11/20/2025
Rack Junkies said it best:
EHD vs. CWD: hunters lump them together, but they couldn’t be more different. EHD hit the Midwest like a sledgehammer this year, wiping out entire pockets of deer. When EHD rolls through, it kills up to 90% of the deer that get it and can take out 80% of a local herd in weeks. You want to talk about a real “zombie deer”? That’s EHD, the fever, the internal bleeding, the hooves coming apart. Yet somehow, the media (looking at you, New York Times) slapped a picture of an EHD deer into an article about CWD and created years of confusion in the hunting world. That’s the deer in the picture, an animal on the brink of death from a disease that burns hotter and faster than almost anything else in the whitetail world.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the graphic… the “CWD deer.” Perfect coat, standing tall, looking completely normal, because many of them are. That’s the part nobody wants to talk about. There are documented cases of whitetails living five, six, seven-plus years with CWD. Some live out their entire natural lifespan. The reason? CWD spreads through prions, proteins that don’t die, don’t break down, and can sit in the soil or a licking branch for a decade or more. You cannot shoot it out, and you absolutely cannot eradicate it. States have tried wiping out herds, and guess what? CWD stays right there in the dirt waiting for the next generation. The deer population grows right back over it. So why do we pretend this is a disease we can stop?
Here’s my opinion, and yeah, it’s controversial: CWD isn’t the monster we make it out to be, and we’re wasting money fighting something that cannot be stopped. It’s here forever. Deer evolve with it. The herd adjusts. Hunters keep hunting. Meanwhile, EHD, the disease that actually knocks herds to their knees, barely gets half the attention or funding. So the real question is… why are we pouring millions into stopping a disease we can’t erase, while ignoring the one that actually wipes deer off the map?
