SHAWANO COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Deer Hunt 2025 kicked off over the weekend, and as hunters prepare to bag that trophy deer, they are also asked to think about a deadly disease that often goes along with it.
Chronic wasting disease, or CWD, is fatal and impacts the nervous systems of deer, elk, moose and caribou. Scientists say testing is key.
Wisconsin DNR State Deer Specialist Jeff Pritzl says confirmed areas with CWD cases include Shawano County.
“This is the leading edge of the disease, as it is moving north and east. We’re unfortunately in the middle of that,” he said.
“It’s always fatal. There’s no cure for it. There’s no vaccine for it,” said DNR Wildlife Biologist Jaqi Christopher.
Christopher says CWD is highly contagious and can linger in soil or other infected animals for years. She says whitetails are social animals, so bans on baiting and feeding will follow. She says getting harvested deer tested is free.
“We have several sampling kiosks across the county. Here at the Shawano DNR office, one at the Navarino shop down at Navarino and several with different partners across the county. We also have our carcass disposal dumpsters. Right now, there are three in the county. One here in Cecil at the boat landing, one in Wittenberg at the Wittenberg Town Hall and one down at Navarino at our DNR shop,” she said.
Christopher says hunters using dumpsters keeps carcass waste off the landscape. The big bins are scheduled to be available at least through the end of the nine-day gun-season. Pritzl says hunters often get CWD test results in about a week.
“This is the area of the state we really would like to see abundant sampling coming from, so that we can just get better picture of what is the true prevalence of the disease in the population. It requires just a pretty robust sample size from each of those counties. So yeah, we do hope to see an increase in sampling participation in 2025 in Northeast Wisconsin,” he said.
Health officials recommend people should not eat meat from a deer that tested positive for CWD. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there have been no confirmed cases of CWD being transferred to humans.
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