Blood-soaked lungs draw in one last rugged rush of hot summer air. The buck savors that last labored breath, and then releases it back into the atmosphere. Life fades from its eyes, leaving behind nothing but a pair of cloudy-blue spheres. Then, nothing. All is still. All is quiet. The deer is dead.
That isn’t the ending scene of a hunter’s kill. It’s the final moments of a whitetail that contracts a lethal dose of hemorrhagic disease — one of the deadliest illnesses in the world of whitetails. And sometimes, it just doesn’t get its due. Hunters need to know about it, including the latest news.
HD DEFINED
Whitetails face a great number of threats. Some of these include urban sprawl, habitat degradation, disease spread, expanding predator populations, and more. But disease is currently a significant issue for the whitetail herd throughout North American. While chronic wasting disease seems to be at the forefront, a big issue that commonly flies under the radar is hemorrhagic disease (HD). Currently, it comes in one of two forms, epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) or bluetongue virus (BTV). Both EHD and BTV stem from the Orbivirus genus, which is part of the Reoviridae family.
HD viruses are not spread from deer to deer. Culicoides,
