It Could Happen Here - The Deadly Threat Waiting in Our Forests2

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Have you heard about Chronic Wasting Disease? You will.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Sometimes it's about good stuff and ways people can fix things. Sometimes it's about frightening stuff, like today. Today's a scary episode. Joining me to scare everybody is Professor Calvin Norman. Calvin, how are you doing today? Oh, Robert, I do well some days, but most days not. I work on climate change, invasive species, forest health issues, and chronic waste disease. So most days are bad days. Oh, are there problems with those things? Well, actually, last time we were on, we talked about

climate change. Solve that. We're good there. That's all been solved. Yeah, we locked that down, right? Yeah. We got the eels fed. That was the problem. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's like a car company that's electric now. We're good. We're nailing it. So, I get, we

had you on the show once before to talk about how the forest is bad. Yeah. Yeah. Still bad. Still a lot of problems in the forest, as the people who are watching their forests burn can probably say. Although there's other problems than that, as we talk about in your episode. You sent me an email a while back. It took a bit for me to get my shit together to have you back on.

email a while back. It took a bit for me to get my shit together to have you back on, but it was a frightening email about a disease sweeping through the country that could have massive effects on the lives of everybody listening to this. And it's not one of the diseases that you're all thinking about. I know there's a couple things that meet that decision, that like, there's a couple of different diseases running unchecked throughout the United States at the moment and the world. We are not talking about either of the ones that are big in the news right now. We're going to talk about chronic wasting disease. Calvin, do you want to kind of introduce that concept to the people?

Because this was not something I really, I'd heard of it, but I didn't. It was just kind of like, you know, animals have weird diseases, right? Cats get, you know, lymphoma or whatever. I never thought about it much as a thing that was a problem other than a problem for some deer but it is it is quite an issue yeah yeah it's if it stays in deer i will be happy let's put it like that yeah so um we're gonna actually like do a little throwback to the past year watch watch out hold on so we're gonna go back to the 90s um all right i'm gonna get i'm gonna get my shoulder pads on i'm gonna get my x-files poster stuck up on the wall i'm gonna yeah vote for a serial sexual abuser well that's that's every decade um okay sorry so so chronic wasting

disease is a prion the reason we're going back to is a pr prion. The reason we're going back to, is a prion disease. And the reason we're going back to the 90s is to look at the most, the biggest, like, reason anyone would have heard of a prion disease outside of, like, you know, some, like, you know, brain scientists and stuff. And that's, you know, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or more commonly known as mad cow disease. Yeah. So, you know, Robert, I'm not sure how much you are aware of mad cow. It popped up in the U.S. in the mid-2000s, but it killed a bunch of people in England in the 90s.

Yeah, isn't there, like, there's still restrictions on, like, blood donation and stuff if you lived in England at a certain period, right? Like, there's some weird shit like that. Yeah, you can't donate blood for that. It's a very good reason we'll go into that in a second actually i was in england not too long ago and i did not eat beef there uh because i've read too much about prions to mess around with that stuff yeah i mean thankfully here in america we have health food standards unlike those filthy

brits but yeah yeah we had a scare um canada had scare. And we'll talk about the repercussions of that later. But so the reason we're going back is we're going to look at the most recent time prions have become mainstream. So what happened there? So let me just unfold this a little bit. That's a joke you'll all understand in three minutes, hopefully. a prion, it's a protein in your brain. Now, I'm not a neurologist. I am a wildlife biologist and forester. So I'm not going to be able to answer every question out there about brains and proteins and stuff like that. But what the prion protein in your brain does is it moves copper around, which is important for cell stuff. I personally think that mankind should have never looked through a microscope and everything at the cellular level is just heresy. We shouldn't look at it at all. No, I'm completely on board with you there. There's certain things we never should have studied and anything that involves a microscope is one of them.

Oh yeah. You lost me there. A hand lens, I'm good for. You can see small stuff, but microscopes, Audi 5000. Okay. So in your brain, you're moving around copper and stuff, and it's important for like cell stuff. So, um, we're going to go back to high school biology for most folks, you know, proteins building block of life important. So your protein structure is dictated by the elements in it and how they're like arranged, you know, like stacked on top of each other. So that's, that's basic, you know, uh, high school biology, but then, you know, as you get a little bit further in biology you find out that it's a little bit more complex so proteins like you know all things in our real

world are unfortunately not like in the textbook and these are 3d and so they have like shapes and folds now when folded correctly it just prion protein operates normally and just moves copper around um unfortunately doesn't always you, sometimes it doesn't fold correctly. And when that happens, it doesn't move copper. And so brains have a little bit of an issue because they don't get copper to the right place. Yeah, and this is why all those truck stops sell those copper bands that you can put on your wrist to solve diseases, right? It's to deal with that. Yeah, you just keep that copper band on your wrist, sure.

Solve that problem. Yeah. So what happens when that happens is you get a prion disease. There are some that evolve in, that just like, they don't evolve because they're not living. Yeah. They just pop up in nature. So like bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow. We referenced that a little bit earlier.

Talk about that in a second. Scrapey, feline spongiform encephalopathy, which comes from cats that ate meat that was infected with mad cow. And then there's kuru. Yeah, kuru. That's the one cannibals get, right? Like this is famously why cannibals, quote unquote, go crazy. Actually, a lot of cannibals were well aware that you don't eat meat from certain areas, but it is a thing. If you're going to eat people, be really careful about the spine.

Don't eat brains and spines. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. There's, in humans, it's called the spongiform encephalopathy. I'm going to explain the big word in one second. It's called Kramholtz-Jakob's disease. It was figured out by two Germans.

Really neat stuff. Yeah, it's one of my favorite disease names because you just know you're in for some like horrifying shit when you when you see the the that spelled out you're like well that's got to be something bad yeah well yeah luckily like you know for two german guys like alive in the 30s yeah did good stuff like they they two of the four german doctors who weren't nazis in that period yeah yeah it seems like one of them died right before things like the you know things went south there and what great timing yeah yeah okay so so i've been throwing around this word spongiform encephalopathy um and then like you know i changed like the you know bovine

feline whatever so it a spongiform means something looks like a sponge. And an encephalopathy means brain. So your brain turns into a sponge. And that's because you're not getting copper. And so cells are falling apart. And your brain just doesn't work, to be real simple. It's kind of like Alzheimer's. That's how it presents in humans, which is why it's really hard to figure out.

And then when you want to determine that something has spongiform encephalopathy you got to cut the brain open look at it under a microscope hell yeah you do um and as you can imagine uh that doesn't usually happen in people you don't usually cut their brains open and also in a lot of animals you don't usually cut their brain open look at it under a microscope well it's bad for them right like that's not yeah yeah it's always lethal always a microscope. Well, it's bad for them, right? Yeah. It's always lethal. Always a lethal sample. So that's the basics of what a prion disease is. And then when we saw it in England,

what had happened was it got into cows. Cows got it from eating other cows that were fed back to them. And then it got into humans because we ate the Brits in the 30s. In the 90ss ate cows that were infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy and you had to eat a good amount of it for it to build up in your brain right and what i mean by that is but we're americans right right so not a

problem for americans yeah i just want to kind of like lay a foundation so we all understand what's going on yeah um and so what i mean when i build up in your brain is like, you know, you get like one, two proteins in there. You're fine. It's okay. Proteins misfold all the time. It takes, you know, brains are big, especially in humans. So it takes a while for this to become a problem. But what happens is over time is one is once you build up enough, you're getting exposed to enough prions that are misfolded.

Like the prions in the brain start misfolding, and then slowly your brain just stops functioning correctly. It's like a slow chain reaction. So that's the basics of prion diseases and spongiform encephalopathies. Now, we're talking about chronic wasting disease, which can be easily described as the deer equivalent of mad cow disease. And when you see a lot of stuff about it, it's called zombie deer because deer get weird when they are dying from chronic wasting disease. The name chronic wasting disease comes from because they're wasting away. They're like drooling and also drinking a lot.

They act weird. They look dumb. They just do weird stuff. And so people call it zombie like fear, but they're not. They're just infected with a prior disease and their brain is falling apart. It's like a person getting Alzheimer's. Like they do weird stuff. My grandma has Alzheimer's.

It's terrible. Don't get it. Yeah. I, yeah. My grandma had, um, uh, the same thing that Robin Williams got the, uh, uh, Lewy body dementia. And it's, it's pretty much the same thing, right? Like you can just see somebody kind of falling apart piece by piece, but that probably does make the deer easier to hunt. Yes. And it also makes it really easy to identify what it's an it's advanced stages in deer so we got a kind of an understanding of about it but like you know why do we care we are people we are not deer right robert are you a deer uh not right now i mean i have been to a furry convention but but i didn't commit so we all got our things. Well, so I,

I hunt deer, Robert, I think you hunt. I don't know. I'm getting, I'm getting ready for, for hunting season as we, as we speak.

Yeah. So, so lots of people hunt deer and they eat deer, which is, which is cool and it's fine. And it's important to do in, you know, certain ecosystems.

I mean, in most of the U S like deer have been hunted by various you know humans for as long as people have been here yeah so you know it's it's a natural thing to do yeah it's very normal for people to hunt deer and it's very normal and also there are areas where we killed everything else that hunts deer yeah so there's there's anyway whatever we don't need to defend deer hunting here i i've done yeah hours of webinars on the importance of deer management it's it's a real fun subject to go into but yeah we don't care about that we're talking about chronic wasting disease fun stuff so so we care about that we care about chronic wasting disease because it impacts

all members of the cervid family or deer so that's you know elk moose i just learned the europeans call moose uh european elk wild arrogant it ridiculousness yeah look at a moose look at an elk super different wildly different animals like they're both very big but they're also different sizes it's like the difference between like an armored car and a tank like a fucking moose is like it's basically an elephant in terms of its footprint like oh yeah they're so cool to see but so enormous yeah yeah the impact it it can get in all cervids that we know of it's um and you know people like you know people like to see cervids they like to hunt cervids we'd like to do it you know in different countries they're delicious they have the best meat yes absolutely yeah so much better than fucking beef so much

better than uh uh pork in my opinion like oh i fucking love venison oh yeah moose i don't know if you had moose i've had it once oh it's delicious yeah moose and elk wonderful meats uh that's actually a big thing joe rogan and I talk about when we're hanging out is elk meat. He's a big elk meat guy. That's good. I, I've, uh, I've never, I've never hunted an elk. I've put in for the lottery every year, but it's hard to get hard to get elk tags in Pennsylvania. I know it's a real surprise.

Yeah. You know what? I'll, I'll go ahead and reach out now. It's easy to get the tags here, but it is hard unless you have a friend with land that elks are on to actually hunt them as as much as it could yeah anyway if you've got land in oregon and you want me to hunt elk on it hit us up yeah so so you know as we can see there's a clear demand for cervids and cervid products and so in like the 50s and 60s people started you know they're like well you know sometimes you're not

always good at hunting and not everyone wants to hunt so they started trying to domesticate and farm them right um cervids famously like running away i've seen a lot of deer tails robert you hunt i'm sure you have yeah yeah and a lot of like tracks that you can tell and like with shit or something near them that like oh man i fucking missed that son of a bitch by like 30 seconds yeah yeah and if you even if you drive around you'll see just like they're like oh car i'm out of 5000 they don't need to be here uh sometimes they go across the road and hit him that's the story um then you get your free meat in some states yeah you know sometimes it's bruised to heck but uh that is how i get to eat some moose. Someone hit it with a car. They don't like being in captivity at all.

Not a fan. They were very stressed in captivity. In the 60s in Colorado, on the University of Colorado, on their deer farm, they noticed the deer were getting skinny and weird. And that's how, that's where chronic wasting disease was discovered. Because we tried to fucking farm an animal that's not, okay, awesome. Love it.

Yeah. Yeah. There are some folks who think that it's a natural thing, but it doesn't look like it. Doesn't look like it. No reports of it being around from before the 60s. And as we laid out, lots of people ate a lot of deer and saw a lot of deer before the 60s. So probably came from farming servants. So then since then, deer farming is not really regulated.

And also deer are not really easy to keep in captivity. They like to jump. And when fences blow down, and so they'll get out of captivity. And also other deer they like come up to you know captive deer and they're like yo what's up with you though you're in a cage huh and so you you can actually see them they'll like interact through the fence um and that's probably how it got out of containment is through interactions and you know cervids being spread uh the country. And so now chronic waste disease is found in 30 states, I think four Canadian provinces, Scandinavia, and Korea. So I think it's four or five countries.

So it's out there. It's out there. And it's infecting cervid populations across the US and across Canada and the world. It's real bad. it's real bad it's real bad so yeah it seems like a problem yeah yeah so if you're a deer what happens is you either interact with another to pick up chronic wasting disease we'll go through the deer kind of the progression in deer to pick it up you either interact with the deer that has chronic wasting disease so you go up and smell them, you lick them a little bit, deer groom each other, you know,

they're animals. You eat a plant that another deer pooped on. Now, it doesn't have to have pooped on that plant. So, like, this is a deer that's infected with chronic wasting disease, can poop in the soil, and the plant will pick up the prion from the soil. Awesome. Yeah, and then another deer can come in. It can just spread.

Yeah. Cool. That's, that's some real scary shit. Yeah. Yeah. And it can also, you can also pick it up from water,

but it has spreading in water is really tough. So, um, those are your main vectors is, you know, deer to deer and environment to deer. Um, and that's why it's pretty tough to control once it gets into a state, because to destroy

it, you have to dig up the soil and you have to burn it at a thousand degrees for an hour, or you have to expose it to bleach for an hour to destroy the prion. Because it's not a living thing, it's a protein. Yeah, I mean, and there are a couple of towns that I would be okay doing that too, but on a nationwide scale, that seems difficult to pull off. Yeah, I can think of a state that starts with an a nationwide scale, that seems difficult to pull off. I can think of a state that starts with an O and an H that I wouldn't mind losing.

You know, if we just were like, let's just try it. Why not give it a shot, right? Yeah, it's just Ohio. Come on. It's not a real state. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So in deer,

we're going to stay just in the deer. We're not going to get scary yet. So in deer, this slowly builds up throughout the population and you get worst case scenarios like in southwestern Wisconsin where like 50 to 75% of the deer harvested, bucks harvested a year are positive for chronic wasting disease and because it's an always fatal you know brain disease you're looking

at population collapse and extinction great yeah because it remains in the soil too like yeah it's around for at least two probably more years but the studies we've done are only two years because uh these are not fun things to study. People have died studying these diseases from prions. When they've done work on BSE, a lab tech actually pricked herself with the tool and got CJD and died from it. Oh my god. Yeah, they're not fun to study. We're talking like

martian suit style study stuff it's not fun cool so like yeah the stand level shit yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah so so like you know it without you know when chronic wasting disease is not addressed in deer populations like in southeastern in southwestern Wisconsin, you're looking at extinction level stuff. Because all of the deer that are out there, 75% of them have chronic wasting disease or at some point are getting chronic wasting disease, which means that they're putting more and more of it in the environment. And they're more like, if you're an uninfected deer, three-quarters of your buddies are infected. So you're going to get chronic wasting disease and be dead within two or three years. So you're looking at extinction of all cervids in that area for some amount of time until it comes out of the soil. That's bad.

That is a problem, yes. Yeah, yeah. As we have established, neither of us are deer. So why do we care? So why do we care? I mean, outside of the fact that deer are pretty important to the ecology of local areas and that that collapse is bad. Yeah. What is the risk to human beings beyond that?

Yeah. Yeah. We put ecology aside all the time. Right. This is the world. We don't really care about that. Yeah. I deal with what happens when you put ecology aside so i'm super used to that that yeah so the the risk is if it jumps into humans because all of a sudden you have a disease that's really hard to detect that can live in the

environment that can be transferred from not just spinal fluid, but if you eat a lot of infected meat from deer, if you eat some of the organs, you can get it at a high risk. So all of a sudden, you have a large portion of the population that could be exposed through direct consumption. But the other thing is, prions are really hard to kill. I said they live in soil. They also live on steel surfaces, glass surfaces. Every surface that they've tested, like trying to kill prions, putting prions on and seeing how long they live there soil they also live on steel surfaces glass surfaces uh every like surface that they've tested like trying to kill prions like you know putting prions on and seeing how

long they live there hang out there there was some surgical equipment that was infected with a prion uh gave someone chronic wasting or not not chronic cjd three years after using it on someone who had um cjd great yeah and that's you know, surgical grade stainless steel stuff. So like not supposed to hold things, gets like cleaned, but not like super, like not prime level clean. Cause they didn't know about it at the time.

So, so there's, there's the risk is, is, is it could potentially develop into a human, something that impacts humans. Like right now it hasn't, we do have eight different variations of it out there in the landscape.

And as more and more deer are exposed to it, what happens? We get more and more variations of it because that's just what happens in nature. Yeah. As we're all becoming familiar with with COVID. Yeah, it keeps changing because nothing has been done to stop it from spreading. Yeah. And like the only thing you can do to stop it is just reduce deer numbers. You can't really eliminate it out of the landscape

because it's in the soil. Yeah. Yeah, and you can't test live deer for it. You've got to kill them to do it. There are some tests being developed to determine if animals are infected that are faster, but it's still in progress.

So that's called RT-Quick. It's a protein test that's much faster than current testing, but it's still in progress. So the thing that really scares me is the other thing that makes chronic wasting disease different from BSE, mad cow diseases, mad cow was in cows that were in you know captive spaces right and you know you know where the cows are yeah it's a problem but it's a problem that you can like with enough fire and or other tools eradicate yeah yeah and it didn't it didn't

seem to be you know very present in soil and it was like you had to feed dead cows to live cows to get them infected. Chronic waste disease is a different beast. So the real scary potential here is that it's in soil, so it can get into plants, and we know that plants can transmit chronic waste disease to other deer. So it could transmit it to other animals animals like things that eat plants you know for example you and i eat plants if you're an american uh you eat corn in a couple of different forms deer love hanging out in cornfields oh yeah so there is an exposure vector right there and it's you know when you're due when you're processing corn into corn syrup let's say um you take a bunch of corn from a bunch of different places,

smoosh it up, grind it up, you know, you do a bunch of stuff to it on steel surfaces, and you don't heat it to a thousand degrees for an hour, so all of a sudden you have a case of soda that could be infected with chronic wasting disease. There's the potential, the big potential damage.

If this shit jumps to people, which it hasn't yet i want to be really clear about that so we're not causing too but if it does the containment thing is like even an order of magnitude beyond fucking covid shit right like it's because it's spread through the soil it gets into the fucking basic ingredients of food and we we simply the way that we process that stuff isn't set up in a way that will eliminate it right now. Yeah. And I would tell you, you really can't on a large scale, like process anything that's, and make it safe from, you know, like chronic wasting disease.

Because you'd have to like, you know, if you, if you like cut up, like, let's, let's, let's go back to like, assuming like, you know know it's just in the you you're handling an infected deer if you cut that deer up you use your knife you got to put it in bleach for an hour and then you can come back to it bleak does really corrosive so it'll eventually destroy your knife so there's there's your end thing there but you can also get through your hands you know touching it you can get um yeah so that's the scary part there i mean like you like as you pointed out and i start i really totally failed on my part to mention it hasn't jumped to humans yes we're not we are not saying you are going to get the disease tomorrow that is not the but it also like isn't like there's nothing that says it can't jump to humans right right yeah right exactly so um there have been a number of like three or four there are two studies I know of.

There's a third one I've heard about looking at if, you know, human-like animals can get chronic wasting disease. So that's macaques, which are kind of monkey. And when they have been fed chronic, you know, meat infected

with chronic wasting disease, and they were exposed to blood, they were fed it, they were exposed to blood, and some it they were exposed to blood and some of it was just injected right into the back of their brain stem um the monkeys got chronic wasting disease um that's so it looks like it's possible um and then also hamsters which are also used as a human stand-in have also been fed meat infected with chronic wasting disease and they were able to get it and they really get it

from a number of different uh sources um there are some really like fun and by fun i mean scary uh papers out there about like all the ways you like chronic wasting disease moves around and survives uh and the the studies about like using human stand-ins are not always fun to read i know Like, using human stand-ins are not always fun to read. No. And this is definitely one of those things where it's like, yeah, what is the other option other than, yeah, you have to try it on shit that's, yeah, that's very unsettling. But, like, yeah, what else are you going to do? Like, this is something you do have to know.

Yeah, yeah. something you do have to know yeah yeah and um the other problem with prions is detection when it comes to like you know different species is it presents like alzheimer's and so the only way you know that something got a prion disease is if you cut their head you if you cut its head open you look at its brain so um when and in humans it can take a long time for these symptoms to present. I think if you look it up on Wikipedia, it says the average age detection is 60 years. Oh, then we're good. Fine. Yeah, yeah. The researchers that I've spoken to say it takes 40 years for enough prions to build up in your brain for it to start to show symptoms. brain for it to like you know start to show symptoms so it you know if it is to jump if it jumps the species barrier the first time we detect it will probably not be the first time anyone has

been infected yeah it will already have spread quite widely and then people will yeah hopefully not but yeah so so that that's the scary part that that's the human side scary part but you know we don't always have to keep human side scary. Sometimes, you know, things work in, you know, monkeys and hamsters that don't work in humans. And we've cured cancer, you know, hundreds of times in mice, right? Yeah. And in humans, it's a lot harder to do because we're not mice. We're not monkeys.

We're humans. So it doesn't always work like that. But the other scary part is when it comes to agriculture and the impact on agriculture so pigs can pick up chronic wasting disease they're what's called a prion amplifier so they can pick it up they can it like you know hangs out in them just fine it doesn't kill pigs at all they can nothing kills pigs but people yeah it's true that's the truth right there that That's the truth. Yeah. So, so, you know, if, if it, you know, as people, you know, governments become more aware of it and more concerned about

it there, there's the real possibility of, you know, agricultural exports getting hammered on, you know, exporting it. Cause you know, other countries, you know, are concerned about spreading it. So right now, you know, it's pretty hard other countries you know are concerned about spreading it so right now you know it's pretty hard to well it's getting increasingly harder to export live deer is it probably should be probably farming servants is not a great idea for their health and ours but um you know also there's the concern about spread so if if chronic wasting disease is you know crosses from humans to cows like we we've seen if BSE just pops up in some cows, that might be from chronic wasting disease. And the impact of that is going to be huge. I mean, Canada, they were shut out of the Japanese beef market for 14 years following a case of mad cow disease in 2006.

They got let back in two years ago. And the studies on that was like a couple of billion dollars in damage to the Canadian beef market. And that was BSE, which doesn't transfer via plants. So imagine as the US agricultural export market got shut down for plants, the economic damage is incalculable. Yeah. Yeah, so that's the scary part about chronic wasting disease.

Those are all the scarinesses. That's what keeps me up at night. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows. Presented by I Heart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories

inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. time listen to nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast this is frightening and important for people to be aware of because it's a serious threat are there things that can be done at the moment like is there uh is there an actionable even not just like not on a what can our audience do but like is there a thing that could potentially be

done by you know states or or the federal government whatever that would help this like is there actually, do we have any fucking idea of like what could be done to make it less likely for the kind of nightmare scenarios that we've alluded to to occur here? Yeah, so the best, you know, the best things we can do are to, you know, hunt deer, reduce deer populations, so that way you're, you know, taking deer out that might be infected. And when you hunt deer in most areas that are infected, you test them for free with your state or various authorities. And so then those carcasses are destroyed. So you can remove disease off the landscape that way.

And then by also just hunting deer, you reduce population levels. And so you make the disease loading in the landscape lower and less likely to spread, both to other deers and then potentially vector to other animals, be exposed to other animals. Excuse me. New York is a great example of this. They had a case of chronic wasting disease pop up, took it out, really, you know, hunted that area hard. I think that they even brought in professionals and did some real serious deer reduction and they haven't had a case since. So, you know, in areas where it pops up, you had a case since so it you know in areas

where it pops up you can just hammer it with you know lethal removal of animals harvesting whatever and um you can prevent spread um and you can knock it you can really knock it back the other thing we got to do we need to be very serious about we need to take the the captive servant industry so i've used the word serve a couple times i never defined used the word cervid a couple of times. I never defined it. My apologies. Cervids are members of the deer family. So elk, moose, sika deer, all those guys, red deer, fallow deer, whatever, a bunch of them. We need to make sure that we're very closely regulating that industry because of the potential spread.

There was a farmer in Wisconsin that sent like almost 400 different infected deer to like 197 different farms. over the course of four years. So regulation is incredibly important, and it's not really enough on most farms. My home state here, if you make less than ten thousand dollars from your servant farm you don't have to report it you don't have to track it or anything that's a real problem because we are experiencing expanding chronic waste disease yeah so regulation you know that's not fun maybe we just shouldn't be farming servants maybe that's bad yeah i don't disagree with you at all there

yeah yeah yeah not not a fan. Yeah, don't... From an ethical standpoint, too. There's many... I raise several different... I raise bunnies and chickens and goats, and I help raise sheep for meat. There's plenty of different things that you can raise for meat

that are used to it because we've been raising them for meat for like tens of thousands of fucking years like the sheep i have are angoras which i didn't go back like 20 30 000 years like they're they're they're they're meant for it we have changed them into animals that are supposed to be raised for meat don't take new animals and try to farm them like that because it seems like it causes problems yeah well there's a really, there's some really neat work out there about domestication stress.

And like, you know, domesticated sheep don't care about being domesticated. Whereas like they've compared like domesticated sheep to wild sheep. Wild sheep die really quick when you put them in domestication from the stress. But yeah, like you said, maybe we don't play around

with some of these animals and try to force them to do human, what we humans want them to do. It's okay for animals to just be animals. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, so the other thing, there was a large amount of money set aside. And I can't remember which legislative package it was that got defeated a while back that put money towards chronic wasting disease research. So legislatures and states can be – legislatures and and governments can be taken seriously putting money towards it right now it's it's not a lot of money going

towards it because it's like yeah it's a zombie deer thing who cares yeah well you could get into agriculture this is not just a problem for deer hunters this could be a real issue for everybody yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah i mean i mean it's kind of like a larger symptomatic thing, too. We don't really take environmental problems that seriously. No. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the scary thing about this is we don't treat the environmental problems seriously when everyone's saying, hey, the consequences that like all of Florida will be uninhabitable, right? Like we don't take that seriously. So when you're saying this is much wonkier which is definitely a barrier to effective action yeah i did a legislative testimony about chronic wasting disease a couple of months back no one was paying attention but you know it made me feel good i was

doing something oh here's a fun thing about florida and chronic wasting disease so florida you know full of invasive species obviously it has chronic wasting disease like yeah that's a come on this is florida obviously i pick up a new disease yeah you know what else is in florida huh colonies of macaques there's like two colonies of wild macaques i was unaware of that yeah was it because people were unill advisedly keeping pets i think one of them started that way and i think one of them was some monkeys that had been kept for testing or zoo stuff escaped. But there are at least

two colonies of macaques in Florida, which also has chronic wasting disease. They're near the Everglades. I don't think chronic wasting disease is made that far south of Florida. There's a fun possibility of the lab experiments done under highly controlled conditions getting performed you know performed in in the wild setting we could see

if if macaques can pick up chronic wasting disease in the wild um there's a there's a fun research project for someone who uh you know is able to handle dark sides of things yeah uh thank you florida um but more importantly thank you flow rida. And a lot of people are unaware of this was just a couple of years ago in the Eurovision Song Awards representing San Marino. So, you know, 22nd overall, not bad. Yeah, that's pretty good. Better than I could do. Mm hmm. I think I had a good day. Yeah. And also, you are not technically a citizen of the Republic of San Marino.

No, but yet they offered me citizenship. I would consider it. Absolutely. Who wouldn't want to be a citizen of the most serene Republic of San Marino? Yeah, I looked at Andorra. So, you know, it would be a really we're looking at European micronations. I mean, if Andorra came knocking versus San be a really – we're looking at European micronations. I mean, if Andorra came knocking versus San Marino, obviously San Marino is getting kicked to the curb.

I love that dual government between the president of France and the bishop of somewhere in Italy. Yeah, it's very funny. Yeah, you got to love those weird little micro-republics. Oh, huge fan yeah um so okay well this has been great yeah i'm glad this is happening yeah yeah it's cool and fun yeah i'm not usually fun to hang out with when i talk about work stuff yeah i know but it's like it's again people need to be aware of this like this is one of those just in the same way that like people were talking about for years prior to COVID. Hey, we actually really need to be aware like a coronavirus could break out and it'll spread really quickly due to the way that global travel and transit and stuff works. And it'll be almost impossible to control.

You know, we should we should build structures into our societies to make it easier for us to deal with a coronavirus which we didn't do but maybe we'll do it this time yeah well what makes that really fun i'm just gonna i'm gonna build off you for a second uh you've fallen into my trap here uh the same people who were writing about like uh mers and predicted you know uh i can't remember which came first mers or sars I can't remember which came first, MERS or SARS. I can't remember which one. The same people who predicted that and then who are also predicting COVID

are also talking about chronic wasting disease. So it's like, you know, I really hope you don't get to be right on this one. Yeah. I just want you to lose one of these times here, bud. You're a nice guy, real smart guy, but can you be wrong occasionally? Just for old times' sake, just be

nice to me. Yeah. Well, there we go. That's been a fun episode. Everybody have a good time. Thank you. Calvin, do you have anything you want to plug before we roll out here? Yeah, I would like to plug trees trees is real neat try that we are supported by trees

not the plant but a club in Dallas that I took ecstasy at once that's our primary sponsor I'm physically supported by trees my my computer is on wood so oh excellent yeah there's that also good yeah trees like to plug also getting outside that's good for you do that absolutely get outside for sure yeah uh uh tweet tweets from from birds i don't do the twitter not not from twitter yes definitely yeah those are things i'd like to plug yeah replacing the tweets from twitter that you encounter with tweets from birds is probably among the best things you can do for your mental health. Unless it's this one bird that lived outside of my apartment in Los Angeles.

But anyway. Well, Calvin, thank you for coming on. I appreciate your expertise, even though it's always deeply unsettling. That's going to do it for all of us here today. It could happen here, by which I mean you and me. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find

sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow of Rye. Join me, Danny Trejo, and

step into the flames of Rye. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.