The CWD epidemic is still growing...

[russm86]

Bud, show me a natural source that congregates deer like a truck bed full of carrots. There’s nothing that calorie dense in nature. If there was there would be no need to bait.

You must not have any alf-alfa fields around you. Any field here has minimum 20+ deer in it.

You obviously haven't tried baiting either, maybe other areas are different, but where I've tried, you're unlikely to get more than 2 or 3 deer come through at the same time and usually it's just individual deer and usually the same dozen or so deer over the whole year. There aren't hordes of them coming out left right and centre and they do not seem to go out of their way to come to bait so you're not pulling them from all over the country side.

I have had 3 stands/cameras setup within 200 yards of each other and each cam has different deer, none of them overlap or wander to the other stands, so the deer obviously only use the same trail time and time again. Even when the bait ran out, they never went to either of the other 2 stands. There is so much natural food out there its basically if they happen to wonder across it they will eat it, otherwise they don't go out of their way. In the interior here some areas water can be more scarce than food at times so I imagine some small water holes that last through the 40degree heat of summer would have substantially more deer visiting than a random bait pile. Even the neighbours hay barns seem to have more deer at them.

If they can prove that CWD transmission by bait piles is a substantial risk compared to agriculture and water holes etc then by all means I'll stand behind a ban, but if we are talking about something that accounts for less than 1% of all the other means of transmission, then there's absolutely no point. As I said previously, they need more research/info.