The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards

00:00:02.000 Five, four, three, two, one.

00:00:06.000 Yeehaw! 0.92

00:00:07.000 And we're live, my good friend Doug Duren.

00:00:09.000 Hello, Douglas.

00:00:10.000 Hello, Joe Rogan.

00:00:11.000 Good to see you as always.

00:00:12.000 Oh, man, it is good to be here.

00:00:13.000 And Brian Richards, your friend, wildlife biologist.

00:00:16.000 And, 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...

00:00:24.000 Well, 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.

00:00:37.000 And 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...

00:00:48.000 It 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.

00:01:13.000 Is this all correct and accurate, Brian?

00:01:16.000 Well, you just started out about an hour's worth of conversation.

00:01:21.000 So just a little bit.

00:01:23.000 I'm a wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Health Center, U.S. Geological Survey up in Madison, Wisconsin.

00:01:29.000 And so one of the things that I spend a lot of time on is chronic wasting disease.

00:01:34.000 I wouldn't say that makes me necessarily an expert, but I've gotten to know a lot of people that I would call experts over the years.

00:01:41.000 So I've gained a little bit of knowledge.

00:01:44.000 Your statement there, we could start a number of different places.

00:01:48.000 This disease, it essentially Well, describe what it does to these animals and why it's such a major concern.

00:01:56.000 It hasn't jumped to humans yet.

00:01:59.000 That we're aware of.

00:02:00.000 That we're aware of.

00:02:01.000 But it is a possibility, a very real possibility.

00:02:03.000 We can't rule it out at this point in time.

00:02:06.000 Science is unable to rule it out.

00:02:07.000 So, okay, that's a great place to start.

00:02:10.000 Why would we care about this thing called chronic wasting disease?

00:02:13.000 And I would argue, and some other scientists have argued, there's two major reasons.

00:02:18.000 Number one is the impacts of this disease on members of the deer family themselves.

00:02:24.000 And the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWD could become a human health issue at some point down the road.

00:02:32.000 Okay, so you kind of nailed those two.

00:02:34.000 With 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.

00:02:43.000 In Norway, of all places, we could articulate some reason, some rationale, why this disease might be thought of as being important.

00:02:52.000 The first we look at would be geographic spread.

00:02:56.000 So, 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.

00:03:10.000 A wildlife biologist, wildlife disease specialist, looked at this disease.

00:03:14.000 It was interesting.

00:03:15.000 We didn't know much about it at that point in time, but it seemed to be very isolated there.

00:03:21.000 What does it do to the deer?

00:03:22.000 It kills deer.

00:03:24.000 Right, but how does it kill them?

00:03:25.000 Alright, so this is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs.

00:03:33.000 So big long words, transmissible means it can go from animal A to animal B. Spongiform means looks like a sponge.

00:03:42.000 And encephalopathy means disease of the brain.

00:03:45.000 So you put it together, and so this disease results in holes in the brain resulting in progressive neurological degeneration followed by death.

00:03:55.000 Okay?

00:03:55.000 It's a death sentence.

00:03:57.000 And there's no cure for it?

00:03:58.000 It's not like you can capture the deer?

00:04:00.000 Give them some sort of medication.

00:04:02.000 No cure for these diseases.

00:04:05.000 The suite of diseases, you know, there's members of this TSC group of diseases in humans.

00:04:11.000 Most familiar is one called Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease.

00:04:15.000 So it's very similar to mad cow disease?

00:04:18.000 In the same family.

00:04:19.000 So it comes from prions?

00:04:21.000 Well, I'd say prions.

00:04:22.000 You could say prions.

00:04:23.000 Sorry, I don't know how to say it.

00:04:24.000 I'll just read it.

00:04:26.000 That's interesting.

00:04:27.000 It goes back and forth on whether it's prion or prion.

00:04:32.000 Stan Preussner, who received a Nobel laureate for his work on these diseases, coined the term prion.

00:04:38.000 And in his first publication describing these diseases, he did a phonetic spelling, and it's prion.

00:04:44.000 So other researchers, especially, you know, some from across the pond, say it's got to be prion.

00:04:52.000 And the main reason that, you know, some of them I've talked to about that is that it irks Stan Preussner when he hears it called prion.

00:04:58.000 Oh, so we'll say prion.

00:04:59.000 So I'll say prion from now on.

00:05:01.000 Now, this disease, which people know as mad cow disease, obviously is transmissible to humans.

00:05:09.000 And that's one of the reasons why people are very scared that this could potentially jump from deer into humans.

00:05:17.000 And correct me if I'm wrong, but it also is making its way into the actual plants that these animals eat.

00:05:24.000 You're correct on both accounts.

00:05:26.000 So with BSE, mad cow disease, that was an interesting disease where it resulted from, in essence, turning cows into cannibals.

00:05:35.000 We were recycling...

00:05:36.000 Which also exists in New Guinea, right?

00:05:38.000 With cannibals, Jacob Kreutzfeldt. 0.90

00:05:39.000 With Kuru, which is a human disease, a TSE, likely started when one individual developed Kreutzfeldt-Jakob's disease.

00:05:49.000 That individual died.

00:05:50.000 And 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. 0.92

00:06:04.000 So they would feed upon the corpse and the bodies of their deceased.

00:06:10.000 So 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.

00:06:30.000 And so when they got sick and died, fed it again.

00:06:33.000 So we saw that with Kuru.

00:06:36.000 In 1960 or around there, it was realized that this cannibalistic behavior was likely the result, you know, or likely the cause of disease transmission.

00:06:49.000 Cannibalism was outlawed and at that point in time you broke completely the disease transmission cycle.

00:06:56.000 So 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.

00:07:09.000 So now with BSE or mad cow disease, We were doing exactly, in essence, the same thing.

00:07:15.000 Not exactly the same thing, but in essence.

00:07:18.000 So, 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,

00:07:34.000 cook them at high temperature and typically, you know, high pressure as well, And it turns into a slurry, a high-protein slurry.

00:07:42.000 You 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.

00:07:51.000 Realizing 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.

00:08:02.000 So at some point...

00:08:04.000 It doesn't get better.

00:08:05.000 Turning cows into cannibals.

00:08:07.000 So at some point in time, a cow developed a TSE, a prion disease.

00:08:13.000 Whether it came from scrapie, the TSE of sheep, or a rose on its own is unknown.

00:08:18.000 But that cow died, it was rendered into meat and bone meal, and this high protein feed was then fed out to hundreds to thousands.

00:08:27.000 And correct me if I'm wrong, but these prions, they could survive up to more than a thousand degree temperature. 0.96

00:08:33.000 Yeah, surviving is kind of a strange term, Joe, in that they're not alive to start with.

00:08:39.000 It's a protein.

00:08:40.000 They can persist.

00:08:42.000 They cannot be inactivated.

00:08:44.000 So yeah, you have to cook pretty hot.

00:08:46.000 These prions are not necessarily a living thing like a disease or a virus or a bacteria.

00:08:52.000 Well, they're a disease-causing agent, but they are incredibly unique.

00:08:56.000 They're an etiologic agent, like a virus, a bacteria, or, you know, a parasite could be causing disease.

00:09:03.000 But all these other things have genetic material.

00:09:06.000 They're alive.

00:09:07.000 Which allows them to change rapidly to evolve over time.

00:09:12.000 So 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.

00:09:28.000 One that you mentioned was resistance to heat treatment.

00:09:32.000 A normal prion protein, and we have billions of them circulating in our bodies right now, have a specific purpose, a cellular purpose.

00:09:40.000 We don't know exactly what it is, but it's likely involved in some sort of intracellular communication.

00:09:45.000 It's a string of around 250 amino acids, so a relatively short protein.

00:09:52.000 It does whatever it does, and then the body recycles, breaks that chain of amino acids down into its component parts and recycles it.

00:10:01.000 Turns out that normal cellular prion protein likely has a half-life of maybe four to six hours.

00:10:06.000 So you're producing them relatively constantly.

00:10:09.000 Then there's the disease-associated form.

00:10:12.000 And all disease-associated prions start as the normal cellular prion.

00:10:17.000 So they're converted from one three-dimensional form To a different form, okay?

00:10:24.000 And this different form has these radically different characteristics.

00:10:28.000 One is heat resistance and other is UV light resistance.

00:10:31.000 I mentioned that the normal cellular prion protein has a half-life of maybe four to six hours.

00:10:37.000 The disease associated ones can persist in the environment for years and potentially up to decades.

00:10:42.000 And when you say persist in the environment, you mean like on the ground, on leaves, like how would they persist?

00:10:50.000 Yeah, all of those things, Joe.

00:10:52.000 So 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,

00:11:09.000 dramatic weight loss, all of those things.

00:11:12.000 That incubation period, you know, it's probably shedding infectious agent for the vast majority of that time period.

00:11:20.000 So it looks healthy, but it's able of transmitting disease.

00:11:23.000 We call that, you know, a typhoid Mary syndrome.

00:11:26.000 The 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...

00:11:37.000 Initially we got our only bucks tested and then the last three or four years we've gotten all the deer tested.

00:11:45.000 They were two and a half year old bucks, looked perfectly healthy.

00:11:48.000 And these are the first ones that you tested?

00:11:50.000 They 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?

00:12:02.000 At some point they will.

00:12:03.000 At some point?

00:12:04.000 So they could be spreading infectious agents without testing positive?

00:12:07.000 Yes. 1.00

00:12:08.000 Oh, fuck. 1.00

00:12:09.000 So it's probably between three and six months out when we can test an animal, test positive. 0.99

00:12:16.000 But it's likely shedding infectious agent at least at lower quantities prior to that point in time.

00:12:23.000 And so it's shedding infectious agent.

00:12:26.000 It's capable of transmitting disease.

00:12:29.000 Long before it looks clinically ill.

00:12:32.000 That's one of the real challenges with this disease from a management standpoint.

00:12:36.000 They 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.

00:12:48.000 So, 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,

00:13:03.000 they look perfectly healthy.

00:13:05.000 And then, obviously, with this multi-year incubation period, this could just cascade.

00:13:11.000 And I think we've seen evidence of that now.

00:13:14.000 Started out, you know, we talked about being isolated disease.

00:13:18.000 It 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.

00:13:31.000 Two Canadian provinces.

00:13:34.000 In addition, it was picked up in South Korea.

00:13:38.000 And that was real interesting.

00:13:39.000 It was in captive elk, and those elk still had Canadian ear tags in them.

00:13:45.000 So we pretty much know how CWD, you know, those elk didn't swim across the Pacific pond. 0.58

00:13:51.000 Most 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.

00:14:07.000 There's a real concern over in Norway with reindeer.

00:14:14.000 Okay, so reindeer are very gregarious.

00:14:17.000 You know, white-tailed deer, you know, caribou, reindeer.

00:14:20.000 So not unusual to see them in herds of hundreds of animals.

00:14:25.000 So very, very different than what we see with white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, or moose.

00:14:31.000 We don't see those huge herds.

00:14:32.000 Well, with elk, you can in the wintertime.

00:14:35.000 But anyway, it's thought that this gregarious behavior might really facilitate transmission in reindeer, right?

00:14:41.000 So when it was picked up in reindeer, Norway said, you know, maybe we should do something.

00:14:48.000 It's an interesting story in that Norway's got experience with scrapie and sheep, and so they have a long history.

00:14:56.000 What is scrapie?

00:14:56.000 Scrapie is the same as, well, it's the same family of diseases in sheep.

00:15:01.000 It's actually the first one that was described, scrapie, we've known about since the early 1700s.

00:15:07.000 A disease of domestic sheep.

00:15:09.000 And it's called scrapie because of the behavior of these animals once they enter a clinical phase of disease display.

00:15:15.000 And they seem like they itch bad.

00:15:19.000 And so they'll go up to fence posts and other objects and they'll literally rub their hide off of their body.

00:15:24.000 So that's the name scrapie.

00:15:26.000 And it's the same progressive neurological disorder followed by death.

00:15:30.000 Think about it.

00:15:32.000 As this disease creates vacuoles in the brain, it's killing off neurons.

00:15:38.000 And so without those neurons firing, you fall into that progressive degeneration, and yet at some point, your body can no longer survive.

00:15:46.000 And that's what's really spooky about how this thing kills.

00:15:48.000 So anyway, go back to Norway.

00:15:51.000 When they detected CWD... Brad, try to keep this a little bit closer to you.

00:15:54.000 Sorry, you're very soft-spoken.

00:15:56.000 I can hear myself plenty.

00:15:58.000 I know.

00:15:59.000 The problem is the recording.

00:16:00.000 I'm sorry.

00:16:00.000 Okay, no worries.

00:16:01.000 So 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.

00:16:14.000 They took it very, very seriously.

00:16:17.000 So they took kind of some harsh medicine.

00:16:20.000 They announced their plans that they were going to eliminate a herd unit.

00:16:24.000 They were going to kill every reindeer in an entire herd unit in Norway. 0.92

00:16:30.000 The idea is to eliminate the host population.

00:16:33.000 It's called stamping out.

00:16:34.000 And it works in a pen.

00:16:36.000 This is the first time it had been done realistically in a free-ranging population.

00:16:41.000 The whole idea is we don't have effective tools for management of disease.

00:16:44.000 They were very fearful of what would happen if this spread throughout that reindeer population and throughout other reindeer herds.

00:16:52.000 And like Alaska, they have...

00:16:54.000 Multiple herds.

00:16:55.000 Like last year, I hunted caribou with Steve up in the Forty Mile River area.

00:17:00.000 And so they're very localized, but at least they have a range that they move through.

00:17:08.000 And in Norway, they have two or three different herds.

00:17:12.000 Many more than that.

00:17:13.000 So I don't know exactly how many herd units they have.

00:17:15.000 But the point was that you could isolate one of the herds.

00:17:17.000 So the idea is before this gets any worse, before it gets any farther, let's take it out.

00:17:23.000 So they had a hunting season.

00:17:25.000 They allowed hunters to take as many as they could, which was a little over a thousand reindeer.

00:17:30.000 Then they came in with government agents.

00:17:32.000 But isn't there a concern that the hunters could eat something with CWD and then catch it?

00:17:38.000 Well, that's always a concern, but we can talk about human health.

00:17:41.000 Let me finish this one up with Norway.

00:17:45.000 They literally took the bull by the horns.

00:17:48.000 They decided to do what was very unpopular, what we have not been able to do in North America.

00:17:54.000 And so after the hunting season, government agents, sharpshooters took an additional 1,400 reindeer.

00:17:59.000 They 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.

00:18:07.000 So it says every bit of promise of being the first large-scale success with dealing with this disease in a free-ranging herd.

00:18:15.000 Pretty different than what we've been able to accomplish over here.

00:18:18.000 Five 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,

00:18:37.000 I mean, they're not living so they don't die, but they don't become viable anymore?

00:18:41.000 Yeah, 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.

00:18:51.000 So it's a good first guess.

00:18:54.000 And what they'll do then is slowly allow reindeer to repopulate.

00:18:58.000 And as they do, they'll be harvested periodically and every one of those will be tested.

00:19:03.000 So, 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.

00:19:14.000 So another thing, they caught this disease very early.

00:19:16.000 So after killing off, you know, 2,400 reindeer, I think they had around 20 positives.

00:19:21.000 So very low prevalence, suggesting the disease was very, very new in this system.

00:19:26.000 So 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.

00:19:36.000 If you're gonna get on it, detect it early, get on it fast, get on it hard.

00:19:40.000 Why the decision to let human beings consume them?

00:19:44.000 Well, 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?

00:19:55.000 Because you were talking about...

00:19:57.000 Was the correct pronunciation?

00:19:59.000 I was pronouncing it wrong.

00:20:00.000 No, no, no.

00:20:03.000 So that has a long incubation period in human beings, correct?

00:20:11.000 Likely, yeah.

00:20:12.000 And mad cow, same thing. 0.98

00:20:14.000 Extended incubation period.

00:20:15.000 Kuru could, you know, some of the cases it looks like we're up maybe even to 40, maybe even 50-year incubation period as individuals.

00:20:22.000 That is crazy.

00:20:22.000 I 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.

00:20:42.000 Isn't that interesting?

00:20:43.000 And the reason why was the men ate the meat.

00:20:47.000 And the women and children ate the internal organs and brain where it's concentrated. 0.99

00:20:54.000 As 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.

00:21:11.000 And so it came back to that ritualistic cannibalism, and it hit it right on the head.

00:21:19.000 The women and children got the internal organs, including the brain, that had the highest concentration of the prion protein.

00:21:27.000 The men, if they consumed anything, consumed the finer cuts of meat.

00:21:31.000 Which have a lower concentration, but not nil.

00:21:36.000 That's just one of those social things that just kind of stuck with me, you know?

00:21:40.000 It's a pretty interesting story.

00:21:43.000 A bunch of people reached out and some were very angry after Ted Nugent was on the podcast and Yeah.

00:21:56.000 Yeah.

00:22:06.000 I guess I would, yeah, I'd have to agree with that.

00:22:11.000 There'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.

00:22:28.000 80-90% of a herd can be killed in a single event.

00:22:34.000 But a very, you know, distinction between these diseases, you know, EHD is spread by midges.

00:22:42.000 A little black no-see-ums. 1.00

00:22:44.000 A bug.

00:22:46.000 It actually transmits the disease, the virus from animal A to animal B or from the environment to animal A, either one.

00:22:54.000 So 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.

00:23:07.000 So it has significant impacts on a localized level periodically, but the disease cycle, there's a definite end to the disease cycle.

00:23:17.000 And then it's no longer present for that period of time, or for a period of time anyway, right?

00:23:22.000 Yeah, the virus may persist in the environment, but once the transmission cycle is broken, the mortality stops.

00:23:28.000 And 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.

00:23:42.000 And I think there's also some stuff they're doing that bolsters the animal's immune system.

00:23:46.000 They'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.

00:23:55.000 And populations that have been exposed to EHD over time definitely develop a herd immunity to it.

00:24:04.000 And is EHD transferable to humans?

00:24:07.000 No, not that we've ever seen.

00:24:09.000 There's no evidence that it is.

00:24:11.000 This is a disease of deer, and it also can get into livestock.

00:24:15.000 So even if people get bitten by these midges, there's still no concern that we could potentially get EHD? Not EHD, no.

00:24:22.000 So contrast that, this disease, EHD, with a very definite end to the transmission cycle.

00:24:28.000 First frost kills off the midges.

00:24:30.000 With CWD, there's no known ecological factor which signals the end of the transmission cycle.

00:24:37.000 So that's why we see prevalence or the proportion of animals that are positive in individual locations and individual herds.

00:24:44.000 It just keeps going up, up, up.

00:24:46.000 In captive facilities, the Hall Farm in Wisconsin where CWD was first detected in 2002, the place was depopulated in 2006, Prevalence was nearly 80%.

00:24:59.000 So four out of five deer in that captive cervid facility had it.

00:25:04.000 Wow!

00:25:05.000 More recently, we had a farm, a deer farm in Iowa, where disease had gone undetected for some period of time.

00:25:13.000 And when the herd was depopulated, again, about 80% prevalence.

00:25:17.000 But this was a big herd.

00:25:18.000 So there were over 200 positives in this single high-fenced enclosure.

00:25:23.000 And so winter's not going to change that.

00:25:26.000 It grows.

00:25:27.000 So no stop.

00:25:28.000 There's no known feature which stops the transmission cycle.

00:25:32.000 And so when you say that something like EHD kills a lot of deer, yes it does.

00:25:38.000 But the disease transmission cycle stops.

00:25:41.000 With CWD we don't know anything that stops it.

00:25:47.000 EHD is more like the flu.

00:25:50.000 Have you had it on your farm?

00:25:52.000 EHD never, no.

00:25:53.000 Let me rephrase that, not that I'm aware of.

00:25:58.000 So 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,

00:26:15.000 It just continues to grow.

00:26:17.000 So it'll start out as a very small problem.

00:26:20.000 There's some maps of how it developed or how it spread in southwest Wisconsin.

00:26:25.000 And we're on the front edge of it now.

00:26:30.000 Correct 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.

00:26:45.000 It moves very slowly, but once it's there, it's there.

00:26:49.000 Now I have read about hunters eating meat from some sort of diseased deer and getting sick and dying.

00:26:56.000 What would that be?

00:27:02.000 Misreporting?

00:27:02.000 Possibly.

00:27:03.000 I mean, I shouldn't say that.

00:27:04.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:27:05.000 There have been instances where people that hunted deer later died of a prion disease, likely developed Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease.

00:27:19.000 Was it the deer that gave it to them?

00:27:22.000 Well, there's no epidemiological evidence that this occurs at this point in time.

00:27:27.000 And we've hinted about some of the human health issues.

00:27:30.000 So there's a few things we can look at.

00:27:32.000 In 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?

00:27:44.000 The answer is no.

00:27:45.000 So from an epidemiological standpoint, there's no evidence that CWD has crossed over that species barrier into humans.

00:27:53.000 Now, we can take a look at a number of science experiments that have been conducted.

00:27:59.000 And 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.

00:28:16.000 But now these are models.

00:28:19.000 It's not quite the same as pumping CWD into the brain of a human patient and seeing what developed.

00:28:27.000 So the science suggests that there is a small Non-zero chance that CWD could become a human health issue.

00:28:36.000 There'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.

00:28:53.000 That barrier may not be as tough as we think it is.

00:28:57.000 And that barrier may be changing over time.

00:29:00.000 And 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.

00:29:07.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:29:11.000 Like I said, man, it gets worse.

00:29:13.000 It's fascinating.

00:29:14.000 It's fascinating stuff.

00:29:16.000 You've got to get to that point, that fascinating point.

00:29:18.000 It's definitely fascinating, but it's scaring the shit out of me already.

00:29:21.000 So, yeah, the idea of strains is really interesting.

00:29:24.000 With Scrapia, I mentioned that disease of sheep.

00:29:26.000 We recognize some 30 different strains and it's still all that same identical strand of amino acids and its shape.

00:29:35.000 That tertiary form must be slightly different and it manifests slightly differently in sheep.

00:29:41.000 So, now with CWD, there's at least two recognized strains that have been published in, you know, peer-reviewed literature.

00:29:50.000 There's probably more strains out there.

00:29:53.000 In fact, it's kind of interesting.

00:29:55.000 There was a paper done a couple years ago which looked at the actual architecture of this disease-associated prion protein.

00:30:04.000 And there's a portion of it that's referred to as a loop structure.

00:30:08.000 And 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.

00:30:19.000 And in DEAR, in CWD, that loop is very, very rigid.

00:30:25.000 It's very inflexible, shall we say.

00:30:30.000 In humans, it is more of a flexible loop as opposed to the rigid loop.

00:30:36.000 And it's thought that this difference in that architecture is partially, you know, controls that species barrier.

00:30:45.000 So I was telling Doug...

00:30:46.000 I read the paper yesterday.

00:30:48.000 It's pretty neat stuff.

00:30:51.000 Actually, it was really interesting.

00:30:53.000 So now it turns out mice, experimental laboratory mice, Their prion protein has the same structure as the human prion does.

00:31:03.000 So you cannot give CWD to a normal laboratory mouse.

00:31:08.000 They just don't get it.

00:31:09.000 And it's likely this difference, some of this difference in their prion structure.

00:31:14.000 This one cannot convert that one to a different form.

00:31:17.000 So some researchers in Alberta identified a strain of CWD which came from wild deer.

00:31:25.000 It's not something they engineered in the laboratory.

00:31:27.000 They 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.

00:31:40.000 So, 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.

00:32:04.000 But our experience with Scrapey strongly suggests that even though there's no DNA in these things, that they do change over time.

00:32:14.000 They morph over time into slightly different disease characteristics and etiologic agents.

00:32:19.000 Now, in the hunting community, is there skepticism about this?

00:32:23.000 Is Ted Nugent's ideas, are these unique?

00:32:25.000 Or is this a common thought?

00:32:28.000 Or is it a convenient thought for them because they don't want it to be real?

00:32:34.000 It's a challenge.

00:32:36.000 Of education?

00:32:38.000 Yeah.

00:32:39.000 Obviously, just in whatever period of time that we've talked here, it's really complicated.

00:32:45.000 Right.

00:32:46.000 And to get to the...

00:32:48.000 You almost want to stick your head in the sand and just forget about it.

00:32:51.000 You 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.

00:33:06.000 Well, geez, nobody wants to hear that I can't do what I want to do.

00:33:10.000 We'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.

00:33:25.000 Now, what are you doing in your place?

00:33:27.000 I understand you're just on a mass call.

00:33:33.000 I feel like I'm on the front edge.

00:33:35.000 Well, I don't feel like it.

00:33:37.000 I am on the front edge of the spread of this disease.

00:33:39.000 In Wisconsin?

00:33:40.000 In Wisconsin, in southwest Wisconsin.

00:33:42.000 So 15 years ago, or 16 years ago, when CWD was discovered, there were a lot of changes in hunting structure.

00:33:51.000 And 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.

00:34:04.000 In 15 years, the disease has moved 70 miles north.

00:34:11.000 That effort that the DNR started became political.

00:34:16.000 And quite honestly, that many years ago, I would have likely been a little skeptical.

00:34:24.000 Well, I know I would have been skeptical.

00:34:25.000 You want me to do what?

00:34:26.000 They wanted to kill all the deer in a particular area.

00:34:30.000 That 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.

00:34:38.000 I have no idea how I would have reacted to it.

00:34:40.000 I continued to do buck management, and you were there when we were still doing that.

00:34:46.000 And we can talk about how bucks contribute to the spread of the disease and that sort of thing.

00:34:56.000 Uniquely versus doe?

00:35:00.000 We see different prevalence or curves depending on the demographic faction of deer.

00:35:08.000 Adult 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.

00:35:21.000 So, highest prevalence in adult males followed by adult females and then by juvenile animals.

00:35:27.000 So, it's likely behavioral reasons why we see that in adult males.

00:35:34.000 So, adult male deer, during the rut or breeding season, they greatly expand their home range.

00:35:40.000 They contact multiple female or family groups of females. 0.55

00:35:45.000 Earlier in the fall, especially with white-tailed deer, adult males tend to gather in these bachelor groups.

00:35:51.000 So there's a lot of social contact, grooming, things like that.

00:35:56.000 So because of their behavior, they contact more animals at different times of the year.

00:36:01.000 And 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.

00:36:10.000 So now, if you are an adult male, Then you're in this group.

00:36:15.000 You also have a higher likelihood of being able to transmit disease to other animals because you're out there during breeding season, right?

00:36:23.000 Is 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?

00:36:36.000 Mm-hmm.

00:36:36.000 Okay, interesting question.

00:36:38.000 So, with regard to transmission into cattle, it's basically the same situation as with humans.

00:36:45.000 No evidence that it has, but in an experimental sense, we can push it over that species barrier, okay?

00:36:52.000 Now, 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,

00:37:08.000 That those prions can be uptaken through the roots and deposited into stems and leaves.

00:37:15.000 Okay?

00:37:16.000 And so that's one possible mechanism.

00:37:19.000 A second is that so prions themselves, the disease-associated prions, tend to perform very tight chemical bonds with various surfaces.

00:37:28.000 I showed him a paper on the way out here yesterday where they bind to just about anything.

00:37:33.000 They bind to plants as well.

00:37:35.000 So 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.

00:37:43.000 So 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.

00:37:54.000 It's not just dried on, it forms a chemical bond to the plant.

00:37:57.000 So they literally become part of the plant.

00:38:00.000 Yeah, okay.

00:38:01.000 So a deer could eat those plants and that could be one of the possible transmission mechanisms.

00:38:08.000 So that's the second one.

00:38:10.000 The third one is speculated about and some folks have looked at and it has potential impacts for agricultural commodities.

00:38:21.000 So when CWD was You know, 20, 30 years ago was really, really rare.

00:38:27.000 It probably couldn't happen.

00:38:28.000 But now it's in 25 states, vast geographic areas.

00:38:32.000 We have, just south of where he lives, in adult males, nearly 50% prevalence.

00:38:39.000 So 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.

00:38:49.000 So now let's go out west.

00:38:51.000 50% of them.

00:38:52.000 Yes, so let's go out to...

00:38:54.000 22% prevalence overall in the county at this point.

00:38:57.000 Let's go up into the big agricultural areas in Saskatchewan or out west, okay?

00:39:02.000 So you got a mule deer herd out there with CWD, and let's say maybe 20% overall of that herd is CWD positive.

00:39:11.000 You've been out in some of those big wheat fields and hay fields.

00:39:14.000 How many mule deer are standing out there before sunset?

00:39:17.000 A shitload. 0.75

00:39:18.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:39:18.000 Okay, 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. 0.97

00:39:31.000 And 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.

00:39:43.000 Not just might, right?

00:39:45.000 I mean, most likely.

00:39:47.000 We'd need a graduate student that we could have, you know, pick apart large bales of hay to really prove that.

00:39:53.000 But, I mean, it's almost certainly.

00:39:56.000 So now we're putting those on semi-trailers and moving them across borders.

00:40:01.000 And is there a possibility that these agricultural commodities, then deer could come up to them and be infected by contact?

00:40:12.000 I think it's important to say that Brian's a scientist.

00:40:17.000 These other folks studying that are scientists.

00:40:20.000 And they don't...

00:40:21.000 You know, it's evidence and it suggests.

00:40:24.000 And they get attacked for that.

00:40:27.000 By people who don't want it to be true.

00:40:29.000 Well, and that's how science is attacked anyway, right?

00:40:32.000 Because it's hard to...

00:40:34.000 Speaking in absolutes is a real hard thing to do.

00:40:38.000 You'll hear him say, the evidence suggests.

00:40:41.000 The information is this.

00:40:43.000 I just think that's a real important distinction to draw here when you're having those kind of discussions.

00:40:49.000 There are people who want absolute proof.

00:40:51.000 Proof is hard in a biological world because there's so many factors out there.

00:40:56.000 We can't control for them all.

00:40:57.000 But there are certain tactics that have been used quite successfully.

00:41:01.000 It goes all the way back to smoking.

00:41:03.000 You know, when tobacco companies were attacking science.

00:41:09.000 And the whole idea is to sow the seeds of doubt.

00:41:12.000 There's actually a documentary on it called Merchants of Doubt.

00:41:15.000 We've seen that.

00:41:16.000 We see the same thing going on with CWD. So you mentioned it earlier.

00:41:21.000 Hey, you know, CWD, it's not so bad.

00:41:25.000 What about winter kill?

00:41:26.000 What about EHD? So instead of focusing on that, saying, don't look here, look at this one.

00:41:32.000 This one is worse.

00:41:33.000 Why aren't you doing something about this one?

00:41:36.000 So it's a simple diversion.

00:41:38.000 Another tactic, which is, and I mean, there's a body of science around this.

00:41:42.000 But this is a non-scientific approach to this, because these are unrelated issues.

00:41:44.000 Like, EHD does kill animals, winter kill most certainly kills animals, but we're not talking about the same circumstances.

00:41:49.000 We're trying to divert the conversation.

00:41:53.000 Another thing that's very easy to do is cherry picking the literature that's out there.

00:41:59.000 We saw a real great example of this about a year ago.

00:42:03.000 Where there's a lot of letters to the editor being sent into newspapers in areas where CWD is.

00:42:09.000 And I think it's an attempt to change the conversation.

00:42:13.000 So they were very careful to use citations from peer-reviewed literature.

00:42:19.000 And 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.

00:42:33.000 So this is a true statement taken directly from peer-reviewed science.

00:42:38.000 What they didn't identify was that when they studied that disease was between 2003 and 2007, 10, 12, you know, 11 years ago.

00:42:49.000 The 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.

00:42:59.000 So you mentioned that exponential growth curve and how early on, back in 2003 to 2007, this area, disease prevalence was probably lower than 5%.

00:43:10.000 Now it's shot up in that curve and it's probably in that 25, 30, 30 plus percentage range.

00:43:18.000 So you're cherry-picking literature to make your arguments that even scientists say this is not having a big effect when they studied it.

00:43:26.000 They're just not saying when they studied it.

00:43:28.000 So as a non-scientist, what I'm looking at here is everyone's always terrified of the next pandemic disease.

00:43:36.000 And this is one of the reasons why I felt it was so important to discuss this.

00:43:39.000 Because, you know, people would say, they look at it casually, good, don't eat animals, don't eat deer.

00:43:45.000 This is not that.

00:43:47.000 This is something that has the potential to reach large-scale agriculture.

00:43:52.000 I mean, one of the things about your farm, and we talked about this when we were there, is like, these animals are farm animals almost.

00:43:58.000 Because they're absolutely free-range.

00:44:00.000 They're absolutely wild.

00:44:01.000 When you talk about the deer on your place, you don't have them controlled in any way, but they're feeding off of your corn.

00:44:07.000 They're eating all this stuff that people eat.

00:44:11.000 That's what they eat.

00:44:12.000 That's one of the reasons why the deer populations are so enormous in farmlands is because it's a massive food supply.

00:44:17.000 It's a perfect environment.

00:44:18.000 Yeah, and it's also one of the reasons why they're so delicious.

00:44:20.000 They're so well-fed.

00:44:23.000 You know, they're so, you know, nutritionally balanced diets.

00:44:27.000 But the real, what terrifies me is this potential for a pandemic disease also comes with an incubation period.

00:44:37.000 And 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.

00:44:47.000 Diseases mutate, and many of them come from animals.

00:44:51.000 This 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.

00:45:05.000 Dangerous and deadly to human beings.

00:45:07.000 This to me seems like a ticking time bomb.

00:45:10.000 It has a potential.

00:45:12.000 One 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.

00:45:26.000 Well, we're seeing that spread right now in deer.

00:45:29.000 So in deer, we're seeing clear geographic spread.

00:45:33.000 We're seeing clear increases in prevalence.

00:45:36.000 And in areas where the disease has been present the longest, we are seeing population-level impacts.

00:45:42.000 There's locations in Wyoming where we've demonstrated, where we've proven that CWD is driving population decline in deer.

00:45:49.000 So that's a That encapsulates why we should be concerned about deer.

00:45:53.000 And is this in mule deer?

00:45:54.000 That's in mule deer and in white-tailed deer.

00:45:56.000 And the mule deer have an extended range in terms of, like, their migration.

00:46:01.000 That'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.

00:46:12.000 Mm-hmm.

00:46:13.000 Even whitetails can.

00:46:15.000 There's an interesting research tidbit.

00:46:17.000 The state of Minnesota, you know, they've got what appears to be a fairly recent CWD outbreak in the southeastern part of the state.

00:46:25.000 So their researchers are really trying to get ahead of this and figure out what could move this around.

00:46:30.000 So 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?

00:46:38.000 This 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.

00:46:48.000 Pretty long distance.

00:46:49.000 Now, 80 miles circular or 80 miles point to point?

00:46:52.000 80 miles as the crow flies.

00:46:53.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

00:46:55.000 So, in that 80 miles, could potentially be spreading CWD if it was an infected deer?

00:47:00.000 Sure.

00:47:01.000 Throughout crops, throughout, I mean, and this is...

00:47:04.000 And then there's that exponential growth.

00:47:06.000 So once it's there, sure, it takes a long time for it to become a large problem.

00:47:13.000 And we're seeing that in Richland County.

00:47:17.000 It crossed the river.

00:47:21.000 Surveillance testing has been going on.

00:47:22.000 It crossed the river, and it just keeps moving.

00:47:27.000 And it could be in, again, all these different plants, all these different berries.

00:47:33.000 People could be eating these berries, eating these plants, fruits, vegetables, all these different things, and they could be potentially consuming these prions.

00:47:43.000 Well, I think it's very clear that there's exposure.

00:47:47.000 And I talk with Doug quite a bit about the difference between exposure and disease transmission.

00:47:53.000 So it is certain that lots of humans are exposed to disease-associated prion protein from CWD and likely from plant materials as well.

00:48:05.000 Whether that will result in transmission of disease across that species barrier is an open question.

00:48:11.000 We absolutely cannot say it will.

00:48:14.000 We absolutely cannot say it will not.

00:48:17.000 It's an open question.

00:48:19.000 And one thing we can, though, identify very clearly is that the rate of exposure is increasing exponentially.

00:48:27.000 As 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.

00:48:39.000 So we're rolling the dice.

00:48:40.000 And 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.

00:48:52.000 We cannot rule that out.

00:48:54.000 When 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.

00:49:10.000 At this point that it can...

00:49:13.000 And this is what the CDC and the World Health Organization says as well.

00:49:17.000 The chances are very small, minuscule even, but they're not zero.

00:49:23.000 And I'm assuming that we continue to...

00:49:27.000 That continues to be the concern.

00:49:30.000 And I know you're talking a lot, Joe, about...

00:49:33.000 And I get it, because after all, humans.

00:49:37.000 But I've actually...

00:49:40.000 We've begun to focus more on the effect on the resource, on the deer.

00:49:46.000 I mean, I tested positive animals.

00:49:50.000 We properly disposed of the meat, which is a whole other line of discussion.

00:49:56.000 I'm still eating venison, but I'm not eating...

00:49:59.000 Are you testing the animals that you eat?

00:50:00.000 Every one of them.

00:50:01.000 We test every deer killed on the farm.

00:50:05.000 Now, how long, when you raise a cow, how long before you kill it?

00:50:10.000 Like, how long do you wait?

00:50:11.000 Well, I do grass-fed beef, and this is actually kind of interesting.

00:50:15.000 You 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.

00:50:24.000 I control what my grass-fed beef eat.

00:50:27.000 I mean, you've met some of my cows.

00:50:29.000 The one says hello, by the way.

00:50:31.000 Tell ourselves I. Anyway, but it's very controlled.

00:50:36.000 So even though my deer...

00:50:38.000 Could be infected, your cow will not be.

00:50:40.000 Well, and that they're not organic.

00:50:43.000 Right.

00:50:44.000 My cattle are.

00:50:45.000 Right.

00:50:46.000 Because it is controlled.

00:50:47.000 How ironic.

00:50:49.000 Oh, yeah.

00:50:50.000 I mean, you have farm animals in captivity that are organic, purely eating grass, as nature intended, and you got deer eating Monsanto corn.

00:50:59.000 Yeah, believe me.

00:51:03.000 It's kind of crazy.

00:51:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:51:07.000 And before anybody out there gets the idea that my cattle are confined in a little barnyard or everything.

00:51:14.000 No, it's a big, large area.

00:51:15.000 Big pasture.

00:51:16.000 They are free-ranging within that pasture, pasture-raised.

00:51:22.000 So, short answer, with grass-fed beef, I just sent four in.

00:51:28.000 Unfortunately, none of it was ready.

00:51:30.000 I was going to bring you some, but they just went in on Monday.

00:51:34.000 I would like to see them go through the security checkpoint carrying, you know, bags of beef with them.

00:51:42.000 So they were two years old and two months or three months.

00:51:47.000 Now, 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.

00:51:55.000 So these animals would fall into that line between birth and slaughter, that that would be inside that incubation window for deer.

00:52:03.000 It could be potentially larger for cow, is that correct?

00:52:07.000 BSC, I think the incubation period is between three and five years.

00:52:10.000 And 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.

00:52:20.000 What does BSC stand for?

00:52:21.000 Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease.

00:52:26.000 So that's one of the precautionary measures is not allowing cows to get old for mad cow disease.

00:52:33.000 Well, and from my standpoint...

00:52:35.000 They're prime at 26, 27 months.

00:52:38.000 Right.

00:52:38.000 And so when they are in an incubation period, they're still capable of distributing the disease though, correct?

00:52:46.000 Well, that's with CWD and with scrapie and sheep as well.

00:52:50.000 With 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.

00:53:00.000 We 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.

00:53:05.000 But BSE is quite different in that Similarly with the human prion diseases, an individual with Kuru could not give Kuru to another human being.

00:53:18.000 They had to consume it, so there was that artificial process involved.

00:53:23.000 Same 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.

00:53:32.000 So when they stopped it, when they stopped Feeding cows to cows.

00:53:40.000 CWD is a different animal.

00:53:42.000 CWD and scrapey are different animals.

00:53:45.000 This is like BSE times 10 on steroids.

00:53:47.000 Well, they're contagious.

00:53:49.000 Kind of freaking me out a little bit.

00:53:50.000 Because these animals are shedding, okay?

00:53:54.000 That infectious agent.

00:53:56.000 Cows with BSE are not shedding infectious agent.

00:53:59.000 CWD-positive deer and Scrapey-positive sheep are.

00:54:02.000 These two diseases are unique in the world of TSEs.

00:54:07.000 TSEs, prion diseases, are unique amongst themselves, but Scrapey and CWD are in a different world of their own.

00:54:17.000 Okay, what, if anything, can be done?

00:54:23.000 Well, I try to break this stuff down to the most basic level so a guy like me can understand it.

00:54:33.000 Buy time, pay for science.

00:54:36.000 That's sort of one of the things.

00:54:37.000 Slow the spread of the disease.

00:54:40.000 There's a lot of work being done.

00:54:44.000 All kinds of studies being done.

00:54:47.000 Different organizations and the government, unfortunately, in Wisconsin, not as much as we should be doing.

00:54:53.000 We're a hotbed of it.

00:54:54.000 I think that in Wisconsin, quite honestly, that we've become an example of how not to handle the disease.

00:55:00.000 And a lot of the other states have begun to...

00:55:04.000 We're good to go.

00:55:25.000 So 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.

00:55:35.000 We'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.

00:55:47.000 So people resist that, right?

00:55:49.000 Sure.

00:55:50.000 If your economic vitality depends on selling and moving live deer, you're going to be opposed to restrictions on your economic activity.

00:56:01.000 But that is one of the primary infection sources.

00:56:03.000 It's one of the infectious sources.

00:56:05.000 He'll always correct you when you say something like primary.

00:56:09.000 What Doug's getting at is...

00:56:11.000 No bullshit. 0.96

00:56:12.000 He wants them. 0.99

00:56:13.000 He's going to break it down.

00:56:15.000 It's the world I live in.

00:56:18.000 I appreciate that world.

00:56:19.000 There's two primary mechanisms if we lump them together for how CWD moves.

00:56:24.000 One is deer to deer to deer to deer.

00:56:27.000 That slow, diffusive process of moving out on the landscape.

00:56:30.000 That's really hard to deal with.

00:56:32.000 The other one is this anthropogenic or human-assisted movement where humans are moving infectious material.

00:56:39.000 And that might be how it got from Colorado to Wisconsin in the first place.

00:56:43.000 It'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.

00:56:55.000 And 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.

00:57:09.000 I mean, just what you did, right?

00:57:10.000 You put it on the back of the truck and off you went.

00:57:13.000 And then process that.

00:57:15.000 You can remember doing it in the garage in Cazenovia as a kid, you know, working there with knives.

00:57:19.000 This is a great thing.

00:57:20.000 Well, what do you do with the bones and the non-meat stuff when you're done?

00:57:26.000 Well, back in the day, it still happens.

00:57:29.000 We take it out and Put it in a bone pile, a coyote pile or something like that.

00:57:34.000 Gets dumped on the back 40. Yeah.

00:57:36.000 Where?

00:57:37.000 That still could have infectivity if it was a positive animal.

00:57:42.000 So how it was brought to Wisconsin is...

00:57:44.000 Who knows?

00:57:45.000 But anyway, these are...

00:57:46.000 He's absolutely correct.

00:57:48.000 The 25 states that don't have CWD don't want to get it.

00:57:51.000 They want to do everything they can.

00:57:53.000 What states are these?

00:57:53.000 What is it?

00:57:54.000 Eastern states or...

00:57:55.000 Southeastern states and some of the far western states haven't picked it up.

00:57:59.000 If you go to our website, you'll see a map there that shows the current known distribution of where the disease is.

00:58:07.000 So the other states really don't want it.

00:58:09.000 They don't want it bad.

00:58:10.000 So 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.

00:58:26.000 Teaching 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.

00:58:34.000 And 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.

00:58:54.000 They'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.

00:59:09.000 And 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. 1.00

00:59:18.000 It's like, what the fuck did you just do? 1.00

00:59:21.000 They don't look real. 0.99

00:59:24.000 They have like 80 points.

00:59:26.000 Instead of like an 8-point buck, which is very typical, or a 10-point buck, you're like, wow, look at that monster.

00:59:32.000 That's a natural animal that lives in the wild.

00:59:34.000 They have these things that they don't even look like deer.

00:59:37.000 They look like...

00:59:39.000 Some cartoon. 0.99

00:59:40.000 But like that stripper with the triple F tits, there are dudes who go, I'm digging that. 1.00

00:59:48.000 Yeah, but it's obvious to all who are in the know. 0.99

00:59:52.000 Like, you go over a guy's house and he has one of those over his wall.

00:59:55.000 You're like, did you just walk right out to that thing and put a pistol in its head like the deer hunter?

01:00:00.000 You know, like, what is that?

01:00:02.000 That's not even a wild animal.

01:00:03.000 That's some weird science project.

01:00:06.000 Well, and...

01:00:08.000 Genetics play a role, and Brian will correct me when I start to veer off the science thing here, but genetics play a role in bigger deer.

01:00:20.000 Your friend John Dudley would say he's doing it.

01:00:24.000 The number one way to get big antler deer is let them get old. 0.99

01:00:28.000 Let them get old and give them plenty of food. 0.51

01:00:30.000 Yep.

01:00:32.000 Genetics have a role in it, too.

01:00:33.000 There's three factors in production of antlers. 0.54

01:00:36.000 It's genetics, age, and nutrition are really the key three there.

01:00:41.000 But now, a lot of places will identify these as genetically superior.

01:00:47.000 Well, that's kind of a misnomer.

01:00:48.000 When 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.

01:00:59.000 Okay?

01:00:59.000 So let's take an example where we took one of these, you know, 80-point whatever, and let's release it out into the wild.

01:01:08.000 And during breeding season, it comes across a prime three-and-a-half or four-and-a-half-year-old eight-pointer.

01:01:15.000 You know, this physical specimen that you've witnessed them.

01:01:18.000 They're unbelievable.

01:01:20.000 So now, if you put those up against each other in a mortal battle, I know who I'm putting my money on.

01:01:29.000 The wild animal.

01:01:31.000 Absolutely.

01:01:31.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:01:32.000 Every time.

01:01:33.000 So 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.

01:01:48.000 Well, let's also point out that the reason why you're bringing this up is these animals actually do fight to the death.

01:01:53.000 It happens all the time.

01:01:54.000 They kill each other in combat.

01:01:56.000 That's the reason why they have those antlers in the first place. 0.95

01:01:58.000 They don't have them to protect themselves against wolves like caribou do.

01:02:01.000 They literally have them to fight with.

01:02:04.000 Female caribou have antlers as well, and they have these antlers so that they can try to fend off animals that are trying to eat them. 0.99

01:02:10.000 There's a big difference between that and elk and deer.

01:02:12.000 They have them for combat.

01:02:13.000 That's why once the breeding season's over, they shed them, and then they start all over again.

01:02:18.000 There's an interesting example if you look to history.

01:02:22.000 It's an animal called the Irish elk.

01:02:24.000 Those things were incredible.

01:02:25.000 They're extinct now.

01:02:27.000 They were twice, three times the size of our normal elk, and their antlers were measured in feet instead of inches.

01:02:34.000 And so during their evolutionary time period, when they were on the face of the earth, it was when animals were larger, predators were larger.

01:02:44.000 These things got gargantuan.

01:02:46.000 Then they disappeared from the landscape.

01:02:49.000 And at least, you know, they offered author Stephen Jay Gould.

01:02:51.000 There you go.

01:02:53.000 Stephen 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.

01:03:05.000 If you're in the plains and you have antlers that are seven, eight feet wide, you can walk around.

01:03:11.000 But now when trees start to grow up, how can you survive when the world around you changed?

01:03:17.000 And you'd have to literally walk with your head turned sideways.

01:03:21.000 And Irish Alkaline extinct.

01:03:23.000 So 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.

01:03:33.000 Jamie, pull up a photograph of these farmed deer antlers.

01:03:40.000 Just type in Google, ridiculous farm deer antlers, and you get a sense of what we're talking about.

01:03:45.000 For the people that are watching this on YouTube, because until you see it, you don't understand how gross it's gotten.

01:03:51.000 Yeah, I think one was called Goliath that I remember.

01:03:54.000 Well, there we go.

01:03:57.000 Perfect example.

01:03:58.000 That is a perfect example. 0.99

01:04:00.000 What in the fuck is that? 0.99

01:04:02.000 Because that's not a deer. 0.99

01:04:04.000 That thing is, that's crazy what they've done to that deer.

01:04:08.000 It's a product of selective breeding for specific characteristics that some people will pay a lot of money for.

01:04:13.000 Yeah, 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.

01:04:24.000 Drawing.

01:04:24.000 Oh, it's a drawing.

01:04:25.000 Yeah.

01:04:26.000 Duh.

01:04:27.000 You went so quick, I thought it was real.

01:04:29.000 Look at that thing. 0.92

01:04:30.000 I mean, that is just insane.

01:04:31.000 Look at the one behind it though.

01:04:32.000 Very normal looking deer.

01:04:34.000 Yeah, it's probably a one year old.

01:04:39.000 There's these places that have these animals and some people will take these animals and then they import them.

01:04:46.000 They 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.

01:04:57.000 And this is a source of CWD. They are...

01:05:02.000 Potentially.

01:05:03.000 Well, okay, so a deer has to have CWD in order to be a risk, right?

01:05:08.000 So 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.

01:05:17.000 So we can definitively identify that the captive cervid industry has been a part of moving CWD across the landscape.

01:05:25.000 We know that, you know, CWD-positive deer have been moved by the industry even across, you know, international and state lines.

01:05:33.000 Okay?

01:05:33.000 The ones in Korea are a great example.

01:05:36.000 Right, and even we had a recent one where a CWD-positive farm in Wisconsin, it can do trace backs where this animal came from.

01:05:43.000 It turned out it came from Pennsylvania, a game farm in Pennsylvania.

01:05:46.000 And then doing testing in that source herd, they found additional positives there, so definitively.

01:05:52.000 So now, while I'll say that very clearly, the captive industry is a portion of the equation.

01:05:59.000 They're not the whole equation.

01:06:01.000 No.

01:06:01.000 They're not the whole equation.

01:06:03.000 Where did it originate?

01:06:04.000 You said the first testing of the positive testing of this stuff was...

01:06:09.000 It was first described in 1967 in a research facility in the state of Colorado.

01:06:16.000 That's not to say that was the first instance of CWD. It was the first time it was described in research.

01:06:22.000 So this is pre-deer farms?

01:06:25.000 Well, I think deer farms have been around for a long time.

01:06:27.000 There'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.

01:06:38.000 So we've domesticated animals for a long, long time.

01:06:42.000 But as an industry, probably really came into vogue in, you know, maybe the 60s and 70s.

01:06:48.000 And more recently now it's grown, you know, that industry has grown exponentially.

01:06:52.000 I 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.

01:07:02.000 So when I started this, I didn't start the program, but when I came into that role...

01:07:08.000 What do you mean you administered it?

01:07:10.000 Well, deer breeders in the state of Texas, like many states, need a permit from a state agency to conduct those activities.

01:07:19.000 And so I was administrating that program.

01:07:22.000 I think there were around 120 licensed breeding facilities, white-tailed deer breeding facilities in the state at that point in time.

01:07:30.000 You know, 10 years later, when I left Parks and Wildlife in Texas, there were around 600 or 700. So it just grew exponentially.

01:07:40.000 And now, I believe there are around 1,000 captive deer facilities in the state of Texas.

01:07:47.000 Jesus!

01:07:48.000 Pennsylvania, there's around 1,000 of them.

01:07:50.000 Ohio's got several hundred.

01:07:52.000 Wisconsin's got a couple hundred.

01:07:54.000 So, like I say, they're part of the equation.

01:07:57.000 But 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.

01:08:06.000 Doug hit on one of them, and that's the idea of carcass movement.

01:08:11.000 It 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.

01:08:20.000 So 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?

01:08:30.000 You know, the meat component in a deer is probably around 30%, 35%, something like that.

01:08:35.000 So I've got a lot of other stuff.

01:08:37.000 Landfills, it turns out, are very loath to accept this material.

01:08:42.000 You know, it's almost taboo now.

01:08:43.000 Ooh, 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.

01:08:54.000 So, 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.

01:09:05.000 Well, now what am I going to do with this stuff?

01:09:07.000 So, 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.

01:09:20.000 And I drive down that trail and, hey, there's a pile of deer bones and deer heads here.

01:09:26.000 Whoops.

01:09:27.000 Man, did I knock that over.

01:09:29.000 Sorry about that, Joe.

01:09:31.000 I apologize for that.

01:09:32.000 No worries.

01:09:33.000 I've done it a thousand times.

01:09:34.000 So it's easy to see how inadvertently...

01:09:38.000 Just hold your thought when you're not on a microphone.

01:09:42.000 That's...

01:09:43.000 And it is one of the concerns, is how are we...

01:09:49.000 What kind of hygiene do we have with the carcasses? 0.96

01:09:52.000 And it is something that we're talking about a lot more in Wisconsin now.

01:09:55.000 And it's become an issue.

01:09:57.000 And one of the...

01:09:58.000 Interestingly, I'm in the County Deer Advisory Committee for Richland County.

01:10:01.000 And we...

01:10:02.000 It's a citizen group.

01:10:03.000 And we have some say in season structure and then how many antlerless permits there are.

01:10:11.000 There's a lot of things we don't have any say in, which is fine.

01:10:14.000 I'd rather leave it to the biologists.

01:10:16.000 But...

01:10:17.000 Because there are hunters involved, I'm happy to be one of them.

01:10:22.000 One 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.

01:10:35.000 On the Wisconsin DNR CWD website, there's a list of haulers who will take it.

01:10:41.000 So there are some that will take it.

01:10:44.000 There are some who don't.

01:10:45.000 But the problem is, where are they taking it?

01:10:47.000 Well, they're taking it to clay-lined landfills.

01:10:52.000 And how it's being handled, there's some question.

01:10:57.000 But it can be isolated so the effluent isn't being taken out and pumped out of fields.

01:11:01.000 It's something that we can do something about.

01:11:03.000 Absolutely.

01:11:03.000 There's clear science.

01:11:06.000 We noted how prions bind to various surfaces.

01:11:08.000 They bind to clay particles very, very tightly.

01:11:12.000 And 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?

01:11:22.000 Turns 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.

01:11:31.000 And while the prions will then migrate down over time through the soil, when they come in contact with the clay particles, they bind.

01:11:40.000 And they don't go anywhere.

01:11:42.000 So it can be completely safely done.

01:11:44.000 So there's a way to dispose of these materials very, very safely.

01:11:52.000 But the thought of it, the risk associated with it, the liability, some landfill owners are just like, nah, we'd rather not.

01:12:01.000 And interestingly, because we're challenged about this, what are we supposed to do?

01:12:06.000 And you can't incinerate it, right?

01:12:08.000 Well, it ends up being a budget issue.

01:12:11.000 In Wisconsin, everything's a budget issue.

01:12:12.000 And the DNR is having issues with that.

01:12:15.000 And it is something I'd like to talk about a little bit.

01:12:20.000 When this all first happened 17 years ago, they were incinerating deer and it became a problem.

01:12:29.000 But there are landfills that are taking it and there are haulers who will take it.

01:12:35.000 They have dumpsters that they use specifically for it.

01:12:37.000 They're lined with heavy mill plastic.

01:12:41.000 They're very specific to deer bones.

01:12:46.000 But some haulers aren't doing it. 0.90

01:12:47.000 So I contacted the head of Solid Waste for the state of Wisconsin and asked, well, how is this?

01:12:53.000 I go on your website and I see some take it and some don't.

01:12:56.000 And her response was, we have no legislative authority to require them to take this. 0.80

01:13:03.000 So 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.

01:13:16.000 But it's simple hygiene. 0.92

01:13:18.000 So 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.

01:13:42.000 So 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.

01:13:54.000 You 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.

01:14:04.000 They 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? 0.93

01:14:14.000 I mean, otherwise, you're holding on to the damn bones until you find out whether the things...

01:14:18.000 If you're being... 0.98

01:14:21.000 Completely careful about the hygiene, which I've been trying to do.

01:14:26.000 Suddenly you've got a pile of bones in the old milk house down there until you find out whether it's positive or not.

01:14:31.000 And 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.

01:14:43.000 So that's one of the things.

01:14:45.000 There's a difference between what we can...

01:14:47.000 There's natural spreading of the disease.

01:14:50.000 And then there's human, like, putting them on trucks and moving them around or taking the bones around.

01:14:56.000 This carcass thing, is it really a low-hanging fruit?

01:14:58.000 The idea that we can't fix this one? 0.99

01:15:00.000 I mean, that's ridiculous.

01:15:02.000 And it's easy. 0.98

01:15:05.000 It seems easy to me.

01:15:06.000 I mean, it's just a matter of...

01:15:08.000 Will and money and education obviously.

01:15:12.000 That we're providing opportunity for this.

01:15:15.000 I've been working with the DNR a little bit on this and we're in some discussions about two things.

01:15:20.000 One 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.

01:15:34.000 They're fairly simple.

01:15:35.000 They've been doing this for a couple of years on an experimental basis.

01:15:39.000 But again, it becomes a budget issue.

01:15:42.000 So 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...

01:15:53.000 Gather those heads and then take them into the testing facility and therefore keep the budget money targeted at doing the actual testing.

01:16:01.000 Right next to that self-service kiosk really should be a dumpster that you can throw your deer bones into.

01:16:11.000 Whether you know whether it's positive or not.

01:16:12.000 Otherwise you are holding it.

01:16:14.000 The other thing that the DNR suggests that we do is if you kill the deer on your farm, leave the bones on your farm.

01:16:21.000 Makes sense to me.

01:16:22.000 If it is positive, disease is already there and so you're not taking as great a chance of moving it.

01:16:30.000 That's not an optimal solution to leave that stuff on the ground surface.

01:16:35.000 An optimal solution is dig a hole but you know it's pretty hard to dig sometimes in December in Wisconsin.

01:16:42.000 If the dumpster thing doesn't end up working out with me, there will be a hole.

01:16:46.000 I 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.

01:16:58.000 This all seems to me, sorry to interrupt, but this all seems to me like Band-Aids on massive gunshot wounds.

01:17:04.000 It is, but go back to what I was saying before. 0.99

01:17:07.000 Let's buy time, because this shit's spreading, man. 0.99

01:17:11.000 Let's buy time and pay for science. 1.00

01:17:13.000 Not, ah, there's nothing we can do about it, or the other one, that it's always been here, which I think the guitar player talked about.

01:17:20.000 Is there any consideration whatsoever that there could potentially be a cure?

01:17:25.000 Absolutely.

01:17:26.000 Absolutely.

01:17:26.000 See, we hit on a couple of things.

01:17:28.000 I think it's important to talk just very briefly about some very generic disease management practices.

01:17:34.000 Number one, and this would be wildlife disease, human disease, livestock disease.

01:17:39.000 Prevention, number one.

01:17:41.000 If you don't have it, don't get it.

01:17:42.000 Do everything you can.

01:17:43.000 That's why we get vaccinated for various diseases.

01:17:47.000 If you do get disease, do everything you can to keep from moving it artificially.

01:17:53.000 So that's why we don't want to move the carcasses around. 0.50

01:17:55.000 That's why we don't want to move captive deer around.

01:17:58.000 That's why when we had an Ebola outbreak in 2015 in Liberia on Ivory Coast, we stopped commercial airline flights.

01:18:07.000 We didn't want people inadvertently moving it out.

01:18:10.000 So prevent.

01:18:11.000 Don't move it around.

01:18:13.000 Conduct surveillance around areas where it is to see what's going on.

01:18:17.000 And states are doing that very well, largely.

01:18:20.000 The next one is a tough one.

01:18:22.000 Do something about disease.

01:18:23.000 Manage disease to try and knock down prevalence incidents and get rid of the disease.

01:18:29.000 So, that's challenging.

01:18:30.000 But two other things, number one is support research because if we don't have a cure today, we won't have one tomorrow either.

01:18:37.000 How is research funded right now?

01:18:40.000 Either by states or by the federal government.

01:18:42.000 And there's not a ton of money.

01:18:44.000 The last one is being transparent with your stakeholders, being open and communicative with them.

01:18:49.000 So with many diseases, we have good therapeutics.

01:18:54.000 We can treat some diseases.

01:18:57.000 CWD and other prion diseases, we have no therapeutics.

01:19:00.000 We have no treatments right now.

01:19:02.000 But people are certainly working towards it.

01:19:05.000 Now, 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.

01:19:16.000 And 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.

01:19:26.000 I mean, it's a roller coaster going awry by the time it gets up into the brain.

01:19:31.000 So then you're looking at preventative measures.

01:19:33.000 The idea of vaccines is number one.

01:19:36.000 And number two is looking at animals that through their genetic profile are resistant to disease.

01:19:43.000 And there's some advances on each front.

01:19:46.000 So we can talk about vaccines for a moment.

01:19:50.000 So people, individuals, scientists, research outfits have been trying to develop vaccines for TSEs, for prion diseases, for a long time.

01:19:59.000 Okay?

01:20:00.000 None have been successful.

01:20:02.000 There's no human prion disease vaccines.

01:20:04.000 There's nothing for BSE. There's nothing for scrapie, but there's research ongoing and there have been some advances.

01:20:11.000 There 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.

01:20:28.000 It turned out that this vaccine was not ready for prime time.

01:20:31.000 And 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.

01:20:49.000 So it turned out to be almost an anti-vaccine.

01:20:51.000 Okay?

01:20:52.000 So it didn't work.

01:20:53.000 So instead of being inert, there was some sort of active CWD in the vaccine?

01:20:57.000 Is that what it is?

01:20:58.000 No, just for whatever reason, it predisposed the animals.

01:21:03.000 So it was a massive failure, but even from failures, you learn.

01:21:08.000 Okay, so they're working now, and they learned a lot in that experiment.

01:21:13.000 There'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.

01:21:21.000 And they've got a vaccine candidate That provides some degree of protection, quote-unquote, protection from disease.

01:21:29.000 Now, all but one of the animals that they gave this vaccine to and then challenged with CWD got CWD. Okay?

01:21:37.000 So that's not good news.

01:21:39.000 But the average incubation time was extended to something like 300 days.

01:21:45.000 Okay?

01:21:45.000 So they're on the right track.

01:21:47.000 They have a mechanism that is somehow interfering with the conversion from normal host prion protein to the disease-associated form.

01:21:56.000 So very valuable.

01:21:57.000 Now, will they get there?

01:21:59.000 We don't know.

01:22:01.000 But think about it.

01:22:02.000 Even if we do create a vaccine that works, that prevents CWD, and prevent as opposed to slowing, there's a very big distinction.

01:22:12.000 So 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?

01:22:27.000 Like none of them test positive?

01:22:30.000 The vast majority of deer farms have never had CWD. The vast majority.

01:22:34.000 Absolutely.

01:22:35.000 So there is a potential that you could...

01:22:39.000 Isolate 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?

01:22:50.000 Well, 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.

01:23:09.000 So to date, we have not seen any deer that are genetically completely resistant.

01:23:16.000 There 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.

01:23:30.000 But even the genetically resistant deer do get CWD. And they transmit it.

01:23:39.000 They get it at a lower rate.

01:23:40.000 They likely transmit it.

01:23:42.000 They're likely shedding infectious agent.

01:23:44.000 So instead of that kind of garden variety two-year incubation period, it might be closer to a five-year incubation period.

01:23:52.000 So 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.

01:24:00.000 But on the downside, you're talking about a population of animals that have CWD with all these other side effects.

01:24:07.000 They'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.

01:24:19.000 So I'm not so certain that this is a success story.

01:24:22.000 Just like a vaccine, That results in a longer course of disease where deer can get CWD, but they die from something else.

01:24:32.000 A 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.

01:24:46.000 A shorter incubation period would be preferable. 0.99

01:24:50.000 Yeah, because then you have the...

01:24:51.000 I mean, it's almost like engineering deer to survive longer gives them more potential to spread it.

01:24:57.000 Absolutely.

01:24:58.000 So now, recently, there's claims that...

01:25:02.000 And there's research going on in some of the conservative farms, the deer farms...

01:25:06.000 That they've identified genetic markers, ones that are not published in the literature yet, that are affording a higher degree of protection from disease.

01:25:15.000 But until it's published in the peer-reviewed literature and really tested, it's a speaking point until that point in time.

01:25:23.000 So we don't know if they'll get there.

01:25:25.000 We've got to put a fence around Wisconsin, Doug.

01:25:28.000 Giant one, 30 feet high.

01:25:30.000 Well, it's, you know, there's...

01:25:31.000 30 feet down, too.

01:25:32.000 It's already in the northern Illinois, northeast style.

01:25:35.000 Well, all the places that have it.

01:25:37.000 25, so we're half and half.

01:25:40.000 Yeah, it's...

01:25:40.000 Well, Alaska doesn't...

01:25:41.000 Does Alaska have it?

01:25:42.000 Not that we know of.

01:25:43.000 No, Hawaii.

01:25:44.000 No.

01:25:45.000 No, okay.

01:25:46.000 So lower 48, 25, it's more than 50% then.

01:25:49.000 More than 50% of states have it.

01:25:51.000 Wow.

01:25:53.000 25 out of 48, yep.

01:25:54.000 So this is something that, it just can't be dismissed.

01:25:59.000 This 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.

01:26:08.000 Well, look, if I want to...

01:26:09.000 You know, I play guitar.

01:26:10.000 And if I want to learn some kick-ass Detroit guitar riffs, I'm going to listen to Ted Nugent.

01:26:16.000 If I want to learn about CWD, I'm going to listen to Brian Richards and guys like him.

01:26:20.000 Well, the thing is, Ted does know a lot about hunting.

01:26:22.000 He knows a lot about wildlife.

01:26:24.000 He knows a lot about conservation.

01:26:25.000 But it appears that he's very misinformed or under-informed about this.

01:26:30.000 Let me...

01:26:32.000 Try and put this in perspective.

01:26:34.000 Okay, so you have a disease which is contagious.

01:26:38.000 It's always fatal upon clinical presentation.

01:26:41.000 Always fatal.

01:26:42.000 100% fatal.

01:26:43.000 Man, deer don't survive.

01:26:44.000 Humans don't survive prion diseases.

01:26:46.000 When it enters the central nervous system, it's a death sentence.

01:26:49.000 Okay?

01:26:50.000 So it's contagious, it's fatal, neurodegenerative disorder, it's got to be a horrible way to die.

01:26:57.000 So that's a pretty significant set of clinical signs or symptoms in an individual animal.

01:27:03.000 Now let's look at the geographic spread, rampant geographic spread.

01:27:08.000 So it has an ever-expanding geographic footprint.

01:27:12.000 In 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%.

01:27:22.000 Can 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,

01:27:38.000 meh, that's no big deal.

01:27:42.000 There isn't one.

01:27:43.000 I'm not aware of one.

01:27:44.000 There isn't one.

01:27:45.000 No, this is obviously very, very significant, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys on.

01:27:49.000 I wanted to ask Jamie to pull up some photos of clinical CWD deer or elk.

01:27:56.000 I think you had some and then you kind of took them down.

01:27:59.000 Photos of the ones that are infected?

01:28:02.000 So again, 24 month plus or minus incubation period in the last six to eight weeks are clinical.

01:28:10.000 You know, I got to tell you, man, I killed this deer, and he tested positive.

01:28:15.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:28:17.000 Tested positive.

01:28:19.000 That is awful.

01:28:20.000 That one's not CWD. That's not?

01:28:23.000 Not the one before.

01:28:24.000 No, that one.

01:28:25.000 What is that?

01:28:26.000 That's cutaneous fibromas.

01:28:29.000 They're tumors that grow on the surface of the skin.

01:28:32.000 Pretty grotesque looking.

01:28:34.000 What's the cause of that?

01:28:35.000 It's a virus.

01:28:38.000 Is it fatal?

01:28:40.000 Well, if you get those warts and those fibromas on your eyes and they block your vision, it would be.

01:28:45.000 But otherwise, it's a stressor on animals, and you can actually eat them.

01:28:49.000 They're fine, but I don't think I would.

01:28:51.000 Chronic wasting disease.

01:28:53.000 That image that Jamie's got up there, the larger image, scroll down.

01:28:57.000 That's likely CWD, yes, absolutely.

01:28:59.000 Pick the one that's on the row underneath the second one from the left.

01:29:05.000 That one, the buck there.

01:29:08.000 That's a photograph.

01:29:12.000 So that was taken by a game warden, Michael Hopper is his name, in the state of Kansas.

01:29:21.000 And this disease has a pretty decent footprint in Kansas.

01:29:26.000 This game warden, he gets calls about deer acting funny.

01:29:32.000 And so he's taken a number of good pictures.

01:29:35.000 If you can zoom in on that photo, I don't know if you can, look at what's coming out of that deer's mouth.

01:29:41.000 See that stream of saliva?

01:29:44.000 Yeah.

01:29:44.000 Yeah, that's all filled with infectious material.

01:29:47.000 So that's one of the clinical signs is this hypersalivation.

01:29:50.000 That's a wild deer.

01:29:51.000 That's a wild deer.

01:29:52.000 So it's almost like this disease is trying to spread itself.

01:29:58.000 It's pretty efficient, yeah.

01:29:59.000 Yeah, 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.

01:30:10.000 The 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.

01:30:26.000 I mean, if you wanted to stack the deck for a disease, you couldn't come up with a better set of characteristics.

01:30:31.000 Plus, they look perfectly healthy, so we have no idea that they're diseased until later on in the disease progression.

01:30:40.000 Now, is there a higher prevalence in deer versus moose versus elk or anything else?

01:30:49.000 We tend to see higher prevalence in the deer species, whitetail deer, mule deer, in isolated areas, than we do in either elk.

01:30:59.000 Moose, there's only been, you know, worldwide, there may have only been 10 positive moose to date.

01:31:06.000 And 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.

01:31:15.000 Moose tend to be solitary.

01:31:18.000 Do you have moose in Wisconsin?

01:31:23.000 Periodically, a single yearling will wander down from northeastern part of Minnesota, but very, very rare.

01:31:30.000 What about wolves?

01:31:31.000 Have wolves contracted it yet?

01:31:33.000 Wolves are an interesting story.

01:31:37.000 To 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.

01:31:47.000 No evidence that any canid has gotten CWD. Now that could be a real observation. 0.95

01:31:54.000 It could also be that we haven't done enough science on it.

01:31:57.000 But there's certainly exposure.

01:31:58.000 As 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.

01:32:14.000 Very similar to how humans are.

01:32:16.000 Mountain lions.

01:32:17.000 Yeah, great cats.

01:32:18.000 Which most certainly consume deer on a regular basis.

01:32:21.000 Now, 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.

01:32:32.000 In 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.

01:32:43.000 And so somebody's going, aha, CWD doesn't always kill deer.

01:32:47.000 Well, but it predisposes them.

01:32:50.000 So think about that progressive neurological degeneration and think about how mountain lions hunt.

01:32:55.000 They're ambush hunters.

01:32:57.000 So 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.

01:33:06.000 It's not at the point where we are humanized, which really are very, very poor.

01:33:11.000 We 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.

01:33:22.000 See, the same thing in Colorado.

01:33:24.000 Studies have identified that CWD-positive deer tend to get hit by cars more often than CWD-negative deer.

01:33:31.000 It's very logical.

01:33:33.000 So now let's extend that to wolves and ask the question, could wolves be a management tool for CWD? Okay.

01:33:43.000 Wolves are present in northern Wisconsin, a lot of other locations.

01:33:49.000 And at some point, wolves and CWD will meet.

01:33:54.000 So there's been mathematical models developed, which are...

01:33:58.000 There's a lot of assumptions built in those models, but it leaves it as an open question.

01:34:02.000 Could a large coursing predator...

01:34:05.000 Whose vision and senses are much more acute than ours, could they take advantage of this disease in earlier stages?

01:34:14.000 And so when disease meets geographically wolves, could wolves slow or maybe stop the progression of disease?

01:34:22.000 Because they're taking the weak and the...

01:34:25.000 The sick and the old. 0.86

01:34:26.000 But they still wouldn't stop the excretion and they still wouldn't stop all the bodily fluids.

01:34:32.000 Could they slow the spread or stop the spread?

01:34:37.000 Maybe.

01:34:38.000 Could they reverse disease?

01:34:40.000 You 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.

01:34:51.000 But as disease spreads geographically, at the inner base, could predators be an effective tool to slow or stop disease from spreading?

01:35:02.000 It'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.

01:35:15.000 So we don't have good tools.

01:35:17.000 And I'll leave it an open question.

01:35:19.000 Do we want to take that potential tool and take it out of the toolbox?

01:35:23.000 And what about, okay, so a wolf, well, a coyote by us, you know, they're eating...

01:35:30.000 Deer die in our woods.

01:35:32.000 We 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.

01:35:40.000 It was laying there and it turns out it was probably hit by a car, but it was fairly well consumed by coyotes by then.

01:35:48.000 And I cut the head off of it and sent it in and it came back non-positive.

01:35:54.000 What 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.

01:36:11.000 Yeah, 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.

01:36:23.000 It's still infectious.

01:36:24.000 There's still infectivity and it is capable of transmitting disease.

01:36:28.000 Now you said mice don't get it.

01:36:30.000 Rats eat coyote poop, correct?

01:36:33.000 Yeah.

01:36:33.000 So they don't get it though.

01:36:36.000 Not that we're aware of.

01:36:37.000 But they could potentially spread it in their urine because they would be carrying it?

01:36:41.000 So 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.

01:36:52.000 Okay, so that's a fairly local geographic phenomenon.

01:36:55.000 They could be spreading infectious material.

01:36:58.000 Now you have to ask yourself more questions.

01:37:02.000 When they defecate on the landscape, is a deer likely to encounter and consume that material?

01:37:08.000 Well, maybe not now, but it might be fertilizer two years down the road for plants that the deer could eat.

01:37:15.000 But I think that's quite restricted.

01:37:17.000 It's a localized geographic phenomenon.

01:37:20.000 Okay?

01:37:21.000 And that's something that we can do a hell of a lot about.

01:37:23.000 It's hard to.

01:37:24.000 Same thing with crows.

01:37:26.000 You can put CWD in the front end of a crow or probably other scavengers and CWD comes out the back end about four hours later.

01:37:33.000 So you could ask yourself the question, how far does a crow fly in four hours and is a deer likely to consume crow poop?

01:37:40.000 So these have been shown to be possible in a laboratory environment, but how much they really apply out in the field is of question.

01:37:53.000 So we go back.

01:37:54.000 We know that deer to deer to deer to deer, we see that slow, diffusive process on the landscape.

01:37:59.000 That's the biggie that's going on just south of him and now is past him.

01:38:04.000 Then we have that anthropogenic movement, you know, humans moving at long distances, and the potential for agricultural commodities to be involved.

01:38:13.000 I mean, there's likely other things like crows and coyotes.

01:38:17.000 They're proof of concept in a laboratory, but whether they're really happening in the field is an entirely open question.

01:38:23.000 And if they are, how big are they as compared to these other features?

01:38:30.000 So 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?

01:38:40.000 Licking branches, licking each other, those normal deer activities.

01:38:49.000 But 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.

01:39:00.000 Or a feeder.

01:39:01.000 Or a feeder.

01:39:04.000 You know, a bait pile.

01:39:07.000 And we've seen bait piles.

01:39:09.000 I mean, I've seen bait piles where there's a pile of corn, there's a pile of apples.

01:39:11.000 Well, they're all eaten off the same pile.

01:39:13.000 You've got all these deer coming into that.

01:39:15.000 That's something we can do something about.

01:39:17.000 There 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?

01:39:32.000 Yeah, 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?

01:39:43.000 Yeah, the things you're talking about, the baiting and feeding.

01:39:45.000 Artificial congregations of animals.

01:39:50.000 Where TB is in Michigan, you can't bait and feed.

01:39:53.000 And in Wisconsin, some of the other states where CWD is, you can't bait and feed deer.

01:39:58.000 The idea is you're artificially congregating them.

01:40:01.000 So remember that single deer, we saw him up there on the screen, he was shedding copious amounts of saliva.

01:40:06.000 So if that deer goes up to a pile of corn on the ground, he's sharing, spreading infectious agent into that corn.

01:40:13.000 It can persist on that corn for a long, long time.

01:40:16.000 Decades.

01:40:17.000 Healthy, 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.

01:40:28.000 The analogy there is daycare, okay?

01:40:34.000 If you want to get your kids sick, your three-year-old kids sick, what's the best place to do it?

01:40:40.000 Send them to daycare, okay?

01:40:44.000 Daycare is the analogy there is that pile of corn on the ground.

01:40:48.000 So if every child that ever goes to daycare is perfectly healthy, they're not little disease factories.

01:40:54.000 But we know that's not the case.

01:40:56.000 So 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?

01:41:04.000 Same thing there.

01:41:05.000 So these artificial congregations, if all the deer are healthy, well then they can't be a place to transmit disease.

01:41:12.000 But we know that's not the case.

01:41:13.000 So it's one of those risk factors we can control.

01:41:16.000 But now you hit, Doug, you know, we get back to this area where disease is established.

01:41:21.000 Is there anything we can do?

01:41:23.000 And there's certainly things we can try, right?

01:41:26.000 We haven't exhausted the toolkit yet.

01:41:30.000 Mike Samuel at UW is now retired.

01:41:34.000 He looked at this from a mathematical perspective and he's trying to leverage the idea that adult males have higher prevalence.

01:41:43.000 So they are sinks for disease, they're gathering disease, and then they're shedders of disease as well.

01:41:51.000 So what if in our harvest regime, in hunting season, We focused on adult males.

01:41:59.000 We hammer the bucks because they're the ones most likely to have disease. 0.84

01:42:04.000 So we would lower prevalence in that we're reducing the proportion of the population with the highest prevalence of disease.

01:42:12.000 The 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.

01:42:23.000 Now you still have the persistence in the environment, But, from a modeling basis, it works.

01:42:30.000 Alright, so now think about the deer hunter out there listening to me today, listening to this show today.

01:42:35.000 Oh, now they want us to go out and kill all the bucks.

01:42:38.000 So it's not going to be a very desirable, from a hunter's perspective, Tool.

01:42:45.000 So all the tools we have, you consider these like medicine for a disease.

01:42:51.000 They're very bitter.

01:42:52.000 It is a bitter pill.

01:42:54.000 You were there when we were still wearing the sombrero if you shot a smaller buck or whatever.

01:43:02.000 We had a management idea that we wanted to grow some bigger bucks, but at the same time we were pretty lenient about it.

01:43:11.000 We're not doing that anymore.

01:43:13.000 The deer I shot last year were deer that seven, eight years ago I wouldn't even take another look at.

01:43:18.000 I shot the first buck I had an ethical shot at.

01:43:21.000 Were they giving you more tags?

01:43:25.000 No.

01:43:27.000 There's resistance in the hunting community to that.

01:43:32.000 That's unfortunate.

01:43:33.000 It is unfortunate.

01:43:35.000 I'm not one of those people.

01:43:38.000 I'm part of the County Deer Advisory Committee again.

01:43:40.000 We'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.

01:43:53.000 You 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.

01:43:59.000 But the other thing is population.

01:44:01.000 So one of the things that, for a couple of different reasons, I mean, you saw the number of deer that we have in our place.

01:44:06.000 In Richland County, we have in excess of 75 deer per square mile of habitat.

01:44:11.000 And I know there's places in the country that are higher than that.

01:44:14.000 But, you know, it's sort of...

01:44:18.000 It's a big population, and I have issue with it for a few different reasons.

01:44:22.000 One of them is disease.

01:44:23.000 The 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.

01:44:32.000 I'm not just trying to raise deer on our farm and on our woodlands.

01:44:36.000 So, you know, that...

01:44:40.000 That's one of the issues.

01:44:41.000 So there's this demographic issue that Mike Samuel had been working on, but then there's the population issue as well.

01:44:49.000 We're given four...

01:44:50.000 When 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...

01:45:08.000 They were trying to manage the herd to have more deer.

01:45:12.000 Because again, when I was a kid, seeing deer was a big deal.

01:45:14.000 It's the exact opposite now.

01:45:16.000 So now you get a buck tag and you get four antlerless tags with every tag that you buy in our county.

01:45:25.000 What changed from when you were a kid where the population exploded?

01:45:30.000 Well, management was a big part of it.

01:45:32.000 And the management exploded as, I mean, I'm going to be 60 years old, Joe.

01:45:37.000 You look great.

01:45:39.000 Well, thank you very much.

01:45:40.000 As do you.

01:45:41.000 Thank you.

01:45:43.000 And Brian, you look pretty good, too.

01:45:45.000 Pretty good. 1.00

01:45:46.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:45:47.000 Jamie, on the other hand, over that, I don't know. 1.00

01:45:49.000 He's the young buck amongst us. 0.98

01:45:51.000 No kidding.

01:45:52.000 No kidding.

01:45:53.000 But, I don't know, of course.

01:45:57.000 That's a pretty long period of time.

01:45:59.000 And 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...

01:46:12.000 And they're having two fawns, and this year, at least in my area, we're seeing a lot of does having three fawns.

01:46:22.000 You can see how that growth of the herd would be pretty Yeah, if you want a herd to grow, stop shooting does.

01:46:28.000 If you want to take a herd down, shoot does.

01:46:31.000 Remember back in grad school in Illinois, they gave away these little pins that hunters collected.

01:46:36.000 And 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.

01:46:43.000 People collected these little mementos.

01:46:46.000 That's interesting.

01:47:01.000 We didn't shoot many does.

01:47:02.000 The regulations in the state didn't allow you to shoot does.

01:47:05.000 By 1980 on opening day, I remember I counted 160 deer on opening day.

01:47:11.000 Fifteen years before that, probably saw three, something like that.

01:47:15.000 So exponential growth in the deer population over that point in time.

01:47:19.000 The deer management program worked really well.

01:47:22.000 Oh yeah, we know how to grow deer.

01:47:23.000 And then along with all of that that we've already talked about, the agriculture and The agriculture expanded.

01:47:29.000 Well, I don't know that agriculture, but it was always there, so it had the potential for this explosion.

01:47:37.000 So there's an interesting...

01:47:39.000 I 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,

01:47:58.000 it's called antler point restrictions.

01:48:00.000 The idea is a yearling buck, 18 months old, has fairly small antlers.

01:48:06.000 And then as they get older, they typically get successively larger antlers.

01:48:13.000 So 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.

01:48:28.000 So 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,

01:48:44.000 versus a herd of 20 animals with 5%, which would be 1, and that's a dramatic difference.

01:48:52.000 The prevalence is the same, but we have fewer positives out there, right?

01:48:55.000 So lowering populations overall does make sense with regard to disease, okay?

01:49:01.000 But now, the other part of antler point restrictions is allowing males to get older.

01:49:07.000 And they argue that that will keep hunters engaged.

01:49:10.000 And if hunters are engaged, they'll shoot more does and keep the population down, and that'll be a good thing.

01:49:16.000 But, you know, we've already discussed how adult males tend to have the highest prevalence of CWD, okay?

01:49:25.000 And 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.

01:49:34.000 And so from a biological perspective, from a numerical modeling perspective of disease, I fail to see how this can work.

01:49:45.000 So, will it keep hunters engaged?

01:49:48.000 That's a sociological question that I can't really address.

01:49:52.000 But 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.

01:50:07.000 It seems the opposite.

01:50:09.000 I'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.

01:50:23.000 Most hunters are just not going to do it.

01:50:24.000 So I have a feeling that Like what Ted Nugent had said, that his perspective is possibly way more prevalent than should be.

01:50:36.000 And because this information is not that digestible.

01:50:41.000 I think that there's, you know, I know you talked about it on Meat Eater episode...

01:50:47.000 70. 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.

01:50:56.000 And 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.

01:51:03.000 This is a real issue.

01:51:04.000 And this is not simply like, hey, we don't want to do this because this could negatively impact our hunting opportunities.

01:51:10.000 We might not have any hunting opportunities in 10 years or 20 years.

01:51:13.000 This literally could devastate the entire population of deer.

01:51:18.000 This is not a simple thing.

01:51:21.000 This is an incredibly complex thing with a terrible disease that is 100% fatal and is absolutely spreading.

01:51:29.000 No question.

01:51:30.000 Some of the take-home points I always think, and I get regularly asked by hunters, well, what can I do?

01:51:37.000 Well, what do hunters do? 0.96

01:51:38.000 They sit at deer camp and they shoot the crap around whatever, libations or whatever. 0.76

01:51:44.000 And they're going to talk about things like CWD and good. 0.96

01:51:47.000 So let those conversations be driven by fact and science as opposed to rumor and innuendo.

01:51:54.000 That's what we're doing here today, and that's why I think this public information is It's so important.

01:51:59.000 There's other things it can do.

01:52:02.000 Doug hit on a bunch of them.

01:52:04.000 Hunting is part of promoting a healthy deer herd.

01:52:07.000 Keep populations low.

01:52:10.000 Test your deer and manage those carcasses.

01:52:14.000 Don't leave them out on the landscape.

01:52:16.000 There'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?

01:52:26.000 It's almost a sport to kick around at night and see who can insult the DNR the worst, right?

01:52:32.000 So with regard to disease, though, is that really an effective use of your time?

01:52:36.000 It might be fun, but it's likely not effective.

01:52:38.000 Because think of these state management agencies that deal with deer.

01:52:43.000 It might be the Agriculture Department or the Natural Resources Department.

01:52:46.000 They're very, very restricted in what they can do.

01:52:49.000 They operate within a legislative framework.

01:52:53.000 So 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?

01:53:09.000 It's important to put pressure on our elected representatives.

01:53:14.000 And we've seen change in that in, well, Wisconsin being a great example.

01:53:19.000 Our management used to be science-based.

01:53:22.000 Wildlife biologists making decisions about deer management.

01:53:26.000 It's politically based now.

01:53:28.000 Politicians are deciding what...

01:53:31.000 You'll often hear that in...

01:53:33.000 Iowa County, Wisconsin, where this first effort started.

01:53:37.000 Well, see, it didn't work up there.

01:53:38.000 DNRs, you know, they had this idea and it didn't work to stop the disease.

01:53:41.000 It didn't get a chance to work because...

01:53:44.000 Social and political pressure forced the DNR to vacate their plans and their aggressive measures.

01:53:52.000 And even more recently, there was a court case.

01:53:55.000 The 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.

01:54:07.000 The deer breeders sued the state.

01:54:10.000 It 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.

01:54:26.000 And 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.

01:54:39.000 So 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.

01:54:52.000 The legislative part of it is really important, and I can't put too fine a point on it.

01:54:58.000 Laws can be changed, and there's pressure to do that under a lot of different reasons.

01:55:03.000 I've been a part of changing some legislation that had to do with forestry, and I know how it's done.

01:55:12.000 And, 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.

01:55:25.000 So 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.

01:55:31.000 Is 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.

01:55:49.000 I mean, even these hunters would resist this because it would limit hunting opportunities.

01:55:56.000 This could potentially be a large tool in the toolbox of conservation and stopping the spread.

01:56:03.000 Short answer on that is yes.

01:56:05.000 As I said, I'm on the County Deer Advisory Committee.

01:56:08.000 We have the opportunity to give out as many tags, antlerless tags, as we want.

01:56:13.000 What about antler tags?

01:56:14.000 Because that's the issue, right?

01:56:15.000 One.

01:56:16.000 That's it.

01:56:16.000 One per person?

01:56:17.000 And that is legislatively controlled.

01:56:20.000 But even with this disease, which that might be the number one tool to slow down the spread.

01:56:26.000 We used to have a policy in Wisconsin called Ernebuck.

01:56:32.000 And...

01:56:35.000 It was not particularly popular with a lot of hunters because, you know, I want to shoot my buck.

01:56:43.000 And I don't want to have to earn a buck.

01:56:45.000 You have to shoot a doe or a deer to earn a buck tag.

01:56:50.000 And it wasn't particularly popular.

01:56:53.000 That's really a mild way to put it.

01:56:56.000 It was vehemently opposed.

01:56:58.000 Well, 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.

01:57:13.000 It wasn't popular.

01:57:14.000 It was popular with me as, well, again, you hunted on my farm.

01:57:19.000 We shoot way more antlerless deer than we shoot bucks.

01:57:23.000 When earn a buck was in place, we'd have a stack of buck tags because we were shooting so many DOAs.

01:57:31.000 That was because it was politically or socially became a political issue.

01:57:38.000 It was rescinded.

01:57:39.000 And so now what we found in Richland County is we can give...

01:57:44.000 We could drop antlerless tags from a helicopter. 0.99

01:57:47.000 Shoot as many as you want. 1.00

01:57:49.000 And we're still going to kill... 1.00

01:57:51.000 About the same number of those. 0.99

01:57:52.000 About the same number of those.

01:57:54.000 There's been a little bit of an uptick. 0.98

01:57:56.000 But when we had earned a buck, we killed a shitload of them. 0.97

01:57:58.000 You know, three times as many. 0.99

01:58:01.000 And...

01:58:04.000 It becomes a, and I understand, especially like casual hunters, like gun hunters are a good example.

01:58:11.000 Bow hunters are a different example because they're not as casual, but they're more interested in killing the big buck generally.

01:58:23.000 Gun hunters, you go out there for two or three days.

01:58:26.000 I mean, you were there. 0.96

01:58:26.000 We froze our asses off. 0.96

01:58:28.000 I mean, it's like, well, how long am I going to stay out here?

01:58:30.000 We have a really short season.

01:58:32.000 We initially had a much longer season.

01:58:35.000 When the CWD management first started, we had a much longer season.

01:58:39.000 I loved it.

01:58:40.000 I invited...

01:58:41.000 I got to hunt with folks that maybe had their own place to hunt, or I invited folks from the community to come in and hunt.

01:58:48.000 You know, friends from different places came down and hunted.

01:58:50.000 But again...

01:58:53.000 A small, noisy group.

01:58:55.000 And I don't know if small is the...

01:58:57.000 I don't know what the numbers are on that.

01:58:58.000 But made that go away.

01:59:01.000 So now we're back down to the nine-day season.

01:59:04.000 That doesn't make any sense to me.

01:59:05.000 Like, who gave into that?

01:59:07.000 The politicians did.

01:59:09.000 Politicians understand.

01:59:10.000 And they're doing it from an ignorance. 0.74

01:59:12.000 From a point of ignorance.

01:59:14.000 Political pressure.

01:59:15.000 Political pressure.

01:59:16.000 I've got to hope that something like this podcast gets to them.

01:59:20.000 I sure hope so, man.

01:59:21.000 I'm sure why we came out.

01:59:22.000 This is a terrifying scenario.

01:59:25.000 So the Wisconsin experience was really important.

01:59:28.000 And 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,

01:59:47.000 thrown on the ground immediately.

01:59:50.000 When you stop doing earn a buck and you stop having longer seasons, the population trends reversed and started going back up.

01:59:59.000 So it was easy to label, hey, the DNR failed.

02:00:03.000 Their effort to eliminate disease by having aggressive seasons failed.

02:00:08.000 Like Doug said, we don't know that because we stopped.

02:00:11.000 We pulled the plug on the tool.

02:00:13.000 Alberta, when CWD started really blossoming in Saskatchewan, Alberta was like, we don't want it.

02:00:20.000 And they found their first handful of cases right on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

02:00:25.000 They raised the odds a little bit.

02:00:28.000 They started harvesting deer from an aerial platform called a helicopter.

02:00:34.000 A 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.

02:00:50.000 Well, that was not very popular either.

02:00:52.000 It went over like a fart in church.

02:00:54.000 And landowners and outfitters went to the ministry and said, we can't possibly have this.

02:00:59.000 And that program had every chance of being successful, and the rug was pulled out from underneath them.

02:01:07.000 It's a matter of time.

02:01:09.000 Here we are years later.

02:01:12.000 And the western states, you know, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, where disease has been a long time, they're wildlife health professionals.

02:01:20.000 They have put together a set of uniform management recommendations for the western states, okay?

02:01:28.000 And 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.

02:01:40.000 Okay?

02:01:41.000 The male focused the social group with the highest prevalence.

02:01:46.000 And also kind of what I guess I would refer to as hotspot shooting.

02:01:49.000 When you see a new spark of disease out there on the landscape, Get on it.

02:01:54.000 Don't allow it to become established.

02:01:56.000 Your only chance to be successful to eliminate disease is very, very soon, before it gets established and starts spreading.

02:02:03.000 So now we're seeing in Wyoming and Colorado and Montana, they're actively talking.

02:02:09.000 They're talking to the media.

02:02:10.000 They're talking to their commissions.

02:02:12.000 And they're talking about implementing these regulatory structures, at least on an experimental basis, recognizing that doing nothing It's no longer an option.

02:02:22.000 And 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. 0.98

02:02:39.000 But, 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. 0.94

02:02:49.000 And you can't actively try to defeat something and then say it doesn't work. 0.98

02:02:54.000 You really have to let it, you know, of course.

02:02:57.000 And 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,

02:03:13.000 both on a scientific level, but on a social level as well.

02:03:18.000 And I can tell you, man, if you don't have it, you don't want it.

02:03:22.000 You know, 15 years ago I felt, and there's so much more known now than there was 15 years ago.

02:03:30.000 You know, I feel like it's not too late in Wisconsin.

02:03:33.000 I 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.

02:03:39.000 It takes a will.

02:03:40.000 But it really does take the will.

02:03:42.000 The medicine is very bitter.

02:03:43.000 I 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.

02:03:50.000 I agree.

02:03:51.000 I agree.

02:03:51.000 I'm surprised in my area.

02:03:55.000 Intelligent people that I know that are casual hunters.

02:03:59.000 So it's getting to be deer hunting time.

02:04:01.000 And I'll talk to them about it.

02:04:02.000 I'm like, ah, they don't really know.

02:04:05.000 They don't know.

02:04:06.000 Yeah, that.

02:04:07.000 Yeah.

02:04:08.000 And that really is one of the things.

02:04:10.000 So 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,

02:04:26.000 and 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.

02:04:37.000 Joe, you're exactly right.

02:04:39.000 Yeah, I just don't think there's enough digestible education.

02:04:43.000 And I think this sort of form is one of the most digestible.

02:04:48.000 All you have to do is you put it on your car, you drive around, you listen to it, you put it in your headphones when you're at the gym.

02:04:53.000 You'll get this information.

02:04:54.000 You'll get it in a way that you're probably not going to sit down and go through these studies.

02:04:59.000 I appreciate it as well.

02:05:01.000 I mean, I'm pretty not very savvy on social media and things like that.

02:05:06.000 I wasn't even sure what a podcast was when, you know, Stephen Rinawa, you know, asked me to come on and do Meat Eater.

02:05:14.000 And 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.

02:05:34.000 So from an impact, being able to get a message out to people, this type of forum really, really is helpful.

02:05:41.000 And getting it down, like you say, down to a level that, you know, hunters can understand and digestible, I think is very, very important.

02:05:47.000 Because we talked about how misinformation, active misinformation to try and, you know, hey, it's not so bad.

02:05:54.000 Or look over here.

02:05:55.000 Don't look at this.

02:05:56.000 Look over there.

02:05:57.000 You know, these diversionary tactics are very, very successful.

02:06:00.000 They were very successful with tobacco.

02:06:02.000 They were successful with other scientific endeavors, you know, today.

02:06:07.000 And also the simplistic perspective that, hey, look how many deer get killed by winter.

02:06:11.000 You know, it's way more than CWD. Stop crying wolf. 0.98

02:06:15.000 Yeah, it's a diversionary tactic.

02:06:16.000 Here's the other thing that I'd like to bring up about that.

02:06:20.000 I've killed some big deer.

02:06:22.000 And I get it.

02:06:26.000 Guys want it.

02:06:27.000 People want it.

02:06:27.000 Hunters want to do that.

02:06:28.000 They want to kill. 0.86

02:06:29.000 It's what they look forward to.

02:06:30.000 They look forward to hunting season.

02:06:31.000 It's only one time a year.

02:06:33.000 Yeah, and you get to do that.

02:06:35.000 We're not just hunters.

02:06:36.000 We're conservationists.

02:06:38.000 What we do is going to affect the future.

02:06:40.000 And we have an obligation to do what's best for the resource and what's best for the future.

02:06:45.000 And 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.

02:06:56.000 I enjoyed that deer.

02:06:57.000 I 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.

02:07:13.000 And I was one of them, man.

02:07:14.000 I feel like a recovered alcoholic sometimes about the whole antler thing, you know?

02:07:17.000 Like, hi, I'm Doug, and I used to be an antler.

02:07:20.000 It's a 12-step process.

02:07:21.000 Well, and there is a part of that.

02:07:24.000 But 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.

02:07:40.000 There 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.

02:07:52.000 I 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.

02:08:04.000 That my descendants and their friends and their family are going to be able to come there and still enjoy that.

02:08:10.000 And 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.

02:08:17.000 100 years from now, we have to do what we need to do now in order for this Opportunity be there for the future.

02:08:26.000 Our hunting heritage is huge.

02:08:28.000 Not to mention the- Financial impact!

02:08:31.000 The economics of deer hunting.

02:08:33.000 In a place like Wisconsin, there's over 650,000 people that hunt deer.

02:08:38.000 They pump in excess of one billion dollars every year into the economy of the state of Wisconsin, surrounded by hunting.

02:08:45.000 If we put that on a national basis, there's millions of hunters and more billions of dollars spent.

02:08:52.000 It's not a small thing when you think about, you know, the economics of hunting, but the heritage of hunting is very, very important.

02:09:00.000 I mean, I've been hunting my whole life.

02:09:02.000 Now, I hunt primarily one county west of him.

02:09:07.000 And, you know, CWD is coming.

02:09:09.000 I'd say I'm sitting in my tree stand three years ago and CWD is in the next county over.

02:09:15.000 Two 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.

02:09:26.000 Last 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.

02:09:35.000 I find myself looking at deer differently.

02:09:38.000 I'm looking for those subtle cues of disease.

02:09:43.000 It's changing the experience.

02:09:45.000 I get calls pretty regularly from hunters who are like, you know, really?

02:09:52.000 It's a coin flip out there?

02:09:54.000 I'm not so sure I want to hunt there anymore.

02:09:57.000 I 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.

02:10:08.000 And they're doing, they bought it to manage it for bigger bucks.

02:10:13.000 and 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

02:10:43.000 years.

02:10:44.000 She's never going to have fawns of her own.

02:10:45.000 That's a population issue.

02:10:47.000 But what I, you know, I hope those guys are listening.

02:10:52.000 What I applauded about them is what they've done is really worked.

02:10:56.000 With 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.

02:11:08.000 Well, you know what?

02:11:09.000 They're not seeing big old bucks anymore because they're dead.

02:11:12.000 They're dying.

02:11:13.000 They're finding them, but they're finding them dead.

02:11:15.000 We've seen that in Wyoming.

02:11:19.000 We look at the long-term impacts of disease.

02:11:22.000 I talked a little bit about population impacts, driving populations down.

02:11:26.000 The other thing we would identify is changes in that demographic structure.

02:11:33.000 When you're hunting for the big antler deer, you're looking for animals that are four or five years old, mature or over-mature animals.

02:11:42.000 In an area where CWD is established at high prevalence levels, those animals are not going to exist or will be extremely, extremely rare.

02:11:50.000 They're rare now.

02:11:51.000 There's an example of a real large ranch out in Wyoming.

02:11:56.000 It 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.

02:12:06.000 Even 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.

02:12:16.000 They're not anymore because, you know, those deer aren't living that long.

02:12:20.000 Think about it, a math question, math quiz for Duren here.

02:12:24.000 So 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.

02:12:36.000 We've demonstrated that.

02:12:37.000 At 2.5, it's probably 30% prevalence.

02:12:40.000 At 3.5 and 4.5 and above, it's close to 40, 45, 50% prevalence.

02:12:46.000 So this is a two-year disease, right?

02:12:49.000 So half your prevalence dies every year.

02:12:53.000 So if you have 20% prevalence, Half of those deer are going to be dead the next year and half the year after that.

02:13:01.000 Okay, so over time, you would expect these cohorts to diminish.

02:13:05.000 So the math question is, in that population, how many five-year-old bucks are there?

02:13:10.000 Because disease penetrance grows over time.

02:13:14.000 The answer is not many.

02:13:16.000 It's not many.

02:13:17.000 Come on, man, I'm supposed to answer this.

02:13:19.000 Sound the alarm.

02:13:21.000 Yeah, no, and that really is the case.

02:13:27.000 Again, that's why I wanted to bring Brian along because he's going to provide the science and I'm going to try to break it down to...

02:13:36.000 You know, Doug's level and hopefully that, you know, folks can understand it.

02:13:40.000 And I know I get emotional about it, but, you know, part of it is...

02:13:42.000 You care.

02:13:43.000 Yeah, well, my dad would have been 94 years old today.

02:13:46.000 And he's the guy that I started deer hunting with.

02:13:49.000 You know, he died a couple years ago.

02:13:52.000 And he grew up with that farm.

02:13:54.000 It was my great grandfather's farm.

02:13:57.000 And that area, the Driftless area, and you've heard me talk about the Driftless area before and how important that area is to me.

02:14:03.000 And this is a big part of that area.

02:14:06.000 It is an emotional thing for me.

02:14:09.000 Which is why I then look at the science and what can we do about this.

02:14:14.000 And I think about, you know, I think about Elder Leopold.

02:14:17.000 Well, what would Leopold do right now?

02:14:19.000 I mean, what would he be thinking about this?

02:14:20.000 You know, my old man would be thinking about this.

02:14:22.000 You know, I know what my dad would be saying. 0.99

02:14:25.000 He always thought my antler thing was bullshit. 1.00

02:14:29.000 Every time he'd see a buck on the trail camera, he'd go, shoot her. 1.00

02:14:32.000 He was just like, he was just an old school buck hunter, man. 0.97

02:14:35.000 He had an antler on it, you shot it.

02:14:38.000 So all those things are in my head as I think about this.

02:14:41.000 And, you know, the emotion's important.

02:14:45.000 And I get the emotion part from all of these folks.

02:14:49.000 And I understand that some of them want to kill big bucks.

02:14:52.000 And, you know, maybe because I have killed a couple of big ones, it's not as important to me.

02:14:56.000 Maybe it has something to do with being 60 years old.

02:14:58.000 Well, it's also you understand the consequences.

02:15:01.000 I mean, this is a real serious issue.

02:15:02.000 Forget about the ego of killing a big buck or, you know, this...

02:15:06.000 Desire to achieve something that's more difficult than shooting a young one. 0.59

02:15:10.000 There's more at stake here.

02:15:11.000 Yeah.

02:15:12.000 So you brought up an interesting thing.

02:15:14.000 What would Leopold do?

02:15:15.000 And, you know, I mean, kind of a Leopold disciple.

02:15:20.000 You know, father of modern wildlife ecology, started the first program of wildlife ecology at University of Wisconsin.

02:15:27.000 In the 1940s, populations of deer in the northern part of Wisconsin were growing by leaps and bounds.

02:15:36.000 And they were dramatically changing the landscape, you know, denuding the landscape, you know, eating eastern white cedar.

02:15:43.000 And deer in northern latitudes tend to yard together in the wintertime.

02:15:47.000 And so Leopold knew that this was You know, deleterious to the long-term viability of that ecosystem.

02:15:54.000 Unsustainable.

02:15:55.000 He 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.

02:16:05.000 And 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.

02:16:15.000 So he was a real proponent of showing people the results of doing things the wrong way and education.

02:16:21.000 So I think, you know, it comes back.

02:16:23.000 It's what we're trying to do.

02:16:25.000 Not saying that, you know, we're Leopoldian or anything like that.

02:16:28.000 But education, getting information out, getting accurate information out is maybe one of the biggest things we can do.

02:16:36.000 I think you guys did that here today.

02:16:38.000 So thank you.

02:16:39.000 Thank you for being here, Brian.

02:16:40.000 Thank you, Doug, for organizing this and putting it together.

02:16:43.000 I'm really happy we got a chance to talk and scare the shit out of me.

02:16:48.000 Thanks for the opportunity.

02:16:49.000 My pleasure.

02:16:50.000 Thanks, guys.

02:16:50.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 08, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards

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