Help Slow The Spread Of CWD This Season: Avoid Baiting And Feeding Deer

Wisconsin's economic strength, its strong educational system and its vital natural resources are wasting away, needlessly, because of a conservative, laissez-faire political philosophy ascendant in this state. Giant iron ore strip mines, frack-sand mining, gigantic animal factories and business development on wetlands have received much more attention than another tragic environmental situation: the continuing spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in the state's huge deer population.

State news media -- including Madison's weekly Isthmus and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel -- have been following CWD developments for years, now, yet here again the state is going backward, not forward, as our state motto assures. From a new look in the Wausau Herald, that city's daily newspaper:

Past CWD-eradication strategies seen as detrimental to herd size drew opposition from hunters and were axed by lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker. And Walker's so-called "deer czar" recommended a more passive approach to CWD.

http://www.wausaudailyherald.com/story/news/local/2015/04/01/deer-disea…

That would be deer czar James Kroll, whom Walker hired from Texas to design new ways of managing Wisconsin's hunt. Imagine that: Wisconsin's own natural resources agency, our own sportsmen, our own conservation boards and our own, very adept university biologists apparently had no clue how to handle this. Call up Texas immediately!

Kroll, moreover, arrived from a state where, unlike Wisconsin, many deer are hunted on fenced-in private lands. The problem with that, as Isthmus reported almost three years ago, is that such deer preserves "are breeding grounds for disease," including CWD. 

The other problem is that Kroll's eventual report recommended a "watch and see" approach to CWD's decade-plus presence in Wisconsin. And what's been the result of the Walker administration's embracing of that approach? Again, the Wausau Herald:

Though fewer deer are being tested, the incidence of the disease is up. In the 2014 season, which ended March 31, more than 6 percent of the roughly 5,400 deer tested were positive, a DNR tally shows. That's an all-time high disease rate; as recently as 2008, it was below 2 percent.

More alarming still, the disease rate among adult male deer has reached 40 percent in north-central Iowa County and around 25 percent in two other sectors. And CWD is no longer found only in southern Wisconsin.

Tami Ryan, the DNR's wildlife health section chief, calls these numbers "not a good news scenario" but also not unexpected, given that the state is no longer attempting to manage the disease but is instead just monitoring its distribution and prevalence. Earlier attempts to employ more aggressive strategies were abandoned amid intense public opposition.

"Given that the state is no longer attempting to manage the disease"? What the hell is Team Walker thinking? Apparently, this is simply a political problem. Educating the public and taking heat for painful but vital decisions is just too much for our state's current [insert finger quotes] "leaders."

On the face of it, managing the state's at-risk deer herd and the environment in general is all just a matter of preferring to let the free market of disease vectors and pollution hotspots decide everything naturally, while the commerce department -- er, the DNR -- is made to spend more time granting businesses wetlands easements, lest those employers pack up and move to other more environmentally careless states.

The DNR does have a CWD "plan" that carries out to 2025 -- you can find it and read it for yourself on the DNR web site. But while here and there the report talks in terms of urgency, the fact is that the state's plan does not, overall, indicate that state government perceives a biological management crisis.

Compare the CWD plan's leisurely pace to the speed with which the Walker administration and Republican legislature zoomed into action to allow hunters, with the help of dogs, to go trap and shoot wolves, only recently removed from protected status. A few hundred of those wild animals occupied lead status in news reports for days on end, whereas  millions of deer have not.

Across much of the industrialized world, where avian flu is found on chicken farms, birds are immediately destroyed lest the disease spread more widely and rapidly. But when wild deer that roam mostly free carry the hugely debilitating CWD from herd to herd northward across Wisconsin and across state lines, our state leaders hesitate, lest their actions reduce the number of game animals that hunters might bag. Gosh darn it. Sportsmen might get upset! Including Sportsmen for Walker.

Might CWD someday jump to other wild animals, livestock or even humans, as ebola or bird flu did? Who knows? Let the hunters bag their animals and get out of their way while they're doing it. Wisconsin is open for huntingness.

If we were luckier the reaction to CWD would be an isolated situation. But in Wisconsin, as in America overall, a similar, largely sidelong approach has been taken with regard to massive die-offs in bee colonies, without which the human diet would be limited mostly to grains that bees do not pollinate.

Yet as it becomes clear that bees are dying in huge numbers thanks to hericides, insecticides and perhaps other human-induced environmental changes, we get a big yawn from too many policymakers.

In another context, DNR Secretary Cathy Stepp recently said flat out that she's "not a regulator." Right. We already pretty much had that figured out. Why would your government want to regulate hugely harmful human behaviors? After all, it's not like Walker or Stepp and other secretaries and elected officials are the government, or anything.

But never mind. Sit back and relax. Go enjoy your all-wheat, CWD-laced vension sandwich -- if, eventually, you can bag a deer at all, increasingly problematic as disease thins the herd.

“What happens if I have a public permit because I’m not rich enough to afford a private one?” the deer hunter asked me. “I shoot a deer and it runs across the road. There’s my deer. It’s not dead. But I don’t have a private permit to go get it.”   “It just seems to me that the new rules are set up to force people to lease hunting land because there are more permits on private land than public land.”   Deer hunters taking to the woods in Wisconsin are facing a slew of new hunting rules. Hunters will experience the long-talked-about rules of the Texan ‘Deer Czar’ James Kroll.   In the DNR’s words, the new rules change the “season framework, management units and antlerless deer hunting permits”. DNR press releases tout their “robust public outreach” and the “Deer Trustee Report” guiding this year’s changes.   Gone are “management zones” setting deer overwinter population goals. Gone are free tags & $2 tags in highly populated or CWD areas; gone are landowner deer tags. Soon-to-be gone is registering your deer at the local bar or convenience store.   Deer management units – usually set by natural boundaries and major highways – are replaced by county borders and four major ‘management zones”. Urban areas have their own “metro units”. DNR is pilot testing deer registration on-line. Next year all registration will be on-line.   Rules about antlerless tags are the biggest rule changes affecting hunters. Everyone who purchases a license will receive one buck and one doe or youngster (antlerless) tag. Many hunters, including our family, hunt for food. Filling the freezer with many critters, especially with hamburger prices rising, can make a real difference in the food budget. Buying tags was easy, cheap and –when deer were plentiful – families could easily fill up freezers for the year.   Now those ‘extra tags’ are limited. First, you do not get an extra tag when you buy archery and then a gun license. The new deer-hunting license is not weapon specific – meaning you can shoot an antlerless deer in archery season - that’s it for the year.   Second, tags are more expensive (6 times more expensive), limited, and depend on whether you hunt a private or public area.   Many times Secretary Cathy Stepp repeated, “The rules have changed, but the tradition remains.” Hunters whom I’ve spoken with wonder if all we’ll have years from now is the fond memory of what used to be Wisconsin’s very equal deer hunting tradition. Many things are changing. New rules could hasten the loss of our populist deer hunt.   For years those who live in the Northwoods have hunted paper mill land.  Now the companies don’t need the pulp and they are selling off the land. Hunters concerned about the deer rule changes reminded me, “open for public hunting” is different than “public land”. Mostly land up north is corporate owned but “open to the public”.   What happens when the land is sold?   Cash strapped counties up north are contributing to the problem. As one Eau Claire hunter whose family hunts up north told me, “Starve local government and things suffer. Local government looks for cash. The state isn’t giving them enough to keep up with the demand for services. So they clear-cut the county forest. The deer are driven out of the forest because the forest isn’t there anymore.”   Convenience store owners and hunters are also concerned about on-line registration. Storeowners are worried folks won’t stop for coffee and a doughnut if they register deer on-line. Hunters tell me: change the rules, make it hard to get public tags, expensive to hunt in private land and leave folks on their own to register a deer? Isn’t this asking for trouble?   Murmuring among hunters I’ve heard deals with the ‘artificial’ boundary between public and private. Deer don’t know who owns what. “If I shoot a deer on public land and he wanders across to private land, do I go get him and break the law, or let him suffer?” The general consensus was…. You can imagine.