Is CWD Politically Generated ?

[texans42]

Don’t hear much about it in Oklahoma where I hunt but seems like it controls itself since it’s fatal.

Oklahoma doesn’t spend much money on testing but it’s there. Just look at a CWD/scrapies maps,
In panhandle its bordered on three sides by positive freerange populations

 

[robtattoo]

"CWD can't jump species"
They've never proven that BSE can either, but I'm still not allowed to give blood because I lived through the outbreak in England.
There's pretty much a form of Encephalitis in every species so who's to say for sure that it didn't start at a single origin.

Chances are, I've eaten more BSE infected beef than 99% of folks will have eaten CWD infected venison. However, it might be another 30 years before the holes in my brain start to appear & then they'll call it alzheimers anyway.

 

[Coldtrail]

Interesting discussion, a few years ago this very thing was a hot topic in WI to the point that the governor hired a game farm hunting "Deer Czar" (not kidding on that title BTW) from Texas to oversee the WDNR deer management program to assure that the State DNR wasnt mismanaging the deer herd. Two interesting things came from that, 1 is the the Deer Czar determined that the number of deer required on the landscape to keep your average hunter satisfied is not attainable, essentially there could be a deer behind every tree & hunters will always complain there isnt enough, and 2. The job of wildlife biologist in WI became the easiest job in the world because now its up to individual county's citizen committees to set their own population goals & decide what the appropriate harvest should be which is putting farmers and hunters at odds.

CWD is a real deal issue, but nobody know if there is a fix so getting rid of the sick ones makes sense, they know that nose to nose contact spreads it, interestingly enough the area of WI that first saw it was by DNR numbers considered overpopulated, when eradication started people were pretty pi $$ ed. Hunters that hunt that area today after years of depopulation efforts, are now harvesting more trophy deer than ever before....just sayin'

Regardless your opinions on cwd, lets agree we dont want the state fish and game agencies to be tasked with controlling the spread of Covid.

 

[rclouse79]

It has barely started to show up in my state. I didn’t get any of my animals tested this year. I would rather live in blissful ignorance. If I am the first person that contracts it from wild game, then that was my way to go.

 

[elkyinzer]

Check back in 50 years. I think we are going to know a lot more about prion diseases by then. They operate on a different timescale.

 

[kentuckybowman]

its a money generated agenda by the industry that tests for the disease. there is no evidence that cwd has done any long term damage to any herd of big game animals on the planet. its the Y2K crisis of our time.

 

[huntineveryday]

it would be nice if there was a "home test kit" that you could get & test on your own if you chose to.

FYI: K-State's vet lab has free kits they will send you (you pay the shipping), you collect the sample and send it back and they'll test it for a $28 fee. They make it a pretty easy process and have a quick turnaround time. I've tested around 10 deer, have only had one positive result.

 

[Jimss]

Here is an interesting set of articles on CWD testing of live deer in the Estes Park Valley, Colorado. In this article, they tested 50% of the deer herd, tonsil-biopsied, marked, and released the tested deer to the field. They later returned and culled the positive tested deer. They originally predicted that they would reduce CWD to <2% via test-and-cull in 5 to 10 years based on their predicted models.

https://cpw.state.co.us/Documents/Hunting/BigGame/CWD/PDF/ResearchArticles/Feas_of_testcull.pdf

This sounds like a fantastic idea doesn't it? Culling 1/2 of the deer in a herd that test positive to CWD rather than non-selectively culling high numbers of deer of which many are healthy. They continued this same study by comparing CWD prevalence in their 5 year Estes Park culling program to the prevalence of CWD in deer harvested by hunters in the adjacent hunting unit.

Despite expending considerable field effort and adhering closely to management objectives, they did not uniformly reduce CWD prevalence through selectively catching and culling close to 1/2 of the entire deer herd and culling 100% of the positively tested CWD deer for 5 consecutive years. They mention that CWD became endemic in this area well before disease management began, so it seems plausible that contaminated environments could sustain transmission over several years, despite aggressive removal of infected deer. In other words, although their innovative 5 year culling program was an aggressive approach, it did not work!.

EVALUATION OF A TEST AND CULL STRATEGY FOR REDUCING PREVALENCE OF CHRONIC WASTING DISEASE IN MULE DEER (ODOCOILEUS HEMIONUS)

We evaluated a test and cull strategy for lowering chronic wasting disease (CWD) prevalence in a naturally-infected, free-ranging mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) herd wintering in the town of Estes Park, Colorado, US and in nearby Rocky Mountain National Park. We tested 48−68% of the estimated...

bioone.org

Bottom line....here's what blew me away in their discussion! "In some aspects, our culling of known CWD-positive animals simulated the effect of natural predators in the wild that exploit vulnerabilities and weakness when selecting prey. Although we detected some infected individuals well before clinical signs would have been discernible to a predator, at the herd level our testing effort likely was not as persistent or effective as that of natural predators. Our findings could lend credence to the potential role of predation−of sufficiently high intensity and duration−in helping suppress CWD outbreaks if CWD-positive individuals are preferentially targeted by predators (Wild et al. 2011)."

This compliments what many have observed for years....predators are highly effective, efficient, and do a heck of a great job of "culling" the few weak and sick CWD positive deer that exist! Hunters add on to the total CWD positive deer killed within any given area by harvesting an additional low % of CWD positive deer. There have been no catastrophic, epidemic losses of deer throughout the US in over 40 years of CWD prion existence.

This study reinforces the fact that increasing harvest of old age class bucks by increasing tags and rut rifle season dates does little to prevent the spread or prevalence of CWD. If using an aggressive test-and-culling approach for 5 consecutive years is ineffective at preventing CWD spread and prevalence, how will hunters harvesting a low % of CWD positive deer going to impact CWD?

 

[Loggerdude]

we have been eating dirt, drinking crick water, sleeping with bugs, and nobody has given us anything?. I want a grant to study this, weel all meet up in yellow stone and go crazy hunting for one day and eat everything we get and meet annually to see how everyone is felling. With hunting equipment In hand of course.

 

[RS_Non-Res]

Having read the abstract, intro and discussion in the original reference (Wild et al. 2011), I find that the most important and solidly supported conclusion of the work is the first sentence of the Discussion as quoted by the WKR:

"Despite expending considerable field effort and adhering closely to management objectives, we did not uniformly reduce CWD prevalence through selective culling."​

The rest of the discussion addresses what may have gone wrong in, or how to improve, the study. The excerpts quoted in the post above about predators are speculation about an unmeasured parameter that is beyond the scope of the work in the paper. They are WAG comments tossed in the last paragraph of the paper for drama and which are typically used to justify grants for, or to direct, later research.

Finally, this comment by the WKR:

​

"...predators are highly effective, efficient, and do a heck of a great job of "culling" the few weak and sick CWD positive deer that exist!"​

...is not remotely supported by the quoted excerpts or anything else in the paper, but rather is the underlying assumption that is required to be true for the speculations about the effectiveness of predation to be true, and which has been demonstrated again and again to be false.

Besides the speculation at the end, the paper was well written and had clear conclusions.
The muddle-headed extrapolation to wolf-love by the peanut gallery was not useful.

 

[KsRancher]

FYI: K-State's vet lab has free kits they will send you (you pay the shipping), you collect the sample and send it back and they'll test it for a $28 fee. They make it a pretty easy process and have a quick turnaround time. I've tested around 10 deer, have only had one positive result.

Yep, it's really simple and fast with them. Usually call up and order 4 test kits at the beginning of each season. If I can 1 day ship it in a Monday, will have results by Friday.

 

[rtkbowhunter]

Gonna make a risky thread here….but I just can’t get behind the risk of CWD and how it maybe political generated.

It’s December and a good time to debate stuff….

Not sure if it's politically generated in PA, but dealing with it sure is. Our first case in PA was in 2012 and traced to a captive herd in a deer farm. Every case since then can be traced back to another damn deer farm. Probelm. Pennsylvania Game Commission has zero authority over game farms. That falls under the auspice of PA Dept of Agriculture. And they have zero interest in shutting down the deer farms. The really ironic thing? Deer waste, feces, urine, salivia, is thought to be a vector for CWD transmission. In PA's DMA's or disease management areas, it's illegal to use deer urine based lures. Even though there are deer lure operations operating within those restricted areas. That's right. Gathering deer urine from a deer farm in an area with high CWD cases for resale in other areas.

 

[Newtosavage]

December is conspiracy theory month.

clearly

 

[540-Virginian]

Is cwd a political vehicle? Could be, but it is not in my state. CWD wasn’t created as a political weapon. It does sound like it got out by accident. Humans **** up all the time. If you look for conspirarcies in atuff you’ll find it in everything.

For example, there is no TP in my bathroom and Im the one who replaces it. My wife and two kids (both girls) are conspiring against me as it is always gone when I need it.

 

[Newtosavage]

Conspiracy theorists - don't trust the experts that are trying to help them, but unconditionally trust con men who are using them for their own purposes.

 

[Coldtrail]

You can go back over 100yrs and find citizens and politicians pushing conspiracy theories that relate to state fish and game agencies conspiring to end hunting as we know it, yet somehow we are all still harvesting game nationwide & in some cases have better game populations than 100yrs ago.

 

[Coveyleader]

Not much to say but anything we touch, we destroy. Locusts we are.

 

[sasquatch]

Isnt that really the whole basis of hunting/conservation? We have to hunt them to keep the herds healthy.

Totally diff, how can you compare normal hunting structure to decimating herds?

Maybe it is needed, maybe it’s not. I just think we may jump the gun too soon sometimes.

And of all things nature, man can sure screw up more s*** than imaginable.

Many cures are worse than the disease


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

 

[texans42]

Conspiracy theorists - don't trust the experts that are trying to help them, but unconditionally trust con men who are using them for their own purposes.

Don’t trust the experts? Half the experts said we need to go scorched earth on entire county populations of ungulates. Other half were looking at different tissue samples and mislabeling scrapies CWD. This is not the end of the world, anthrax and EHD has had much wider population effects the scrapies/CWD

There is one way out of CWD/scrapies, genetic resistance

 

[texans42]

Interesting discussion, a few years ago this very thing was a hot topic in WI to the point that the governor hired a game farm hunting "Deer Czar" (not kidding on that title BTW) from Texas to oversee the WDNR deer management program to assure that the State DNR wasnt mismanaging the deer herd. Two interesting things came from that, 1 is the the Deer Czar determined that the number of deer required on the landscape to keep your average hunter satisfied is not attainable, essentially there could be a deer behind every tree & hunters will always complain there isnt enough, and 2. The job of wildlife biologist in WI became the easiest job in the world because now its up to individual county's citizen committees to set their own population goals & decide what the appropriate harvest should be which is putting farmers and hunters at odds.

CWD is a real deal issue, but nobody know if there is a fix so getting rid of the sick ones makes sense, they know that nose to nose contact spreads it, interestingly enough the area of WI that first saw it was by DNR numbers considered overpopulated, when eradication started people were pretty pi $$ ed. Hunters that hunt that area today after years of depopulation efforts, are now harvesting more trophy deer than ever before....just sayin'

Regardless your opinions on cwd, let’s agree we dont want the state fish and game agencies to be tasked with controlling the spread of Covid.

Was it Dr. Kroll? Sounds like it was transforming it to mirror Texas MLD program. From the private landowner side the MLD program is probably the most ecological friendly program backed by sound science in the US. Although in some parts you better be prepared to kill a lot of deer to provide relief to the eco system