Every generation of Mississippians inherits something they did not build and owes something they will never fully see. Our white-tailed deer herd is one such inheritance, heritage handed across kitchen tables and deer camps, an economic engine that moves nearly two billion dollars through our state each year, and a public trust that belongs to every Mississippian. Today its future rests inside a single document, and the people writing it face a decision that will echo for generations.
One of Mississippi’s finest governors, Haley Barbour, liked to say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. So let us give this issue some daylight, so everyone can see what our state stands to lose.
The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks is revising its Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) Management Plan, as it does every five years. On June 9, the Department reviewed the proposed updates to the plan with several other conservation partners at the Mississippi Conservation Officer’s Training Academy at Holmes County State Park. That plan is our central defense against a disease that is always fatal, cannot be cured, and once on the landscape, cannot be eradicated. It spreads silently, roughly three and a half miles a year, indifferent to county lines, property fences, and political calendars. It cannot be stopped; its march can only be slowed. For those who doubt these facts, the nation’s oldest conservation organization, the Boone and Crockett Club, lays out the evidence at boone-crockett.org/chronic-wasting-disease.
Before revising any plan, we should ask whether the current one is working. Mississippi recorded one positive CWD case in 2018. By 2020 there were 35, by 2022 there were 50, by 2024 there were 111, and this year the count has climbed to 140. If the goal is to slow the spread of CWD, the plan plainly is not working. So let me be direct: this plan must be strengthened, not softened, and written by science, not by the preferences of a few well-connected people who would rather grow deer bred for the bullet than sustain a wild resource that belongs to all Mississippians.
Consider what this disease has already done. In a CWD research area in Wyoming, the mule deer population dropped by 83 percent in four years. In Arkansas, deer numbers fell by 91 percent over the same span; their herd has fallen from 28 deer per square mile to 2.5. In Benton County, right here in Mississippi, because of CWD, there are parts of the county where it is now difficult even to find a deer track.
The disease does not stand still. Mississippi, which averages roughly 30 deer per square mile, now has 23 counties where CWD has been found. Agency biologists estimate that, absent new introductions, we will have 55 affected counties within ten years and 73 within twenty. If the herd in those 73 counties fell by the same 90 percent already seen in Arkansas, Mississippi would lose roughly 1,165,000 deer, a 77 percent reduction in our entire herd. That is not an outside critic’s projection; it follows directly from science.
A threat of that scale deserves a plan built on one foundation only, the best available science. Yet by the agency’s own account, the revised plan is being shaped not solely by disease management but also by politics. Diseases do not negotiate. When the governing document for a fatal, irreversible epidemic bends toward political comfort rather than biological reality, the herd loses, the hunter loses, and every Mississippian loses.
Nowhere is that tension clearer than in the proposal to allow supplemental feeding statewide. Feeders concentrate deer, nose to nose, at the same fixed points day after day, precisely how this disease moves. We are not guessing. A recent study in the Journal of Wildlife Management, the premier wildlife research publication in North America, was not the work of activists. Its authors were leading researchers from Mississippi State University, the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks itself, and the National Wildlife Research Center. They found that infected deer contaminate feeders, and that the risk of CWD exposure around them was three times higher than around food plots. Their conclusion was plain: the results support restrictions or bans on supplemental feeding to slow CWD.
The agency’s own scientists helped write that paper, and the agency is now proposing to expand feeding across the entire state. I cannot reconcile those two facts, and neither, I suspect, can the biologists who did the research. To press ahead against that evidence would be to knowingly hand the disease a faster path through our woods. If I were Governor, I would not want that on my watch.
The plan must also hold firm on surveillance and testing of enclosed, high-fence operations, where concentrated densities and restricted movement raise the risk of transmission. Deer harvested from high-fence areas do not qualify for the Boone and Crockett Club’s record book as they are not considered fair chase hunting. And Mississippi is, quite literally, ground zero for fair chase hunting, the ethic born of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1902 bear hunt in the Delta that also gave the world the Teddy Bear. Earlier this year, House Bill 1628 and Senate Bill 2656 sought to strip away CWD testing inside certain enclosures and repeal mandatory testing. Those bills died, and rightly so, thanks to the wisdom of our Legislative leaders. The Management Plan should treat oversight of enclosed deer as a frontline defense, not a burden to be lightened.
This matters beyond biology. Deer are a public trust resource. They belong not to a single landowner or enclosure operator but to the people of this great state. When a policy weakens surveillance, it exposes the neighbor down the road, the family that has hunted the same forty acres for four generations, and the children not yet old enough to carry a rifle. When the few put that trust at risk, they should bear financial responsibility if the damage escapes their fences. We have watched good ideas turn ruinous before: feral hogs, kudzu, and Asian carp were all once believed harmless. In 1841, at naturalist John Wesley Monette’s urging, Natchez banned steamboat traffic from a yellow-fever-stricken New Orleans, and while river towns around it were devastated, Natchez was spared.
Most Mississippi hunters have never encountered CWD; it is only beginning to take hold. But make no mistake: it is a cancer on our herd. If a doctor told you that you had cancer, and treatment offered a real chance at a longer life with little pain, would you do nothing, or everything in your power to keep living? I would choose treatment. I would make the decision Natchez made in 1841.
The economic stakes should focus every mind on the Commission. A declining herd means lower hunter success, fewer licenses sold, and less funding for the agency charged with protecting our wildlife. It means fewer hunters leasing and buying land, gas, lodging, food, leases, ammunition, and gear, a real blow to rural Mississippi. It is a downward spiral that feeds on itself. But the deeper loss cannot be counted in dollars. It is measured in the time a father and daughter will not share in a deer stand, and in a way of life quietly draining out of the landscape.
None of this is inevitable. We have one of the finest wildlife commissions our state has had in years, and its willingness to enforce the rules will matter as much as the rules it writes. A ban on baiting would even pay a dividend beyond deer: less corn in the woods means less aflatoxin, which is toxic to wild turkey poults as their numbers keep falling.
Let me be plain about what a plan equal to this threat would do. First, it would follow science without exception, treating CWD as the generational emergency it is. Second, it would abandon the push for statewide feeding, ban supplemental feeding, keep our CWD Management Zones in place, and extend restrictions even into areas the disease has not yet reached, where we have the best chance of slowing it. Third, it would pair those rules with firm, even-handed enforcement, no matter who the violator is or what campaign he or she has funded. Fourth, it would keep mandatory testing and surveillance on enclosed, high-fence operations and hold those operators financially accountable when disease escapes their fences.
Under Mississippi Code Section 49-2-1, the Department and its Commission are charged with conserving, managing, and protecting our wildlife for this and succeeding generations. That is not a slogan. It is a duty. The commissioners, and the governor who appointed them, will own this decision. Save the herd from one of the worst diseases on earth, and they will earn the credit. Let it slip toward the emptiness now seen in parts of Benton County, and they will own that too. So, I would ask each member to weigh every provision against a single question, borrowed in spirit from President Ronald Reagan: will Mississippi’s deer herd be better off in four years, and in forty, because of the decision I am about to make?
Answer with science and with courage, while upholding your duty, and the plan will take care of the rest. This disease cannot be stopped, but we can slow it down. Our deer, and the generations who will one day hunt them, are counting on nothing less.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of SuperTalk Mississippi Media.
