/vehicle collisions, crop damage, and suburban nuisance problems from deer.
Richards said that effective CWD management requires dramatic and sustained efforts. His recommendation is that if an area does not have CWD, preventative measures should be implemented to keep it out. If an area does have it, strong management actions are needed and it should be monitored.
Because of budget cuts, the DNR stopped much of its research in outlying areas of the state.
Richards congratulated the State of Wisconsin for its 2002 work to implement measures to reduce risks, and he said the new proposal to restrict the movement of carcasses was an outstanding idea.
"The science is absolutely clear on feeding and baiting," he said. "Where you have high densities of deer congregated around food sources, you have a risk of disease. When you have CWD in the southern Wisconsin and Bovine tuberculosis in Michigan and northern Minnesota, you have a valid rationale for a statewide ban on feeding and baiting."
Richards told the board that if they are depending on the recreational harvest of deer alone to control CWD, they will likely fail.
"Hunters in the State of Wisconsin have not shown themselves as being capable of managing deer populations," he said. Currently over 90 percent of the geographic area of the state is overpopulated with deer.
Minnesota is proposing to allow landowners in a specific area to kill deer 24 hours a day, seven days a week to reduce Bovine TB in the deer population. Their idea is to get rid of restrictions and allow people to kill deer.
Richards raised questions about the current regulations proposed by the DNR and CWD Stakeholders Advisory Committee, saying that the DNR was originally on the right track, but was forced to back off. He believes that the current regulations being considered by the board, which went out to public hearings in March, have no possibility of helping to reduce or eradicate the disease. It would merely slow the spread.
Richards said that, from disease management perspective, he found the proposed CWD regulations for this fall "somewhat stagnant and maybe even taking a step backwards." He sees very little evidence that hunters will bring the deer population back down.
Unfortunately the state is talking about "containment and control," without adequate steps to reduce the disease.
