Illinois increases doe season in the infected counties to reduce the deer population generally in those counties. So step one, it decreases the population in roughly a 700 square mile area surrounding the disease. Step 2 Illinois aggressively targets specific sections of land where the disease is detected. When I say section I am referring to the plat map terminology, being 640 acres or a single square mile, which is how all counties map out their land. Here they often deploy sharpshooters to drastically reduce the population in that 1 section out of 700. Step 3 is banning transportation of carcasses out of these areas. This general and surgical approach has been very successful.

The Achilles heel to the Illinois approach is yearling buck dispersal.. Yearling bucks will disperse 10-20 miles in farm country, maybe 30.. This results in “sparks” where the disease sparks from one controlled area, let’s say an infected 640 acre section, to another area. So now you have 2 sections out of 700 to sharpshoot and they are 20 miles apart. While the surgical approach has been very successful at containing fires as they appear, the sparks from the yearling dispersal can be reduced but not eliminated unless you just kill all the deer in infected areas. Eventually it will reach the point where, not unlike a wildfire, certain areas will need to be abandoned and a new “firebreak” established. There will invariably be sparks and a new firebreak will need to be established and so on and so forth. Absent a cure, it’s all about buying time and killing deer, especially where the disease is located, is the only viable way to buy time. Illinois has bought itself decades compared to Wisconsin with its approach. This is not a point of view or a talking point. It is cold hard scientific fact supported by the real life evidence of two different approaches

For what it’s worth, Illinois also bans feeding in the whole state while Wisconsin allows feeding and only bans it an area once the disease is located within 10 miles. A widespread baiting culture, and the resulting congregations of deer, may very well help account for why the wisconsin counties are so densely infected with the disease. When baiting is so common place, an infected deer is a new area is sure to come into very close proximity with most of the deer in its home range. As for the argument that baiting would keep Alzheimer’s deer from roaming... ...isn’t that kind of self defeating? Even if it isn’t, Deer at the “Alzheimer’s stage” may spread the disease further but if it does so, it does so at a walking pace that is stopped by the first coyote it comes across. The bigger threat posed by feeding is congregating other deer in the home range. I.e. the same area, that the infected animal spends 99% of its time. The 1 percent exposure from rutting when he is rutting or a walking zombie is negligible in comparison.