In 2020, Cody stopped culling deer within city limits. Although the numbers of deer have since increased, Cody Police Chief Chuck Baker recommended that culling be halted for a third year due to concerns about discharging a firearm within city limits.
“The city is being developed, and it’s becoming more and more of a liability to discharge firearms within the city of Cody,” Baker said to city council members at their Feb. 28 work session.
Baker recommended the city continue to survey the community instead.
“I would suggest that our transparency and our efforts to educate the community on living in an environment with urban deer populations is going to be positive,” he said.
Baker cited two community surveys that showed an event split in opinions.
“50% of the community said that we should [cull deer], and 50% of the community said we shouldn’t,” he said.
Baker further recommended the continued monitoring of the city’s deer population.
Dan Smith and Tony Mong with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department told the council their concerns lay in chronic wasting disease (CWD), which has been detected in many of the city’s deer.
In a recent sample of 29 deer in Cody, 72% came back positive for CWD. Five years ago, that rate was less than 10%, Mong said.
“From 2021 to 2022, we’re seeing that spread across the city,” he said. “And that is something that can occur with dense populations [of deer] ... I just point this out that if Cody becomes an epicenter for chronic wasting disease, it could have impacts beyond Cody.”
Smith and Mong did not give a specific recommendation to the council on whether to cull or not to cull this year.
“It certainly doesn’t hurt to wait till next December and see what the survey [of deer] looks like,” Smith said. “But certainly, I think we’re going to see a higher mortality rate caused by CWD than what we’ve seen in the past.”
Smith said he was also concerned about the potential mixing of wild and urban deer.
“A lot of our town deer were born and raised here. They’ve never left. They’ve stayed within city limits,” he said. “We would rather not have a bunch of interaction between wild deer and our town deer.”
Wild deer, Smith explained, usually spend some time in Cody during the winter, and then leave.
The city’s deer management program got its start in 2011 when Game and Fish partnered with the city to survey how many deer were within the city limits, Mong said.
The deer culling program began in 2016, with the last cull occurring in 2020, Baker said. During those four years, 200 deer were harvested, with the meat donated to residents, he said.
The goal was to reduce deer versus car crashes and the nuisance calls regarding deer, Baker added.
With no cull since 2020, the deer population in town have increased, Mong explained.
“Those numbers are starting to creep back up,” Baker added.
The council will determine the next step.
“I would leave it to council’s direction to see if the concern is high enough, or if we wait and continue with the surveys over a couple of years,” Baker said.
The council decided to monitor the situation for the current year.
“We’re not going to go for a culling recommendation this year, but continue to monitor,” Mayor Matt Hall said.
However, the issue of the urban deer population remains.
“It’s not just Cody, but statewide,” Smith said. “How do we address these urban deer populations that grow and what do we do about them?”
(1) comment
Show us the data , the census, and the pathology please. None of this adds up to me. How can the urban deer in Cody have gone from 0-2% CWD positive in years past to a whopping 72 percent in such a short time ? We recall that even one deer testing for CWD a decade ago was a Code Red calamity . Now you say 3/4ths are testing positive , but don't recommend culling this time around ? In years past City deer culling was supended because of budgetary dollar reasons, not biology . The City is flush with money currently thanks to federal pandemic funding and economic stimulus monies of just about everything , so that excuse isn't a reality. That leaves biology and bigotry ( i.e. that sector of residents who summarily hate deer but are too lazy or cheap to fence their property ). Neither the City of Cody , Wyo G&F , and even WY-DOT have done anything at all proactively to manage deer in town. Their only tool is an AR-15 with a night vision scope and a silencer . Proactive nonlethal ungulate management is not in the playbook around here. The real problem with urban deer isn't the deer , it's the people.
It's way too late in the winter season to be shooting deer anyway if your goal is to distribute healthy meat . Culling is optimally a January thing, not March. Why did it take so long to bring the data to City Hall in the first place ?
I observe the urban deer . Constantly. Up close ( I live a block from Canal Park which is a deer haven . I track multigenerational families of deer going back years ) . I see next to zero symptoms of CWD. Saw some respiratory issues after the Rut , but they seem to have cleared up. Given the somewhat wicked winter we have all endured, the town deer seem remarkably fat , hairy, and healthy to me. I cannot speak to the deer on the far eastern and western city limits, only those who browse the center of town.
Regardless, None of this pencils out IMO.
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