Long term analysis of CWD

I’ve hunted deer a few times, but not on a regular basis. Now I’ve realized that watching a dog flush a rooster pheasant is what I’d rather be doing by a factor of 100. But a guy I work with just told me about a podcast he heard and it was all about chronic wasting disease. I’m curious what you think the future will be with this terrible disease? Will deer go extinct? Will scientists/biologists find a way to eliminate the disease? Will it spread across the entire continent? I think when mad cow happened in England they had to slaughter close to a million bovines to get it under control.

Colorado and Wyoming have had it for years and years. Wisconsin has it. MN has it. Wisconsin and MN both have reacted with and employed knee-jerk reactions and extermination kills and basically nothing has worked. The western states seem to have settled on let it be and nature will take its course, yet they have booming deer and elk populations. Michigan is rife with cwd. Many eastern states have it in their deer herds.

When it comes to Minnesota’s deer herd, the circus of idiots in St. Paul charged with investigating and dealing with cwd have but one answer and that is to have a wholesale deer shoot several times a year in certain areas and yet the deer thrive. And healthily. The deer are smarter than those tasked with eliminating them.

Deer are resilient. Leave the damn things alone and they’ll take care of their own naturally. Just like the aquatic invasives, whatever the dnr comes up with in answer to their existence does nothing but cost the tax payers a lot of money, and by taxpayers I’m referring mostly to those who buy hunting, fishing, and trapping licenses and any stamps required for the taking of game and fish, but the general natural resources fund is robbed too. Every year we hear of this “the sky is falling” crap from the fisheries or big game divisions and yet in spite of all the costly crap they come up with to deal with the issues whatever seems to flourish.

When you ask if CWD will spread across the continent, it likely already has.

I’d be interested to see what podcast? I know Meateater/Doug Duren have adopted CWD with Chicken Little like fervor, but I like to hear the arguments. Jimmy summed it up well, imo. It’s been in CO since 1967. In WY since 1985. And since 2002 in WI.

While it may not eliminate deer herds it will damn sure reduce the population when the CWD prevalence rate is high.

The area my wife and I hunt we have had 50% of the deer (mature bucks) we killed test positive for CWD.

This season we saw only 10-20% of the deer we saw 10-15 years ago. We have watched a steady decline in both the white-tailed and mule deer numbers to the point this year my wife decided she was not going to kill a deer.

Buffalo Fishhead

Comparing mad cow disease to CWD is not a great analogy, even though they are essentially the same thing. The issue with that comparison is that cows are livestock and we can control them, while deer are wild animals and controlling them is significantly more challenging.

I am not wildlife biologist so I can’t comment on what the best route to combating this is in the wild herd. Its obviously very important though, as deer represent the most popular game that is hunted, and generates a lot of business in many sectors.

gim wrote:

…while deer are wild animals and controlling them is significantly more challenging.

This is exactly the problem with CWD. It’s very difficult to get all the deer to report to the local testing station for a CWD test. So even establishing the prevalence of the disease within the population is slow and difficult.

Add to that the fact that it has not been established as to when or how the disease might suddenly ramp up and become a pandemic.

It is not valid to say that just because a disease has been endemic in a certain place and under certain conditions, that is proof that it will remain just an endemic “nuisance” everwhere. Maybe it will and maybe it won’t.

The DNR is damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The only real tool they have available is to reduce numbers to slow transmission. If they do this, then you get the predictable complaining. Also, it’s very difficult to have a control group in wild, free-ranging deer herd. But that’s exactly what you need to determine what works as far as controlling the disease.

But if the DNR does nothing, what happens if a combination of conditions and deer numbers make CWD suddenly go into pandemic mode and wipe out a large swath of the deer herd in MN? Well, then it’ll be the DNR’s fault for just sitting there and doing nothing, won’t it?

IMO, part of the problem is that many out there think that there are so many deer that nothing could possibly happen that would wipe out a large percentage of the herd, so why bother with CWD control at all? The problem with this thinking is that just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen.

If I told people that the deer population statewide could crash to a point so low that hunting would have to be shut down statewide, they’d say I was crazy. But that’s exactly what happened in the 1970s, due to a combination of factors the population crashed and hunting was shut down. So it CAN happen.

There is no easy answer and I don’t envy wildlife managers who have to figure out what to do when both diagnosis and “treatment” options are so limited.

From a hunter’s point of view, I don’t want anything to do with hunting in an area where CWD is prevalent. After having a good friend die of CJD, there are just too many questions as to the links and relationships between these brain diseases and I don’t want to be anywhere near an animal that has CWD because of that.

Another problem the DNR has is there is no gauranrtee that completley eliminating ALL deer in an area, and bringing in new deer from a clean area, that the CWD wouldn’t come back.

Mad cow is a tough comparison because of the way the English reacted to the disease. There was a professor called Neil Ferguson who has been making wild predictions on everything from covid to mad cow to H1N1 and everything in between, all based on computer models. He was always wrong by a huge margins on every prediction he made. They killed millions of cattle over hoof and mouth, then more millions over Mad Cow. All they really accomplished was destroying the livestock industry in England.

SR

Tom schmitt wrote:

Another problem the DNR has is there is no gauranrtee that completley eliminating ALL deer in an area, and bringing in new deer from a clean area, that the CWD wouldn’t come back.

It will come back.

There are research areas (pens or pastures) that once had CWD positive deer or elk using those pens. Then the animals were removed and the ground sterilized. The pens were left empty for a few years, but then when deer or elk were put back into those pens they contacted CWD.

People that work with CWD know that once the prions are in the soil there is essentially no turning back.

Buffalo Fishhead

Went to a meeting in 2001 it was a joke ! Rep from the state was there . He just gave ridiculous answers to questions Example I asked him about the farm in Minnesota that had a bull elk with CWD . 43 ELK killed including the bull . Yet only the bull tested positive ? I asked how could that be ? He said that’s Minnesota not Wisconsin ! Then admitted he knew nothing about it . It was on the front page of the Pioneer Press . This guy is getting paid to be the answer guy about CWD ? Early on the false positives and false negative at the Aims Iowa lab really put the icing on the cake .

Buffalo Fishhead wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Tom schmitt wrote:</div>
Another problem the DNR has is there is no gauranrtee that completley eliminating ALL deer in an area, and bringing in new deer from a clean area, that the CWD wouldn’t come back.

It will come back.

There are research areas (pens or pastures) that once had CWD positive deer or elk using those pens. Then the animals were removed and the ground sterilized. The pens were left empty for a few years, but then when deer or elk were put back into those pens they contacted CWD.

People that work with CWD know that once the prions are in the soil there is essentially no turning back.

Buffalo Fishhead

So basically once it is in the area the only strategy is let it be and hope for the best, or reduce deer heard in that area to near zero and keep it that way. Hopefully you will keep it from spreading.
I don’t know that option 2 is attainable.

The strategy that most states have pursued is to try to reduce that segment of the deer population that tends to consistently have the highest positive tests.

Whether or not that strategy will work is still being evaluated.

ClearCreek

Here’s the link to Wisconsin deer herd population, and harvest #’s. Iowa County, WI is the epicenter, so I was told. You tell me.
http://www.dnr.wi.gov/WIDeerMetrics/DeerStats.aspx?R=5

I think the MN DNR CWD response plan is a far bigger threat to the deer herd, directly from the plan: 1. Act aggressively to eliminate the disease. 2. Prevent or minimize disease spread…achieved by 1. Increased or unlimited bag limits. 2. Eliminate special rules that protect specific classes of deer (i.e. APR). 3. Allow cross tagging. 4. Institute special hunts. 5. Allow harvest of multiple antlered deer per hunter. 6 Conduct agency directed culling and 7. Issue landowner shooting permits.

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/cwd/cwd-response-plan.html

Saw it was recently detected in buffalo county. Will be interesting if that changes their plan.

If you are interested in CWD listen to this:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chronic-wasting-disease-facts-matter/id1012713381?i=1000420231334

Buffalo Fishhead

Buffalo Fishhead wrote:

If you are interested in CWD listen to this:

Buffalo Fishhead

Thanks for sharing! Although this is from September, 2018. Dr. Straka is the new wildlife chief for the DNR in MN, and she presented at the roundtable last winter, so likely a good indication of what is coming in MN. Listening now.