When I was young, deer were not very common. Our family had deer drives through the woods to drive the deer out into the fields so they could be shot. Over time it died out. About 20 years ago I mentioned to a cousin that what we needed was a deer drive to thin out the deer on my farm that was rank with deer. So he talked a bunch of family member into doing it the last day of deer season. It was going to be a group effort with all sharing in the meat as they wanted.
That farm has three sections of woods around very large fields that borders marsh or a small river and is a kind of small peninsula. Well they put out shooters in the fields, decided on safe lanes of shooting and sent men and boys into the woods to flush the deer out. And out they came, ran across the fields and those who were not killed went into another section of woods. So they repeated it on the nearest section of woods and even more deer poured out. Again more deer were killed. At this point it was lunch time and they had a BBQ setup. The drivers decided to take a break before they would try the third section where almost every deer on the farm was now hiding.
Just before it was time to start again one of the smarter cousins said that they had killed 23 deer so far and that was going to be a lot of work when they were done. A quick discussion ensued and they decided 23 was enough. At least they did send the young boys into the woods to stir them up and flush them out. I do not know the true number of deer the ran out of there. Most of my cousins are not good with higher math but a conservative estimate was well over 50. Some of those deer had been run out twice and survived two different gauntlets. And as you would guess it they never left that farm. It took years to get the numbers under control. We used a lot of permits to thin the number down and if you thought they were too thin a few would move in in the next few weeks.
CWD may never make it that far south. We have had a couple isolated die offs where every deer in a mile radius dies in a rapid time frame. But it always burs out before it spreads too far and deer number recover very quickly. Too quickly.
