"To be blunt,... If you believe deer density has nothing to do with speed of transmission of diseases like this, you have not been reading anything written by people that know what they are talking about.
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Trust me, when it comes to disease transmission, infectivity, and epidemiology, "I know what I am talking about." I am a moron on most topics, but I have a lot of education with these topics. You are correct with "deer density affects speed of transmission of diseases", but where you erred is when you said "like this". The "like this" does not correlate with CWD. For other diseases, reducing deer density is effective. This disease is the perfect storm because it survives for decades in the environment, and has latency period of years, not days, while remaining infective.
"The disease my still survive and spread if the herd is significantly smaller, but it won't spread as fast. That provides what is needed here - TIME."
Parts of Illinois have undergone extensive, and expensive, sharpshooting to eradicate deer in hot spots. Yes, it slowed (still increasing by the way) the rate of spread some, but it continues to spread. Geographically speaking, it has done NOTHING to slow the spread. This disease needs to be controlled geographically, and eradicating deer has proven not to stop or slow geographic spread. Once it gets to a new area, this deer eradication will go on for eternity or until a vaccine is developed.
What does reducing deer density/eradicating deer accomplish? You have to literally spend millions of dollars to sharpshoot, test, and incinerate carcasses.
This also will predictably result in loss of hunters - the only tool the DNR has to control the deer herd beyond predators. Remember also, that if you rely on predators to control the herd, prions have proven to remain infective in their feces, and helps propagate the disease further. In addition, you will have to literally eradicate every single deer for decades to ensure the prion is no longer present in the soil.
This does not seem like a workable solution, and is not a solution at all. Instead of having some deer to hunt and infected, you have a smaller number of deer and infected. In both scenarios, the environmental contamination is going to be a problem. Without vaccine development or some discovery (ie. spiroplasma causation), both scenarios result in the same outcome. Like I have stated before, there is nothing humans can do from a deer management perspective to control the disease. Severely reducing deer density will cost more money and provide no measurable benefit.