re: CWD detections by Parish.

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I stopped trying to plant food plots and went 100% to gravity protein feeders and corn feeders

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Yeah, people keep referring to this as "baiting".. It's not. It's supplemental feeding.

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I can agree on certain situations where you have enough land and moisture to be able to grow decent food plots. I live and hunt in South Texas and after 3 years of prepping, purchasing seed, and fertilizer only to have zero results due to lack of rain I stopped trying to plant food plots and went 100% to gravity protein feeders and corn feeders. I started feeding year round about 6 years ago and the quantity and quality have dramatically increased since that time.

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not every area is meant to have a shitload of deer, Boone and croquet book bucks. Carrying capacity.

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Dumping corn on the ground in front of a camera is baiting.

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Absolutely agree with this. Having a protein feeder that doesn't get hunted is feeding.

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It's artificially concentrating deer spit and increasing contact either way. Both are conducive to spreading disease.

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I don't disagree with that..

On a different note, did you see what the Kerr County Deer program did?? 50 years of research down the drain...

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And it was a false positive..

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Damn.

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Meanwhile the government still will not allow hunters to feed in most of Madison and Franklin parishes.

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sucks for the folks on the fringes with nearby feeding going on, but I'd be thankful. bare with me, because this is getting to how I feel on CWD and feeding.

among many other ethical issues and effects on hunting and deer movement, one problem we've seen this year is that, like many others, central mississippi had a terrible drought. as a result, 99% of food plots had terrible results, and the acorn crop was dismal as well. this should've led to good deer movement, but because of copious baiting, it was the worst year I've ever seen as far as movement goes, including the rut, and we had the best rut hunting weather we've had in at least 8 or 9 years.

every feed store in the area could barely keep up; they had record winters on corn sales, and feeders too. the local co-op owner told me they couldn't buy enough feeders to keep up with demand. you can't go for half a mile down the road without seeing empty bags of corn, rice bran, mobucks and big and j in the road ditch that blew out of a truck bed. the only common denominator to the poor movement is the feeding like never seen before to supplement the food plots: by pre rut, the water situation was about normal. no acorns, hunting pressure the same, logging situations the same, weather fantastic, deer everywhere at night...unparalleled baiting...no deer in the day. I pride myself in having picture worthy, done right food plots, and while mine did better than most, they were still poor by my standards. that could've been a factor, but I've had worse results in years past on certain plots that i neglected to plan and plant for. unlike the feeding, their condition is not unparalleled.

being surrounded on 3 sides by a deep section of national forest, i waited until middle of peak rut to bait, hoping the deer would move better, but they never did. as soon as I put the feeders out, what few doe groups I was seeing went nocturnal overnight, but with them came dozens more to join the large groups that were nocturnal. typically, during late season, on my largest 6 acre plot located in a river bottom with 100 acres of prime unbroken bedding thickets adjacent, during good weather, you can plan to see 10-20 deer with a 60/40 mix of does to bucks per evening hunt.

we saw no more than 15 all year on that plot.

worst season I and others around me have seen in a decade, and it sucks because our peak season weather was the tits.

the deer don't move naturally anymore around here. they hole up in their bedding areas 100 yards from the feeder and don't move until after dark. I firmly believe we're conditioning our doe groups to adapt, and only the ones with a propensity to lay low, stay away from feeders until nighttime, and in the thickets even with a buck after them, are breeding. it follows along the same line of theory that Tom Kelly laid out in one of his books about gobbling turkeys and why the science shows that turkeys gobble less and less, and like rattlesnakes are adapting to rattle only as a last resort: humans. animals aren't stupid. they're wild, they can't reason, but they can adapt byway of pattern recognition. a 10th generation doe whose ancestors lived by being increasingly dependent on nocturnal corn feeding and staying deep in thickets and learning that behavior through the years has to got eventually come to a head.

Because I'm becoming more and more skeptical about the science of CWD, I would almost rather them find the deer that I know is running around here right now with CWD so they could ban feeding in our area. I believe as far as hunting quality goes, the latter is far worse than the former.

the day mdwfp bans feeding and dog hunting on lands less than 1000 contiguous acres, our 4 county area will see major improvements in deer hunting. while the dog situation will sort itself out in time due to lawlessness, I'm afraid that unless cwd is the conduit to stopping the baiting culture and businesses that depend on it, that the cat is already out of the bag, and getting it back isn't going to come without some major backlash- and we all know the politicians who run wildlife departments instead of biologists don't like that word one bit.

No baiting and kill more deer.

Populations are too high. Spread of any disease is a risk.

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i waited until middle of peak rut to bait, hoping the deer would move better,

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So after three paragraphs ranting about baiting you still baited?

The extent of corn having an impact on positive CWD results comes only from deer congregating in a small area.

As for the bait ban, it sure makes my work easier on the places I manage within the bait ban zone, while also making it more difficult to get herd information via trail cameras.

Good and bad

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like rattlesnakes are adapting to rattle only as a last resort

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Not true. Jesus….