CWD Areas: A Hunter's Plan for Cooling, Sampling, Transport and Carcass Waste

Start by cooling your deer. Submit its head for testing wherever the responsible agency provides sampling or makes it mandatory. Until results arrive, separate the venison by animal. Transport only material your destination permits, and send the leftover carcass material to a landfill, the first option in Wisconsin's disposal list. The current USGS records show wild CWD detections in 37 states, so the guidance below applies well beyond a small set of zones. Sampling supports disease surveillance; it does not establish food safety. According to Minnesota DNR, prions strongly resist both heating and freezing.

Version 4.0 of the USGS release contains information current through June 2026. The wild-cervid worksheet contains 927 rows representing 37 states. Records for captive facilities occupy 166 county rows across 22 states and account for 269 facilities with positive detections. All of those 22 states occur in the wild-cervid records as well. Most states have county-level records. Colorado and Idaho, along with Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming, instead have county groupings or management units, making state-to-state row totals unsuitable for comparison.

The table includes Nebraska counties totaling 71 out of 93. Wisconsin's count is 51 out of 72, Kansas's is 69 out of 105, and Missouri's is 55 out of 114. St. Louis City has its own listing.

Bacterial growth sets the first deadline, beginning when you shoot. An agency's limit on delivering a head for collection sets the second. Laboratory turnaround determines the third. State laws govern the last two: which material can enter another state and which disposal locations are allowed.

Start cooling "within a couple hours" after harvest, advises Wisconsin's university extension guide. It also cautions that freezing during the first six hours can toughen the meat. Refrigerate the carcass promptly after skinning, says Utah State's university extension guide. When outdoor temperatures exceed 45°F, its usual refrigeration window is 3 to 4 hours. The first figure marks the start of cooling; the second marks arrival in refrigerated storage. Hunters may choose to age venison for 7 to 10 days at temperatures between 35 and 45°F. Wisconsin's extension advice discourages aging during warm weather.

Minnesota DNR explains that testing may reveal a CWD infection in your deer, while distinguishing CWD testing from food safety testing. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas and Pennsylvania all describe multiple sample submission methods, with several options listed by each state.

Wisconsin confirms on its sampling page that it accepts heads for sampling at locations in counties other than the harvest county. Texas's guidance describes testing as free, with results taking roughly two weeks. Pennsylvania's guidance describes submission choices but provides neither a price nor a result timeline. Both cells remain empty in the table because we did not substitute figures from secondary accounts.

Whether to eat venison while awaiting results is up to the hunter, Minnesota DNR says. The agency describes prions as substances that "are very resistant to heat and freezing temperatures" and reports that public health officials advise avoiding meat from animals with confirmed infection. Minnesota suggests handling processing and wrapping separately for every deer. Wisconsin DNR likewise directs hunters to separate venison by animal. Wisconsin's extension guidance also discourages consuming any deer's eyes or brain, spinal cord or spleen, tonsils or lymph nodes.

One experiment examined meat grinders. After grinding CWD-positive muscle, Milstein's research team put CWD-negative muscle through the same household-style machine. Prion seeding activity appeared in 5 out of 8 replicates, equivalent to 63%. That activity reflects amplification detected in a laboratory. It establishes neither infection nor the risk to someone eating the meat. Cooking was outside the experiment's scope. Treatment with bleach concentrations of 10% and 40% produced no significant remaining seeding activity on the examined surfaces. Find out whether your processor will grind your animal's meat separately.

Processing also raises a lead question. Using radiographs, Hunt's research team examined 30 hunter-killed deer taken with standard lead-core ammunition. Metal fragments appeared in every carcass. The geometric mean was 136, with counts ranging from 15 to 409. Ground venison contained fragments from 24 animals out of the 30 examined. Of 234 packages of ground venison, 32% contained one or more fragments.

Bullet designs were compared in the Minnesota DNR experiment using sheep. Roughly 30% of fragments lay no farther than two inches from the wound where the bullet exited. Ordinary trimming therefore probably leaves some fragments behind.

Under Minnesota's import requirements, permitted material includes quarters and other meat without attached head or spinal column portions; deboned meat or meat already cut and wrapped; hides; teeth; antlers; antler-bearing skull plates cleared of brain tissue; and completed mounts. Entire carcasses cannot enter from any state or province, "regardless of their CWD status". A head may be brought in only when delivery to a licensed taxidermist occurs within 48 hours after entry into Minnesota.

Wisconsin applies a different condition. If CWD has been detected in the originating state or province, whole carcasses and specified parts can enter only when delivered to a licensed processor or a permitted taxidermist within 72 hours after entry into Wisconsin. Those requirements appear in Wisconsin's carcass guidance. That agency also discourages transporting an entire carcass beyond the harvest county and its neighboring counties.

Our reading of these two states is that heads have delivery deadlines and licensed recipients. Wisconsin extends such conditions to entire carcasses and specified parts; Minnesota prohibits entire carcasses from entering. This interpretation is our own. Our review covered only these two states. Consult the requirements for every state along your travel route.

Wisconsin DNR presents disposal options in this sequence: landfill, transfer station, permitted curbside collection or carcass dumpster; then burial at a depth that prevents scavengers from uncovering the material; then return to the harvest site. Burial requires property you own or permission from its owner. The same ownership or permission requirement applies at the harvest site. In Wisconsin, discarding carcass waste on public land or on a roadway is against the law. Field dressing remains allowed, including leaving the gut pile where the animal was dressed.

For deer harvested inside a CWD management zone, Minnesota requires disposal through a sanitary landfill, a licensed processor or taxidermist, or the privately owned harvest property with permission. Additional lawful choices become available after a "not detected" result.

Keeping scavengers out helps explain the burial requirement. VerCauteren's research team force-fed scrapie prions to 20 crows. Scrapie is a related disease used as a substitute in the experiment. Every mouse that received extract made from the birds' feces developed severe neurological problems and returned a positive test. According to the paper, daily travel from communal roosts can reach 80 kilometers for crows. The research demonstrates a possible route of spread without quantifying how much CWD moves through that route.

We obtained agency figures directly from the respective agency websites on 2026-09-29. Rules undergo changes each season, so check them again before opening day and ahead of travel. States outside our review fall beyond this article's coverage. USGS worksheets use counties, grouped counties and management units; the share chart includes only states with county-level reporting. A previously retained worksheet copy contained 593 rows across 36 states. The current release contains 927 rows across 37.

Sheep were the subjects in the ammunition experiment. The crow experiment used scrapie, while the grinder experiment detected a laboratory signal. Scripted access is blocked by the federal CDC webpage. Public health guidance in this article therefore relies on state agencies and extension sources that reference it.

Our view is that hunters should decide how to handle a deer before shooting it. Before the season begins, check where to submit samples, what carcass material can travel and where remains can be discarded for every hunting location.

Follow that sequence after a kill: start cooling, deliver the head before the agency's deadline, separate venison by deer while awaiting results, and transport only permitted material. Wisconsin allows 5 days for delivery of a refrigerated head, with more time available when it is frozen. County-level information for covered states appears in our reports on Wisconsin's CWD and the captive-facility watch list.