Privatization of the Deer Herd?
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A retired, nationally known DNR deer biologist Keith McCaffery thinks our hunting heritage is under assault because commercialization and privatization brings more disease, illusions, and less access to hunting grounds.
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A retired, nationally known Wisconsin DNR deer biologist worries about the trend toward privatizing wildlife and hunting. Nick Vander Puy from the Superior Broadcast Network talks with Keith McCaffery about threats to our hunting heritage.
Right now there are almost seven hundred licensed, private game farms operating in Wisconsin. On few farms, for a fee ranging up to fifteen thousand dollars, you can shoot a trophy deer or elk. [
According to Keith McCaffery the first game farms for deer in Wisconsin were established in the nineteen twenties. There weren’t many deer running around the woods and fields, back then, and game farms were thought to be a way for private citizens to increase the deer herd.
“And so all this was occurring long before game management as a science was even founded, if we want to use Aldo Leopold’s 1933 book as being the birth of modern game management. This was taking place before awareness of any of the perils of privatization of wild life.”
McCaffery and other wildlife biologists are concerned about the role game farms play in spreading diseases, especially Chronic Wasting Disease. To date thirty of the more than five hundred CWD positive deer in Wisconsin have been found on game farms.
“Well, one of the problems with CWD is that there is no live animal test. And so as these animals are being traded across state borders there’s no way to check to find out the health condition of the animal.” In the face of CWD, most states have now attempted to control interstate movement by prohibiting imports from states known to have CWD. However, there are no customs stations on state borders.
Some DNR wildlife managers are also concerned because during the past two years more than three hundred deer have escaped from Wisconsin game farms.
Game farm spokespersons defend their industry by saying no one has discovered a smoking pistol showing game farms spread Chronic Wasting Disease. They say it’s just as likely wild deer under the DNR’s management are infecting captive deer.
But that doesn’t explain how the disease leaps hundreds of miles from a source.
But McCaffery says there’s little doubt hunting on a game farm is a vastly different experience than hunting wild, uncaged deer.
According to McCaffery most game farms stock more than the equivalent of 200 deer per square mile. This necessitates artificial feeding., which heightens disease concerns. Mc Caffery thinks shooting a deer near a feed trough as has occurred on some shooting preserves is pretty much a “fish in the barrel” proposition.
“The artificiality that is imposed as a result of having deer in a captive facility and often baiting them to a specific site is not what hunting is about.”
What is hunting really about? Aldo Leopold, the author of “A Sand County Almanac” and himself a deer hunter gets close to explaining it when he talks about hunters going into the woods or marshes to gather their meat from God.
“Meat has been the foundation for hunting since the ascent of man. And the extent to which we drift away from meat as being the primary motivation for hunting we get into trouble with that vast non-hunting audience. They see “sport” and a focus on trophies as being a frivolous use of wildlife.”
Next time you stop at the magazine rack, check out the covers on hunting magazines.
“When I go down to the grocery store and check out hunting magazines there are at least eighteen specialty magazines devoted to taking whitetail deer. Every one of those has a picture of a huge monster buck plastered on the front of it. I’ve always viewed that as a form of pornography, being it is a distortion of reality. For the most part, these aren’t even wild deer. Any photographer that wants to get a picture of a Boone and Crockett buck is not likely to go out in the woods and sit and wait until one appears. He’s going to go where there is one and more than likely it’s going to be in an enclosure or some sanctuary.”
Besides, game farms McCaffery points out other threats to hunting.
“More and more wildlife privilege is being transferred to private landowners to the point deer poaching in Texas is now a felony. We’ve seen in Wisconsin the tightening of trespass laws. Access to lands is being more closely controlled. I just don’t know whether there’s anything that’s going to reverse that trend.”
Private timberlands across Wisconsin are available to public hunting under the state’s managed forest law. But earlier this fall the Tigerton Lumber Company near Shawano altered their ownership so that they can offer the hunting land up for private leases.
This means hunters who don’t have enough money for a lease will have to move on to allow more exclusive use of the land by those that can afford it.
McCaffery says this is beginning to resemble aristocratic hunting privilege in Europe.
“I do fear that the European model is probably an unfortunate inevitability, if trends continue, and I’m not seeing anything that’s really gonna change that trend. We pride ourselves on being an open, free enterprise society. Markets kind of dictate what happens, and I don’t see that we’re going to somehow cut down on landowners rights. I do fear that landowners are going to increasingly control, if not the wildlife that are supposedly held in public trust, at least the access to them.”
I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network