Targeted Hunts Were Supposed to Curb ‘Zombie Deer Disease.’ Now What?

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Targeted Hunts Were Supposed to Curb ‘Zombie Deer Disease.’ Now What?

In Illinois and other states, officials hoped that culls could halt the progress of chronic wasting disease. Now they are losing hope.

Chris Jacques, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, tagged deer he culled during an evening of sharpshooting in Jo Daviess County, Ill., in early February.

Targeted Hunts Were Supposed to Curb ‘Zombie Deer Disease.’ Now What?

In Illinois and other states, officials hoped that culls could halt the progress of chronic wasting disease. Now they are losing hope.

Chris Jacques, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, tagged deer he culled during an evening of sharpshooting in Jo Daviess County, Ill., in early February.

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By

Jim Robbins

Photographs by

Julia Rendleman

Jim Robbins is a longtime freelance contributor to The Times from Helena, Mont., writing about wildlife, environmental issues and other science topics in the American West.

April 26, 2026

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.”

“You would be hard pressed to come up with a disease, even if you were inventing one from scratch, that would be harder to manage than C.W.D.,” Mr. Skinner said.

But in mid-April,

state officials decided

to abandon the practice. The disease, they realized, had simply become too widespread.

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