Wisconsin has a rich history of deer hunting. Every November, upwards of 600,000 hunters take to the woods. I used to hunt deer with a passion, having taken more than 100 deer over my lifetime with most of them in the period from 1978 to 2008 and on the 300 acres that was the farm that my property usw part of.. I hunted with both bow and rifle.
I gave up hunting twelve years ago, mostly because of the CWD problem. I lived three miles from ground zero when the problem first surfaced. Currently, it is estimated by the DNR that 1`5% of the deer population is infected and 45% of the adult bucks are infected.
I used to live on venison but with the increasing prevalence of CWD in the herd, I gave up hunting deer and eating venison. CWD is a close relative of Mad Cow Disease and while the has not yet been a case of the disease jumping to humans, IMO, it's just not worth the risk.
A change occured in the rules and regulations which also affected my desire to hunt. For most of my huinting life, we had a traditional 9 day gun hunting season whuich began on the Saturday preceding Thanksgiving and ended the Sunday following. On the day before season opened, there was a mass exodus to the woods. Season opened at daybreak and was was generally amassive kill that first day with things slowing dow3n on Sunday. Thanksgiving morning was usually an active time as well. Bow hunting began in late September and continued until the end of the year with a break for the gun season. In latter years, a black powder season was added after the traditional gun season, then a T zone hunt in October in the Eradication zone in our area. The result of all of this was that the hunter presence was scattered throughout the year and there wasn't nearly as many hunters in the woods at any given time.
Additional rule changes permited hunting from tree stands, hunting over bait, and the use of cross bows for bow hunting. The sport changed from one of hunting to shooting. Deer generally do not move very much during the day. They will bed down and stay unless something, like a hunter walkng through. spooks them. Hunters would walk out to their stands before daybreak and sit there, in some cases until the end of the day and then complain about not seeing any deer. The war-like sounds of bygone years have past. Nowadays, it is not uncommon to not hear a single shot in the course of a day.
I used to freeze my butt off on a stand. I came to the realization that if I moved slowly and quietly through the woods I didn't get cold and I didn'r get bored. I strategy was to move slower than the deer. If I did so, I would have a god chance at getting off a shot before the deer saw me. I digured that I had about one chance in ten of seeing the deer before they saw me but I saw ten times as many deer so it was a wash. And I didn't have cold feet. I also preferred still hunting when bow hunting. There is a huger adrenaline rush when you are on the ground and a ten point buck walks to within ten feet of you.
I miss the hunting experience but I have no regrets. I used to tremember were every kill occured and what the details were. There were far too many ro do so in the later years and my memi4ry isn't as sharp as it once was. I still have my rifles and bows. Perhaps because selling them would be an admission that it was over. Who knos, my rwelve acres has been transformed from a pasture yo a forest and I ,ay go out again.