When they first found cwd in WI they went the wholesale slaughter route. Think 2+ month rifle gun season instead of 9 days, lifting shotgun restrictions allowing rifles in almost all areas, unlimited free tags, dnr sharpshooters over bait, carcass drop off stations where you could dispose of whole deer, etc. They/we killed tons and tons of deer to the point few deer were left in many of the core areas. Now fast forward 18 yrs and much of the core area has come back with pockets of extremely high deer numbets in spots and we still have 40+% infection rate of adult bucks in most of the core area and the core area keeps growing every year. The massive kill off at this point seems pretty much pointless and a huge waster of a resource and $. I would think trying to reduce the areas that are grossly overpopulated along with moderate reductions in the rest of the herd and spending the $ towards testing and monitoring would be a much greater use of $ imo. But it seems almost every state that finds cwd follows the same playbook. Kill them ll before they die
