Early reports of less-than-average deer kills during this past week's hunting seasons have made some UW-Madison professors concerned about the potential spread of Chronic Wasting Disease, but they said they are not quite ready to abandon ship.
Hunting license sales were down 10 percent from last year, while opening weekend saw only 120,658 license sales, significantly below 10 year average of 156,796 according to Wisconsin's Department of Natural Resource figures.
\With the herd still up and large and the imperative if needing an even larger-than-normal kill for the purposes of CWD management, I would have to say the opening-season kill was disappointing,"" UW-Madison professor of Wildlife Ecology Scott Craven said. ""But ... the numbers just aren't in. It's kind of like predicting the election winner with only 10 percent of the precincts reporting.""
According to Tom Heberlein, UW-Madison professor emeritus of rural sociology, the gun season is only part of the picture, as bow license sales are down 20 percent, something Heberlein said is more indicative of the way people feel about CWD.
""Bow hunters tend to hunt alone and tend to be after individual deer,"" he said. ""But with the gun hunters it's a nine-day celebration where people come all over the country for. I think the hunting tradition kept the numbers from dropping further than they did.""
Going into the final days of the hunt the DNR had also only received 34,000 deer heads from hunters. The heads will be tested for CWD to determine if the disease, similar to mad cow disease, has traveled outside western Wisconsin where it was originally found. The DNR had requested 50,000 specimens.
The total number will most likely be sufficient to conduct a valid study, according to UW-Madison professor of clinical diagnostics, Philip Bochsler.
""It depends on where they took [the deer] from. They wanted 500 per management unit,"" he said. ""That would give a 99 percent confidence level that you picked up CWD if it was present. As the number decreases below that the confidence goes down, but in the field of science ... if you have a 95 percent confidence level its considered a valid set.""
Bochsler added that if the DNR is below a reasonable confidence in any of the areas they could create a special extended hunting season or go in with their own people and harvest the deer themselves.
There are three possibilities that the testing could reveal according to Craven: There is no spread of the disease outside of the controlled area, there is limited spread of the disease or the whole state herd of deer is contaminated.
""If it turns up here, there and everywhere, it's game over,"" Craven said.
