Thanks to the effort of a local sportsman’s club, area hunters have a place to take their deer carcasses while also helping to keep chronic wasting disease in check.
Since 2019, the Oconto County Sportsman’s Alliance has provided Dumpsters for carcasses.
This year, seven of the Dumpsters are located throughout Oconto County, two are in Marinette County and one is in Shawano County.
Alliance President Gary Lemmen said there are two main reasons behind the effort.
“One, it keeps the deer hides off of the landscape and helps control CWD a little bit,” he said. “The other thing is a littering issue where everybody would get their deer, butcher it themselves and put it in one of the county forests or on private land. This keeps the public land a lot cleaner.”
Lemmen recalled driving through the Machickanee County Forest east of Oconto Falls and seeing several deer carcasses on the ground.
“You’d drive through there after deer season, and there’d be carcasses lying all over the place,” he said. “Another place is the Oconto County Sportsman’s Alliance land just out of Morgan. It actually is illegal to dump a carcass anywhere except your own private land. I understand you can get a $250 fine.”
Dumpsters will be set up in time for the start of the gun deer season, which this year begins Nov. 22.
Dumpsters in Oconto County will be set up at 515 Gas & Convenience Store, Highways 32 and 64, Suring; Morgan Recycling Center, 3276 County Road C, Oconto Falls; DNR Ranger Station, 300 Marks Drive, Oconto Falls; Crooked Lake Sportsman’s Club grounds, County Road W, Mountain; Oconto Sportsmen’s Club grounds, 605 Wedgewood Ave., Oconto; near the Suring Area Public Library, Main Street, Suring; and Gillett Town Hall, 10908 Town Hall Road, Gillett.
Marinette County’s Dumpsters will be set up at Martin’s Junction, N4111 County Road S, Pound; and the DNR Field Station, 101 Ogden Road, Peshtigo.
A Dumpster will also be set up in Shawano County at the Shawano Lake boat landing on Highway 22 in Cecil.
“Most of them go out the week before gun season,” Lemmen said.
“We concentrate them where there is traffic with people coming through. Of course, we had to get a business that would accept a Dumpster. The DNR comes with these big plastic liners and puts them in the Dumpsters so the blood isn’t running all over the place. If we put them out any earlier, stuff starts smelling. We don’t want them out too early. Some of them will be up into the muzzleloader hunt.”
Lee Lake Disposal, a trash removal company based in Pound, removes the Dumpsters and empties them in a landfill.
Lemmen said deer hides are collected separately at some of the Dumpsters, the exceptions being Cecil and the Town of Gillett.
“One of our clubs, the Klondike Sportsman’s Club, has a member who’s a fur trader and takes hides,” he said. “He cleans them up and sends them out, and I’m sure they get made into leather gloves and stuff.
“We just started that last year. Seeing everything going into the Dumpster was kind of a shame. We weren’t using the resource. We were throwing all the hides away and not doing anything with them. The hides are worth five bucks apiece.”
The Dumpsters include mostly bones, some heads and some hides.
“A lot of people will leave the heads on if they don’t cut the hides off,” Lemmen said. “We’re trying to encourage people to take the hides and put them in the collection sites next to the Dumpster. We’re trying to teach the young kids to use the resource. We have clubs that help gather the hides and take the money for the hides.”
CWD is a fatal, infectious nervous system disease that only occurs in cervids, which include deer, moose, elk and reindeer.
“They say this prion gets into the ground, and it’s going to be there for many years,” Lemmen said. “If it’s in the ground already, a lot of people are thinking there’s really nothing you can do about it. You basically have to let it run its course.
“(The DNR) has collection sites to put heads in, and I think last year, Oconto County only collected 170 heads to get sampled for CWD. That’s only like 2% of what we killed. There’s not a lot of people helping with that.”
Oconto County has reported a few cases of CWD in recent years.
“We just had one three weeks to a month ago, a deer hit (by a vehicle) over by Hintz,” Lemmen said. “The deer looked fine, but they tested it, and it did test positive for CWD. There was one a few years ago around Apple Creek Deer Farm on the border of Oconto County and Menominee County. Last year, there was one by Breed.”
On the other hand, Lemmen believes Oconto County led the state last year in the number of deer carcasses dropped off at Dumpster sites.
“I don’t think there’s any other county that puts as much in the Dumpsters as we do,” he said. “Last year, we put 50.9 tons in these Dumpsters. The smallest one last year in Crooked Lake had 2 tons put in it. The biggest one was over by Morgan and that one had 8 tons. There’s a lot of deer in that area. They had to bring in extra Dumpsters.”
