Category: Deer hunting
Posted by Dave Spratt on Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 10:03 AMPut down that bait -- please
So chronic wasting disease is in Michigan now.
No big surprise there. With all the game ranches and deer and elk farms, it was only a matter of time.
What counts most now is whether it can be contained to that one single captive deer in Kent County. Let's hope like heck it can be.
The DNR deserves some credit for taking aggressive action. They've quarantined all 580 farms that raise deer and elk. They're testing hundreds of deer around Kent County and have made it mandatory to have deer killed by hunters around there tested.
And they've banned baiting and feeding deer statewide.
That's the big one, and it's the one that will take the most cooperation.
The state banned baiting in bovine tuberculosis areas when that disease broke out a few years back, and it took roughly 32 seconds for everybody to ignore the ban.
If that happens this time and CWD spreads into the wild herd, the effects will be huge.
CWD is horrible. Its victims wither away and die, period.
In our state, deer hunting is not only a cultural institution but also an economic necessity. If our herd gets this disease, it will be devastating.
That's why we need to do anything we can to stop it for now. Bait piles bring deer nose to nose, and that obviously is a way that disease spreads. It sure seems like a good time to set that method aside.
I'm not necessarily opposed to baiting deer, but it has always seemed kind of silly to me that in a state so crammed with deer who clearly have enough to eat, you'd even need to.
It's just not that hard to look at the habitat, observe the sign and figure out where deer are coming and going.
What a novel concept.
