toledoblade.com --

So, a pile of those 300,000 or so Michigan bowhunters who began sitting on deer stands last Wednesday must have headed to the Upper Peninsula.

Either that or they are fully prepared to flaunt the Michigan Department of Natural Resources and its all-out attempt to contain chronic wasting disease (CWD) by totally banning baiting and feeding of deer in the Lower Peninsula.

The grounds for such a contention lie in observations of stores and convenience/fuel stations suddenly seasonally selling corn, sugar beets, carrots and apples. If you think they are just trying to peddle produce for your dinner table, you just fell off the turnip truck.

It's deer bait, pure and simple. It is business as usual in a state where too many hunters have forgotten how to hunt, hunters for whom getting a deer is more important than hunting a deer.

The baiting business - and even recreational feeding of deer to conveniently watch them on cue outside the cottage picture window - got out of control over the years, especially up in Club Country in the northeast Lower Peninsula. And what did that get Michigan? Bovine tuberculosis in its deer herd, passed nose-to-nose among Bambis drawn by the herd to truck-sized piles of beets, carrots, and what-not.

Now both wildlife and agricultural authorities are trying to head off potentially passing CWD at bait piles via saliva - a known transmission pathway - by trying to eliminate bait piles. Lack of cooperation - some state lawmakers even proposed to countermand the MDNR ban on bait in the lower, unsuccessfully - just adds fuel to a disease outbreak that may just be waiting for a match.

For sure, MDNR authorities know what is going on with these annual roadside "produce" sales. Common sense and an honest eye will tell you that stuff is hardly table fare. But legally the state cannot stop the sales.

Rod Clute, the MDNR's big-game specialist, quotes the legal chapter and verse thusly: "Only when you put it out for deer does it become bait. There are 101 uses for this produce. You could feed squirrels, you could feed hogs."

All true. Clute has to say that because that is the legal theory. The on-the-ground reality is that bad old habits are hard to break.

Aside: Baiting deer rubs against the grain of the ethics of fair chase with perhaps few exceptions. It may, for example, be appropriate in an urban setting where a safe-hunting area is very limited and culling overabundant deer is the object. It may be OK in limited cases involving mobility impaired hunters. But mostly baiting tarnishes the hunt and reduces it to the barnyard.

As for playing the "poor farmer" card, any grower whose financial future turns on sale of bags of bait already is on thin ice. If the case to prop them up is that strong, better to pay them off than risk the millions in losses from CWD in the deer herd. Ask any state with a CWD history.

Ironically, Clute does not think that the bait ban in the Lower Peninsula, which harbors most of the state's deer, will have much, if any, impact on the annual kill tally at season's end.

"Surveys around the Midwest show that the success rate for hunters who bait and hunters who don't are very similar."

In any case, get caught with a pile of apples or carrots under your tree stand and you'll be paying a fine of $50 to $500, depending on the county and circumstances. Given the threat posed by CWD to Michigan's $500 million deer hunting industry, it seems that judges should be thinking on the high side when it comes to choosing baiting fines.

In a related development, the MDNR has had to "depopulate" a second game farm in Kent County because of connections to one where CWD was confirmed in August in a culled doe.

All the carcasses of animals killed at the second farm tested negative for CWD. Around 50 were taken at each of the farms. "We'll be testing tens of thousands of deer [captive and wild] before this is over," said Clute.

He noted that it is easy to jump to conclusions and blame game farms and captive deer herds for the spread of CWD.

But he said that evidence in other states where CWD has turned up is confounding.

Some states have CWD in captive herds some in both wild and captive deer, and some only in wild deer.

So far, no CWD has been detected outside the initial game farm where it was discovered. "We don't know if we are seeing the tip of the iceberg or the tip of an ice cube," Clute noted.

In any event, Michigan deer hunters will have more whitetails to pursue even than last year - some 1.8 million. Clute said numbers are up in the northern Lower Peninsula, down in the Upper Peninsula, and stable in the southern Lower Peninsula, which nonetheless harbors 850,000 deer, almost half the herd.

Along with the bait ban in lower Michigan, antler restrictions have been adopted this fall for the Upper Peninsula. Hunters who decide to shoot two bucks will have to purchase the combination tag and will be restricted to one buck with at least three antler-points on one side and one with four antler-points on one side.

Hunters who buy an archery and/or firearms license will not be subject to antler restrictions but will be limited to one buck.

Hunters taking a buck in the U.P. on an archery license are finished for bucks there for the year.

But hunters can take an antlerless deer with a bow with a buck tag on a combination license, or on an archery license.

The MDNR asks hunters to voluntarily bring their deer to check stations, but reminds them that deer checks are mandatory in the nine townships in Kent County surrounding the game farm where the CWD case was found.

A year ago bowhunters killed 126,000 deer during some 4.2 million days afield. Expect similar or better results this autumn. The season runs until Nov. 14, the eve of firearms season, and resumes Dec. 1 through Jan. 1.

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