The Michigan House just voted to lift the deer baiting ban in the Lower Peninsula. If the Senate agrees, corn piles are back on the menu.
For seven years, it’s been illegal to bait deer below the bridge. The DNR banned it in 2018 to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) and bovine tuberculosis. The idea was to stop deer from congregating around food piles and slow disease transmission.
A lot of hunters weren’t convinced.
Ted Nugent has been the loudest voice against the ban since day one. He testified against it when it was first issued and hasn’t stopped since. His argument centers on the restrictions being overreach, calling the DNR “jack-booted thugs” and regulators “enemies of conservation.”
But the debate over baiting is more complicated than Nugent’s rhetoric suggests.
Michigan has a deer problem. Specifically, there are too many of them.
Deer harvest numbers keep dropping: 295,000 deer were tagged in 2025, down from 299,000 the year before. Meanwhile, the doe population is ballooning, car-deer crashes are up (Michigan State Police estimate more than 58,000 deer-related crashes in 2024), and Kent County neighborhoods are running deer management programs because the herds are out of control.
Hunting is the primary way Michigan manages deer populations. That’s not some hunter talking point. That’s DNR policy. And with fewer hunters in the field every year, Michigan is already fighting an uphill battle to control the herd.
The baiting ban was supposed to slow CWD. Seven years later, CWD has actually expanded to 16 Lower Peninsula counties. Harvest numbers have dropped. The doe population has grown. And hunters have one less tool in the toolbox.
Michigan’s approach is starting to look like an outlier compared to neighboring states. Ohio has CWD in its Disease Surveillance Area but still allows baiting on private land everywhere except CWD-positive counties. Wisconsin takes a similar approach, banning baiting only where CWD has been detected (which is a substantial portion of the state).
Indiana and Illinois ban it statewide, but they also have widespread CWD across dozens of counties. Michigan banned baiting everywhere in the Lower Peninsula when CWD was detected in just a handful of counties, and it’s stayed banned even as the disease spread to 16 counties anyway.
But that doesn’t mean the ban was wrong or that lifting it is the answer.
A 2025 Michigan State University study found that deer concentrate more densely at bait sites than at food plots or natural landscapes, which means more disease transmission risk, not less. And a 2003 Wisconsin study found baiting doesn’t actually increase harvest success for most hunters.
The science suggests baiting could make disease spread worse while not necessarily helping hunters kill more deer. But the lived experience of many Michigan hunters tells a different story.
Many hunters point out that deer naturally congregate anyway. When apples fall from a tree that deer know about, nearly every deer in the area visits that concentrated food source. Deer gather in herds during winter and continue congregating through spring and summer.
From this perspective, banning bait piles doesn’t change deer behavior. It just makes it harder for hunters to do their job.
For a lot of Michigan hunters, especially older ones or those hunting smaller properties without food plots, baiting was the difference between filling a tag and going home empty. Hunting isn’t always about trophy bucks.
Sometimes it’s about putting venison in the freezer and keeping the herd in check. When you pull that tool away from hunters, you’re not just frustrating them. You’re reducing the harvest at exactly the time when Michigan needs more deer taken, not fewer.
The DNR’s position has shifted. Taylor Ridderbusch, the DNR’s chief of staff, said they’re “certainly open to that discussion” about lifting the ban. But they don’t want it coming from the state legislature. They want it to come through the Natural Resources Commission, where decisions are directed by science rather than popular vote.
Jim Sweeney, a hunter from Leelanau County and lobbyist with Concerned Sportsmen of Michigan, agrees. He wants to see baiting allowed again in counties where CWD hasn’t been detected, but he’s worried about the precedent of letting the legislature manage wildlife, instead of the NRC.
“There’s a reason we delegate natural resources policy to the experts,” Sweeney said. “By usurping that authority, we get into very dangerous territory, because, essentially, then you’re managing our natural resources by popular vote.”
That’s a legitimate concern. But seven years into the baiting ban, CWD has spread to more counties despite the restrictions, and the deer overpopulation problem has gotten worse. If the NRC’s science-based approach hasn’t worked, what’s the path forward?
The bill that just passed the House makes no exceptions for counties where CWD has been detected. It’s a blanket lift across the entire Lower Peninsula.
Ohio’s approach makes more sense: allow baiting where CWD hasn’t been detected, ban it where it has. But that kind of nuance would require the NRC to act, and they’ve had seven years to propose something like that.
Michigan’s deer management is caught between two tricky options. The baiting ban didn’t seem to work as well as many hoped. But lifting it without any restrictions on CWD-positive counties might not work so well either.
The question isn’t whether baiting should be allowed. The question is whether Michigan can find a smarter approach than all-or-nothing.
Tom Zandstra is a passionate outdoorsman and CEO of The Fair Chase. Follow him on X @TheFairChase1.
