The discovery prompted a swift reaction from the wildlife department. In fact, Missouri’s state and federal officials, who had been preparing for this moment for years, quickly quarantined the high-fence shooting ranch in Linn County where the sick whitetail was found. They hoped to quell the outbreak before it spread unchecked in the wild. “We have to be aggressive,” state veterinarian Taylor Woods said. “This all boils down to credibility.”

Worried About CWD

Outside the fence, worry consumed deer breeders and run hunting lodges — part of an estimated $4 billion a year industry in the United States. Oklahoma closed its borders to Missouri deer. So did Illinois. Then Louisiana and Indiana. One by one, states refused entry permits to people seeking to import deer from Missouri. All because of one whitetail buck.

“It’s sickening, the panic. What am I going to do?” said David Wood, who has been unable to move any deer from his breeding farm in Linn County since the outbreak.

Missouri joins 15 other states and two Canadian provinces where the disease has been found. Affected deer will look sick, but most of the animals now being discovered with the disease are outwardly healthy.

Researchers and industry officials say this is because they are looking more closely for outbreaks. Although testing cannot be done on live animals, many states test dead animals. Illinois found the disease in a single wild deer in 2002. Kansas found it first in 2006, and again last week with 10 deer testing positive.

Looking for CWD

“If you do enough sampling, you’re going to find it,” said Bill Pittenger, head of the Missouri Whitetail Breeders and Hunting Ranch Association.

Missouri began its statewide surveillance for chronic wasting disease in 2002. Not only to determine if it was already present in the state’s deer herd, but also to monitor cwd spread over state boundaries. It finally turned up at Heartland Wildlife Ranches in Ethel, Mo., 200 miles northwest of St. Louis.

Heartland is a high-end hunting operation, with a sprawling lodge set on 800 acres surrounded by 8-foot fences. Hunters come from across the country to take aim at trophy animals such as whitetail deer, elk and zebra. A three-day hunt for water buffalo costs $4,000.

The infected deer actually died last fall. Months later, as part of the state’s regular surveillance program, Heartland sent a specimen sample along with other samples to a federal lab in Iowa. On February 25, the test came back positive.

“I was disappointed. Worried. Surprised,” said Rob Brasher of Salt Lake City, whose family has owned Heartland for two decades. The positive test sent a shudder through Missouri’s 39 big-game hunting operations and 272 licensed deer breeders, whose operations provide hunters
with so-called shooting bucks.

The state’s deer industry supports the testing program, Pittenger said. But members also chafe at how regulators react to an outbreak. As one person complained on a deer hunter’s message board, the disease “is a lot like global warming,” suggesting that the response was making the problem seem worse than it really is.

Closing Borders to CWD

But government officials say drastic actions are needed to halt the march of a little-understood chronic wasting disease. Oklahoma’s state veterinarian made no apologies for shutting out deer from Missouri “as soon as we found out” about the positive test.

“Because we don’t have CWD in the state of Oklahoma, we need to protect our cervid breeders and our native whitetail population,” said Dr. Becky Brewer. Other states took similar action. Most states, including Oklahoma, have since eased those import restrictions to deer raised closer to Heartland, either in a surrounding county or within a 25-mile radius.

Missouri officials are now trying to determine the size of the outbreak. The 4-year-old infected buck spent its entire life at Heartland. The state agriculture department is running the investigation. Last weekend, 50 deer were killed at Heartland. Specimens were sent for testing. Results are expected Friday or early next week.

To see whether the infection jumped the fence line, another 150 wild deer are being culled in a five-mile radius around Heartland by the state Conservation Department.

“It’ll be interesting to see what comes with the second round of testing,” said Brasher, owner of Heartland. But any test results — positive or negative — will be of little solace for Wood, who runs the Linn County deer farm just 17 miles from Heartland.

Losing Everything to CWD?

Last year, the Linneus, Missouri, machinist decided to step up his small breeding program. He said he spent his savings and borrowed some more to buy a sturdy buck and quality does. He knew it was a gamble. But a baby deer can sell for $4,000 to $8,000. Some farmers have even turned to laparoscopic artificial insemination to generate deer herds.

But after that one positive test, it no longer mattered that Wood had taken part in the state’s disease surveillance program since its inception. Or that he de-wormed and vaccinated his deer. Or that it would seem almost impossible for the infection to have spread to his animals.

His deer farm was simply too close to Heartland for cautious buyers and regulators. He was being blacklisted. “There is no bright spot for me. This is most likely going to be a financial ruin for me.”

Symptoms of CWD

CWD was first identified in a deer in Colorado in 1967. Affecting deer, elk and moose, it is classified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, such as mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Officials do not believe chronic wasting disease is transmissible to humans. Afflicted deer eventually stagger, grind teeth and starve before death.

Everyone loves white-tailed deer, right? Wrong. Deer cause millions of dollars in damage each year in the United States, so it should come as no surprise that some people downright despise them. Just ask some of the automobile insurers. The problem of deer overpopulation continues to plague one are of San Antoniono, Texas, known as Hollywood Park. But for every person that wants the deer removed, there is another that loves these wild animals. As such, there have been efforts to thin out the suburb’s deer population, but they have been met with opposition from everyone from animal-loving residents to state bureaucrats, city deer control expert Will Mangum told City Council on March 16.

“Some area ranchers were interested in taking our deer,” Mangum told council about the just completed deer season, “but none had received permits, because their paperwork came in too late.” He says it is far more complex than simply picking up Hollywood Park’s deer and depositing them onto a ranch.

“The ranchers first need to contact their wildlife biologist, who surveys the land and provides specific permits on how many bucks and how many does they can take. They then need to get a release site permit from the state. We’re powerless without the RSP.”

He said all of the proposed release sites either failed to obtain the permit or missed the deadline, even though many ranches genuinely need deer to replenish herds that were depleted during last summer’s drought. HollywoodPark, he said, was forced to “process” the 35 deer it did capture and donate the meat to the San Antonio Food Bank. Mangum recommended to council that “no feeding signs” be restored around the
city, saying some residents, mainly newcomers, have begun feeding the deer in violation of city ordinance.

This has led to clusters of animals on certain streets, Mangum said, adding that some animal lovers intentionally scare deer away from the collection points so he can’t trap them. What has been done isn’t helping Hollywood Park deal with its deer problem.

“I can’t tell the difference in our deer population after taking those 35 animals out,” Mangum said. “We’re trying to maintain a certain population.”

Councilwoman Ellen Alkire warned that with other neighborhoods and towns such as Elm Creek and Fair Oaks Ranch are also looking to ship out their deer, it may be more difficult in the future for Hollywood Park to find
Bambi a new home.

Urban areas have certain issues that make deer population management difficult. Lots of people and inside the city limits, it’s not like animals can be removed through regulated hunting. Now if those deer move out into the country, that would be a different matter all together. But it seems everyone wants to be in the city these days.

More than 1.1 million hunters take aim at Texas wild game species in each. Ninety percent  fo those hunters are state residents. So while hunting is more popular among rural Texans, more than 600,000 hunters trade urban sprawl for the great outdoors on an annual basis. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that hunting is worth $2.2 billion annually to the Texas economy, so it looks like hunting is big business.

On average, each hunter spends $1,984 to hunt over an average of 13 days each year. And white-tailed deer are the most popular target, and an increasing target for folks interested in wildlife management. From big spenders who pay thousands for a guided trophy buck hunt to weekend hunters looking for a fat whitetail doe for the freezer, two-thirds of hunters in Texas head out in search of white-tailed deer.

Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) estimates 63% of those hunters hit their target so to speak last winter, racking up a white-tailed harvest of almost 620,000 deer during the 2008-09 hunting season. It was also the most successful for white-tailed deer hunters this decade, and the busiest in terms of deer hunters taking to the field.

But in addition to hunting success, the quality of Texas deer is improving thanks to wildlife management efforts that have intensified during the past 25 years. These habitat management techniques have improved the whitetail health and antler quality.

“The most successful managers plan for drought years,” says Mitch Lockwood, TPWD’s white-tailed deer program leader. “The number-one question for the better managers is ‘how many deer can my land support under the worst conditions?’”

Lockwood also stated that the fawn crop this year is better than it would have been 20 years ago, before landowners were seriously managing for wildlife. He also agreed that ranch breeding programs have changed the dynamics of trophy deer hunting by making large whitetail bucks far more common.

In fact, Dr. Mickey Hellickson, chief wildlife biologist on the King Ranch, says the market for trophy whitetail buck hunts remains strong throughout this economic downturn. But he cautions that the forces of supply and demand, combined with the troubled economy, are catching up with the hunting industry.

“Generally speaking, the demand for commercial packaged hunts has dropped off a little bit, and management buck hunts, which thin the herds of less desirable deer, to a lesser degree,” Hellickson says. “We still have a waiting list for the more exclusive high-end deer hunts.”

While the King Ranch has a large commercial deer hunting operation, many ranch owners allow hunting on their lands not so much to turn a profit as to offset their taxes and other operational costs. Some high-intensity places even choose to remove livestock, opting for habitat management and the wildlife exemption. For those who maintain herds for hunting, feed costs can be huge, Lockwood says.

“Tens of thousands of dollars in annual feeding costs is the norm for ranches of a couple of thousand acres,” he says. And hunting fees rarely recoup the cost of the high fences many ranchers build to contain deer herds. “To net the most money, a landowner needs the least overhead — no feed, no high fence,” Lockwood says.

But netting the most money and consistently raising the biggest deer may be conflicting goals. For some, it’s a question of bragging rights — who has the biggest white-tailed deer. So no matter how you slice it, the economic impact of white-tailed deer hunting in Texas is big, just like the bucks.

Think about this just for a second: Where does a mature whitetail buck spend the greatest amount of time during the day? You may not have a good answer for me and that’s because you rarely see such an animal in the middle of the day. That’s because mature bucks are not standing in open fields throughout the middle of the hunting season, and they sure aren’t camped out in the middle of a food plot.

When you get down the nuts and bolts of what a old, heavy-horned buck nees, it all boils down the cover. Thick cover, the kind that provides optimal security. A big sway-back will go wherever he can find such bedding cover. After all, the safest place to be during the day is layed up. It is while bedded that a buck has everything to his advantage. He’s already found an area of habitat rarely visited by humans, he’s got the wind working for him, and he’s watching the only places where anything could possibly sneak up on him. In short, he’s in a sanctuary. That’s why suitable deer bedding cover is so important. Without it, you’ve got no big bucks sleeping on your property.

But maybe you think your food plot will do the trick this hunting season? Did it work for you last season? Let’s say you don’t worry about deer habitat, but instead plant the ole throw-it and grow-it food plot. Hey, this is easy.

However, it’s nothing for a whitetail buck to remain in his bedding sanctuary until dark, then walk a mile and half to your food plot to feed all night, then head back home—all before sunrise. He may use your food plot, and you may even get him on camera, but that doesn’t mean he’s going in your freezer and on your wall. But at least that massive buck will leave giant tracks and huge scrapes to get you pumped up, even if he’s not around when you are.

In closing, think first about habitat when thinking about improving the deer hunting on your property or lease. Wildlife and habitat management can go a long ways towards helping you provide better deer bedding cover and keeping that big buck’s home close to yours!

Tooth wear works because regardless of where a deer lives, animals lose their “milk” teeth and wear out their permanent teeth on a fairly predictable schedule. At birth, white-tailed fawns have only four teeth. Adult deer have 32 teeth. This include 12 premolars, 12 molars, six incisors and even two canines.

When it comes to aging deer by their teeth, aging analysis often is based on the wear of the molars, which lose about 1 millimeter of height per year. Using these measurements, it takes a deer about 9 to 11 years to wear its teeth down to the gum line! As you can imagine, it is quite difficult to determine the age of a whitetail deer that is over 10 years in age.

The ability to estimate a deer’s age based on the wear of its teeth is not easy, but it is something anyone can learn with a little practice. Wildlife biologist willl often disagree on an individual deer’s age, but they are using talking about 1 year in either direction. Using tooth wear is not foolproof, but it will definitely tell you if the jaw you have in your hand is young, middle-age, old, or very old.