New York Times n Illinois and other states, officials hoped that culls could halt the progress of chronic wasting disease. Now they are losing hope. In the middle of a spring afternoon near Lowden-Miller State Forest, Daniel Skinner poured a small pile of dried, yellow corn onto the ground.
Shouldering his .308 Remington rifle equipped with a thermal scope, he disappeared into a camouflaged ground blind in the middle of a cornfield. For eight hours, he waited for a white-tailed deer to approach the bait, hoping for a clean shot.
But the deer stayed away. At 10:30 p.m., Mr. Skinner, the forest wildlife manager for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, called an end to the day’s culling and met up with several sharpshooters to compare notes. For that day, the tally was one deer among four groups. The same cull, a year ago, killed 10.
Over two decades, Illinois has been one of a number of states that have set up culling campaigns to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease, a strange illness that one expert likened to a “disease from outer space.”