What's so bad about baiting?

This article was first published by Great Northern Outdoors in February 2009.

The decision last fall by Michigan's wildlife managers to ban deer baiting indefinitely has hit a nerve with many hunters who find baiting to be an effective tool for harvesting deer. They turned out in droves to argue that baiting is a centuries-old technique that attracts deer to a specific spot, where they stand still.

A standing deer, the argument goes, is easier for young, old or handicapped hunters to shoot, thus expanding hunting opportunities to people who may not otherwise succeed. A standing deer also allows a hunter to be more particular about what and what not to shoot, because he has time to determine how big a buck's rack is or whether the deer is too young or the wrong sex. Because the deer come to them, bait hunters say they can stay still and better define their shooting lanes, making it a safer way to hunt.

And after all, it's still legal in many places, including Ohio, Ontario, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and parts of Wisconsin. Rod Clute, a big-game specialist with Michigan's Department of Natural Resources, says baiting is just one acceptable way to harvest a deer.

"It's a personal choice," he said. "They all work. It's kind of like football: Which is a better way to get to the Super Bowl, a good offense or a good defense? There are many states that do not allow baiting and hunters are very successful, and there are many states that allow baiting and hunters there are very successful."

But deer baiting may be on its way out, and it's getting a not-so-gentle nudge from wildlife managers who say baiting spreads disease, gives hunters a bad name among the non-hunting public and actually makes herd management more complicated. Some go so far as to argue that baiting makes hunters too lazy to actually get in the woods and try to understand the animals they're hunting.

"One of the most telling quotes that I read was a female hunter who said 'well, how am I going to learn how to hunt if I can't bait?'" said Lou Cornicelli, a deer specialist with the Minnesota DNR. Baiting is illegal in Minnesota. "And my response to that is how are you going to learn how to hunt if you do bait?"

Cornicelli said he took his 14-year-old daughter on a hunt last season on a windy day. They sat all morning, then scouted for spots during midday. They found a high spot overlooking a protected creek bottom, in hopes of catching deer sneaking through out of the wind. Shortly after they sat down, four deer did just that, and his daughter killed a doe.

"I was able to teach her a little bit about deer movement," he said. "That's a lesson learned and that's teaching your kid something about deer biology and deer hunting. Those are the things I hope people are teaching their kids."

But that view is not universal among hunters. Many believe that in a high-tech age when kids and their parents are short on time, just getting youngsters into the woods is the greatest lesson. And if that means getting the deer prepared ahead of time with a little corn or sugar beets, then so be it.

"Young people hunt with bait and that's a fact," farmer Kent Karnemaat told the Michigan Natural Resources Council at its September meeting. Karnemaat was one of dozens of hunters, farmers and bait sellers who argued against Michigan's ban on baiting before it went into effect Oct. 9. "You ban baiting and they're gone."

The bait ban in Michigan's Lower Peninsula came about after a single doe at a deer farm near Grand Rapids tested positive for chronic wasting disease. The ban came as a financial hardship for many growers and dealers who had already contracted for tons of cull carrots, sugar beets, apples and corn but then had no market for their product. Some called the ban a "knee-jerk reaction," even though Michigan's CWD action plan, published in 2002, stated plainly that CWD's arrival would be followed by an immediate ban on baiting.

But in states where baiting is allowed, it's more than an economic issue. It's a cultural issue, a North Woods birthright that began who knows when and grew when deer populations began to explode in the 1980s. A Michigan survey showed that 3.3 million bushels of bait went on the ground in 1984. By 1991 it was 13.1 million bushels. Somehow, it became what we do. And now that's the way it is.

But how that came to be is a little murky. Baiting tended to develop in places with large expanses of forest or wetland areas where deer were widely dispersed, like the huge northern forests of Michigan, Ontario, Wisconsin and Minnesota. But it's not that simple. While baiting took hold in Michigan and Wisconsin, it never did in Minnesota. It's allowed in Ontario and Saskatchewan, but not in Alberta or Manitoba. It's legal in Ohio, but not Indiana or Illinois.

"It's odd if you think about from national perspective," said Tom Litchfield of the Iowa DNR, where deer baiting is illegal. "In one state it's illegal and totally looked down upon, and in the next state it's accepted."

In some cases the bait debate has widened the trust gap between game managers and hunters, who haven't always seen eye-to-eye anyway. Hunters like Mark Bartholomew of Houghton Lake, Michigan, have argued that Michigan's baiting ban will mean fewer hunters and a smaller deer harvest, which will lead to a bigger population and increase the likelihood that disease will spread.

But biologists like Wisconsin's Keith Warnke say that's exactly the kind of thinking that makes it so difficult for game managers and hunters to get along. Warnke points to studies that demonstrate baiting alters deer behavior significantly by putting unnaturally large amounts of nutrition into the ecosystem.

"It exacerbates the hard feelings that hunters have for herd control," he said. "On top of that, baiting and feeding have been shown to reduce deer movement. Then you've got a high deer herd, ecosystem damage and they're not moving. If they don't move they don't get shot. The (hunter) isn't seeing this artificially high deer herd."