Chronic Wasting Disease (WD) is a new disease that affects deer and other large game animals. It's been around for a long time, but it hasn't caught on in the United States. In this episode, we talk with Brian Richards, a wildlife biologist at the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, about what it is, how it affects deer, and why it might be a threat to human health. We also talk about the possible link between CWD and other diseases, like Creutzfeldt-Jervous Disease (CJ) and Alzheimer's, and the possibility that CWD could become a problem in humans. This episode is brought to you by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the Department of Neurology and Neurophysiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Center for Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Minneapolis, which is part of the National Museum of Orthopaedics and Neurochronic Disease Research at the U.S. Army Medical Center, located in the Joint Base Mecklenburg-Steinburg-Fort Meade, New York. The museum is home to the largest collection of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in the world, and houses some of the most advanced researchers in the field, including Ted Nugent's lab, which has been working on CWD research since the early 20th century. This is a must-listen to this new disease! and is a death sentence for deer and moose, which could be a major threat to our species. . Learn more about CWD at Chronic Wasting disease and the potential link between this disease and human health? in this week's episode of the podcast, "The Dark Side of the Meat Eaters" by Joe Rogan and Doug Duren's Meat Eater podcast. Subscribe to our new show Meat Eaters: A Meat Eater Podcast! Subscribe to the Meat Eater Podcast! Subscribe on iTunes! Subscribe on Podcoin.fm/Meat Eaters Club? Learn about the latest in meat eating and other related products available on the market? Subscribe and share the show on social media! Leave us your thoughts on the meat eating tips and tricks! by becoming a meat eating tip, we'll be giving us a shoutout! in our next episode will be featured on the show next week on the next episode on the podcast!
00:00:13.000And Brian Richards, your friend, wildlife biologist.
00:00:16.000And, well, we're going to talk about a bunch of things, but one of the things that I wanted to talk about is this scary disease that...
00:00:24.000Well, when Ted Nugent was on the podcast, he downplayed the consequences and effects of something called CWD, or chronic wasting disease, which has made it onto your farm.
00:00:37.000And you live in Wisconsin, and you have this beautiful place that we visited when we did the meat-eater television show, and this is a new thing, that this chronic wasting disease was just...
00:00:48.000It decimates the deer's health and kills them and the suspicion is that some of this at least comes from these high fence operations where people grow deer and treat them like instead of like a wild animal they treat them like a domesticated animal and have them all feeding off of the same Pile of food and they share this disease.
00:01:13.000Is this all correct and accurate, Brian?
00:01:16.000Well, you just started out about an hour's worth of conversation.
00:02:07.000So, okay, that's a great place to start.
00:02:10.000Why would we care about this thing called chronic wasting disease?
00:02:13.000And I would argue, and some other scientists have argued, there's two major reasons.
00:02:18.000Number one is the impacts of this disease on members of the deer family themselves.
00:02:24.000And the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWD could become a human health issue at some point down the road.
00:02:32.000Okay, so you kind of nailed those two.
00:02:34.000With regard to deer, or members of the deer family, white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, moose, and most recently it was picked up in reindeer.
00:02:43.000In Norway, of all places, we could articulate some reason, some rationale, why this disease might be thought of as being important.
00:02:52.000The first we look at would be geographic spread.
00:02:56.000So, you know, CWD 20 years ago was thought to be this really novel thing in a very restricted geographic range in southeastern Wyoming, adjacent northeastern Colorado, and maybe a little spillover into Nebraska.
00:03:10.000A wildlife biologist, wildlife disease specialist, looked at this disease.
00:03:25.000Alright, so this is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs.
00:03:33.000So big long words, transmissible means it can go from animal A to animal B. Spongiform means looks like a sponge.
00:03:42.000And encephalopathy means disease of the brain.
00:03:45.000So you put it together, and so this disease results in holes in the brain resulting in progressive neurological degeneration followed by death.
00:05:50.000And as was the practice in the Furay tribe in Papua New Guinea, they practiced ritualized cannibalism to honor the dead and to help release the spirits from deceased family members.
00:06:04.000So they would feed upon the corpse and the bodies of their deceased.
00:06:10.000So when one individual died of probably some variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, Then the causative agent, the prion protein, which is concentrated in the central nervous system and lymphatic systems of diseased patients, this was fed back to other members of the family and the extended family.
00:06:30.000And so when they got sick and died, fed it again.
00:06:36.000In 1960 or around there, it was realized that this cannibalistic behavior was likely the result, you know, or likely the cause of disease transmission.
00:06:49.000Cannibalism was outlawed and at that point in time you broke completely the disease transmission cycle.
00:06:56.000So no more new cases of Kuru, but they had lingering cases with an extended incubation period up to 40 years later before Kuru finally burned out of that population.
00:07:09.000So now with BSE or mad cow disease, We were doing exactly, in essence, the same thing.
00:07:15.000Not exactly the same thing, but in essence.
00:07:18.000So, in an effort to maximize production and reduce the amount of waste, when they butchered cattle, we would take all the offal, O-F-F-A-L, you know, the hide, the bones, the parts that are inedible, and we would render them,
00:07:34.000cook them at high temperature and typically, you know, high pressure as well, And it turns into a slurry, a high-protein slurry.
00:07:42.000You skim the fat off the top of that and then dehydrate the rest of it, and you have kind of a meat-and-bone meal, a high-protein supplement.
00:07:51.000Realizing that cattle grow faster and produce better when they're on a higher-protein diet, it seemed reasonable to use waste material from cows to feed back to cows.
00:09:07.000Which allows them to change rapidly to evolve over time.
00:09:12.000So the whole concept that you have a protein, a protein that all mammals produce in a normal form, can be converted after production into a disease-associated form that has these radically different characteristics.
00:09:28.000One that you mentioned was resistance to heat treatment.
00:09:32.000A normal prion protein, and we have billions of them circulating in our bodies right now, have a specific purpose, a cellular purpose.
00:09:40.000We don't know exactly what it is, but it's likely involved in some sort of intracellular communication.
00:09:45.000It's a string of around 250 amino acids, so a relatively short protein.
00:09:52.000It does whatever it does, and then the body recycles, breaks that chain of amino acids down into its component parts and recycles it.
00:10:01.000Turns out that normal cellular prion protein likely has a half-life of maybe four to six hours.
00:10:06.000So you're producing them relatively constantly.
00:10:09.000Then there's the disease-associated form.
00:10:12.000And all disease-associated prions start as the normal cellular prion.
00:10:17.000So they're converted from one three-dimensional form To a different form, okay?
00:10:24.000And this different form has these radically different characteristics.
00:10:28.000One is heat resistance and other is UV light resistance.
00:10:31.000I mentioned that the normal cellular prion protein has a half-life of maybe four to six hours.
00:10:37.000The disease associated ones can persist in the environment for years and potentially up to decades.
00:10:42.000And when you say persist in the environment, you mean like on the ground, on leaves, like how would they persist?
00:10:52.000So if a deer sheds infectious agent, this prion protein, and so from the time a deer is infected, it's probably around two years before it develops clinical signs of disease, goes downhill, loses its fear of humans,
00:11:09.000dramatic weight loss, all of those things.
00:11:12.000That incubation period, you know, it's probably shedding infectious agent for the vast majority of that time period.
00:11:20.000So it looks healthy, but it's able of transmitting disease.
00:11:23.000We call that, you know, a typhoid Mary syndrome.
00:11:26.000The two deer that were positive on our farm, two bucks, two-and-a-half-year-old bucks, we had them tested, as you know, for the last several years we've been getting...
00:11:37.000Initially we got our only bucks tested and then the last three or four years we've gotten all the deer tested.
00:11:45.000They were two and a half year old bucks, looked perfectly healthy.
00:11:48.000And these are the first ones that you tested?
00:11:50.000They tested positive and we tested in excess of 35 deer over the last, well more than that, more like 50. During the incubation period would they still test positive?
00:12:32.000That's one of the real challenges with this disease from a management standpoint.
00:12:36.000They look perfectly healthy, they act perfectly healthy, but they're starting to have that progressive neurological degeneration that we can only see very near the end of disease.
00:12:48.000So, correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like we could potentially be facing a ticking time bomb of many, many, many deer that are wandering around out there right now that look totally normal, that are spreading this stuff all over the place, and they're acting normal,
00:13:05.000And then, obviously, with this multi-year incubation period, this could just cascade.
00:13:11.000And I think we've seen evidence of that now.
00:13:14.000Started out, you know, we talked about being isolated disease.
00:13:18.000It was picked up in Wisconsin at the end of 2001. As of today, CWD has now been picked up in 25 states in captive and or free-ranging populations in white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, or moose.
00:13:39.000It was in captive elk, and those elk still had Canadian ear tags in them.
00:13:45.000So we pretty much know how CWD, you know, those elk didn't swim across the Pacific pond.
00:13:51.000Most recently it was picked up two years ago in free-ranging reindeer in Norway and subsequent to that it was picked up in a small handful like three or four moose and a red deer in Norway and a single moose in Finland.
00:14:07.000There's a real concern over in Norway with reindeer.
00:14:14.000Okay, so reindeer are very gregarious.
00:14:17.000You know, white-tailed deer, you know, caribou, reindeer.
00:14:20.000So not unusual to see them in herds of hundreds of animals.
00:14:25.000So very, very different than what we see with white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, or moose.
00:16:01.000So when they picked up CWD and reindeer in Norway, the researchers over there Had witnessed our lack of success on this side of the pond over the course of the last 20 years.
00:17:25.000They allowed hunters to take as many as they could, which was a little over a thousand reindeer.
00:17:30.000Then they came in with government agents.
00:17:32.000But isn't there a concern that the hunters could eat something with CWD and then catch it?
00:17:38.000Well, that's always a concern, but we can talk about human health.
00:17:41.000Let me finish this one up with Norway.
00:17:45.000They literally took the bull by the horns.
00:17:48.000They decided to do what was very unpopular, what we have not been able to do in North America.
00:17:54.000And so after the hunting season, government agents, sharpshooters took an additional 1,400 reindeer.
00:17:59.000They killed every reindeer in this herd unit, and they're going to keep it fallow, allowing no reindeer in there for a minimum of five years.
00:18:07.000So it says every bit of promise of being the first large-scale success with dealing with this disease in a free-ranging herd.
00:18:15.000Pretty different than what we've been able to accomplish over here.
00:18:18.000Five years, is that, with it being in the soil and dirt and from what I was reading, wood and everything else, is that, so at some point there becomes the prions diminish in population or they die out or whatever the Proper word,
00:18:37.000I mean, they're not living so they don't die, but they don't become viable anymore?
00:18:41.000Yeah, five years is probably a pretty good, it's a guesstimate, okay, with regard to how long these prions remain viable in the environment and in the substrate.
00:18:54.000And what they'll do then is slowly allow reindeer to repopulate.
00:18:58.000And as they do, they'll be harvested periodically and every one of those will be tested.
00:19:03.000So, I mean, it'll be a long-term experiment into, you know, successful management, and it'll also learn quite a bit about whether, how far along the environment was contaminated.
00:19:14.000So another thing, they caught this disease very early.
00:19:16.000So after killing off, you know, 2,400 reindeer, I think they had around 20 positives.
00:19:21.000So very low prevalence, suggesting the disease was very, very new in this system.
00:19:26.000So if you're going to be successful, With a disease where animals are shedding infectious agent out into the environment, it persists for years to decades, do it early.
00:19:36.000If you're gonna get on it, detect it early, get on it fast, get on it hard.
00:19:40.000Why the decision to let human beings consume them?
00:19:44.000Well, at this point in time, we really don't have any evidence that humans can get CWD. Could that potentially, though, be an incubation period issue, just like it is with deer, maybe extended with humans?
00:20:22.000I want to talk about Kuru for a minute because every time I talk to this guy, I mean, I've learned a lot from him about all kinds of things and diseases, but yesterday we were talking about Kuru, and one of the things that was interesting to me about it is that these tribes, the women and children contracted it first.
00:20:43.000And the reason why was the men ate the meat.
00:20:47.000And the women and children ate the internal organs and brain where it's concentrated.
00:20:54.000As Kuru took off, it was one of the features as the researchers in the 1950s were looking at the population, Very few adult males had kuru, and it was more focused in the females and the children.
00:21:11.000And so it came back to that ritualistic cannibalism, and it hit it right on the head.
00:21:19.000The women and children got the internal organs, including the brain, that had the highest concentration of the prion protein.
00:21:27.000The men, if they consumed anything, consumed the finer cuts of meat.
00:21:31.000Which have a lower concentration, but not nil.
00:21:36.000That's just one of those social things that just kind of stuck with me, you know?
00:22:06.000I guess I would, yeah, I'd have to agree with that.
00:22:11.000There's other disease out there called epizootic hemorrhagic disease, EHD, and periodically you'll have significant outbreaks of this disease and in northern latitudes where the disease has not been present as often, You can see dramatic mortality.
00:22:28.00080-90% of a herd can be killed in a single event.
00:22:34.000But a very, you know, distinction between these diseases, you know, EHD is spread by midges.
00:22:46.000It actually transmits the disease, the virus from animal A to animal B or from the environment to animal A, either one.
00:22:54.000So while you have these pretty dramatic die-offs, as soon as the weather changes after the first frost, the first hard frost kills off the midges and within about two weeks the disease cycle is broken completely.
00:23:07.000So it has significant impacts on a localized level periodically, but the disease cycle, there's a definite end to the disease cycle.
00:23:17.000And then it's no longer present for that period of time, or for a period of time anyway, right?
00:23:22.000Yeah, the virus may persist in the environment, but once the transmission cycle is broken, the mortality stops.
00:23:28.000And isn't there some genetically engineered food plots that they're putting together now, different types of seed that inhibits midge growth and inhibits EHD? I'm not aware of that, but I wouldn't doubt it.
00:23:42.000And I think there's also some stuff they're doing that bolsters the animal's immune system.
00:23:46.000They're supplementing some of the food with, I don't know what they're using, but it bolsters the animal's immune system and makes them less susceptible to it.
00:23:55.000And populations that have been exposed to EHD over time definitely develop a herd immunity to it.
00:24:46.000In captive facilities, the Hall Farm in Wisconsin where CWD was first detected in 2002, the place was depopulated in 2006, Prevalence was nearly 80%.
00:24:59.000So four out of five deer in that captive cervid facility had it.
00:25:53.000Let me rephrase that, not that I'm aware of.
00:25:58.000So when I learned about EHD and comparative diseases, chronic wasting diseases like none other, as it develops within the herd, as it develops within the animal,
00:26:17.000So it'll start out as a very small problem.
00:26:20.000There's some maps of how it developed or how it spread in southwest Wisconsin.
00:26:25.000And we're on the front edge of it now.
00:26:30.000Correct me if I'm wrong, Brian, but it's almost like the way it develops within the deer Taking that period of time before it becomes clinical and the deer dies, it's almost as if that's reflective of how it moves through the landscape.
00:26:45.000It moves very slowly, but once it's there, it's there.
00:26:49.000Now I have read about hunters eating meat from some sort of diseased deer and getting sick and dying.
00:27:22.000Well, there's no epidemiological evidence that this occurs at this point in time.
00:27:27.000And we've hinted about some of the human health issues.
00:27:30.000So there's a few things we can look at.
00:27:32.000In areas where CWD is known to exist, Do we see higher mortality rates from Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, the prion disease of humans, than we do elsewhere?
00:27:45.000So from an epidemiological standpoint, there's no evidence that CWD has crossed over that species barrier into humans.
00:27:53.000Now, we can take a look at a number of science experiments that have been conducted.
00:27:59.000And at least in some of these studies, In experimental models, we have evidence that the CWD prion protein can cause human normal prions to convert to a disease-associated form.
00:28:19.000It's not quite the same as pumping CWD into the brain of a human patient and seeing what developed.
00:28:27.000So the science suggests that there is a small Non-zero chance that CWD could become a human health issue.
00:28:36.000There's also some of the more recent science that's been conducted suggests that this barrier, we call it the species barrier, and it really is a very robust barrier, one would think, that keeps CWD from crossing into human hosts.
00:28:53.000That barrier may not be as tough as we think it is.
00:28:57.000And that barrier may be changing over time.
00:29:00.000And is that because one of the things we've talked about before is that they've discovered different strains of CWD? Yeah, it sure is.
00:29:55.000There was a paper done a couple years ago which looked at the actual architecture of this disease-associated prion protein.
00:30:04.000And there's a portion of it that's referred to as a loop structure.
00:30:08.000And it's just kind of, you know, if you take a rubber band or a piece of yarn or something and ball it up into a three-dimensional shape, there's a little loop hanging off the side of this disease-associated prion protein.
00:30:19.000And in DEAR, in CWD, that loop is very, very rigid.
00:31:09.000And it's likely this difference, some of this difference in their prion structure.
00:31:14.000This one cannot convert that one to a different form.
00:31:17.000So some researchers in Alberta identified a strain of CWD which came from wild deer.
00:31:25.000It's not something they engineered in the laboratory.
00:31:27.000They have a strain from wild deer that does give mice CWD. So most of the strains out there mice can't give, but they discovered one that mice do get.
00:31:40.000So, researchers from a few years ago, and lately I've seen it in the popular media, that hey, this difference in this loop structure is going to keep people from getting CWD. Well, all the assumptions that people can't get CWD are based on this idea that CWD is CWD and it will always be exactly the same thing.
00:32:04.000But our experience with Scrapey strongly suggests that even though there's no DNA in these things, that they do change over time.
00:32:14.000They morph over time into slightly different disease characteristics and etiologic agents.
00:32:19.000Now, in the hunting community, is there skepticism about this?
00:32:23.000Is Ted Nugent's ideas, are these unique?
00:32:48.000You almost want to stick your head in the sand and just forget about it.
00:32:51.000You know, besides the sort of things that, you know, your friend that we were talking about before, like I was doing on the farm, of, you know, managing deer in a particular way for a particular kind of deer, which might be contrary to the spread of the disease.
00:33:06.000Well, geez, nobody wants to hear that I can't do what I want to do.
00:33:10.000We're talking about management-wise, we're talking about my friend John Dudley's farm in Iowa, is that he only shoots the big mature males and he lets all the other deer grow to a very large size so he has a really healthy population of big deer on his farm.
00:33:25.000Now, what are you doing in your place?
00:33:27.000I understand you're just on a mass call.
00:33:42.000So 15 years ago, or 16 years ago, when CWD was discovered, there were a lot of changes in hunting structure.
00:33:51.000And there was an effort by the Department of Natural Resources to eradicate the disease in the core area south of the Wisconsin River, about 70 miles from us.
00:34:04.000In 15 years, the disease has moved 70 miles north.
00:34:11.000That effort that the DNR started became political.
00:34:16.000And quite honestly, that many years ago, I would have likely been a little skeptical.
00:34:24.000Well, I know I would have been skeptical.
00:34:26.000They wanted to kill all the deer in a particular area.
00:34:30.000That many years ago, had they come to my farm and said, we're going to kill all the deer here and all the neighboring deer, I would have had some real hard questions.
00:34:38.000I have no idea how I would have reacted to it.
00:34:40.000I continued to do buck management, and you were there when we were still doing that.
00:34:46.000And we can talk about how bucks contribute to the spread of the disease and that sort of thing.
00:35:00.000We see different prevalence or curves depending on the demographic faction of deer.
00:35:08.000Adult males, the ones with the big antlers, the gears on the wall over there, tend to have higher prevalence, sometimes maybe two, three, four times as high as other segments of the population.
00:35:21.000So, highest prevalence in adult males followed by adult females and then by juvenile animals.
00:35:27.000So, it's likely behavioral reasons why we see that in adult males.
00:35:34.000So, adult male deer, during the rut or breeding season, they greatly expand their home range.
00:35:40.000They contact multiple female or family groups of females.
00:35:45.000Earlier in the fall, especially with white-tailed deer, adult males tend to gather in these bachelor groups.
00:35:51.000So there's a lot of social contact, grooming, things like that.
00:35:56.000So because of their behavior, they contact more animals at different times of the year.
00:36:01.000And this number of contacts, it's believed, is likely responsible for them becoming infected at a higher rate than other members out in the herd.
00:36:10.000So now, if you are an adult male, Then you're in this group.
00:36:15.000You also have a higher likelihood of being able to transmit disease to other animals because you're out there during breeding season, right?
00:36:23.000Is there any evidence that any of these deer have transferred this to livestock or that it's gone into agriculture, to food sources, to corn and what have you that could be consumed by people even that are vegetarians?
00:36:38.000So, with regard to transmission into cattle, it's basically the same situation as with humans.
00:36:45.000No evidence that it has, but in an experimental sense, we can push it over that species barrier, okay?
00:36:52.000Now, interesting you bring up plants because we have shown research that we've done at the National Wildlife Health Center has shown that if you grow some plant types in a slurry, a concentrate of prion protein,
00:37:08.000That those prions can be uptaken through the roots and deposited into stems and leaves.
00:37:35.000So that deer that's out there with CWD positive, shedding infectious agent out into the environment through its urine, through its saliva, through its feces.
00:37:43.000So if a deer urinates, this deer with CWD urinates on plants, the prions have a tendency to bind to those plants, form a chemical bond.
00:37:54.000It's not just dried on, it forms a chemical bond to the plant.
00:37:57.000So they literally become part of the plant.
00:38:28.000But now it's in 25 states, vast geographic areas.
00:38:32.000We have, just south of where he lives, in adult males, nearly 50% prevalence.
00:38:39.000So when you kill that big buck, take a coin out of your pocket, flip it in the air, and that's the odds that that deer has CWD. And when he says just south, it's 15 miles.
00:39:18.000Okay, so take that amount times 20% or that amount, whatever percent have CWD, figure out how many times does the deer defecate or urinate on a daily basis, and that's a bunch.
00:39:31.000And now think about the possibility that when you harvest those agricultural foodstuffs and roll it up into big bales, that you might have fecal material rolled up into those big bales.
00:41:38.000Another tactic, which is, and I mean, there's a body of science around this.
00:41:42.000But this is a non-scientific approach to this, because these are unrelated issues.
00:41:44.000Like, EHD does kill animals, winter kill most certainly kills animals, but we're not talking about the same circumstances.
00:41:49.000We're trying to divert the conversation.
00:41:53.000Another thing that's very easy to do is cherry picking the literature that's out there.
00:41:59.000We saw a real great example of this about a year ago.
00:42:03.000Where there's a lot of letters to the editor being sent into newspapers in areas where CWD is.
00:42:09.000And I think it's an attempt to change the conversation.
00:42:13.000So they were very careful to use citations from peer-reviewed literature.
00:42:19.000And one of the ones they used was they found that in Researchers in Wisconsin found that CWD was not having a significant effect on mortality rates when they studied the disease.
00:42:33.000So this is a true statement taken directly from peer-reviewed science.
00:42:38.000What they didn't identify was that when they studied that disease was between 2003 and 2007, 10, 12, you know, 11 years ago.
00:42:49.000The next sentence in the paper was, our study can use as a baseline for comparison at a later point in time should disease change over time.
00:42:59.000So you mentioned that exponential growth curve and how early on, back in 2003 to 2007, this area, disease prevalence was probably lower than 5%.
00:43:10.000Now it's shot up in that curve and it's probably in that 25, 30, 30 plus percentage range.
00:43:18.000So you're cherry-picking literature to make your arguments that even scientists say this is not having a big effect when they studied it.
00:43:26.000They're just not saying when they studied it.
00:43:28.000So as a non-scientist, what I'm looking at here is everyone's always terrified of the next pandemic disease.
00:43:36.000And this is one of the reasons why I felt it was so important to discuss this.
00:43:39.000Because, you know, people would say, they look at it casually, good, don't eat animals, don't eat deer.
00:44:23.000You know, they're so, you know, nutritionally balanced diets.
00:44:27.000But the real, what terrifies me is this potential for a pandemic disease also comes with an incubation period.
00:44:37.000And that we are looking potentially at, like, if you just objectively look with no hysteria and no hyperbole, you look at the history of diseases.
00:44:47.000Diseases mutate, and many of them come from animals.
00:44:51.000This is why swine flu and avian flu and all these different things have actually come from either farm animals or wild animals that have somehow or another managed to transmit diseases that have morphed and mutated and become diseases.
00:45:12.000One switch one way or the other like you've observed or they've observed rather with mice and this could potentially infect human beings and spread across I mean the entire country like wildfire.
00:45:26.000Well, we're seeing that spread right now in deer.
00:45:29.000So in deer, we're seeing clear geographic spread.
00:45:33.000We're seeing clear increases in prevalence.
00:45:36.000And in areas where the disease has been present the longest, we are seeing population-level impacts.
00:45:42.000There's locations in Wyoming where we've demonstrated, where we've proven that CWD is driving population decline in deer.
00:45:49.000So that's a That encapsulates why we should be concerned about deer.
00:45:54.000That's in mule deer and in white-tailed deer.
00:45:56.000And the mule deer have an extended range in terms of, like, their migration.
00:46:01.000That's one of the things that we've realized, I believe, over the last decade, right, is that mule deer travel far more, far longer, and far longer distances than we ever saw before.
00:46:15.000There's an interesting research tidbit.
00:46:17.000The state of Minnesota, you know, they've got what appears to be a fairly recent CWD outbreak in the southeastern part of the state.
00:46:25.000So their researchers are really trying to get ahead of this and figure out what could move this around.
00:46:30.000So they went in and captured deer in an adjacent area, put radio telemetry collars on these to see, well, just how far do they go?
00:46:38.000This was in an article just about a week ago, a popular media article, so it's not published yet, but they had a doe, a single doe, collared, that went 80 miles.
00:47:21.000Surveillance testing has been going on.
00:47:22.000It crossed the river, and it just keeps moving.
00:47:27.000And it could be in, again, all these different plants, all these different berries.
00:47:33.000People could be eating these berries, eating these plants, fruits, vegetables, all these different things, and they could be potentially consuming these prions.
00:47:43.000Well, I think it's very clear that there's exposure.
00:47:47.000And I talk with Doug quite a bit about the difference between exposure and disease transmission.
00:47:53.000So it is certain that lots of humans are exposed to disease-associated prion protein from CWD and likely from plant materials as well.
00:48:05.000Whether that will result in transmission of disease across that species barrier is an open question.
00:48:19.000And one thing we can, though, identify very clearly is that the rate of exposure is increasing exponentially.
00:48:27.000As disease has a larger geographic footprint and prevalence goes up, more and more hunters are, just by simple math, being exposed to that positive material.
00:48:40.000And when you do biological experiments, I mean, there's a certain likelihood that you'll see outcome A or outcome B. So if you keep rolling the dice enough times, you might see an alternative outcome.
00:48:54.000When we talked about this when you were on with Ranella and I at the farm, meat eater podcast number 70, Brian, you put it as the chances are very small.
00:50:11.000Well, I do grass-fed beef, and this is actually kind of interesting.
00:50:15.000You were talking about the deer, the white-tailed deer, on our place, eating corn and beans and GMO corn, GMO beans, alfalfa, whatever they want to eat.
00:50:50.000I mean, you have farm animals in captivity that are organic, purely eating grass, as nature intended, and you got deer eating Monsanto corn.
00:51:30.000I was going to bring you some, but they just went in on Monday.
00:51:34.000I would like to see them go through the security checkpoint carrying, you know, bags of beef with them.
00:51:42.000So they were two years old and two months or three months.
00:51:47.000Now, with the incubation period that you were discussing earlier, you're talking about a two-year incubation period with deer before they potentially show any effects.
00:51:55.000So these animals would fall into that line between birth and slaughter, that that would be inside that incubation window for deer.
00:52:03.000It could be potentially larger for cow, is that correct?
00:52:07.000BSC, I think the incubation period is between three and five years.
00:52:10.000And so that's why one of the precautionary measures for BSC in the United States is we don't allow those older-aged cattle into the human food chain.
00:52:38.000And so when they are in an incubation period, they're still capable of distributing the disease though, correct?
00:52:46.000Well, that's with CWD and with scrapie and sheep as well.
00:52:50.000With BSE, and let me clarify, if CWD went into a cow in a natural world, we don't know exactly what it would look like.
00:53:00.000We know what it looks like when we inject it into the brain of a cow, but we don't know what it would really look like.
00:53:05.000But BSE is quite different in that Similarly with the human prion diseases, an individual with Kuru could not give Kuru to another human being.
00:53:18.000They had to consume it, so there was that artificial process involved.
00:53:23.000Same thing with BSC. A cow with BSC can't give BSC to another because they're not shedding that infectious agent out into the environment.
00:53:32.000So when they stopped it, when they stopped Feeding cows to cows.
00:55:25.000So you have to bone your meat in the area and then you can take it home, which is a bit of a problem for some folks.
00:55:35.000We're beginning to stop the movement of captive deer from one farm to the other, but that's just recent and there have been hearings on that lately.
00:56:32.000The other one is this anthropogenic or human-assisted movement where humans are moving infectious material.
00:56:39.000And that might be how it got from Colorado to Wisconsin in the first place.
00:56:43.000It's highly unlikely that a mule deer or a white-tailed deer got up, woke up one morning in Colorado and decided to, you know, go 900 miles across the Mississippi River and settle in, you know, western Dane County.
00:56:55.000And back in the day, my dad and a bunch of his buddies used to go out to Colorado, or Wyoming is actually where they went, and they hunted Elk and mule deer and they bring the whole damn thing back.
00:58:10.000So it makes sense, you know, to look at these anthropogenic factors, human assisted, identify the possible mechanisms, how humans could bring CWD to them, To you and stop them either with regulatory frameworks or with education.
00:58:26.000Teaching hunters that it's a risk to move carcasses around is likely much more effective than just putting a rule in place that says you can't do it.
00:58:34.000And there are Unscrupulous people who purchase deer from these high-fence operations and release them in the wild because they want big racks and Animals that like people don't know there are these high-fence operations I shouldn't call them high-fence operations because some of them are wild animals that are contained in a fence These are farms.
00:58:54.000They're farms that grow deer and they grow deer with special protein feed so they have enormous racks so you have these really Perverse examples of a deer.
00:59:09.000And people look at that, and to someone who enjoys wild animals, you see those, and you're like, it's like a stripper with triple F tits.
00:59:18.000It's like, what the fuck did you just do?
01:00:48.000When you get back to the definition of fitness, genetic fitness, there's only one measure of genetic fitness, and that's how well represented you are in the next generation.
01:01:33.000So these animals, while they're bred very much like livestock for very specific characteristics, big antlers, these don't necessarily translate into something that would be more fit out in the wild.
01:01:48.000Well, let's also point out that the reason why you're bringing this up is these animals actually do fight to the death.
01:02:27.000They were twice, three times the size of our normal elk, and their antlers were measured in feet instead of inches.
01:02:34.000And so during their evolutionary time period, when they were on the face of the earth, it was when animals were larger, predators were larger.
01:02:53.000Stephen Jay Gould has offered up that likely What occurred was a change in the habitat, that climate changed over time and that forests grew up.
01:03:05.000If you're in the plains and you have antlers that are seven, eight feet wide, you can walk around.
01:03:11.000But now when trees start to grow up, how can you survive when the world around you changed?
01:03:17.000And you'd have to literally walk with your head turned sideways.
01:03:23.000So there's a very real example of how a phenotypic characteristic, these mega antlers, really in the long term were not in the best interest of the species.
01:03:33.000Jamie, pull up a photograph of these farmed deer antlers.
01:03:40.000Just type in Google, ridiculous farm deer antlers, and you get a sense of what we're talking about.
01:03:45.000For the people that are watching this on YouTube, because until you see it, you don't understand how gross it's gotten.
01:03:51.000Yeah, I think one was called Goliath that I remember.
01:04:04.000That thing is, that's crazy what they've done to that deer.
01:04:08.000It's a product of selective breeding for specific characteristics that some people will pay a lot of money for.
01:04:13.000Yeah, and there's certain high fence operations that you can go online and they, you know, this is what, like, look, go back to that photo you just had with that guy standing there.
01:04:39.000There's these places that have these animals and some people will take these animals and then they import them.
01:04:46.000They purchase them, import them and then release them into the air quotes wild and then they'll hunt them and then they'll pretend that that's a wild animal that they shot.
01:04:57.000And this is a source of CWD. They are...
01:05:03.000Well, okay, so a deer has to have CWD in order to be a risk, right?
01:05:08.000So it's been shown, I mean, in the lower 48, we're just, I think we're at 100 captive deer and elk facilities that have been shown to be CWD positive.
01:05:17.000So we can definitively identify that the captive cervid industry has been a part of moving CWD across the landscape.
01:05:25.000We know that, you know, CWD-positive deer have been moved by the industry even across, you know, international and state lines.
01:06:25.000Well, I think deer farms have been around for a long time.
01:06:27.000There's, if you Google, you know, tame deer, you'll find some from the, you know, the late 1800s when photographs became possible of deer following people around.
01:06:38.000So we've domesticated animals for a long, long time.
01:06:42.000But as an industry, probably really came into vogue in, you know, maybe the 60s and 70s.
01:06:48.000And more recently now it's grown, you know, that industry has grown exponentially.
01:06:52.000I used to work for Texas Parks and Wildlife before I worked for USGS. And one of the things I did was I administered the deer breeding program for the state.
01:07:02.000So when I started this, I didn't start the program, but when I came into that role...
01:07:54.000So, like I say, they're part of the equation.
01:07:57.000But I don't want to place all the blame for CWD moving it around because there's other possibilities for how this disease moves around.
01:08:06.000Doug hit on one of them, and that's the idea of carcass movement.
01:08:11.000It hasn't been proven that this occurs, but it's certainly, when you look at it from a scientific standpoint, it's very easy to identify.
01:08:20.000So if, you know, I butcher my own deer, so if I kill a deer that happens to have CWD, I butcher my own deer, I've got to do something with this stuff, okay?
01:08:30.000You know, the meat component in a deer is probably around 30%, 35%, something like that.
01:08:43.000Ooh, it might have CWD, so we don't want it at our landfill because the effluent might be pumped out onto a farmer's field and they could come back and, you know, they see it as a liability.
01:08:54.000So, I've got my deer bones and offal, the rest of the material, and I drive to the dump, which is, you know, 25 miles away, and I say, no, we're not taking that.
01:09:05.000Well, now what am I going to do with this stuff?
01:09:07.000So, I could double bag it, you know, a little bit at a time and put it out in the trash, you know, Or maybe on the way home, I'm driving past a state-owned state park or a state natural area or a wildlife management area and I see a trail go down there.
01:09:20.000And I drive down that trail and, hey, there's a pile of deer bones and deer heads here.
01:10:17.000Because there are hunters involved, I'm happy to be one of them.
01:10:22.000One of the things that happened in our spring hearings is that we had folks come in and say, you know, we're concerned about chronic wasting disease and we don't want to spread it on the landscape, but when we put the bones out on the curb, they aren't taking it.
01:10:35.000On the Wisconsin DNR CWD website, there's a list of haulers who will take it.
01:11:06.000We noted how prions bind to various surfaces.
01:11:08.000They bind to clay particles very, very tightly.
01:11:12.000And so one of the researchers at UW-Madison, his name's Joel Patterson, was looking at this issue 10 years ago to try and figure out, can it be safely done?
01:11:22.000Turns out if you put about an 8-inch clay liner underneath one portion of your landfill, You can put all the deer and all the prions there that you want to.
01:11:31.000And while the prions will then migrate down over time through the soil, when they come in contact with the clay particles, they bind.
01:12:47.000So I contacted the head of Solid Waste for the state of Wisconsin and asked, well, how is this?
01:12:53.000I go on your website and I see some take it and some don't.
01:12:56.000And her response was, we have no legislative authority to require them to take this.
01:13:03.000So some are doing it voluntarily, and actually one solid waste hauler said to me, geez, we're putting a hell of a lot worse stuff in the landfills than some deer bones.
01:13:18.000So one of the efforts that we're working on in southwest Wisconsin right now Is to and it's a funding issue is to put place dumpsters in areas where You know like I'm volunteering to have one on my farm It's a question of who's gonna pay for it and if it comes down to it I'm gonna pay for the damn dumpster They're about $500 for a 20 yard dumpster.
01:13:42.000So that then people can come by and put their bones in that dumpster and then they'll be properly disposed of because we have a hauler near us who's said we're willing to bring them there.
01:13:54.000You know, to bring the dumpster there and then dispose of the bones properly, like they do at one of the lockers, one of the butcher shops that processes deer.
01:14:04.000They have the setup, which is actually when I saw it, I was like, well, why aren't we doing that countywide in various places so that people aren't chucking them in the ditch?
01:14:14.000I mean, otherwise, you're holding on to the damn bones until you find out whether the things...
01:14:21.000Completely careful about the hygiene, which I've been trying to do.
01:14:26.000Suddenly you've got a pile of bones in the old milk house down there until you find out whether it's positive or not.
01:14:31.000And I'm literally keeping the deer bones separate so that when I find out that deer A was non-positive, well, okay, I can put those out or something like that.
01:15:08.000Will and money and education obviously.
01:15:12.000That we're providing opportunity for this.
01:15:15.000I've been working with the DNR a little bit on this and we're in some discussions about two things.
01:15:20.000One is Self-service kiosks to make getting your deer tested easier, where you essentially cut the head off the deer and leave it in a kiosk with some information about where it was.
01:15:42.000So we're hoping that what we're going to be able to do is start something called adopt a kiosk, essentially, that hunters and people or sportsmen's groups will...
01:15:53.000Gather those heads and then take them into the testing facility and therefore keep the budget money targeted at doing the actual testing.
01:16:01.000Right next to that self-service kiosk really should be a dumpster that you can throw your deer bones into.
01:16:11.000Whether you know whether it's positive or not.
01:16:22.000If it is positive, disease is already there and so you're not taking as great a chance of moving it.
01:16:30.000That's not an optimal solution to leave that stuff on the ground surface.
01:16:35.000An optimal solution is dig a hole but you know it's pretty hard to dig sometimes in December in Wisconsin.
01:16:42.000If the dumpster thing doesn't end up working out with me, there will be a hole.
01:16:46.000I mean, last year I just kept the bones separate, and the ones that we actually took from the one deer, it went into the dumpster at the locker.
01:16:58.000This all seems to me, sorry to interrupt, but this all seems to me like Band-Aids on massive gunshot wounds.
01:17:04.000It is, but go back to what I was saying before.
01:17:07.000Let's buy time, because this shit's spreading, man.
01:19:02.000But people are certainly working towards it.
01:19:05.000Now, it's likely, it's going to be very challenging to create a therapeutic, something that treats a prion disease, because treatment would then mean you would have to get past the blood-brain barrier.
01:19:16.000And once you start this cascading interaction of normal prions to disease-associated prions in the central nervous system, it's going to be really, really challenging to stop that.
01:19:26.000I mean, it's a roller coaster going awry by the time it gets up into the brain.
01:19:31.000So then you're looking at preventative measures.
01:20:02.000There's no human prion disease vaccines.
01:20:04.000There's nothing for BSE. There's nothing for scrapie, but there's research ongoing and there have been some advances.
01:20:11.000There is a Canadian research group that had a vaccine candidate for CWD. They thought it looked very promising, so it went to a field production stage and they actually tried deploying this vaccine in a captive facility in Wyoming, a research facility.
01:20:28.000It turned out that this vaccine was not ready for prime time.
01:20:31.000And actually after giving this vaccine to some elk, giving a placebo to other elk, and then leaving him in a CWD contaminated facility, actually the vaccinated animals got CWD faster and at a higher rate than the non-vaccinated animals.
01:20:49.000So it turned out to be almost an anti-vaccine.
01:20:58.000No, just for whatever reason, it predisposed the animals.
01:21:03.000So it was a massive failure, but even from failures, you learn.
01:21:08.000Okay, so they're working now, and they learned a lot in that experiment.
01:21:13.000There's another research group centered out at the University of New York who published a paper, I think in 2015, was their most recent work.
01:21:21.000And they've got a vaccine candidate That provides some degree of protection, quote-unquote, protection from disease.
01:21:29.000Now, all but one of the animals that they gave this vaccine to and then challenged with CWD got CWD. Okay?
01:22:02.000Even if we do create a vaccine that works, that prevents CWD, and prevent as opposed to slowing, there's a very big distinction.
01:22:12.000So if you have a vaccine that makes the average course of disease three years instead of two years or four years instead of two years, they still have CWD. Are there any deer farms that have 100% negative CWD deer in them?
01:22:35.000So there is a potential that you could...
01:22:39.000Isolate these populations of completely CWD-free deer, and if there's some sort of a mass die-off, you could reintroduce these deer into the wild?
01:22:50.000Well, okay, so you're looking at the difference between a herd that is CWD-free, which means it likely hasn't been exposed to CWD, versus animals that are CWD-resistant through genetics.
01:23:09.000So to date, we have not seen any deer that are genetically completely resistant.
01:23:16.000There are different genotypes of the prion protein gene out there that do impact the length of disease and also seem to have some impact on how often the frequency that these animals get disease.
01:23:30.000But even the genetically resistant deer do get CWD. And they transmit it.
01:23:44.000So instead of that kind of garden variety two-year incubation period, it might be closer to a five-year incubation period.
01:23:52.000So now, on the one hand, you're going, great, most deer die before they're five years old anyway, so this would be a good thing.
01:24:00.000But on the downside, you're talking about a population of animals that have CWD with all these other side effects.
01:24:07.000They're shedding infectious agent out into the environment, this, that, and the other, and cause a potential risk to human and other health impacts on the landscape.
01:24:19.000So I'm not so certain that this is a success story.
01:24:22.000Just like a vaccine, That results in a longer course of disease where deer can get CWD, but they die from something else.
01:24:32.000A population of resistant animals that have a high prevalence of CWD. I guess I don't see that as a desirable endpoint because of the other consequences and potential repercussions of CWD. It would almost be more desirable if it killed them instantly.
01:24:46.000A shorter incubation period would be preferable.
01:25:02.000And there's research going on in some of the conservative farms, the deer farms...
01:25:06.000That they've identified genetic markers, ones that are not published in the literature yet, that are affording a higher degree of protection from disease.
01:25:15.000But until it's published in the peer-reviewed literature and really tested, it's a speaking point until that point in time.
01:25:23.000So we don't know if they'll get there.
01:25:25.000We've got to put a fence around Wisconsin, Doug.
01:25:54.000So this is something that, it just can't be dismissed.
01:25:59.000This is not something that's a hoax, this is not, so the reason why people were upset at what Ted said on the podcast, there's a very good reason.
01:26:50.000So it's contagious, it's fatal, neurodegenerative disorder, it's got to be a horrible way to die.
01:26:57.000So that's a pretty significant set of clinical signs or symptoms in an individual animal.
01:27:03.000Now let's look at the geographic spread, rampant geographic spread.
01:27:08.000So it has an ever-expanding geographic footprint.
01:27:12.000In areas where it has been known the longest, we now have prevalence in a cohort of animals, adult males of around 50%, and in adult females around 30%.
01:27:22.000Can you name any other disease of humans, fish, domestic livestock, dogs, wildlife, anything else that has that set of characteristics and that degree of penetrance into the population, and you go,
01:29:59.000Yeah, but by doing that, by forcing these animals to have all the saliva excretion, this is a very effective means of transmitting this disease throughout the environment.
01:30:10.000The set of characteristics of this whole disease where the protracted incubation period shedding infectious agents through bodily fluids for the majority of that incubation period The infectious agent persists in the environment for years out to decades.
01:30:26.000I mean, if you wanted to stack the deck for a disease, you couldn't come up with a better set of characteristics.
01:30:31.000Plus, they look perfectly healthy, so we have no idea that they're diseased until later on in the disease progression.
01:30:40.000Now, is there a higher prevalence in deer versus moose versus elk or anything else?
01:30:49.000We tend to see higher prevalence in the deer species, whitetail deer, mule deer, in isolated areas, than we do in either elk.
01:30:59.000Moose, there's only been, you know, worldwide, there may have only been 10 positive moose to date.
01:31:06.000And it doesn't seem that they're less susceptible, it's just that they're likely haven't been exposed because they're not in the same systems.
01:31:37.000To date, there's no evidence that any canid, any member of the dog family, has ever developed any TSE. They never got BSE as far as we know.
01:31:47.000No evidence that any canid has gotten CWD. Now that could be a real observation.
01:31:54.000It could also be that we haven't done enough science on it.
01:31:58.000As opposed to cats, in the BSC situation, both great cats and domestic cats got a TSC, it was referred to as feline spongiform encephalopathy, and it was from consuming BSC-contaminated meat.
01:32:18.000Which most certainly consume deer on a regular basis.
01:32:21.000Now, with CWD in North America, again, we have no evidence that any mountain lion or any great cat or small cat has contracted CWD. In fact, it's very interesting.
01:32:32.000In a research study in Wyoming that I was a part of, It turned out that the highest source of mortality for CWD-positive deer was mountain lion predation.
01:32:43.000And so somebody's going, aha, CWD doesn't always kill deer.
01:32:57.000So if you're a deer and you're not quite right, you know, I mean, this disease is developing in your brain, you're progressing progressive dementia.
01:33:06.000It's not at the point where we are humanized, which really are very, very poor.
01:33:11.000We can't see disease yet, but disease is progressing and an ambush predator can leverage that and take advantage of that in that weakness in the prey.
01:34:40.000You could likely take all the predators you could find, wolves and mountain lions, and dump them You know, into Iowa County, just south of where Doug lives, and they likely would not be able to eliminate disease.
01:34:51.000But as disease spreads geographically, at the inner base, could predators be an effective tool to slow or stop disease from spreading?
01:35:02.000It's an interesting question, especially when states are contemplating more aggressive control measures, opening up hunting and trapping seasons to reduce population densities of wolves.
01:35:32.000We found a dead one last time Steve was there and I was very suspicious of it being a CWD because it was a two and a half year old buck.
01:35:40.000It was laying there and it turns out it was probably hit by a car, but it was fairly well consumed by coyotes by then.
01:35:48.000And I cut the head off of it and sent it in and it came back non-positive.
01:35:54.000What happens when that coyote, which is going to travel, well, they aren't traveling huge distances, but say he's eating a CWD-positive deer on the Dernan farm, and he's running over to Bunker Hill seven or eight miles away because they do that, and he takes that dump over there.
01:36:11.000Yeah, that science has been done, and so it turns out if you take CWD-positive material, you put it in the front end of a coyote, It comes out the back end of a coyote and it's still capable.
01:36:37.000But they could potentially spread it in their urine because they would be carrying it?
01:36:41.000So that coyote, you have to ask, so he could eat CWD-positive material, he could poop it out X number of hours later and he might be a mile or two away.
01:36:52.000Okay, so that's a fairly local geographic phenomenon.
01:36:55.000They could be spreading infectious material.
01:36:58.000Now you have to ask yourself more questions.
01:37:02.000When they defecate on the landscape, is a deer likely to encounter and consume that material?
01:37:08.000Well, maybe not now, but it might be fertilizer two years down the road for plants that the deer could eat.
01:37:54.000We know that deer to deer to deer to deer, we see that slow, diffusive process on the landscape.
01:37:59.000That's the biggie that's going on just south of him and now is past him.
01:38:04.000Then we have that anthropogenic movement, you know, humans moving at long distances, and the potential for agricultural commodities to be involved.
01:38:13.000I mean, there's likely other things like crows and coyotes.
01:38:17.000They're proof of concept in a laboratory, but whether they're really happening in the field is an entirely open question.
01:38:23.000And if they are, how big are they as compared to these other features?
01:38:30.000So why not do the, you know, and some of the detractors will also say, well, you can't stop deer from doing deer activities, right?
01:38:40.000Licking branches, licking each other, those normal deer activities.
01:38:49.000But if we're concentrating them in an area, let's say a mineral lick, Where every deer in the area comes through there and licks that.
01:39:09.000I mean, I've seen bait piles where there's a pile of corn, there's a pile of apples.
01:39:11.000Well, they're all eaten off the same pile.
01:39:13.000You've got all these deer coming into that.
01:39:15.000That's something we can do something about.
01:39:17.000There are all these natural movements that we can't do anything about, but if we can slow the spread by stopping these unnatural gatherings of deer and these unnatural, you know, spreading of the disease, why wouldn't we do that?
01:39:32.000Yeah, there's a few things, you know, you keep honing in on, you know, there's these anthropogenic factors, and then what can we do where disease is, truly is?
01:39:43.000Yeah, the things you're talking about, the baiting and feeding.
01:40:17.000Healthy, naive, susceptible animal comes up and eats that corn or licks that mineral lick, and it's likely that that animal is ingesting viable infectious agent and can transmit disease.
01:40:56.000So they're a great place and schools are a great place to spread disease and then those kids come home and share it with you and then you can share it with others, right?
01:41:34.000He looked at this from a mathematical perspective and he's trying to leverage the idea that adult males have higher prevalence.
01:41:43.000So they are sinks for disease, they're gathering disease, and then they're shedders of disease as well.
01:41:51.000So what if in our harvest regime, in hunting season, We focused on adult males.
01:41:59.000We hammer the bucks because they're the ones most likely to have disease.
01:42:04.000So we would lower prevalence in that we're reducing the proportion of the population with the highest prevalence of disease.
01:42:12.000The idea is if you knock that segment down enough that you would interrupt disease transmission cycles and you could actually lower herd prevalence over time.
01:42:23.000Now you still have the persistence in the environment, But, from a modeling basis, it works.
01:42:30.000Alright, so now think about the deer hunter out there listening to me today, listening to this show today.
01:42:35.000Oh, now they want us to go out and kill all the bucks.
01:42:38.000So it's not going to be a very desirable, from a hunter's perspective, Tool.
01:42:45.000So all the tools we have, you consider these like medicine for a disease.
01:43:38.000I'm part of the County Deer Advisory Committee again.
01:43:40.000We're giving more doe tags or antlerless tags because the other part of it, sure, we have a population, the bucks, that because they're sinks, as he said, and they're spreading the disease, And they're traveling more.
01:43:53.000You know, a doe and her family tend to kind of stay in one area a little bit more, where the bucks have a bigger range.
01:44:23.000The other one is that when I have too many deer, my little oak trees are getting, because they love those little oak trees, and they're getting chewed off, and I'm trying to do multiple things.
01:44:32.000I'm not just trying to raise deer on our farm and on our woodlands.
01:44:50.000When I was a kid, when you bought a buck license, you and four other dudes would get together and then fill out this form and send it in in August to get what was called a party tag, and you could shoot one doe between four people because we had...
01:45:08.000They were trying to manage the herd to have more deer.
01:45:12.000Because again, when I was a kid, seeing deer was a big deal.
01:45:59.000And when you're controlling, because you don't have many deer, and you're managing to increase the deer herd, and you have a mentality out there that, well, I'm not going to shoot a doe because, you know, those are the...
01:46:12.000And they're having two fawns, and this year, at least in my area, we're seeing a lot of does having three fawns.
01:46:22.000You can see how that growth of the herd would be pretty Yeah, if you want a herd to grow, stop shooting does.
01:46:28.000If you want to take a herd down, shoot does.
01:46:31.000Remember back in grad school in Illinois, they gave away these little pins that hunters collected.
01:46:36.000And when you brought a doe into the registration station, you got a pin that said, I shot a doe so the herd won't grow.
01:46:43.000People collected these little mementos.
01:47:39.000I talk with folks in the state of Michigan, and they've got an issue, a relatively recent likely issue, with CWD. And there's user groups out there that are trying to advise the state on how to manage CWD. One of the groups is talking about,
01:47:58.000it's called antler point restrictions.
01:48:00.000The idea is a yearling buck, 18 months old, has fairly small antlers.
01:48:06.000And then as they get older, they typically get successively larger antlers.
01:48:13.000So a group is out there right now as an active proponent of implementing antler point restrictions and promoting antlerless harvest at the same time as a disease management tool.
01:48:28.000So as we noted, lowering the population In the areas that already have CWD. CWD is beneficial in that if we have a herd of 500 animals with 10% prevalence, that's 50 positives,
01:48:44.000versus a herd of 20 animals with 5%, which would be 1, and that's a dramatic difference.
01:48:52.000The prevalence is the same, but we have fewer positives out there, right?
01:48:55.000So lowering populations overall does make sense with regard to disease, okay?
01:49:01.000But now, the other part of antler point restrictions is allowing males to get older.
01:49:07.000And they argue that that will keep hunters engaged.
01:49:10.000And if hunters are engaged, they'll shoot more does and keep the population down, and that'll be a good thing.
01:49:16.000But, you know, we've already discussed how adult males tend to have the highest prevalence of CWD, okay?
01:49:25.000And so now you're talking about promoting, pushing more males into these older age groups in an area where CWD is already known to exist.
01:49:34.000And so from a biological perspective, from a numerical modeling perspective of disease, I fail to see how this can work.
01:49:48.000That's a sociological question that I can't really address.
01:49:52.000But from a purely biological, disease-driven process, promoting more older-aged animals, older-aged deer in a population with CWD, I cannot figure out how that could be beneficial.
01:50:09.000I'm hoping that through this podcast this information becomes more digestible because I think that in order to get what you just laid out over two hours, in order for someone to get that by reading, it's like they're not going to do it.
01:50:23.000Most hunters are just not going to do it.
01:50:24.000So I have a feeling that Like what Ted Nugent had said, that his perspective is possibly way more prevalent than should be.
01:50:36.000And because this information is not that digestible.
01:50:41.000I think that there's, you know, I know you talked about it on Meat Eater episode...
01:50:47.00070. 70. And then now today, this is going to reach a lot more people, and it's in a very digestible form, where they can just sit down and listen to it.
01:50:56.000And hopefully we can get the word out on this in a way that it's not getting out now so people understand the consequences of this.
01:52:10.000Test your deer and manage those carcasses.
01:52:14.000Don't leave them out on the landscape.
01:52:16.000There's another category though of things that can be done You know, in deer camp, what's the easiest thing to do is blame the DNR for everything, the Department of Natural Resources, okay?
01:52:26.000It's almost a sport to kick around at night and see who can insult the DNR the worst, right?
01:52:32.000So with regard to disease, though, is that really an effective use of your time?
01:52:36.000It might be fun, but it's likely not effective.
01:52:38.000Because think of these state management agencies that deal with deer.
01:52:43.000It might be the Agriculture Department or the Natural Resources Department.
01:52:46.000They're very, very restricted in what they can do.
01:52:49.000They operate within a legislative framework.
01:52:53.000So if you really want to impact change in how a government agency goes about its business, should you talk to the local biologist or should you talk to the elected leader who establishes the legislative framework that that agency works underneath?
01:53:09.000It's important to put pressure on our elected representatives.
01:53:14.000And we've seen change in that in, well, Wisconsin being a great example.
01:53:19.000Our management used to be science-based.
01:53:22.000Wildlife biologists making decisions about deer management.
01:53:38.000DNRs, you know, they had this idea and it didn't work to stop the disease.
01:53:41.000It didn't get a chance to work because...
01:53:44.000Social and political pressure forced the DNR to vacate their plans and their aggressive measures.
01:53:52.000And even more recently, there was a court case.
01:53:55.000The state of Missouri, the Missouri Department of Conservation, tried to implement some restrictions on the captive cervix industry to stop importation of live deer, seeing them as a risk factor.
01:54:10.000It went through, you know, the court system, and it was decided by the Supreme Court in the state of Missouri about three weeks ago that, in fact, all deer represent wild deer.
01:54:26.000And that the Department of Conservation was well within their constitutional and legislative authority to implement measures designed to protect the integrity and viability of that deer herd for future generations.
01:54:39.000So the Supreme Court said, yes, Department of Conservation, you do have the right to restrict import of animals into captive cervid facilities to protect the integrity of the herd.
01:54:52.000The legislative part of it is really important, and I can't put too fine a point on it.
01:54:58.000Laws can be changed, and there's pressure to do that under a lot of different reasons.
01:55:03.000I've been a part of changing some legislation that had to do with forestry, and I know how it's done.
01:55:12.000And, you know, one of my favorite quotes from Elder Leopold is, ethical behavior is doing the right thing, even when no one's watching, and the wrong thing is legal.
01:55:25.000So just because it's legal doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, and it doesn't mean it's the ethical thing to do.
01:55:31.000Is there any potential to changing the limits, tag limits, or making them more widespread if they understand the issue with this and they understand that one of the main tools of handling this in a more effective manner and slowing the spread of this disease to the population of deer is reducing the population itself.
01:55:49.000I mean, even these hunters would resist this because it would limit hunting opportunities.
01:55:56.000This could potentially be a large tool in the toolbox of conservation and stopping the spread.
01:56:58.000Well, it was vehemently opposed by a very noisy group of hunters, just like, and again, with my experience with working with the legislature, a small group of people making a hell of a lot of noise with a certain amount of money can change things.
01:59:25.000So the Wisconsin experience was really important.
01:59:28.000And the data shows that the first couple years of this aggressive management with Ernebuck Was actually forcing the population down, but it was very unpopular and so political pressure was applied and that tool was taken out of the toolbox,
02:00:28.000They started harvesting deer from an aerial platform called a helicopter.
02:00:34.000A helicopter with government agents sharpshooting deer to try and basically eliminate deer in a buffer zone between Saskatchewan and Alberta, knock the diseased deer out and create a buffer zone where disease wasn't.
02:00:50.000Well, that was not very popular either.
02:01:12.000And the western states, you know, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, where disease has been a long time, they're wildlife health professionals.
02:01:20.000They have put together a set of uniform management recommendations for the western states, okay?
02:01:28.000And they're promoting the things that we've been talking about, reducing those artificial congregations of animals, Implementing a harvest structure to focus on males.
02:02:12.000And they're talking about implementing these regulatory structures, at least on an experimental basis, recognizing that doing nothing It's no longer an option.
02:02:22.000And that's one of the things that was learned from the Wisconsin experiment, for lack of a better word, that our failure, I mean, you know, the analogy that I often use is, you know, we had this car, and it was, you know, a pretty decent car, this pretty decent model of how we were going to control the disease.
02:02:39.000But, you know, they kind of let the oil go out of the car, and they ran it in the ditch and banged it around and then brought it up and said, damn, this Ford doesn't run worth a shit.
02:02:49.000And you can't actively try to defeat something and then say it doesn't work.
02:02:54.000You really have to let it, you know, of course.
02:02:57.000And in Wisconsin, I hope that what's happening and what I can see is, you know, in the 15 years that I've learned about CWD, is that not only is there a lot being learned about the disease, but there's been a lot learned about how to manage it,
02:03:13.000both on a scientific level, but on a social level as well.
02:03:18.000And I can tell you, man, if you don't have it, you don't want it.
02:03:22.000You know, 15 years ago I felt, and there's so much more known now than there was 15 years ago.
02:03:30.000You know, I feel like it's not too late in Wisconsin.
02:03:33.000I mean, we can keep slowing it down and we can protect the rest of the state, but we've got a lot of work to do.
02:03:43.000I think it takes information too because I don't think people are really aware of the extent of this disease or the danger of it or all the ramifications of it.
02:04:10.000So I appreciate so much the opportunity to come out here and talk about it and Brian and Mike Samuel are going to come to Richland Center in September, which is the capital and county seat of Richland County,
02:04:26.000and we're going to do another presentation on chronic wasting disease, and we're advertising it widely, and more of that information has to get education is a big part of it.
02:05:01.000I mean, I'm pretty not very savvy on social media and things like that.
02:05:06.000I wasn't even sure what a podcast was when, you know, Stephen Rinawa, you know, asked me to come on and do Meat Eater.
02:05:14.000And so we did that, and I understand now it's been downloaded like 650,000 times, which for a scientist, you know, I've been an author on a lot of peer-reviewed papers, and I can guarantee you they haven't been read You take a couple zeros off of there and that's probably the readership on those things.
02:05:34.000So from an impact, being able to get a message out to people, this type of forum really, really is helpful.
02:05:41.000And getting it down, like you say, down to a level that, you know, hunters can understand and digestible, I think is very, very important.
02:05:47.000Because we talked about how misinformation, active misinformation to try and, you know, hey, it's not so bad.
02:06:38.000What we do is going to affect the future.
02:06:40.000And we have an obligation to do what's best for the resource and what's best for the future.
02:06:45.000And I'll tell you this last year I shot a two and a half year old buck opening day and This is a nice little eight pointer and I Celebrated that deer.
02:06:57.000I remember that moment just as much as the 200 inch buck that I killed It's it's different but it concerns me That at times, we get so wrapped up.
02:07:24.000But remember what the joy of hunting is, and the reason for it, and how important it is to make sure that that continues into the future.
02:07:40.000There have been some folks who really you know sounded huge alarms about this and you know you talked about a little bit that 20 years from now it could you know could be well it might take a generation or two but it really could become that.
02:07:52.000I want to be able to eat the meat and I want to know that in future generations you know 100 years from now and that farm is still there and it's still in the Durin name it's been in my family for 115 years I want to know that 100 years from now.
02:08:04.000That my descendants and their friends and their family are going to be able to come there and still enjoy that.
02:08:10.000And in order for that to happen, just like when I'm managing my oak trees, so that 100 years from now there's going to be those big oak trees there again.
02:08:17.000100 years from now, we have to do what we need to do now in order for this Opportunity be there for the future.
02:09:09.000I'd say I'm sitting in my tree stand three years ago and CWD is in the next county over.
02:09:15.000Two years ago, the first CWD positive deer in Crawford County, Wisconsin was detected less than two miles to the southwest of the tree that I'm sitting in.
02:09:26.000Last year, CWD had been detected in a second deer in Crawford County, this time one mile to the northeast of where my tree stand is.
02:09:35.000I find myself looking at deer differently.
02:09:38.000I'm looking for those subtle cues of disease.
02:09:54.000I'm not so sure I want to hunt there anymore.
02:09:57.000I know because I'm on that deer advisory committee, a group of hunters came in who bought land south of us, you know, 20 miles south of us, in a significant portion.
02:10:08.000And they're doing, they bought it to manage it for bigger bucks.
02:10:13.000and population and all that they came into the County Deer Advisory Committee and talked to us about what they're doing they shot 43 deer on that property last year all of the bucks tested all the antler bucks tested positive for CWD about 25% of the does and some of the fawns so a doe fawn who has Who has CWD and she's going to be clinical and die in two
02:10:47.000But what I, you know, I hope those guys are listening.
02:10:52.000What I applauded about them is what they've done is really worked.
02:10:56.000With bringing in other people, and I'm going to do the same on our place, bringing in more people to hunt to take more deer and to do what they can to manage because they saw it.
02:11:51.000There's an example of a real large ranch out in Wyoming.
02:11:56.000It was about 100,000 acres, and they managed historically exclusively for these over-mature mule deer, you know, the ones with the antlers, you know, like that, monstrous mule deer.
02:12:06.000Even in the good times, they probably killed maybe three of them a year, something like that, on that vast acreage because, you know, there's a lot of sources of mortality.
02:12:16.000They're not anymore because, you know, those deer aren't living that long.
02:12:20.000Think about it, a math question, math quiz for Duren here.
02:12:24.000So in this population with super high prevalence, So let's say at 18 months of age, yearling deer, let's say they have 20% prevalence, and we have that.
02:15:55.000He took people out, landowners out, hunters out, into these deer yards in the spring to show them how there was nothing to eat within reach of a deer on its hind feet.
02:16:05.000And there were bodies of dead deer that had starved through the wintertime in order to demonstrate to them the consequences of mismanagement of deer herds.
02:16:15.000So he was a real proponent of showing people the results of doing things the wrong way and education.