This has got to stop CWD again

Well here we go again CWD in ramsey county confirmed by the USDA At a game farm with well maintained fences. what a surprise. come on sportsman we need to abolish all Deer game farms in mn.

That is how it started in WI. The whistle blower was a DNR employee. Is Mn. Paying the game farm owners for the deer that have to be killed? Are the game farms on the “tell us if you have a sick deer.” lol

the problem is not the deer farmer or his deer. Its not the wild deer.

The problem is peoples reaction to CWD.

I might agree with that statement if you could be a little more specific with what you mean or what is your opinion to the solution ?????

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The problem is peoples reaction to CWD.

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…and AIS.

I know, I would live just as long if I wouldn’t have brought that up again.

mat IMHO I think CWD has been blown way out of proportion.

first off it has been know of since the 60’s and there has never been any break out or major spread.

sure states like WI that started looking for it and tested hundreds of thousands of deer have found it. Sure they tell you they have found 14 to 1500 positive deer. that sounds pretty scary and that is what it is suposed to do scare us.. the problem is infact this is less than 1% of deer tested. and another thing is the percentages in areas they have found it are not rising but staying much the same..

deer farms in the last several years have had to partisipate in a CWD monitoring. so 100% of deer that die or are killed on the farm need to be tested. they need to do this or they will lose there privlage of raising deer..

most of the biologest/scientist agree that CWD can occure spontaniously in a very low % of deer. so Of cource you are going to find it in farmed pens since they are testing for it.

If CWD is found in a pened deer most states go into a very aggressive testing of deer in a near proximity of the pen. a lot of times areas where very little if any testing has been done ( not always the case) and then if CWD is found its a big surprise and it scares a lot of people. most people dont know a hole lot about it except for what they hear from others.

Im not a biologest or a scientist or a deer expert. Im a hunter like you. Ive read a lot about it and keep up on it fairly well by reading the latest findings.

If your looking for information on the web about CWD do yourself a favor and not even read postings about it that are more than a year old. There is still alot of old information out there that is designed to scare and give old information that has been proven wrong. Read only the latest info since that is the most accurate at the time.

My solution. I say keep an eye on it! Keep the farmers testing for it and watch for an increaseing number of finds(not just as a number but % of tested)

The DNR should keep testing for CWD at Big game registration stations threw out the state keeping trac of Percentages found. I can tell you this If we keep testing we are going to find more deer with CWD The real question is ARE THE PERCENTAGES GOING TO RISE or are we going to test for say 10 years and only find 1% or less of the deer infected…

Im guessing we will have much the same results as other areas that have done more aggressive testing and find that 1% infected..

Look at the bright side.. Its not blue tounge

Gun you take a very common sense approach to this situation and I pretty much agree with your views except for the fact that we allow Deer farmers to pen these animals . If this disease is as contagious as the experts say it is,then why would we put deer in a confined pen and sit back and wait to see when one will show up with cwd. Just seems to me this is just a breeding ground for this disease to spread to outlying areas. This is when the DNR goes nuts and wants to kill all the wild deer in the surounding area. Maybe Im oversimplifing the the problem but I just cant help to think by eliminating the deer farms is a no brainer.

We have been fighting blue tongue out in central SD the last 2 years. Not a fun one at all. Dead deer everywhere in certain counties.

mat I hear where your coming from. the reason I just dont buy in to the contagious part of this disease is simple.. the farms that have had it you would think there would a very high number of the deer in infected farms to have CWD but this is just not the case!

take the pine island elk farm.. it had been years since any outside elk had been brought in. You would have to think the infected animals must have had CWD for years right?

this is just my take on it mind you… but with these elk feeding out of bunks and touching noses and slava contact why then only 3 out of 700+ elk had it.. this still falls in that under 1% infection rate.

If this was truly something to have the least bit of concern about there would have been way more infected elk..

The true poblem is the simple fact that the DNR screwed up when tyhey decided to eraticate the deer.. they need to push there propaganda because admitting CWD is not to much to worry about means blame will fall on there shoulders..

Gun , dont you think if your livelyhood was raising Elk and you had a animal showing signs of cwd’ that you would pratice the old 3 s’s you know shoot shovel and shut up ?

It is an Orbivirus spread by biting flies. It causes facial swelling especially of the lips mouth and tongue, thus the name Blue Tongue. It is usally like a bad cold to most ruminants except the deer in South Dakota are swelling up so much they die. It some times cause lesions on the hoof skin junction causing them to try to keep the weight off their sore feet. It give the appearance they are dancing, thus Dancing Disease is another name for it.

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take the pine island elk farm….If this was truly something to have the least bit of concern about there would have been way more infected elk.

The true poblem is the simple fact that the DNR screwed up when tyhey decided to eraticate the deer.

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The 1 [one] deer said to have cwd that led to the demise of a lot of deer was never proven to have been a resident or local deer. It was taken at a time when deer movement naturally has them traveling sometimes great distances. This was a wild, free-range deer.

Urban growth and sprawl in the area where this deer was said to have been taken is rising very fast. Its happening in an area where deer populations tend to be high simply because of the great living conditions for those deer. When you put lots of people planting pretty vegetation in the deer’s back yard [yes, the deer were here first]and the deer find favor in eating it, calls to the dnr escalate. Since the dnr can’t just run out and blast every suspect critter for eating something, they had to have another scapegoat and it was over-population. CWD is cited to run hand-in-hand with a high population density and its my contention that an infected deer would be an excellent way to cast the fear of God into everyone and serve as a basis for eliminating a large portion of that particular herd. Remeber though, that the suspect deer could have come from anywhere well outside of this area since it was a wild deer.

The dnr isn’t always forth-right with people. Keep in mind that the dnr stated that we had no cougars in Minnesota until someone shot one in the SW corner of the state and another was seen and recorded on trail-cams [verified by the dnr though] in a Twin City suburb. The asinine need to kill all those deer when they were carrying fawns was more in line with erradication than cwd. A mature doe will most likely be carrying two fawn fetuses, so for every mature doe shot three deer could well have been killed. Any study intended to focus on cwd should have happened state-wide during the firearms deer season with manditory checks IF cwd was a real threat. When the final results of the testing were made public the dnr made a statement saying that this action was, in large part, an attempt to reduce herd numbers. Period.
On the elk in that farms pastures…. I find it ironic that there was a purchase agreeement with the farm owner and a California based developer that required the elk to be removed. Clearing stock of that sort is not easy given the testing needed to have a legal transfer. Nobody with clean animals is just going to import a pile of newbys without certification of being disease free and testing for cwd needs dead animals. I think smoke screens ran rampant in this case by calling in “suspect” behavior in some of the animals. Because the permits fall in part in the hands of the dnr, a kill was ordered by the dnr and the ag dept. And to answer a question regarding who paid for the animals, we all did. He was re-imbursed for his loses per animal at market value. Ever go buy a pet elk? Spendy. So this farmer got his money for each market animal without any illnesses plus he got paid bazillions for his property from a developer. Talk about double dipping and to top this off I believe he could legally call his animals a loss and NOT have to pay taxes on his re-imbursement money. Again, I don’t feel as though this was about cwd near so much as it was about clearing the animals out in a way in which the farmer wouldn’t take it in the shorts.

I think that the paralell between that elk farm [and its supposed cwd]and the proximity of where the deer was said to have been shot are just all too covenient. If an elk could not jump out of that enclosure, its a shoe-in that a deer wasn’t getting in. The dnr made specific references to the cwd virus being able to exist for years on and in the soil where infected animals have lived. Why are there no enclosures around all that construction to keep wild deer from entering into that whole area to protect them from the disease? I think the answers are obvious. The disease did not exist.

This whole Pine Island area is crawling with ambiguous crap. Does your Ramsey area around that deer farm have a high wild deer population? Are home-owners harping about Bambi eating their precious vegetaion? Is that deer farm looking to get out of the business? I’d look in a lot of directions before I got too fired up over this. Definitely I’d turn some stones before I started to believe a whole lot of whats on the news. CWD has been with the deer family members for as long as they have existed. Colorado had had it for decades. Does Colorado have a deer and elk season? Seems to me that some huge racks come from that state each year. For those that don’t know it, Cornicelli was looking for work when he came to MN from Colorado’s big game division where he was less than popular. Can a pattern be seen here? I don’t think cwd is as much of a concern as having the public mis-led and lied to by an agency of the state government that today is showing how ineffective it really is with petty laws that protect nothing and ordering massacres of wild animals under one ruse only to say that another reason was big part of the plan. Any time I here cwd, I immediately begin to suspect that there’s something underhanded going on or going to happen. Its just Minnesota conditioning that makes me say that I guess.

Tom, There is no evidence that was a wild deer. All the DNR knows is that was at least 9 years old. With that being said the average life of a wild deer is 2.5 to 3.5 years old. So since ear tags are not required on domestic deer and locals are saying the guy that raises deer nearby had a tree fall on his fence. Well I will let you connect the dots.

To the contrary….there’s no evidence that it was a tame deer. It was shot in the wild. Having been shot outside of an enclosure, it has to be considered wild unless a dna match to a tame deer has been made or an ear tag is present to indicate a tame deer. I hear what you are saying though. Imagining, speculating, guessing, connecting the arbitrary dots, whatever….too much ambiguity. I think that proof or evidence has to be more concrete before making any decisions. And then the dicision to do one thing should not have a hidden agenda or be hinged in any way to another issue. This is the same thing that our lawmakers are famous for….pass a bill for one thing, as in the Vikes play pen, and have funding attached to it for everything under the sun.

We have waters that are being being assualted with silt every time it rains. These same waters are supposedly protected by laws that are currently on the books, but not enforced. Why? Because these waters originate in agricultural areas where strong lobbies pay our legislators and enforcement agencies to look the other way. These same people will tell you that “we are working on getting these rules and laws strengthened to help prevent future issues with the silt”. They don’t mention the lobbies in the government right where they themselves work.

Our governing agencies and protectors of the environment and out wildlife resources have agendas way different from what the ordinary citizen imagines. When they cannot prove proof of something, they throw out worse case senarios for people to fret over and when the media grabs hold of this crap it gets sensationalized to the point that half the state’s lay people thinks the sky is falling. Of course the media is the first source these state saps contact. Both the elk farm and this deer issue were done deals long before they ever were introduced to the media. The media was used to blow it way out of proportion. In both instances there was an agenda other than the one we were told of by the media and/or the dnr.

DNA tests why didnt I think of that. Maybe you can answer that for me Tom. Why didnt they do a DNA test to see if did belong to the farmed deer pen ? On a side note DNR is passing most of the responsibility of Deer farming on to the Mn. Board of Animal Health, which still hasnt required or enforced the double fence which they promised they would require

I agree with the double fencing. There are so many simple answers but everyone involved seems to want to complicate it.

I just thought of something else Red Deer should fall under AIS category well almost except for the Aquatic part. But seriously why the hell do we have Asian Deer in MN. they are non native and dont belong here.

I too like to think logically and actually consider the harm done on prevention side also. I dont believe the DNR has put the effort into this side like they should unless they have with other economics and we just dont know it (ie, insurance companies, lobbyist, etc.)

The only “proof” that we know about CWD is that it has always been a very small percentage of test positive so I look at this way. The “danger” as presented to the deer herd can be deduced only one of two ways and as of right now the 1st way and the way of the DNR is by far the MOST detrimental. Here are the two ways I see it:

1. Kill 1200 test subjects and reduce population by X number of animals (I will use 5000 for now in the generated test area). Total kill in 9 months = 6700 animals. Animals tested = 6200 + avg annual deer season kill(10000). Animals found positive = somewhere between 0-1%.

2. Remain cognitive and alarmed of the potential area being a hotbed for disease. Animals tested = avg annual deer season kill(10000). Animals found positive = somewhere between 0-1%.

What have we deduced from these two options…. Option #1 has decimated the heard to the magnitude that it would take 200yrs for the disease to kill this many animals (6200) if the percentage of test positive does not increase. Very simple math would tell you this is not right.

That being said…If the percentage increases things change but I dont believe that should be determined in a 9mo massacre. It needs to be a year over year sampling.