Wisconsin Advisory Group Observation
1. After following CWD for years and sitting on WI's CWD Stakeholder
advisory group, allow me to get out the crystal ball and read your
future for the next 5 years. 1. A discovery of CWD will take place.
2.
A lot of media hype will occur and you will be treated to a large
amount of news about how devastating this is going to be. This will be
partially fueled by you State's DNR
3. Your state will enact a
baiting ban. Bait will be blamed for the spread. States like IL that
don't/didn't allow baiting but still have CWD will not be mentioned.
4.
A percentage of hunters will stop hunting all together out of fear from
the hype and fear of the unknown. (Wives will tell husbands that they
can't bring the meat into the house)
5. You will be treated to a
great deal of info on how to safely process deer and how to avoid the
brain, spine, lymph nodes during butchering. You will be told to wash
everything in bleach water even though bleach has ZERO ability to kill
CWD prions. In fact, the average person can not even purchase a
cleaning agent capable of killing CWD prion since you can't kill was is
not alive in the first place.
6.
Your DNR will go overboard with a plan to eradicate the disease even
though this has been tried by many States without success simply
because doing nothing is not an option and they will be criticized for
inaction of they don't do something.
7. You will see pictures of
DNR personnel in bright yellow HAZ MAT suits with masks and gloves at
some deer collection stations. The news media will make it look like a
nuclear accident took place thus scaring even more folks
8. Your DNR will do testing/surveillance and discover more CWD than they had originally thought existed.
9. Many farmed cervid operations will be depopulated.
10.
Land owners will be asked to kill off as many deer as they can and in
general an all out war on deer will be declared. A population goal will
be established that will in effect attempt an eradication.
11.
Many land owners will not comply and the MI DNR will seek access to
those lands through the courts with DNR staff as sharp shooters.
12. Hunters will begin a revolt of the DNR management plan.
13. MI will establish a sharp shooter program that will bait deer and shoot them at night with the aid of spotlights.
14. MI hunters will call authorities sharp shooters hypocrites for hunting over bait.
15. Landowners will be offered monetary incentives to kill deer.
16. The monetary incentive program will end after it is realized that it's not working.
17.
After the first deer season is over, the hype will begin to die down
once folks realize that they didn't notice anything out of the ordinary
about the deer or deer hunting.
18. After the first seasons
samples are taken from hunter and sharp shooters, a map of the infected
area will be established and a whole new set of rules will be
established for the infected area.
19.
Hunting land values in the infected area will plummet. Folks with the
means and a little knowledge of CWD will snap up lands at bargain
prices.
20. Question will begin to be asked if the millions of
dollars that were spent on CWD were worth it. Folk will complain about
how the money was wasted and very little was accomplished with it.
21.
After two years into the CWD scare, you will hear less about CWD and
the plans on how to deal with it will be quietly scaled back.
22.
After 5 years, it will be just a footnote in MI deer hunter history and
it will hardly ever be mentioned again until another State Discovers
that it has CWD. Folks will wonder what all the hype was about.
21. A portion of the hunters that left the sport will have returned but not all of them.
I
will not fault the MI authorities for all the actions they will take
even though they already know that testing and surveillance is really
all they can hope for. They know they will be pilloried for doing
nothing and so they will go through the motions so as to avoid any
calls of inaction. In retrospect, it will be a big "Ho Hum" event that
will be forgotten about in short order. You will be back to hunting as
usual before you know it.
There are two types of deer habitat.
#1 Those that have CWD
#2 Those that have CWD but it has not been discovered yet.