25 of 25,000 Deer
ink and watercolor on paper 22”x30” (series of 5)

“The state of Wisconsin, concerned that the fear of transmission of Chronic Wasting Disease [possibly a cause of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans] could cripple the state’s one-billion dollar-per-year deer hunting industry, is in the process of killing 25,00 deer (a desperate solution that sickens everybody involved) in an infected area in hopes of controlling the CWD epidemic there.” - Jared Diamond, Collapse (2005).

This series of drawings is inspired by the above study regarding the outbreak of Chronic Wasting Disease (a serious deer and elk epidemic) in Jared Diamond’s seminal book on societal and environmental crisis, Collapse (2005). My intent here is simply to put a visual to the sheer number of deer that were intended to be killed due to this outbreak in Wisconsin alone.