We’re hearing a lot of information on the topic of CWD these days. Some of it legit – some of it just far fetched attention-grabbing stories to scare or persuade anyone that would listen. However, one of our Bowhunting.com forum members, gunther89, recently passed along an interesting story on a series of trail cam photos that seem to document a CWD buck’s rapid decline on a farm they were hunting. Even more interesting is the rapid rate at which this buck declined. Here’s gunther89’s input on the story…
Well I thought about not even making a thread about this, but I feel like everyone needs to see it.
I always hear people saying that they never find any dead deer in the woods or that CWD isn’t a issue. Well, to all the haters, here is proof. We’ve known about this buck for 2 years and he has always appeared healthy. In mid-December, he shed one side and started to look different. By Christmas, he had shed his other side and the final pictures we got of him were on December 30th.
Here’s the buck back in mid-October.
The buck is captured on camera again in early December on his normal travel route.
The buck began to show some signs of illness in mid-December and dropped one side right after this photo was taken.
By Christmas, the buck had dropped his other side and was looking rough. This was the last photo captured of the buck. It shows the CWD buck’s rapid decline over the last two months.
The last photo we have of the buck was from December 30th of 2018. Clearly he looks sick. We figured he was dead and on the ground close by. My cousin went out January 6th to look for him and found him dead roughly 75 yards away from the last photos. He contacted the WI DNR and they said if we wanted to get it tested, we could. So he cut the head off for testing.
As expected, we got the news back that the buck indeed tested positive for CWD.
I hated to see a buck like him go out because of CWD but it just shows that deer can, and do, die in quick fashion in the wild because of this disease.
We want to hear from you. Have you ever seen the visible effects of CWD on a deer? What did they look like? How were they acting? Comment below and let us know what you’ve experienced.
