Rifle season is here, and if you’re chasing deer, elk, or moose anywhere in Montana right now — especially in areas like the Judith Basin, eastern prairie units, or anywhere near the Wyoming border — getting your animal tested for Chronic Wasting Disease isn’t just a good idea anymore. It’s something every serious Montana hunter should be doing. CWD has been creeping steadily into the state’s deer and elk herds, and Montana FWP needs hunter participation to track where it’s spreading. The good news? Testing is free, it’s straightforward, and FWP just dropped a video that removes every excuse not to do it.
This video from Montana FWP walks hunters through exactly where to drop off samples and how to prepare them before you go — which matters more than you might think. Showing up at a check station with a poorly field-dressed head or samples that weren’t kept cool is one of the fastest ways to end up with an unusable test result. FWP needs the lymph nodes from the head and neck region, so knowing how to properly remove and store that tissue before you haul your animal out of the backcountry can save you a wasted trip. If you’re packing out a mule deer from the breaks east of Lewistown or dragging a whitetail out of the river bottoms along the Yellowstone, watching this video the night before you head out is time well spent.
Here’s the bigger picture: CWD has already been confirmed in multiple Montana counties, and wildlife managers are in a race to understand how far it’s spread before it reaches population densities that could genuinely crash deer and elk numbers. Other states — Colorado, Wyoming, Wisconsin — have watched CWD quietly hollow out local herds over years before hunters even noticed. Montana still has a window to get ahead of this, but only if hunters participate in the surveillance. Every sample submitted is a data point that helps FWP make smarter management decisions about harvest quotas, herd movement, and disease containment zones. Your buck’s lymph nodes could literally shape next year’s regulations in your hunting district.
Drop-off locations and testing hours vary by region and change seasonally, so the video is worth bookmarking now rather than scrambling to find answers at 6 a.m. after a successful opening weekend. This is low-effort, high-impact stuff — the kind of thing that takes twenty minutes and pays dividends for Montana’s deer and elk hunting for decades. Watch it, share it with your hunting partners, and get your animals tested this fall.
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