Haley and Samuel said the disease was like a wildfire that is raging in the southern Wisconsin herds where it started and will eventually spread elsewhere.

“There’s very little you can do to keep it from getting worse,” Haley said of the core CWD areas around Mount Horeb and in southern Wisconsin. “You have to be on the edge of the burn scar to do much.”

Samuel and others said it was difficult to predict how long it will be before there are population declines in Wisconsin’s deer herd like those seen in the West, where the disease was detected in the 1980s.

New approach

After CWD was discovered near Mount Horeb in 2002, the DNR spent millions of dollars trying to eradicate it by killing as many deer as possible in the infection zone.

But the state changed course in 2010 and adopted a new 15-year plan focused mostly on monitoring the disease after hunters and landowners resisted the eradication strategy, saying it was impractical and a waste of deer.