Today was the last day to legally hunt deer in Eaton County, Michigan as Late-Antlerless season ended at end-of-shooting light on January 1, 2024.
I saw four deer this morning. I was in the kid's bathroom and looked out of the window. They were on the neighbor's property, thirty yards away. Furthermore, there were houses downrange of the deer.
Too many deer...
I was talking to a local farmer on Sunday. He farms about 400 acres (a square mile is 640 acres) so he is a medium-small sized operation by today's standards.
He had one 40 acre field that was so pummeled by deer that it was not worth the diesel to run the harvester over it. His problems were exacerbated by our exceptionally dry summer. The only succulent greens for more than a month were soybeans. Guess what the deer were eating during that month.
Small fields are generally hammered harder than larger fields. Deer are hard-wired to stay close to cover.
The farmer was telling me that he has "block permits" and he is allowed to cull deer. He said he could kill 100 of them...but he hesitates because he cannot give them away.
The issue is that Michigan law does not allow the for-money-or-favor transfer of game animals or the meat of game animals. He cannot afford the time to cut them into meat or hire somebody else to do it. He can only "give" the dead animal to hungry people.
Very few people have the confidence, the skill-set, the time (culling generally happens in June/July), refrigeration (it is hot in June/July in the mid-west) and space to cut up a deer. It is a public relations nightmare to shoot ten deer and to have the stink of the rotting corpses blowing toward the closest subdivision.
Chronic Wasting Disease
Mr Green-Jeans and I had started our conversation talking about Chronic Wasting Disease.
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| Eaton County outlined with yellow highlighter. Townships (6 miles-by-6 miles square) where CWD has been identified in free-ranging deer identified with orange shading. This map is thirty months old and should be considered old-data. |
He threw up his hands in disgust. "There are just too many darned deer!"
In some townships, it is entirely plausible that there might be one deer every ten acres (64/square-mile). Shooting bucks will have zero effect on the population growth as one buck can cover 20 does over the course of the season. And there is no way that 95% of the bucks will be killed every year.
Since year-old does might average 1.2 fawns while older does might average 2.5 fawns per year, it matters which does get culled. In theory, HALF of all does could be culled every year and result in almost downward pressure on the population (assuming no mortality due to other causes).
To move the needle in terms of population (and the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease which COULD evolve into a zoonosis) a minimum of 2/3 of the does must be culled for several years in a row.
Wails of anguish
The idea of opening a "window" where venison might be allowed to enter commerce and the producers of venison compensated generates screams of horror from many different quarters.
DNR will lose revenue if they cannot continue to charge $26 per doe-tag. Oddly enough, they offer senior discounts for all other game-harvesting licenses but not for doe-tags.
The safety minded will point out that there is no regulation to protect consumers from CWD-positive meat.
DNR will lose revenue.
Safety minded will point out that the meat is not "slaughtered" in a regulated butcher shop.
DNR will lose revenue.
PETA will freak out as will suburbanites who feed deer (not legal in Michigan, so they drill 3" holes in their bird feeders and fill them with shelled corn) so they can commune with nature.
DNR will lose revenue.
It is difficult for the State to collect taxes on meat that is transferred through casual channels.
DNR will lose revenue.
Traditional game hunters will freak out at treating game, which has been burned into our minds as being pure and precious and on a higher-plane than common mammon, as a commodity.
BUT...
Epidemics are exquisitely sensitive to crowding. The math is almost identical to critical-mass and Plutonium. I don't see any other viable way to thin the herd short of stepping out of the way and letting the free-market rage. The only other option is to let CWD burn-out naturally and to seed the range with extremely persistent prions to infect future generations. To push our Plutonium analogy, to salt the earth with Cobalt-60.
Where there are 60 deer-per-square-mile there is no hope, no possibility of stomping out CWD (or tuberculosis) short of the burn-out scenario.
On the other hand, we at least have a fighting chance if there are 10 deer or 5 deer per square-mile.
Market hunting expatriated white-tail deer from southern Michigan once. It can do it again...or with a few tweaks, stop a couple steps short of expatriation.
My grandfather's property in Northern California was being overrun with deer. They ate his crops and were starting to destroy his fruit trees. There was no hunting allowed, mustn't shoot Bambi's Mom! Grandpa had worked as a butcher for a few years. He gave away a lot of 'goat meat'.
ReplyDeleteAfter a mud slide got him, the deer in the area really multiplied, they became spindly and sickly.
When populations of anything get too high something always comes along and really thins it out. I've seen it over and over during my life. Your downstate deer next, humans soon.---ken
ReplyDeleteYep, I believe the Kaibob game preserve in Arizona last century proved that conclusively. You can't allow game populations to increase exponentially - they will eat themselves out of food and have a massive starvation event.
DeleteThe politics surrounding hunting are identical to the politics surrounding everything else. Money. Which equates to power.
ReplyDeleteSo can Michigan Sportsman Against Hunger be of service here ?
ReplyDeleteThat is a head-scratcher.
DeleteLocally, Hanna-Davis meat-locker processed deer donated by sportsmen. Somebody told me they turned it all into ground-meat.
Since free-ranging deer have been identified as CWD positive in Eaton County as well as Ingham immediately to the east and Clinton and Ionia counties to the north folks are going to get a little bit dancy about donating meat OR putting their business at-risk by processing it due to contamination issues and the PR nightmare of having the press identify YOUR BUSINESS as the source of an outbreak in humans.
Okay, that sounds reasonable. I had a game meat processor turn down my request for processing a feral hog because the butcher claimed that regulations prevent cross contamination from wild meats vs. farm raised pork.
DeleteCWD is present in Texas (mainly but not exclusively to the Texas Hill Country region) as well, and animals should be checked out in CWD stations manned by Texas Parks and Wildlife within 48 hours of harvest before continuing. Hunters For the Hungry are main 'free game meats' in Texas. I've donated in past, but this was prior or CWD becoming a factor down here.
I hope you find a solution - darn shame to waste protein, especially when people are needing some food relief.
DNR will always come down on the side of 'more funding'... Until the deer start dying of starvation.
ReplyDeleteAs with all things the bottom line gets dominated by $$$$. The deer hunters I know would like to ship you a few of the Minnesota wolves here........ :)
ReplyDeleteCoyotes. I know it’s heresy … but where I live in northern NY they’ve grown to the size of small wolves ….
ReplyDeleteI think that kind of wholesale change is quite unlikely, especially given the # of if-not-anti-hunting-certainly-not-pro-hunting people involved in the Natural Resources Commision (NRC) process. To be fair, Michigan does a pretty good job limiting these people to public comment and nibbling around the edges while the actual work is mostly done by professionals not obviously biased against hunting.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think a few modest tweaks to the block system could accomplish these goals over a decade or so AND leave a system in place to address these issues on a going forward basis. 2 primary ideas:
1. Farmer + Landowner can document deer concentration in excess of X amount, possibly based on available Winter cover as document via GIS/Sat images. DNR Reviews submission and approves a special transferable block cull of X does/antlerless deer. This special transferable block cull allows farmer + landowner to bring in friends/fams/trade favors/sell the hunting rights and they are issued special tags. Cost of program to be borne by the tags, but I'm betting that won't be an issue with the kind of demand we're seeing. Meat on these tags can be donated, but must be tested for CWD at the MSU VDL.
This doesn't replace the block system, it instead allows additional documentation to be submitted to gain the right to transfer the block permits to a set # of does for a set time period.
2. DNR picks overpopulated areas and runs its own analysis of herd overpopulation, then goes to Farmers + Landowners and ask them if they would like a Special Transferable Block Permit (TBP) or DNR managed cull to be done on their land. TBP works as above. DNR managed cull is basically the same thing, but the DNR brings in the hunters and provides some supervision at cost to the hunters. It'll be a bit more expensive to the hunters, but I'm thinking the minimal DNR supervision will be enough to bring some farmers + landowners along with letting random idiots on their land (program will provide assurances that violations committed by DNR selected random idiots will not fall on the farmer + landowner). Yes, many (not liking the state, the DNR or wanting EGLE enforcement people stalking around their land) will not take this option, but I think it's a good tool in the shed to have.
However, b/c this is DNR lead it'd have to focus on key areas first. With both options there might have to be some state subsidy, but it'd be a matter of running the #s and seeing how it goes IRL.
My personal hypothesis (which I think I've seen in Deer and Deerhunting) is that since time + contact controls CWD transmission rates it is important to control winter concentrations (deer yards and farm country that often has very limited cover per deer even if it supports high deer #s).
The carrying capacity curve has multiple points where same kill #s keep equal population, we're often at the higher/highest point and we need/should (with CWD) to move to the lowest point with a sustainable and healthy population.
am betting dollars to doughnuts that there are not enough Amish living in those CWD infested townships. Northern Indiana has apparently been blessed with Amish, and a shortage of chronic wasting syndrome deer.
ReplyDeleteIndiana DNR and many deer hunters have noted some "lapses" in the sportsmanship of this religious clan. Trespassing, bag limit infractions and small army deer drives are reported. But not CWD.
You might suggest to your farmer friend that more Amish-like practices could go a long way towards his successful soybean harvest.
MIlton
p.s. This CWD thing came while the overbloated DNR thought up ever more complicated rules to write more tickets and fund their budget. They failed and their budget should be reduced to the level of service that they provide, which is none.
Some of the Amish in Central Ohio have similar "habits"; I've heard complaints from landowners about it.
DeleteTrespassing and the use of firearms during bow season are the biggest complaints.
Jonathan
The Ohio DNR is worthless. My buddy got video of trespassers unloading their trucks, got license plates and all… they did nothing.
DeleteFrom Muskegon county:
ReplyDeleteSo how does one get in touch with farmers in areas with too many deer? I struggled for two months to make contact with anything besides fawns and failed…
When Whitetail Farms in Olivet stopped processing deer, I became suspicious as to why. CWD has kind of put me off my taste for venison, frankly. The following article from the NIH is pretty interesting, and my take on it is that there has been no trans-species jump to humans detected so far, it is possible that the incubation period in humans is much longer than in Cervids. It is also possible that this particular prion cannot jump. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7766630/#:~:text=Human%20exposure%20to%20high%20levels,other%20cervid%20byproducts%20%5B28%5D.
ReplyDelete