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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wjschmaltz" data-source="post: 357823" data-attributes="member: 6150">I guess I have a hard time disagreeing with this. Deer were essentially a timber species up until about 70 years ago. The Shelter Belt Program went into place from 1935-1942, likely none of them reached effectiveness for 20 years and then it took a while for dispersal to occur. I wasn't hunting deer in the 80's and early 90's but my uncles and grandpa sure talked it about it like the glory days. Even with the horrible winters in the late 90's, deer were very abundant then and into the early 2000s. I had something like 6 deer tags in 2006 along with all of my uncles and cousins. We should've been able to shoot more of them rats. Coincidently, that aligned with the peak of CRP acres in the state of approximately 3.4 million acres. Almost every shelter belt reached maturity by 2010 and the majority were removed thereafter. A lot of them went with the 2.3 million acres of CRP land that was planted into corn and soybeans over the last 15 years or so. Correlation does not always imply causation, but overall habitat in the state tracks very close to overall deer population, which seemed unchanged by major weather events for several decades up until recently. As far as the CWD thing, I remain an onlooker from the outside. Is the NDFG now suggesting that CWD is causing deer die offs?  That would be a major change in messaging from what I've heard from any state or federal agency. The message that I've always heard is slowing down the spread of the disease until more is known (I know that's a tough message to sell after what happened a few years ago); especially recently as it seems CWD as an actual cause of death seems rare. It seemed like the major concern was monitoring the zoonotic potential of CWD. If there is ever a zoonotic case of CWD that can be traced directly back to eating deer, the seasons will essentially be eliminated forever. They will not risk the liability of allowing people to hunt deer and dispose - so they will shut it down completely.  A man that I consider a very trustworthy and intelligent man here in Alaska (he owns then Alaska Outdoor Forum, has written books on float hunting Alaska, worked as a guide for Buck Bowden) has sworn that his wife suffers from a form of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease from eating a confirmed CWD positive deer. His evidence is compelling. Eventually they will spread it to monkeys in a lab and it will be game over for deer hunting in places with confirmed CWD-positive deer IMO. There's enough data (very good and very bad) from both sides of the argument to know they're both missing the mark on messaging.</blockquote>

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