The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 070: Chronic Wasting Disease

Episode Date: June 29, 2017

Steven Rinella talks with CWD expert Bryan Richards, Doug "Buckman Juice" Duren, and Janis Putelis of the MeatEater Crew.Subjects discussed: The U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center; bighorn sheep in Texas; hibernacula; white-nose syndrome in bats; people eating other people's brains and a disease called kuru; cannibalistic cows; where did CWD come from?; elk in South Korea; CWD in Norway's reindeer; neuronal death; zoonosis (a disease that can move back and forth between animals and humans); peanut butter and prairie dogs; the “ick” factor; the captive deer industry; transporting deer carcasses and other possible vectors; deer piss; why you should care about CWD; what hunters can do to help prevent the spread; why you shouldn't begin Google searches with the words "the truth about..."; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We want the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. So we're joined by a special guest, Brian Richards.

That's right, right? You got it. With the USGS, the United States Geologic Survey, and at the... National Wildlife Health Center. At the National Wildlife Health Center. In Madison, Wisconsin. Now, just to start the most basic thing, because we're going to talk about wildlife diseases, particularly chronic wasting disease.

But how does wildlife disease sort of fall under the bailiwick? How is the USGS tangled up in that? Because I would hear that when I was younger, and I would think that the USGS mapped mineral deposits. USGS is formally known as the science wing or the science bureau in the Department of the Interior. But the National Wildlife Health Center originated back in Fish and Wildlife Service and moved over eventually into USGS as part of that larger conglomerate of science. So USGS does a lot of different things. Earthquake monitoring, volcanoes, natural hazards. There's a water science center virtually in every state that deals with water issues. But we also do issues in environmental health,

biology. So what's kind of interesting with the National Wildlife Health Center is we are a national center. So we deal with wildlife health issues across the country and internationally as well. Our main campus, being in Madison, Wisconsin, we have a satellite in Honolulu, Hawaii. I've been trying for the last 12 years to get relocated out there, but so far it hasn't worked. Yeah. And you grew up here in Wisconsin. I did. I grew up just maybe an hour, hour and a half northwest of where we are now on a dairy farm. And so really spent the better part of my life living outdoors and enjoying hunting and fishing, just like very similar to the property we're on here today. Just a fantastic place to grow up.

And then spent some time in Texas. I did. After I got done with grad school, you're poor, you need a job, and you start sending out applications. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, for whatever reason, decided to entertain me down there for about 11 years. I worked at the headquarters for Parks and Wildlife in big game management. I learned a lot. Texas is a very fascinating place um you know from an ecological perspective i think there's 10 distinct ecological regions in the state of texas there's something very neat about

virtually every one of them texas being so large uh you know when i was there you know we figured it was about 14 hours from east to west you know from houston del paso and probably about 14 hours from east to west, you know, from Houston to El Paso, and probably about 14 hours drive from Brownsville up to Amarillo. So, you know, just a tremendous space. But game management there is a lot of fun. There you're dealing with, you know, white-tailed deer, the premier, but you get out in west Texas, you got mule deer, you got pronghorn antelope, you got elk in a few places. So a lot of diversity and you have you know desert bighorn sheep that the state has spent a lot of time and effort restoring sheep putting them back on the mountains in in parts of texas and fantastic place that's way off subject but how's that

project going do you still follow that i keep track of uh of bighorn sheep in general from a disease perspective. And disease is a very prominent issue and a limiting issue for sheep management across North America. It's always pneumonia, right? It's a pneumonia complex. And when you look at the causative factors, it links back to domestic sheep virtually every time. And the states realize that. And, you know, if you want to boil it down, if you put desert sheep in the same space or time, you know, with domestic sheep, the wild sheep are going to die. You're going to lose them.

It's pretty, it's that simple. So, you know, sheep management is like a lot of other species management. Obviously, you need habitat. You need spaces for them. You might need to engage in some sort of predator control early on to get them established. But disease is the limiting factor when it comes to sheep pretty much across their range. There's a few places where state management agencies, game management agencies, identify that there is contact, physical contact or close contact between domestic sheep and the wild sheep. They'll go out and they'll take a herd off a mountain just because they realize the disease. If it gets embedded in that herd on one mountain, it'll spread from there.

So pretty dramatic. Sounds pretty draconian. But in order to keep sheep out there, we have to do some pretty harsh things. Now, with the bighorn thing, with the desert bighorns in Texasas how many are there in texas it's a great question i mean do you have a ballpark you know i have like this very like uh like this hunter centric way i look at it i know i think they give out a tag right there texas gives out like a bighorn tag it's pretty limited yeah so there's probably a few hundred desert sheep um some of those are going to be on public land and some of them are going to be on private land so the state manages you

know pretty tight you know hunting access trying to afford you know the great opportunity and so i think you know i don't keep track because i haven't been't been in Texas for 12, 13 years now. Oh, okay, it's been quite a while, yeah. Since I've been down there and engaged in management. But at that point in time, it seems like we were harvesting or giving way or allocating opportunities to harvest two or three rams per year. Yeah. And they were great opportunities. The neat thing, and I'm not sure if they're still doing it,

but they called it, I think it was called the Big Time Texas Hunts. And people could enter into a drawing, and the winner got a whitetail hunt, a mule deer hunt, a pronghorn hunt, and a desert bighorn ram hunt. And they were all quality. They weren't guaranteed hunts. They were quality hunts. That hit all at once you had you had to work you know but the people that won that that was like you know from a from a big game hunting standpoint i mean how could you do any better than that you know you

mentioned predator control ahead of some of the reintroductions they've done with those i remember man a long time ago when i was uh i used to do a bit of fur trapping and i was reading an article in trapper and predator caller magazine and it was the article something like the 500 000 lion and it was about they did a reintroduction you know moved in a bunch of sheep into this area and in a single lion systematically like eliminated the whole reintroduction. And so he picked up the name of what that whole project cost. Well, when you think about it, you're putting sheep on a mountainside that they're not familiar with. And that cat is familiar with every nook and cranny,

every water opportunity, every ambush spot on you know, on that mountainside. So who's got the advantage? Yeah, he just thinks a bunch of weirdos moved into town who are like very easy to kill. Yeah, so I can, you know, I can really see there's a place for predator management early on, you know, to help those herds. If you're going to go to the effort of trying to reestablish those sheep on that mountainside, it does. It kind of makes sense to try and give them the best opportunity they can. But once they're established, once those sheep know what's going on, I mean, they evolved with

predators. So we don't have to eliminate predators in order to have sheep on the mountainside. But maybe adding a little bit of balance early on seems pretty reasonable to me. So from Texas, you moved up here to Wisconsin. I did. I moved back home. Yeah. And was the, how long is the, tell me again, I'm sorry, the wildlife disease, was the? National Wildlife Health Center.

The National Wildlife Health Center. How long has that been in Madison? Since its inception back in the 1970s when it was put together. And so we just had over 40 years the center has been. It started out on the UW-Madison campus, and then we moved out into our facility. It's on the southwest side of Madison now. We've been there quite a while. How many – this might be hard to answer, but if you had to take a ballpark,

how many wildlife diseases are being looked at or are of interest to you and your colleagues? I mean, is it like over a dozen or? Yeah, I mean, if you had to ballpark it, well, we're interested in anything that results in mortality events in wildlife. So we don't really look at the single cardinal that's laying outside the plate glass window because it's probably pretty obvious what happened there. But people are our partners, and our partners being states, other federal agencies, tribal partners, report mortality and morbidity, sick or dead, events to us. And that's when we get engaged and we try and help understand what the causative agent was,

what caused that mortality event. We've been doing that for a long time. So that's a very important part of our work because our partners rely on us to be able to tell them what's going on and maybe parlay that into some management information. But then the deeper we go, we try and learn and conduct scientific activities, research to learn more about the ecological conditions that lead to disease. disease okay and then beyond that start working into where possible into mechanisms that might be able to help prevent or mitigate the effects of disease um you know you mentioned kind of a number i guess over the course of of time there have been maybe 20 big you know disease issues that we have seen that we have worked on. Some of the recent ones, we'll talk about chronic wasting disease today. Not too long after CWD, we got involved with

what is now called white-nose syndrome in bats. Pretty interesting disease, a fungal disease that it's one of the rare diseases in wildlife that truly can impart population level impacts. If you look at caves or hibernacula where white-nose syndrome has become established, we see regularly 90-95% population declines in those hibernacula and that disease is moved quite clearly from east to west and i believe it's been picked up now in about 26 states so um and having pretty significant impacts is it lethal to a lot of species of bats um it's pretty much isolated to those species of bats which hibernate in caves. You need appropriate conditions for the fungus. It's a cold-loving fungus, so it prospers in these hibernacula,

be they traditional caves where bats are hibernating, and sometimes in artificial or mines, things like that. Pardon my interruption. No worries. Hibernacula is a cave that bats use for hibernation. That they hibernate in. Gotcha. You bet.

And is there something to do with that one where they feel that some of that spread is coming from humans going into caves? Like you hear about that. That's a consistent feature with disease in general certainly uh we we expect that bat to bat you know movement of disease occurs with white nose syndrome but there's also a possibility that cavers spelunkers with their equipment could be moving that fungus that infectious material from cave to cave. So part of the management's scenario being enacted by states and federal agencies is limiting access to caves and also encouraging spelunkers, cavers, to thoroughly decontaminate all their equipment.

You know, if you're crawling, you're crawling in through a cave, I mean, you're in muck and you look like you've been crawling in a cave. And so certainly, if the fungus responsible for white-nose is in one cave, you come out of that, there's a high likelihood that you've got contamination on your ropes,

on your gear, on you. And so if the next day, you go 300, 400 miles to another cave you. And so if the next day you go, you know, three, four hundred miles to another cave, go in there with the same equipment, it's easy to understand how you might be moving infectious material. Now it certainly looks like most of the movement of white-nose syndrome is associated with that bat-to-bat type movement of disease.

Yeah, it's just like a gradual movement. Yep. But now, a year ago, white-nose popped up in the state of Washington. It's a long ways from the other closest places. So you've got to ask a question. How did it get there? And you could go back to the original question. How did the fungus get to North America?

Turns out that this fungus has been in Europe probably for a long time. And the hibernacula there, the caves where the bats doesn't manifest in large mortality in the European bats. Now, somehow that fungus got brought over to this side of the large pond and got into hibernacular cave systems where we have these incredible densities of, you know, tens of thousands of bats of bats you know congregated in the wintertime put a little bit of fungus in there the bats are hanging in there for well literally hanging in there i guess over the over the course of the winter and it provides an opportunity for that fungus to move bat to bat to bat to bat in that colony then in summertime those bats may commingle with bats or they're coming from other hibernacula, or they may in fact themselves spend the next winter in the next hibernacula,

and so you can see how that fungus has an opportunity to move. How long does the fungus take to be fatal? Probably most of, and this is not my area of expertise, but I'm going to say probably most of the winter. So if the fungus is in a cave, it's going to get on a bat soon after they move in for hibernation season. And then I think we see most of the mortality kind of in the dead of winter. Oh, so the bats will sometimes die in the cave? Some of them will die in the cave. Another thing, one of the things that people observe is bats flying around in the dead of winter. Okay?

Okay. When those bats are all reliant on insects as their food. And if it's zero degrees outside, that bat, there's no food available. So something has aroused or woken that bat up. And it could be, you know, the discomfort associated with, you know, having a fungus all across your body. You know, they're using energy resources. You know, they're in a very delicate balance when they go into hibernation. So they don't have a ton of energy left over to spare. So maybe that fungus is causing some irritation, some physical irritation, some problems with thermal regulation as the fungus might be causing holes in the patagium on the bat's wing.

So they're running out of energy. And if they're completely out of energy, they're going to have to go outside and try and hunt. And hunting in January in northern latitudes is not going to be successful. There are no insects available. So I think that contributes to the disease is that they're short on energy come middle of winter, and they just can't make it through. Yeah. So jumping on from there into cwd and the reason i kind of the reason that our audience well i know the reason our audience is interested in cwd because we have a lot of people we hang out with and who listen who eat a lot of venison

okay avid deer hunters and the question we get all the time is like what do you think about cwd and what's gonna happen with cwd and is my deer safe to eat would you eat a deer if it had cwd and um i'm always like i i'm always uh brimming over with opinions about everything but i'm always really hesitant to talk about something that has so many question marks. And I think we'll probably, in talking to you about this, we'll probably butt up against a lot of those question marks, maybe to a point where you don't even feel like, you know, where you feel like you've moved beyond the known science and you're just going into pure speculation. So I realize that's going to happen. And if you do get up to a thing where I'm asking you an opinion and you don't

want to give it, that's great. But I think that a safe way to begin and talk about this, can you explain the relationship between when we hear about mad cow disease, we hear about chronic wasting disease, and then we hear about Jacob. Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease. Okay.

They're all kind of cousins, right? I mean, can you break down that family tree? Sure. I can try to. And Scrapey is another one, right? Scrapey is another one. Transmissible mink encephalopathy is another one. Okay.

All right. All of the diseases you mentioned, CWD in deer, scrapie in sheep, BSE or mad cow disease in cattle. And that's bovine, spongiform? Bovine, spongiform, encephalopathy. Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease in humans. There's another one in humans that we don't see anymore. It's called Kuru. root. All of these diseases are members of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs. Great big long words and you look it up in the dictionary

and it boils down pretty simple. Encephalopathy is a disease of the brain. Spongiform means spongy or holes and transmissible means very simply that a disease can be transmitted from animal A to animal B. So transmissible spongy brain. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. But it's important to understand the source of that sponginess or the holes in the brain as well. These diseases are the causative agent is a protein, okay, being very different than virtually any other disease we know of. You think of viruses,

we think of, you know, bacteria, we think of, you know, in the case of white nose syndrome, you know, an invasive fungus, okay? All of those are, in essence, living entities. They have nucleic material. So we can see how they can reproduce. We can see how they can evolve over time. So you come back to the causative agent for TSEs, a protein that's referred to as a prion. And so you get into, it's kind of challenging to put this in the same sense as viruses and bacteria because they don't have genetic material. So these prions- It's a living thing though, right? Well, not really.

A protein is not necessarily a living entity. We don't- But it causes- Causes disease. You'll explain what happens. I living entity. We don't. But it causes disease. You'll explain what happens. I'll try. I'll try. So all mammals produce a normal cellular prion protein. It's a chain of amino acids.

It's about 250 long. So it's a relatively small protein. And so if you go back to what you learned in biology class about proteins, it's a chain of amino acids that then folds up into a three dimensional shape. Okay. So all mammals produce normal prion proteins. We're not certain exactly what they do, but they're very efficient. Okay. in the body and produced by all mammals. And it seemed like produced a lot of normal cellular prion protein in the central nervous system as well. When a prion protein is produced, it's produced in an extracellular environment or coded for,

it does whatever it does. It might be involved in intracellular communication, but then that normal cellular prion protein is broken down. It's recycled by the body, has a half-life of maybe between four and six hours. So it's produced, it does what it does, it's broken down by the body and then recycled into its normal parts. Okay. Then there is this disease-associated prion protein. It's the exact same sequence of amino acids. It's folded up into a different three-dimensional form. So if you think of, if you took a piece of a really old rubber band, you know, that's been sitting in a drawer for several years, it's wound up into a three-dimensional shape. So if you think of that as the normal form, and then you stretch it out and you let it go, and it snaps back into a different form, that's in essence what we're looking at, okay?

A different three-dimensional form of the same protein. And this different form, the disease-associated prion, has radically different properties. I mentioned a normal cellular prion protein breaks down on its own in about four to six hours or has a half-life of four to six hours. The disease-associated form is persistent. It can persist in the environment for years, potentially up to decades. It also cannot be broken down by ultraviolet light. It's very insensitive to changes in temperature. So if you want to destroy disease-associated prion protein, you'd have to

get it up to maybe 600 plus degrees centigrade. So you're not going to cook it out of a steak per se. So a radically different protein, it's the same protein with radically different form and radically different characteristics. It looks like this is more or less like a template where a single disease-associated prion protein enters into a healthy, susceptible animal. That disease-associated protein makes physical contact with the normal cellular protein, causing it to unfold and refold into its own form, and then moving on. So creating kind of a cascading interaction where the disease-associated form takes over the system. And the disease-associated prion protein in the body is associated with neuronal death. And so when we talk about that spongy appearance of the brain, those are holes where

neurons used to be. Oh, really? I didn't realize that. And as the disease-associated prion proteins come in contact, we don't know the exact mechanism of how they kill neurons, but they do. They result in neuronal death, leaving those microscopic holes in the brain. So that's the physical mechanism of how we get to that spongiform encephalopathy. So without equipment, because you with a naked eye look at like a grossly infected brain and tell? No, the holes aren't quite that large so the neurons aren't that large yeah i'm saying even if so even so it would appear even if even if it was this brain was like racked with the stuff it would never like shape change the form of the

brain you'd look at and look like a normal brain unless you look at it under a microscope with some special staining then you would be able to see it. The hallmark of all TSEs is progressive neurological degeneration. You slowly are losing the capability to be a functional being. And if you look at Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, one of the human TSEs, it affects, we see new cases about one in a million to one and a half per million new cases per year in humans. The typical clinical figure is a person in their late 50s to early 60s. You say one in one million?

One in a million in new cases per year. And is that globally or nationally? That's globally. But is it true in an international sense? Like, does it say that 300 Americans a year get this? Yeah. Yeah, probably pretty close. If we've got 300 million, we're probably looking at 300 new cases per year in humans in the United States.

And, you know, that's a ballpark figure. Horrific way to go, progressive neurological degeneration followed by death. And we think about as these disease-associated prion proteins accumulate in the brain and in the central nervous system, resulting in neuronal death, it's easy to see how, you know, once that reaches a critical mass, you know, inside of the central nervous system, neurological degeneration proceeds fairly quickly and is followed by death. So that's the hallmark of each one of the TSEs. It was the same thing in BSE or mad cow disease where you probably remember seeing videos of cows that are just nobody's home. It's reached that phase. Another hallmark of the TSE is this tremendously long incubation period.

So in Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, it's hard to say how long that disease has been progressing in individuals, but it seems to manifest in that clinical phase of disease at the same time frame, that late 50s into early 60s. It doesn't spontaneously generate. It has to be that the person, in the case of the human form, it has to be that the person somehow took in. The infectious agent? Yeah. That's uncertain. With CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, it's thought that most of the normal cases are sporadic or spontaneous in those individuals.

That something just happened okay there during you know the course of the lifetime that started that cascading interaction with one or multiple prion normal cellular prions tipping over into that disease associated form and starting that cascading interaction so it's not necessarily that they rubbed noses with another infected person. Correct. In the majority of cases in that classical CJD profile, either that or we have been unable to identify the moment, the causation, the causative event. We can contrast that a little bit with another disease, really remarkable disease called Kuru. Kuru was first described back in the 1920s, 1930s, someplace in there in Papua New Guinea in a tribe called the Foray tribe, F-O-R-E. And the Foray had a rather,

what I guess we would consider an unusual trait. And they practiced ritualized cannibalism. Okay. So when one of their tribal members died, to honor that tribal member, they consumed the body. Okay. And somehow a TSE got into that population.

And so when the ritualistic cannibalism occurred, it created an opportunity for transmission of the disease-associated agent for the disease-associated prion protein. And so Kuru developed over the course of a few decades into an epidemic situation. It started very small. So when one person died of Kuru, their body was consumed, maybe leading to other cases. They infected multiple individuals. Then after a fairly protracted incubation period, some of those individuals died. Very horrific death, you know, after severe neuronal degeneration. And then they were consumed.

They were consumed. And so you can see how that cascading interaction. So there, very clearly, there was a consumption, you know, some sort of a foraging habit which led to disease. That, coincidentally, is identical or virtually identical to what happened with bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE, mad cow disease, where it seems like we were trying to create maximum efficiency in a livestock production system. And so there's a lot of waste. When you butcher a cow, there's a lot of waste. There's the offal, the hide, bones, things like that.

And so we all realized that cows produce better on a higher protein diet. So it made sense. It made logical sense from a production standpoint to take the offal from, you know, when you're slaughtering cattle, to render it, cook it, and then mix it up into a high-protein food source, mix it with other forage material, and feed it back to cows. So in essence, what we were doing was we were creating cannibalistic cows, right? Yeah. Or feeding cow back to cow. It's not a normal. It's an aberrant foraging behavior. So somehow we got the first case of BSE in a cow.

That cow either died from BSE or was processed normally for beef production, whatever the case may be, the infectious material being concentrated in the spinal cord in the brain of that first cow was rendered not quite effectively enough to deactivate the infectious agent. Yeah, you're saying that has to be 600 degrees centigrade. Yeah, it didn't get quite warm enough. And so that cow, in essence, was fed back to thousands. Some of those animals developed BSE.

And so you're trying to maximize the use of the carcasses. So you grind that up and feed it back to more. And so the numbers look like, you know, there were probably potentially millions of cows at one point that were infected with BSE. Is that right? Really? And as soon as epidemiologists, you know, disease specialists figured out, you know, it seemed like, yeah, this has got to be a foodborne thing. And they were able to figure out what it was, banned feeding bovine protein back to other cows. And the cycle stopped, in essence stopped. And so we had an epidemic curve that ran like it looked like it was going straight up a mountainside. And as soon as you figure out what was going on and you stop that practice, the epidemic curve comes down the other side. Now, there's still a few cases out there periodically today, but not

the volume that there were. Yeah, like the U.S. has only had one, right? Some cow out of Yakima, Washington, right? Well, that was the first one. We've had a few more than that. There's been some since then. Yeah, it's kind of interesting in that we can talk about how CWD moved around, but it looks almost certainly like the United States gave Canada CWD through movement of captive elk back in the 1980s or potentially early 1990s. Was that before they had identified it? We'd identified what was going on. Our scientists had identified what was going on our scientists had identified what was going on but it certainly it was prior to knowledge of how movement of of animals could really contribute to movement of

disease yeah but it looks like almost certainly that we gave cwd to canada and so maybe it was only fitting that they sent bse back to us in Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. Boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Whew! Our northern

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So let me back you up a little bit here. I want to get to that, but let me back you up. Are there known cases? I should know this, but I don't. Are there known cases where they could track the mad cow form having passed into a human? Are they able to trail that? Yes. Yes, pretty clearly.

We mentioned Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease as being kind of that classic disease. The clinical profile is a person late 50s, early 60s. There's another form. It's called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease. And the first cases were detected largely in Great Britain in the same time frame, a little bit later after the BSE crisis began in Great Britain as well. These humans were exhibiting very similar characteristics. And when they died, it was very apparent from their autopsy, from looking at the spinal

and the brain material, that they had a spongiform encephalopathy. And they were able to tie that statistically back to consumption of beef from the mad cow or the BSE situation. So here's an instance, and BSE is a very interesting disease that it was able to jump across that species barrier. So it was not just a disease of cattle. When we fed BSE positive material to multiple other species, including humans, it led to disease. And so that variant CJD, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease profile, seemed to be humans that were a lot younger, typically in 20s, in 30s, things like that. So it looked like CJD, but it acted different. And so that was kind of the first tie. Was there a possibility that BSE crossed over? And now it's fairly certain that BSE did cross over into humans,

bridging that species barrier. And you might come back and wonder, well, where did BSE come from? Well, that's an interesting question, but one of the possibilities is that it originated as scrapie in sheep. And that's one of the TSEs we haven't gotten to yet, but that's one that's been known longer than any. Scrapie in sheep was first documented in the literature in 1734. So it's been around for a very long time. And they probably could only tell the behavior of the dying animal, right? At that point in time, yeah. And Scrapey has been a problem for you know for you know many years decades to centuries but it looks like scrapie

may crossed over into bse and certainly it's it's one plausible explanation for for where chronic wasting disease came from you know cwd first described back in 1967 in a in a research facility out in the state of colorado doesn't mean it started there but it was first described there and when we say cwd we're talking about angular or not so we're talking about just members of the deer family carry cwd as far as we know cwd is the tsc of members of the cervid or the deer family so we name Name which species it's been found in. Okay. It has been detected in free-ranging and captive white tail, mule deer, elk, a handful of cases in moose and in reindeer as well. Most recently picked up in reindeer, three reindeer, and a couple moose in Norway.

You know, the first cases outside of North America, other than a game farm situation in South Korea. So we talk about distribution of CWD in those species, and it's been picked up in 24 states in free-ranging and or captive situations in North America, two provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada, also picked up and described in South Korea. In South Korea, didn't they have some American deer? Elk, actually.

American elk? Yeah. It's an interesting case because the original animals that that died were elk that still had Canadian ear tags in them. And so it's highly unlikely that those elk, you know, swam the big pond from North America over to South Korea. So I think we can we can pretty clearly identify how, you know, how those animals and how disease moved. Now, there have been additional outbreaks in South Korea. So it looks like their efforts to stamp out or keep the disease under control have had some success, but they haven't been completely successful in that they've had a few additional outbreaks.

But how about the ones in Norway? Norway is a real interesting situation, and I don't know that we'll ever truly know how CWD got there. It was picked up a year ago initially in a reindeer, and then after they did some additional surveillance, outbreak surveillance, and they found it in two more reindeer. They also found it in two moose. Okay.

And it's kind of, it's interesting. Did the moose live near the reindeer? They were not. The moose were quite a distance away. And as you're full aware, moose are relatively solitary animals. They don't hang out in big herds. And so the cases we've seen in moose and even in North America have been, you know, just one here, one there. I think it's, you know, less than 10 total cases in all of North America in free-ranging moose.

So they don't seem to be a real big player. They're certainly susceptible, you know, to CWD, but they don't seem to be a real big player in movement of disease. Now with the reindeer, again, as you're aware, reindeer are, you know, they hang together in very large herds. So the science was completed a few years ago that strongly suggested reindeer were susceptible to CWD, but we have not seen an outbreak in North America. So this instance in Norway now, pick it up in three reindeer, is the first instance in free-ranging herds. The Norwegians are very, very concerned about this. And so they're kind of taking the gloves off with regard to management. Something that we have not really been effective at dealing with disease in free-ranging populations in North America, they're going to take the gloves off over there. And so the reindeer maintain relatively to eliminate eradicate one whole herd unit of about 2 000

reindeer over a fairly large geographic area now it'll be a little bit easier than uh than trying to get rid of all the whitetail in a region because they are they you know they hang together they're stuck together and they're in more open country. More open country. So they will be able to pull it off. But hats off to the Norwegian government and their natural resources and agriculture folks. They look at this as a very serious issue. They have observed what has been going on in North America with CWD over the last few decades. And they concluded, A, they don't

want it. B, so far, it seems like that disease, however it got there, is a fairly recent phenomenon. And so with CWD, I would argue that you probably get one chance at effective management of CWD in a free-ranging population. It has to be early. And so they believe, based on the data they have, that CWD has not been there long. They don't want it, so they're going to take the gloves off. They're going to eliminate this herd unit, and they're going to keep all other animals out of the geographic area where this herd has lived for a minimum of five years.

We talked about that characteristic of the disease-associated prion protein not being able to be degraded in the environment. It looks like it persists in the environment for years, potentially decades, and can remain viable and bioavailable. So healthy, naive, susceptible animals can pick up that disease-associated prion protein from contaminated environment. If you catch disease early enough, early enough in the epidemic, there's probably not much of that contamination relative to later on. So if you're going to be successful with managing this disease, you have to catch it early, and you probably have to take the gloves off the way the Norwegians are doing.

Now, you may recall back to Wisconsin back in 2002. Well, before you do that, though, hit me with Colorado. So what happened in Colorado? All right. That was where they identified it in the U.S.? Yeah. Well, CWD was first described in this research facility in Colorado back in 1967. And that was captive deer?

They were research animals. Okay, yeah. They were captive animals. They were research animals maintained by the state of Colorado. Now, part of the history of CWD is that there may have been disease research going on with scrapie in that vicinity or the same area or maybe even the same facility. So one of the possible mechanisms for where CWD came from, and it's not the only one, is that what we're looking at is scrapie and deer. CWD and scrapie have some really unique characteristics. All the rest of the TSEs, be it Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease, be it BSE in cattle,

they don't move on their own. We had to feed cow to cow in order to create an epidemic with BSE. With Kuru, people had to consume people, okay, in order for disease to move. Scrapie and CWD are unique amongst the TSEs in that they are contagious. They are freely laterally transmissible. So deer A or elk A can give CWD to another animal on its own. There doesn't need to be any human intervention. Scrapie is the same way. It moves sheep to sheep to sheep. These animals are shedding infectious agent through bodily fluids, through saliva, through urine, through feces. And that creates a contagious mechanism.

If that saliva is taken up by another animal, a healthy, naive, susceptible animal, it can lead to disease transmission. So we go back to the Colorado thing. One of the possibilities might be that CWD originated and transferred across the species barrier from scrapie. You look at the timeline. I mentioned that scrapie was first described in America was in 1948, and it was traced back to a flock of sheep that had been moved across the pond. So human intervention. But over the course of the next 20 years, scrapie had proliferated and been moved largely by humans moving sheep around. Scrapie had moved across a lot of North America as well.

So the time and the place, if we think Scrapey came to North America around 1948 and the first time CWD was described was about 20 years later out in Colorado, that's what we would refer to as a parsimonious solution for where CWD came from. We can't prove it, though. There are other possibilities.

Because some people are kind of... I don't fully understand why, but there's some resistance to that, I gather, because if you start reading on the web, you'll find people making very spirited arguments that it's always been here.

I read that. Do you even care to speak to that? Well, yeah, I would. I can take a stab at that. Okay, so CWD in these places where it has been established the longest, places in Colorado, a place in Wyoming, in the South Converse unit, in Converse County, Wyoming. I think we're not far behind in Iowa County, not far from here, Iowa County, Wisconsin. Places where CWD has been established for a while, decades. We've seen two phenomena.

Number one, we see geographic spread. So deer to deer to deer, you know, it starts spreading from there. Number two, we see increases in prevalence or the proportion of animals that are afflicted by CWD. In some of these places, in Wyoming, South Converse County, in a few areas in Colorado, just south of here in Iowa County, prevalence has reached up into the area in adult males. So we're talking two and a half and older aged animals, deer, prevalence in the 40 to 50% range. So you think about that.

So you go out hunting and you're lucky enough to be able to tag a three and a half year old buck. Take a coin out of your pocket, flip it up in the air, I mean, the science, the numbers suggest that we're going to start seeing population level impacts. That a population cannot sustain that level of disease. Because, I see this all the time, because it's always fatal. It is. It's a fatal disease. Now, you'll get arguments. And somebody right now, when they're listening to this, is going to say, oh, he's full of crap. It's not always fatal.

And the argument that I typically hear goes along something like this. So a deer had CWD and a hunter shot that deer. That deer didn't die of CWD. It died of paracute lead poisoning. But if a disease is allowed to progress, it is fatal. If you think about it, and what I described is- Like barring that some other thing happens. Barring some other thing happening. That disease is always going to be fatal.

Once you start to see that neurological neurological degeneration in the brain it's progressive there's no way to stop that domino effect of the disease associated prions proliferating through the brain resulting in neuronal death there's no stopping that there's no reversing the damage and how long could it take but i guess it's hard to answer because you don't know what the beginning is. If you say, like, I want to get back to where I'm getting ideas stacked on top of each other here, but we'll just run with this for a minute. When you hear people say it's always fatal. So, you know, a deer that gets to be like a buck, let's say, that gets to be five years old. He's already super old anyways. So if it's always fatal, how do you measure that? Because you don't know when they got it in the first place.

So I was going to ask how long it takes to kill a deer, but you probably can't say, like, today this deer got CWD. Let's watch and see when he dies. Right. We will never be able to truly identify the infectious moment, but we can track when mortality occurs, and we can look at sex and age ratios of animals that are harvested, and then we know how many of them, those that are sampled, we know whether they were CWD positive, CWD negative. So we can do a little back calculation. We do know from, based on studies in pen situations,

if you take your garden variety deer, the incubation period for CWD is probably between 18 and 24 months. So you want to think it's maybe a two-year disease. That animal looks perfectly healthy all the way through that incubation period up until maybe six, eight weeks before the end. And then they start really looking ragged. And you think about the accumulation of that disease-associated prionic protein in the brain. At first, it's probably having no effect on the animal at all. Then during the course of disease, it looks like an exponential curve going up. And towards the end, you see that vast proliferation of prion protein resulting in

neuronal death. That animal cannot survive. So it's impossible. So on average, it's probably about a two-year disease. I want to go back, if we can, to, we talked about CWD. Has it always been there? Yeah, because I want to lay out, people, can, to we talked about CWD. Has it always been there? Yeah, because I want to lay out people, like, why I'm asking about that is when, and Doug, you follow this a lot, so you can speak up if this doesn't jive with, so your understanding of hunters' understanding of this. When people, when you get CWD in a herd of deer or herd of elk, there's a lot of talk all of a sudden about trying to go in and radically cull the herd

to lower numbers or to do eradications in certain areas to try to contain the disease or to knock the numbers back so hard that it won't effectively pass from animal to animal. And this pisses a lot of guys off because as anyone who likes to hunt knows you want as many animals around as possible and so when people start hearing this chatter they get uneasy feeling about it they don't like where this is going and i feel that

it's a guy that feels that way who's likely to be the same guy who says that's always been here is that fair doug i don't you've logged more hours thinking about this night boy i sure have uh i don't know if it more i'm right up there with you yeah no but i'm not trying to do the science i'm just trying to do the psychology of like the kind of guy who's who likes the idea that it's always been here. Well, I think that they're more likely to say, well, we can't do anything about it anyway. Yeah. That ends up being the attitude that I get as much as anything.

Well, it's too late. We're not going to eradicate all this. Like when they had the eradication effort or we had the eradication zone it really upset people because well how are we going to be able to do that we're going to kill all the deer it became a national news story yeah yeah um that was not supported socially was not supported it was not support yeah yeah and so same thing happened in alberta whenD, it looked like, was starting to march from Saskatchewan towards Alberta, Alberta wanted to stop it. And they were doing everything they could at that point in time. So they were culling large numbers of animals, trying to keep CWD on the Saskatchewan side or drive it back to the Saskatchewan side.

They even went to a point where they used kind of an unconventional method to kill deer. They were doing it from an aerial platform, and it wasn't a tree stand. It was a helicopter. Yeah. And so if you want to be effective at knocking down deer numbers, same as if you were trying to kill feral hogs or something like that, do it from a helicopter. You can really take down a lot of deer in the course of a day or a week. Well, it looked like they were being quite effective. They were being very effective at dropping deer numbers, and it looked like they had a chance. Well, that technique was not supported. The outfitters and the hunters in that area were offended that the ministry in Alberta was taking that many deer for something that they didn't consider to be that big of a problem to start with.

And so that social pressure led to political pressure, led to the program being basically defunded. And so Alberta stopped doing that aggressive management of CWD. And if you take a look at the map that I put together of the known distribution of CWD, or you look at the Alberta ministry stuff, you'll see CWD marching westward. And it's now established and it's going to be very challenging to do anything with. There's another thing I've heard from hunters and that is, well, they've had it out in Colorado this whole time and it's stabilized. Now, I have no... It's a stabilization of the population. Yeah, I can... Stabilization of the population or whatever.

Yes, I've heard that. Sure, it's no big deal. In other words, it hasn't hurt the deer population. That's what I hear on a regular basis. And that comes back to that situation, you know, trying to identify, has it always been here? In places where disease has been the longest, we have now documented population level impacts in localized geographic areas where CWD is clearly impacting numerically the deer herd. We've seen cases now documented, peer-reviewed literature, peer-reviewed science in mule deer

in Colorado. We've seen white-tailed deer in an area in the South Converse County in Wyoming, and documented in North American elk in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. So if this disease had been here always, we know that CWD does two things really well. It spreads geographically, and it grows in prevalence. When the prevalence gets high enough, there's every likelihood that it will impact populations. Is there any evidence anywhere that this has occurred historically? There's none. There is no evidence that a TSC has been out there and has caused local or regional population declines

historically. And the interesting thing about CWD... But there'd only be, I mean, we'd only have, if we're lucky, you know, what we got 100 years to draw on. I mean, that stuff could have been going on you know you have no idea but over the last it's they say like over the last hundred years we might have been able to to measure something like that or realize something that was occurring okay but what will stop cwd to date we know of no biological feature which will stop it so if it had been there 200 300 500 years ago it wouldn't be one little pocket yeah what you know we've seen yeah we've seen small pockets of disease grow into larger pockets of disease and none of those pockets has vanished none it's never like any area that's had

it has never gotten rid of it cwd as far I'm aware, has not gone away anywhere other than potentially in a captive facility where we depopulate that facility. So there's no, you know, populations don't seem to adapt. There does not seem to be any strong genetic selection for resistance to disease. Now, there are genotypes in each of the three main species, white-tailed deer, mule deer, and elk, that seem to have some level of quote-unquote resistance. Now, that resistance, they seem a little less likely to get CWD, but they can get CWD. And what it does is manifest through a longer incubation period so when i said your garden variety deer it's about a two-year disease in these in these resistant genotypes it seems like

it's maybe a five-year disease so that gives them enough time to that gives many of them enough time to have the life they would have had to and to have the life they would have had reproduce and then die from the shit that kills deer without them ever knowing that they had it. Like if you told me I had a disease that's going to be fatal in 100 years, I'd be like, that's cool. Get in line, right? There's plenty of stuff that's going to kill me between now and then.

Okay, but let's think about if that disease you have, if over the course of that 100 years, 80 years of that, you're able to actively give that disease to other people. And so that's kind of the difference. So that deer. I got you. This guy's got the answer. So that deer.

This guy's got the answer for everything. The garden variety deer with CWD, where I said that clinical, you know, it's inapparent in the animal, at least to us, for maybe 20, 22 months, and then it's sick and it dies. That animal is shedding infectious agents, so it's infectious. It's capable of transmitting disease probably as early as three months after it gets disease. Really? So for the majority of the time frame that animal has CWD, it's able to give that disease to others and to shed infectious agent out into the environment where it may persist

for years, potentially up to decades. Now that resistant genotype, he's got a five-year version of cwd instead of a two-year so that deer might be shedding infectious agent for maybe four years or even longer before it gets sick and dies so although it's good for him it's bad for everybody else it's good for him or her and it might be good for their progeny if they you know if that if that trait breeds true it might be good for their progeny but it could be bad for everybody else. We call that a typhoid Mary syndrome. Yeah.

It's not dying from it, but it's spreading. Two things that are probably going to die from it quicker than he would. Right. Now, there's another interesting thing. These genotypes that are supposedly resistant to CWD are incredibly rare. Out in a wild population, they might be 5% of the animals or even less. So if this was a desirable trait, genotypic trait, one would expect that at a minimum it'd be in a larger proportion.

If it had always been around. Yeah, if that gene had had an opportunity to proliferate in response to disease they ought to be the dominant genotypes out there but they're not they're very very rare so it's interesting because uh you know some folks in the captive cervid industry have proposed hey why don't we start breeding these resistant genotypes and infiltrate the populations with them? So we'll replace the susceptible animals with the resistant animals and everything will be just hunky-dory, right? So the observations of these animals, well, number one, if that genotype is really rare, it suggests that that animal may not be fit, may not be a genetically fit animal in other characteristics.

That CWD resistance may be tied to other characteristics that may be deleterious to animals. There's got to be an explanation for why that genotype is really rare. And researchers in Colorado were able to actually breed up some of the mule deer with the resistant genotypes. And their conclusions were that while these deer looked like mule deer, acted largely like mule deer, highly technically, they weren't quite right. These animals just didn't behave the way that their wild-type brethren are. So now let's put that animal in a wild system where you've got things like wolves. You've got giant antlers. Put that animal who is just not quite right behaviorally into a system with predators over historical time, and maybe there you can see why that animal was selected against.

That TSE resistance may be tied to other phenotypic characteristics which are less than desirable for an animal who has to be 100 know has to be a hundred percent of or 110 percent of a deer in order to survive so it all you know kind of well together that that resistance quote-unquote resistance um it might not be the the panacea that we're that we're hoping for the cure-allD. Well, there won't be a cure-all. We haven't found one yet. What would it even look like? Well, researchers are working on vaccines.

Okay. Yeah, but are you going to go vaccinate all the deer? And then keep doing it? Well, that's one thought. Now, people have worked on vaccines. Are there communicable vaccines? Pardon me? Has there ever been a communicable vaccine?

A communicable? Oh, where you would put it in one animal and it would spread it the same way that it is a disease? Catch the vaccination just by letting me sleep on his couch. That's an interesting theory. That's an interesting theory.

I'm not aware of any that has been effective that way. That's an idea. Yeah, there you go. I need to patent that idea. You might be on it. You might be on it. There have been a number of vaccine candidates for TSEs in general. It would be great to be able to vaccinate cattle, sheep, humans for TSEs.

You could do all that easily. Scientists have not been able to create. I'm saying, if you had the miracle of the vaccine, administering it to cattle, administering it to sheep, administering it to humans, that's plausible. It's plausible. And certainly, it's not out of question that it could be done with free-ranging animals as well. Some vaccines can be built into free-ranging animals as well. Some vaccines can be built into oral-based formulations, where we could put it into something that deer would eat, spread it, probably from helicopters or

airplanes across the landscape, and vaccinate animals to prevent them from getting CWD. But yes, you'd have to do it over a vast geographic area, and you'd have to do it for a really long time, decades. And you'd have to come up with a vaccine first. Right, you've got to come up with a vaccine. But there are instances with other diseases where that's been effective. With rabies, with raccoon rabies, there's an oral bait that has been created.

It looks like little dog biscuits. Raccoon rabies historically was isolated to the southeastern states, and it was moved up in a little bit further north along the eastern seaboard, either by conservationists themselves or by state agencies who were relocating raccoons to supplant populations that had been reduced by overharvest. Inadvertently— Is that something that's happened? Absolutely. People have had to do raccoon reintroductions?

Yeah, historically. I mean, game agencies have restored darn near everything over time. Yeah, I just thought raccoons were an exception there just because they've enjoyed a general, like in the time that we've been keeping track of such things, they've enjoyed a general northward and westward spread. Humans have helped a little bit. Yeah, no, I'm sure. Why are there fox squirrels in Missoula, Montana?

And so inadvertently, raccoon rabies was moved from the farther in the southeast up into the Virginias. And so as a good pathogen does, it will try and take advantage of a naive, susceptible host population. And raccoon rabies has moved straight up the eastern seaboard where now, you know, it's not uncommon to find cases in places like Central Park in New York. Okay. Okay? And the fear with that is that… It's a zoonosis or a disease… That people give it to a human.

That a disease that transmits between animals and humans and sometimes back. By definition, that's what a zoonosis is. And it's a… And rabies is a fatal disease in humans. To the raccoon, is it? To the raccoon, to other all mammalian hosts. So now raccoon rabies seems to, it wants to move westward as well. And so there is a very massive program that's been ongoing for quite some time where every year these vaccine-laden baits are dropped from aircraft

across a swath all the way from, I believe it's along Lake Erie, down along the Appalachians, down to the southern states. This is going on right now. It goes on every year. And so these baits are dropped across the landscape. Did you catch my interest, Doug? This is news to me. It's neat stuff, but it works.

So you're trying to create a vaccinated path where the raccoons and other animals have been vaccinated against rabies. So even if they are exposed to the rabies virus, they are no longer susceptible to it. You know about this, Yanni? No. Dude, are you serious?

That's fascinating, huh? Absolutely. And it's one of those instances. So you come back and say, is it possible that CWD could be managed sometime in the future by vaccine-laden baits? You're making me feel... It's a possibility.

Even though the vaccine doesn't exist, and it might be impossible or decades or whatever, I'm feeling it. I'm feeling it on the idea that you could, in fact, maybe. So then... It'd be expensive. So then as a hunter in an area where, as we were talking earlier,

that it's moving up through, I'm feeling, and a landowner, and feeling... that it's moving up through, I'm feeling, and a landowner, I feel like an obligation to do what I can, and if I can, spread the word of let's at least, we're not going to get rid of it. How the hunter always says, oh, we're not going to get rid of it if they've had it, it's stabilized, it's all that. I mean, I feel like it's our obligation to slow it down

to buy that time. That's a great point. No, don't. Okay. Sorry. Let me give you another quick example of a vaccine that works. Okay. This one is pretty interesting.

This is one that's been developed at the National Wildlife Health Center. So it was thought that black-footed ferrets were extinct. Until they turned up in Matisse, Wyoming. They popped up in Matisse, Wyoming. A guy's dog carried one up to the door. Yep, basically. Turns out they're not extinct. They're not extinct.

So they brought that population into captivity and bred it up, okay? And then they put these animals back out on the landscape. And now, if you are a black-footed ferret, you pretty much eat one thing. Prairie dogs. Prairie dogs. That's what you eat, all right? And so if we put black-footed ferrets back out on the landscape, and Fish and Wildlife Service and the state natural resource agencies have done just that along some of the tribes as well now what happens if plague

comes into that population and wipes out a hundred percent of the prairie dog colony where you live well either a you're going to starve to death or b you're going to die a plague yourself right okay so this is a limiting factor when we talk about reintroducing the most endangered mammal in north america putting it back on the landscape if your food source dies of plague you die too okay so researchers at the national wildlife health center in conjunction with lots of other places over the course of about a decade developed a vaccine which works it works in both prairie dogs and it works in black-footed ferrets i know a lot of ranchers who are going to be disappointed to hear about that.

Yeah, they could be. But if we're talking about endangered species reintroductions, I think there's a place for it. I'm delighted. I was more making a joke about a certain mentality. There is that mentality. So anyway, now the researchers, they were able to give an intramuscular injection of the vaccine into the ferrets and protect them. But now how do you go out and you capture all the prairie dogs and give them each a shot? It's analogous to what you're saying with deer with CWD.

It just can't be done logistically. So the researchers were able to create an oral bait. And actually they tried different flavors to find out which the prairie dogs preferred. It turns out, guess what? They like peanut butter. So they created little baits, vaccine-laden baits, maybe a centimeter on edge, cubic little baits. And so it turns out we can put these out on the landscape in prairie dog towns the

prairie dogs consume them yeah and they vaccinate themselves thereby you know at the population level making them uh now no longer susceptible to play and those efforts are are probably focused in areas where you're trying to recover you Where you're trying to restore the black-footed ferrets. You know, a little tidbit for people, listeners. The most universal attractant, it doesn't matter what you're trying to catch. Peanut butter. Peanut butter and molasses mixed together. Catch me on that stuff. I really think it's the most, I think beaver caster is regarded as like a seemingly almost universal attractant to anything that likes to eat meat.

And to carnivores, beaver caster. And to herbivores, peanut butter and molasses mixed together is like a universal attractant. Absolutely. I did a lot of small mammal trapping many, many years ago. And you put peanut butter inside of a little Sherman live trap, and you end up with a mouse or a vole in there that they roll around in the peanut butter. And then you've got to deal with this grease-covered animal. You mix the peanut butter with rolled oats.

So that's the component that you didn't have. Peanut butter, glasses, and oatmeal. Peanut butter's got staying power, man. And the rolled oats, yeah, it probably gives them something to actually, they can carry it off too, you know. Yeah, well, and it absorbs some of the grease in the peanut butter. But anyway, come back to that prairie dog and black-footed ferret. So there are very few success stories when dealing with wildlife disease.

In general, if wildlife disease becomes established in a free-ranging population, it's pretty tough. Success stories are limited. But it's really interesting. Through the advent and the development of this vaccine, this oral vaccinated bait, being able to put that out there on the landscape, it's likely that we will be able to remove or largely remove plague

as an issue with reintroduction and restoration of the most endangered mammal in North America. So it's a success story. And it's one that's rare. And that's an animal that gets no attention. Right. So I heard two different things. One was... A gobble.

Long story. No, one was that with the raccoons, essentially there was a band that was established to stop the disease from going further. And I think how that could apply to CWD if and when a vaccine is developed. So you can do that band. Like a containment band. A containment band.

And then this, with the black-footed ferret, is stopping it in a particular area. So those are really two success stories but they're two very different ones that are very very different and you come back to your point does it make sense to try and minimize the impact in the geographic stretch where cwd is and i think you you hit the nail i got one last thing before that i want to go into that and end with that no i want to i want to move into that full on, total move into it. Yeah. But first.

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As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX club, y'all. This is going to be impossible to answer. No, you can answer the first part. I'll give you an easy to answer one. Do we know of a case where a dude has caught CWD from eating deer?

Okay, so you want to talk about human risk. I think it's appropriate. It's a topic that everybody's interested in. I think most people, that's kind of where they end up when they're thinking about this. I'm happy to discuss this. So to date, there is no recognized instance where a human has contracted a TSE associated with consumption of CWD afflicted deer. So from an epidemiological standpoint, it does not look like it has happened.

Now, a tremendous amount of scientific research has been done, many different studies, many different ways. And the bottom line, if I had to boil down all of that research, suggests that the chances of CWD crossing the species barrier into humans is small. It's remote, but it is not zero. It was very remote in the case of BSE crossing over into humans. And to date, we now know of over 200 fatal cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease in humans associated with consumption of BSE-contaminated beef. Now, they put a lot of beef in that system.

Yeah, you're saying millions of animals? Probably about at least three-quarters of a million animals entered into the human food chain, resulting in approximately 200 cases known to date. So the conversion rate was very, very small. Now, if we want to kind of generalize, if we said in experiments, in test tube type environments, we can see CWD causing a conversion of human normal prion protein to the disease associated form at about the same rate as BSE does. I mean, it's reasonable to anticipate that.

It's not unreasonable to think that it could happen. Yeah. I said the risk is very low. we can't quantify that risk exactly precisely the risk is low but it's not zero same thing can be said with the chances for transmission into livestock okay deer are out there commingling with cattle today and if deer have CWD. They're happening. That's happening. Not far from here.

A hundred yards from here. It's not unfeasible. Oh, absolutely. So there's interaction. Plus the deer are shedding infectious agent into the environment and the cattle are exposed to that. Just like when humans are consuming venison, if it's a CWD positive deer, those humans are exposed to the infectious agent. Now, exposure is not the same as transmission. Like I said, the chances are low, they are not zero. But now let's add to that equation just a little bit in the state of wisconsin alone last year there were 400 and about 450 positives detected probably the majority of them were consumed by the hunter that killed them okay it seems that you know at least at least some of them that's positives detected

positives detected so did you guys follow up with those hunters because i heard from a guy today who his family killed five four were positive and he was sketching out for me um he's eating his his girlfriend's pissed at him she won't eat it they had a friend that wanted a deer he wound up declining the deer this is right here in southwest wisconsin so do you guys follow up to be like so what happened to the deer the dnr wisconsin department of natural resources does follow up and with every positive test they provide information back to the hunter and provide them an option they give them information and an option on what they want to do and they obviously allow them to opt out of the wanton waste laws, right?

Certainly. Certainly. They would come pick it up, or at least at one point they would actually come pick it up. You're not going to get in trouble for discarding the edible portions. Nope. CWD, positive material. Nobody's going to go after you for that.

But I would offer up that at least probably the majority of individuals now, and I don't have their data, but i think the majority of individuals now uh would say okay thanks but we we've opted to consume it now what i just don't know okay i don't know but now let's think about it the amount of surveillance that we do is much less than it used to be totally voluntary first first few years in the southern part of Wisconsin, the DNR was testing 20,000 deer. This last year, tested around 7,000 on a statewide basis. Were they losing interest? They really don't have the funding to do the surveillance.

Political will. Yeah. So it's not that hard to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations. If we know what prevalence generally looks like, if we know what prevalence generally looks like in a county, we know what harvest looks like in a county, so we can kind of figure out crude, back-of-the-envelope, and identify maybe how many CWD-positive deer were killed by hunters. I can come up pretty easily with a couple thousand CWD-positive animals killed in the state of Wisconsin every year. Now, if only 400 of them were tested positive, that means that for every test-positive animal, there were probably three or ish, three ish, that were not tested at all. So all of those you would think are going home,

being consumed by the hunters and their families. So when I talked about the risk, so the amount of exposure doesn't change the risk to any one of those people. But if we think about if you had a scientific experiment or maybe even not a scientific experiment, maybe you buy lottery tickets, things like that. The odds that any one of us buying that winning or in this case that losing lottery ticket is extremely remote. But if you keep running that experiment enough times, you might expect an alternate outcome at the end of the day. Somebody wins the lottery. In the case of BSE, at least 200 people got the bad lottery ticket where they develop disease from consuming bse positive positive animals so we keep challenging this system you know the odds are low from any for any one individual incredibly low there's lots of things we do on a day-to-day basis which are much more risky than probably than consuming cwd positive venison but we going along under the assumption that it cannot happen would be

incorrect from a scientific that's what i find myself explaining when people ask me about it is i'm like no known no no no no transmission but i'm like so take whatever solace you like you want from that but it just just a lot of unknown, man. So there's a few things we can look to. One is a place called the World Health Organization, WHO. Their recommendations are pretty firm, that animal material known to be positive for any TSC should not be consumed by any other animal, including humans. That's what WHO says. World Health Organization says keep it out of the food chain.

What does the Centers for Disease Control say? The Centers for Disease Control is very, very similar. They have a presence on their website dealing with chronic wasting disease, their recommendations are things like, you know, if you hunt in an area where CWD is known to exist, you should consider getting your deer tested. And if you follow that, if you get your deer tested and it comes back positive, the recommendation is that you not consume that material. So here you have, you know, both the World Health Organization and our National Centers for Disease Control

making pretty solid recommendations saying, you know, you probably shouldn't eat that stuff. So that's from health professionals. The Wisconsin Department of Health has a little corner in the rules in the rules digest every state has their hunting rules digest or you know hunting regulations digest there's a little presence from the from department of health in there and they recommend that you should have your deer tested and if it comes back positive that you not consume it yeah but man i mean the implications of it though

is as you get into these areas like this guy i heard from that on their family property four or five is what i said earlier four out of the five deer they killed on their property had it if you're going to follow those recommendations at a point soon in a lot of areas around the country it won't warrant the chase there will be no there would be no reason to hunt deer you're going to shoot five deer to get one that you can consume if you're doing the test if you're following the guidelines now i've told this story before but i had mine tested from here from here yeah we had them all tested yeah and took them home now initially i was like i'm not even gonna get it tested because i don't wanna right i'd rather just live in peace

the landowner insisted yeah i'd rather no come on i'd rather live i'd rather live in ignorance right just in the peace peaceful ignorance but then i got to thinking to myself if my wife gets wind of the fact that there's a test one could get for free on a deer and didn't do it and opted to instead take said deer home and feed them to thy children yeah and then later you had to say like oh yeah i could have had a test done but didn't instead just fed it to the kids you know you could picture all that's going so what i did then was just like took the deer home kept in my freezer awaiting my results got my results proceeded to eat the deer which were very quick by the way here in Wisconsin, it's less than a couple weeks. Yeah, so that, absolutely.

I'd almost go so far as to say you're stupid to not do that. Now, the rub is, if it had come back positive, would I really have gone and taken those two deer and thrown them in the garbage? That is painful. And that is a very personal decision. It's based on what you know and your individual tolerance for risk. Yeah. And that's what I like to talk to people about

is the chances are low. They're not zero. Is this a risk that you're willing to endure for yourself, for your family, for your children? Are you comfortable saying what you would do personally? I don't think it's really germane. Because I think my role is to provide the information. I can picture it.

I respect that. That's noble. I've studied this stuff for a long time. To date, and I get my deer tested too because I hunt where CWD is. It's not as thick. It's not as prevalent where I hunt yet

as it is here or just a hair south of here. I haven't hit a positive yet. Let's put it that way but you but you do you do think obviously testing is a good idea if nothing else i mean it's it provides data to people provides data back to for scientists to try and track what's going on with this disease so you're kind of boiling in oh sorry go ahead now you're boiling into that kind of that big question and it's why should people care about CWD?

Okay, why care? Because it's been around a long time. Even where prevalence is high, there's still deer. Maybe not as many. In these localized areas, we see population-level effects. But, you know, that's what I typically hear. It's been here a long time. Cows don't get it.

People don't get it. And there's plenty of deer to hunt. Why should I care about CWD? Because it's a corruption. It's a potential corruption of a pristine food source. Yeah, it's not a normal part of the system. But anyway, I think we can boil this down. And a paper came out a year ago written by a couple people that I highly respect.

John Fisher from the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in Athens, Georgia, and Mike Miller from the state of Colorado. And Mike has been publishing about CWD for, you know, ever since I think the late 70s or early 1980s. He knows as much about this disease as any other person does. Anyway, these guys wrote a paper and they've given some presentations to state audiences over the course of the last year. And they articulate why we should probably care about CWD and boil it down to some very simple things. One, is that chance that CWD could cross over the species barrier and become a human disease issue. So that's a reason, one reason why we should be concerned about CWD, the chance that it could become a human health issue.

Number two is that, as I mentioned, we've now documented in a localized area population impacts coming from CWD. And at this point in time, we don't know. Time will tell whether those population impacts will become more regional, whether they'll spread from the localized area to the regional. So there's that chance that CWD could become a population impacting, population factor that's another reason we should care those are the two big ones that they that they point out in their paper but now there's a third one that when these guys are out talking to audiences and this is one that's come up as well it's a highly technical term we call we refer to as the ick factor you were talking about it before the early human dimensions research where they send surveys

out to hunters and their families they did a lot of that in the state of wisconsin back in 2002 2003 2004 and they reached you know they asked hunters at what point would you have had enough and decide not to go hunting there and it seems like when you get up in that 40 to 50 percent prevalence range, we're not too south of here, too far south of here where you kill that three-year-old buck and flip a coin, we're in that range. That at that point, when prevalence gets to that point, that ick factor might change your behavior and either you will decide not to hunt there or perhaps your spouse will decide for you that you're not going to hunt there so now put yourself in the in the shoes of a landowner who's trying to manage deer keep deer numbers down so he might have some oaks

regenerate someday how do you manage deer without deer hunters? So even when we get CWD prevalence up in that 50% range in adult males, it's probably going to be some time before disease starts limiting deer numbers themselves. So we're going to have that intervening time frame where deer numbers are going to skyrocket. Yeah, but I'll add to that, like how do you manage deer without deer hunters? How do you manage a host of fish and wildlife species without deer without revenue generated from license sales from license sales so i mean it's like it's a it becomes like no hunt like when you have a radical decline in hunter participation it does not bode well for any kind of wildlife that's managed by the state right you run into a lot of problems for access research the very yeah the

very information we're the acquisition of the very information we're talking about right now yep so so people ask me why should i care and those are the things that i've been keying on for probably you know close to 10 years so quick recap would be the the potential impact on deer populations themselves when prevalence gets high enough one, kills deer and you start seeing localized or regional population declines due to CWD, due to disease. Nobody wants to see that. Number two, the possibility that CWD could cross over the species barrier and become a human health or maybe even a livestock health issue. And number three is that ick factor, that when prevalence gets high enough, hunters will change their behavior, quit hunting, or go hunting someplace else. And all the repercussions that that has on our ability to manage deer,

and as you so adeptly pointed out, our ability to manage other things. Because deer hunting licenses pay for it all. All right, Doug. Now, I know you've been itching. You've been scratching. our ability to manage other things because deer hunting licenses pay for it all all right dog now i know you've been itching you've been scratching to get fascinated by the whole conversation because you've been wanting to because i know that you want you you're concerned about controlling the spread now i'm willing because i think of that as the the like yeah you probably haven't noticed but i've i feel like i've tried to take us from the past into the present and now we're moving into the future i i did notice that that's very good yeah

um and and brian's actually answered a lot of what I was, the questions that I had that I wanted to start spurting out right at the beginning. Can I speak for you for a minute? Always. Does that bother you? No, not at all. You worry, Doug Dern worries a lot about CWD because you're on sort of the,

you're on like the threshold. Yeah, we're right. As Brian said, it's just to the south of us. I'm guessing that we have deer in our immediate area that have the disease. And to date, none off this farm. To date, none off this farm. And we've tested every deer for the last

two or three years and where i hunt in crawford county um we saw it coming crawford being just west of richland county where we are um from the tree stand i sit in two years ago the first positive in crawford county was killed in a i think think it was a four year old buck, about three miles to the northeast of where I'm sitting in a tree. Last year, another one was picked up in the section just to the southwest of where I'm sitting in that tree stand. So I'm watching it as well yeah first you know you see it coming then it's just off to this side now it's on the other corner as well and it doesn't and so you start looking at a mature deer a little differently yeah you can go on to the wisconsin dnr uh website and uh and the CWD section.

And, of course, as you were saying, the statistics are a little bit different now because testing isn't as widespread. But you can take year to year over the last several years the photographs or the results of southwest Wisconsin, and it shows every section and it started in the what they called the hot zone and if you you kind of flip through those very quickly you just see that boom it just keeps widening and it starts out there's oh there's little pink squares here and then there gets to be more of them and the numbers keep getting bigger and it just keeps you know spreading that way um i was freaked out about enough earlier but now that i've talked with you about it the part that i didn't that wasn't registering with me was steven i've talked a lot about you know management and why why i'm concerned

about it i like hunting deer i like having enough uh deer to hunt i like eating venison um it's there's the economic impact in the area and all these wonderful things that are a part of it. And I guess I told you before we started the podcast that one of our management objectives here is to regenerate red oak up in a chunk of woods that we're cutting my great-grandfather's trees, 125-year-old trees. uh we've put a lot of effort into a shelterwood harvest up there and now i you know there's been a decline in hunters already certainly hasn't been a decline in hunters on this place but some in the area but these then i'll factor in that ick factor where people fewer people are are hunting and well the deer can start dying off but not until they chew down every oak

i've got up there and that would so i mean there's just there's a whole nother uh concern that i have too um i mean i was you're gonna if it kills all the deer you have more oaks you know what to do with yeah but it's not gonna as brian was saying it's not gonna well it's not gonna kill all the well that'd be a nice problem to have. Too many oak trees. Yeah. Well, yeah, it sure would be. Too many oak trees would be a nice problem to have.

And so I was feeling like, as I said, I'm on the County Deer Advisory Committee, and one of the statements that I made during our meetings was, I feel like we have an obligation in Richland County, especially here a little further north, and I talk with folks around here about this, that we you know, we're on the edge of it now, on the edge of the spread. We have an obligation to, I feel we have an obligation, at least, to do what we can to slow the spread of it down. And how do you do that? Well, there have been these conflicting, and it was actually something I wanted to ask you about.

One is population control, but then the other one was demographic control because the uh the younger bucks are the ones who are more apt to to spread it um or at least that's what i'm reading like in samuel's uh research um so i guess i don't have any i don't have i'm not leading up to a question so much as i'm just making a statement. Well, that gives me some. Is there a reason to believe that lowering a deer population by some factor, 50%, whatever, slows the spread? Or is that just an assumption? We're making some assumptions there. I can try and address that a little bit. So if we have a population that has, say, 10% prevalence, and we wave a magic wand,

and we make half of those deer disappear today, what's the prevalence in the remaining population? 10%. 10%. Right, because we're not selectively taking sick deer. That's why, one of the reasons it's so challenging to try and manage CWD. We don't have good vaccines. We don't have any therapeutics that you could, you know, give a deer a dose of penicillin and it would make CWD go away. And they don't stand out. When you look at a deer standing in the pasture or in the woods unless it's at that very late state of disease where it's obviously positive we have no idea

whether it's whether it's cwd positive or negative so when you shoot a deer you don't know so that's why this disease is one of the reasons it's so challenging is because we don't have effective management tools. Okay, so you would say there, well, then why lower deer population, right? It doesn't make any sense because we're not impacting prevalence or the proportion of animals positive. But I think it's very important to lower, to keep those deer populations low. Number one is for oaks. Well, I'm not sure number one is oaks, but oaks are in the equation.

Oaks are definitely in the equation. I like this guy. He's an oak guy. You know, agricultural crop depredation is another. The number of deer vehicle collisions is another. And disease is another as well. So let's take that population that we waved our magic wand and we made half of them go away.

We still have 10% prevalence, but the key to me is we only have half as many positives as we had before we waved our magic wand. With half of those positives, we have less animals actively shedding infectious agent out into the environment where it's going to persist for years to decades. We have fewer animals which are able to actively transmit disease to other deer. And the thing you keyed on before was that dispersal. Okay. If we have fewer CWD positive deer out there on the landscape, we have fewer animals that might decide to pick up and move their home 10 or 20 miles down the road, moving disease with them. So that, to me, is the argument why lower deer populations, lowering deer populations is good. Theoretically, if we took deer populations down to some very, very astoundingly low level,

we may be able to break or interrupt the disease transmission cycle, and then we would actually reduce prevalence. But that's taking deer down to, you know, scarce. You know, five deer per square mile, probably not going to do it. We'd have to take deer down to where interaction... Less than five per square mile. Oh, yeah. We'd have to take it down to areas where deer would be rare in order to interrupt the transmission cycle.

But, like I said, those very positive benefits of taking deer populations low, lowering the absolute number of CWD-positive deer on the landscape has very definite benefits. um when in in this part of the world we assume we know as deer biologists and landowners who have deer um hunters who spend a lot of time with deer we know quite a bit about deer behavior so who is the most likely candidate to disperse to take a 10 or 20 mile or even up to 100 mile hike young males young males when at what time how old are they one year old 12 months when mama gives them the boot you know they've hung around with mom pretty much their first year of life when that doe gives them a boot before you know she has her next set of fawns um she'll she'll give those um those yearlings 12 months old animals a boot yeah she'll start kicking the shit out of them literally yep or not the shit she the shit part. She'll, like, kick them.

Yep. And a female fawn or female yearling will likely set up her home range adjacent to where mom is. Okay? More often than not, she'll find her place pretty close to mom, keeping that family group together. The young male, on the other hand, he needs to go out and find a place. And so that might be close by. It might be quite a ways away. The young male, on the other hand, he needs to go out and find a place. And so that might be close by. It might be quite a ways away.

Yeah, like any of these stories you hear where some animal turns up three states over. Right. It's a young guy. It's a young male. It's a young male. A mountain lion that comes from South Dakota and shows up in Wisconsin. Yeah, with a radio collar. Yeah, or like an elk that turns up in Missouri or a wolf out of the UP that gets shot outside a guy's chicken coop in Missouri. Now, does can do it too.

But when you think of the predominant animal that disperses as that 12-month-old male. So if that 12-month-old male has CWD and decides to go 10 or 20 miles or 30 miles before it finds its new home, that could be the animal that moves disease. So yeah, I don't think we really didn't quite get into it, but we think about how disease moves, how CWD moves. And we have that clearly, that deer- deer slow diffusion, diffusive type movement with an odd deer that picks up and goes a long way. Case in point that in the state of Wyoming they had a mule deer, I think it was a doe that was CWD positive, had a radio collar. She went over a little over 100 miles as the crow flies.

Yeah, they lost her and then found her again with a fixed-wing aircraft with an antenna on it. Really? And she had moved CWD herself and CWD infectious agent over 100 miles as the crow flies. Now, how far did she actually go? Wander to get there. Okay, so. That's pretty interesting. So we think of that slow, diffuse movement.

This is way off topic, but do they have like what, just, that was her personality type. There's no explanation for it. No explanation I'm aware of why she did that, but she did. And periodically, you know, you'll have animals in, they had a doe here in the early years of CD, when they were doing a collar and follower study, capturing the animals, putting telemetry collars on them and following, they had one that went from outside of Mount Horeb just to outside of Rockford, and then she turned around and came back. Apparently, she didn't like Rockford.

So anyway, that first mechanism is that deer to deer to deer. Then the other one, the big one that we can have something to do with. We might not be able to do a lot about deer to deer other than lowering populations trying to kill CWD positive deer. But the other broad category is human assisted movement. That's a biggie that we haven't really touched on. And there's multiple possibilities there. One is going to be the deer farms, okay, the captive-served industry. That industry is built on movement of animals, moving them from place A to place B.

In the United States, there have been over 80 game farms that have been detected CWD positive. In Canada, there's been just under 100 elk farms now where CWD has been detected. So is this a risk factor? Absolutely. Oh, there are some mainstream wildlife groups who've proposed a ban. And I'm not talking like radical radical and virals but i mean like hunter-based wildlife groups that propose the idea that we should ban

intrastate deer traffic or interstate deer traffic right and some states some states have actually some states have never had a captive servant industryving industry lawful. There's been a few states that have, through citizen initiatives, led to legislative action to get rid of the industry. There is oversight to a degree. There's oversight on interstate movement of animals. But like I said, this is one risk factor. We bring it home to Wisconsin here. We've got three game farms, shooter facilities, or whatever you want to call them. Whatever you want to call them. Like high fence operations in Wisconsin?

High fence operation. There's a lot of them in Wisconsin. Anyway, there's three of them in the northern part of the state of Wisconsin, where CWD has been detected. And the typical, the historical, the response from management community, the agriculture or natural resources, is to depopulate that facility, to stamp out disease, kill all the animals in it, right? So we now have three in the northern part of the state uh where they have not been depopulated there are you know these facilities are allowed to stay in business um restock animals

so multiple cwd positives these facilities are in deer country so we have wild deer on the other side of the fence so also some dude can pretend can pay to pretend to go hunting that's it so he like some guy that can't stomach the idea that you'd have to go out and try and maybe cope with failure would be like i could just pay some money and be guaranteed success. Yeah. Because what I'm interested in- You pay by the inch. Is getting what I paid for, getting what I came for. That's probably true.

I probably shouldn't comment on that. No, don't. Don't comment on that. That's me talking. But these very definitely pose a transmission risk, an epidemiologic risk to free-ranging deer on the other side of the fence. And so these are – when I talk to people in the northern part of the state, they say, well, what are the risks? Well, the risks are things we talked about, deer-to-deer-to-deer movement, and then anthropogenic or human-assisted movement. One of those is the captive deer industry and the existence of these positive facilities where if a fence goes down or there's nose-to-nose contact through the fence, that disease could leak out of that facility. But another one we haven't talked about i know it's movement of movement of

carcasses oh well then there's the third that i wanted to ask about because there's some of these facilities you can go and watch the youtube videos at these facilities and they're put on by the captive captive servant industry about how here's how we do our deer and they run them through just like i run cattle through a chute and they're taking urine and they're taking uh you know any kind of glade for for deer attractants for lures for lures and now and now they're selling that stuff in a bottle and i mean you go into any sporting goods store and you see this stuff are there any restrictions well i guess you would know that necessarily or may not

want to comment it but i started thinking about that so now i can go into the you know bob's sporting goods store or whatever and buy a bottle of dough urine in estrus and take that out and you know spray it around and possibly spread am i is that's not it can't be far-fetched. Is it a risk? Yes. It's a risk. Is it a numerically large risk? You know, it's hard to say. And it depends on the facility. Sure, sure. Let's go back to, I'd like to come back to that. But let me roll up the carcass management issue.

Because I think that's a significant one. So, you know, come back, we've got, you know, that slow deer-to-deer animal movement that it's hard to change that one. But then we have human-facilitated disease movement. We talked about it originally with raccoon rabies. We moved raccoons with rabies around. So we move deer with CWD around. We moved elk with CWD to South Korea, very clear. So the industry has a role, but carcasses are another one.

So let's say you go out hunting in Wyoming in Converse County, and you kill the mule deer buck of a lifetime, and a five-year-old deer, and like I said, it's coin flip. Say he's got CWD. So you bring that carcass you know back to your domicile and you butcher it yourself because that's what you've always done well you've got a few hundred acres here you know there's there's parts left over when you're done butchering you've got the spinal column you've got got the skull, all the parts where infectious

agent is concentrated. What do you do with that waste material? Do you dump it out on the back 40? If you do that, does that constitute a very real risk of introducing infectious agent to a naive susceptible host population the answer is yes so many states and many localities have introduced bans on carcass movement minnesota's done it um you know michigan's working on one we've had some some carcass movement regulations like you can move you can move your processed meat. Processed meat and a clean skull cap, but leave the rest behind type of thing. In the area where you found it. And so that's a very real risk that has been dealt with by regulatory means, but regulations don't cure everything.

We need education to go along with it because if you went to colorado and or wyoming and killed that big deer and brought it home you might have not know that you were violating the law so we have to have education to go along with it yeah and and and the answer is to that if you know if you're going to do that make sure that those carcass parts don't end up out on the back 40 that they go to a landfill or end up underground where any infectious agent is not available to be picked up ingested or inhaled by another deer so that one's easy yeah if we know what we're doing and we pay attention to it so the carcass movement bands um have have a place but when when we boil it down, is there a way to appropriately manage carcasses? The answer is yes. Make sure it ends up underground.

What's interesting about those bands is that it's never like Colorado saying, Don't export. Yeah, nobody hasn't exported. When you guys leave, leave all the bones and the skulls here. It's Michigan saying, don't bring those nobody hasn't when you when you guys leave leave all the bones and the skulls here oh it's michigan you're taking it to yeah don't bring those elk bones from colorado here right it's an import i've yet to see it yeah because they're people like have they're like get that shit out of here well i can remember my dad going out west hunting and they would bring the whole the mule deer the elk whatever you know they packed them

with ice and brought them back i remember you know butchering them at the facility here where those bones end up in it i used to be a little bit of a conspiracy theorist in this whole thing oh there had to be some guys down there who brought in one of those big monster bucks from some place to improve their genetics well that sounds crazy doesn't it so they let it out down there and in the mount horrib area and so it Yeah, cut loose on their farm. Yeah, boy, don't shoot the deer with the tag in its ear. You know, that kind of thing. Or it was a facility there or it was something like that. And then...

It could have been innocuous. Yeah, just some old boy like my dad, you know, bringing his... And that's what they did. You know, and it's just what we did. I know a lot of people that would like to pin it on your dad. Well... It's unlikely but that any one individual but if we're looking for theories about how disease got to a place like wisconsin 900 miles from the nearest infected area in the state of colorado we have those possible explanations was it deer to deer to deer

it's not very likely that a deer from colorado got up and walked and crossed the mississippi and came to mount horub to settle down so then we start looking at the other possibilities could it have been human assisted movement either of live deer to release out in that area yeah it's a possibility pretty hard to prove at this point in time game fire could it could it have been a hunter who inadvertently brought a positive back and you know and carcass parts ended up out on the back 40 absolutely that's possible could it have been other materials um it's real interesting that that prions themselves it turns out bind to some soil particles they bind to clay particles much better than they do to sand particles.

And when we think about that deer who's shedding infectious agent out into the environment, well, when it rains, it all ought to wash away into the river, and it'll end up in the Mississippi, and it ought to be a problem down in the Gulf Delta, right? Well, it turns out the prions themselves can bind very tightly. They form a chemical bond with some soil particles, which helps explain why they don't wash away and why they remain in the environment, because they can be bound to soil particles.

Especially clay, which doesn't erode like sand or loam does. Now, from a disease standpoint, there's another part of that. It turns out when prion protein molecules are bound to clay particles, they are more infectious than they were on their own. It turns out that their infectivity has increased nearly 700-fold in that bound state. And we've seen where a cow's stomach is a pretty harsh place. And you would think that if you put prions into a cow's stomach, that four-chambered stomach, that it would degrade. And actually, it does degrade prions quite a bit.

It lowers the titer. But if these prions are bound to soil particles, it increases their infectivity. So maybe these soil particles help act as chaperones through the system to get in. So they're bound tightly and they're more infectious. Now, you talked about the possibility of a bottle of urine. Yeah. Okay. So urine is collected at captive deer facilities, okay,

or captive elk facilities where they have grates under the floor and the deer, you know, urinate. And so it's collected up in theory, you know, processed, purified to some degree and aggregated together. And then sooner or later, it ends up on a sporting goods shop or you can buy it online, things like that for a lure, you know, doe and estrus. So there's currently a great debate going on. And some states have taken proactive action and they've said, hey, don't use urine-based lures in our state.

Several states have done that because they identify that there is a risk, a small risk, but there is a risk. And if we've learned anything in Wisconsin, if you don't have CWD now, you want to keep it that way. And so other states have paid attention. They're putting in strong protective measures. Don't bring carcasses into my state. Don't bring live deer into my state. And don't use urine-based lures in my state. And that's a decision that a state makes on their own.

Yeah, I mean, a state, even if you just look at a state's function as like protecting, you know, even for the most conservative thing, facilitating business, you're protecting the deer hunting industry. Yeah. Protecting the yeah protecting which is a much bigger industry than the piss industry and it's a much bigger industry than the captive deer industry wisconsin makes way more money selling deer licenses and having people hunt wild deer than they do being a than they do being a service for the captive deer right so science has shown pretty clearly that a deer with CWD

is shedding infectious agent in their urine. But it's pretty dilute. So the argument is that if you have a bottle, a one-ounce bottle of deer urine, it's not enough. Even if it did have CWD prions in it, it's likely not enough to if it did have cwd prions in it it's likely not enough to transmit disease gotcha that's the opinion from the industry or from science by those things aren't distinct it's promoted by it's promoted that's that's promoted by the industry right now yeah um that the bottle of urine has its negligible risk.

Okay, but one of the things, so we just talked about what happens to a prion protein when it binds to soil particles. And that really hasn't been entered into the equation. So how do people use deer lure? I mean, some of them are going to squirt it into cotton balls in the top of an old 35-millimeter film canister case, hang it from a branch of a tree. Others are going to spray it all over either a mock or a real scrape, which is kind of a deer magnet. So lots of animals come there. So now let's just suppose that a bottle of urine did have prions in it, which wasn't enough.

If we squirted it in a deer's mouth, it wouldn't be enough to give that deer CWD. But now we're squirting it on the ground where those prions might bind to soil particles. And a deer might lick that soil and ingest that prion protein that's now bound to clay particles. And increased in 700 times more infectiousness. The infectivity. I think the paper says 680. I was rounding to 700. Fair enough.

So that hasn't been entered into the equation yet. Is that enough? I don't know. Yeah. Honestly, I can't answer that question. Is that enough of an increase in concentration where that bottle of urine constitutes a risk? I can't answer that question. But a question I can answer, that if you are a state agency whose responsibility it is to look out for the welfare of that deer resource for current and future generations of people in your state. If you've seen the impacts of CWD and you believe you don't have it and you want to do everything you can to keep CWD out of your state,

is it a reasonable thing for that state to promulgate rules to say, hey, we'd prefer if you didn't use urine-based lures in our state. I think it's very reasonable that a state making that decision, they've looked at the information, they're making a calculated decision on the level of risk they're willing to incur on behalf of the people of their state. How can you argue with that? And if an overwhelming body of evidence were to emerge that contradicts that, they could walk it back. Lift the ban. Aren't there synthetic-based lures that people use?

I don't know. I gave up on that stuff. I figure if I can't, sitting in a tree stand, if I can't have a deer walk up close to me, probably having lures isn't the way I way i want to go yeah well folks will try all manner of stuff all you have to do all right yeah you got any concluding thoughts i heard you smoking cigarettes up in your stand brings them in well i know that well doug buckman dern um there's special has special properties of his own urine which is very enticing to deer. I just piss in my own scrapes.

He has a lot of photo documentary evidence that Doug Buckman urine is the most potent lure. I don't know. I'd have to test your urine to make sure it's not positive. I was using it in Montana, but I'm going to quit doing that shit.

Doug has actually been sending his urine around from the cwd area oh man see what doug you got a concluding thought i've got i've got a few if you humor me yeah give me a couple minutes here because that's it would kind of boil down i get asked all the time what what can I do? What can people do about CWD? And people, individual hunters can't cure CWD. They're not going to create the vaccine, things like that. So, but what can people do? Well, one of the things I think is really important is to be knowledgeable about really what CWD is. It's things that we've talked about today. Now, if you go to some sportsman's clubs or go to hunting camps or go to a tavern and you get into a conversation about CWD, you'll hear some

things about CWD that'll make you scratch your head. Really? And so alternative points of view are out there. There's places on the World Wide Web, if you looked up facts about CWD or the truth about CWD, you might hear some things that are vastly different than what we've heard today. That's generally a good Google tip is never type in the truth about. Yeah. The truth about X is a good way to get the not truth. I think it's really important if people have a better understanding of what CWD is, what the risks are, what the potential outcomes down the road are, that they'll care about

CWD. But they need to learn about it. They need to get accurate information. So if you're going to Google, go to scholar.google.com and enter in CWD and prion disease. And there you'll get all your links will be peer-reviewed scientific publications. So learn about CWD and discuss CWD, kind of the way we're doing here today. I think that's really, really important. Another thing is obviously going to be working with government. If you don't like what you see, if you don't like the fact that captive servant operations with CWD are still out there on the landscape, haven't been depopulated, work with government.

If you don't like the way your natural resource agency is responding to CWD, work with government. It's not going to do much good to sit in hunting camp and gripe about the DNR. It's really not effective. It might be fun. It might be entertaining. But it's really not effective. So work with government at the appropriate levels. And recognize that the DNR has a natural resource agency, an agricultural agricultural agency are working with a set

of laws created by legislators and so quite often the dnr is not the appropriate level if you want to seek change you're going to have to talk to the legislative bodies during mantra yeah is he's talks a lot about people who are blaming the dn, blaming the State Fish and Game Agency, for things that are coming from the legislature. Right. The DNR has to work within the statutory guidelines provided by the legislature. And those people are voted in. And they are responsible to their constituents.

So working with government is a big one. Another way of working with government is a big one. Another way of working with government, though, is promoting surveillance. You know, we've seen in state after state, there's fewer dollars available for surveillance. So the Wisconsin DNR has surveillance has gone down. Many other states, surveillance has gone down because they don't have the money to do it. So the only way we learn more about distribution and prevalence of CWD is to do surveillance. So that's another way you can have an impact by talking to government. Another one is promoting research, things like epidemiological research,

learning about how disease moves, learning more about the risk to humans, learning about the risk to domestic livestock, learning about the possibilities of vaccines. We do that through research. And the amount of money available for disease research has diminished greatly over time. So there's places where you can work with government. But now, even more, what can a hunter do? Well, we talked about it. You can hunt deer. I believe that taking deer off the landscape, reducing densities is good from a whole host of reasons in addition to disease management. If you feed and bait, those are probably not good things. Those could be considered risk factors. So the analogy there, a great one, is if you have young kids and you put them in daycare. If all the kids in daycare

were healthy, daycare would be healthy and your kid would never come home and give you some illness that you didn't want. But that's not the reality. So one little kid will go into daycare with a cold or the flu, spread it around to everybody else, and then those children go home to their respective families. So now let's move that into the deer world, where if you're baiting out there on the landscape, you're putting corn or some other attractant out there. If all the deer are perfectly healthy, it's not a bad idea, right? Okay, there's no risk of disease transmission.

But now let's put a little bovine tuberculosis into the system. Let's put a little bit of chronic wasting disease into the system. And now if we have one sick animal coming into that pile of bait or that attractant there, they shed infectious agent into that bait pile. Literally exchanging saliva and breath. Exactly. So multiple animals are coming in. So it elevates the risk of disease transmission. So feeding and baiting, anything that artificially congregates animals in association with disease enhances the risk. Carcass management is a big one we talked about. So if you're going to go hunting in, you know, if I'm going to go hunting in Iowa County, Wisconsin, and I live in northern Wisconsin,

or I live in Michigan or Minnesota, if I can get it across the border, if I butcher that animal myself, make sure that the carcass parts end up not in reach of a deer, not on the back 40, preferably at a landfill. That's a solid thing that hunters can do to help reduce the chances of CWD movement. If you're burying it on your own, how deep? Deep enough where a raccoon's not going to dig it up and expose it back to the deer. Now, some people might go, oh, you shouldn't have said something like that, because there is obviously always a chance that effluent would percolate down, get into groundwater.

But that mantra back from the 70ss dilution is the solution to pollution probably applies here that getting those carcass materials out of where they are bioavailable to healthy naive susceptible deer that's what's key yeah um if you wanted to get technical if you want to if you really want to stop prion movement you go to a landfill that uses a clay liner system. Remember, clay binds prion particles. Well, it turns out if you put a clay liner under a landfill, you will stop prion movement. So it won't go into the effluent that then gets discharged out onto the farmer's fields. Yeah. Okay?

So there's science behind that. I think the last thing that people can do to learn more about is, especially if you hunt in an area where CWD is, get your carcasses tested. I mean, that's in line with recommendations coming from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control. Or even the surrounding area. Yep. If you're close to disease, consider having your deer tested. Now, I'm not going to tell you not to eat it. That's your personal decision based on your own capacity to tolerate risk. But you've learned about CWD. You're doing your best not to contribute to movement of CWD.

Getting that deer tested makes a kind of common sense. So those are the kinds of things. Like I say, when I walk into an audience and people say, well, what can we do? That's what I always try and close with. Here's the concrete things you can do. You can't fix it, but you can help. That's good stuff, man. And for most people to test it, it's their local Game and Fish or Department of Natural Resources?

Talk to your natural resource agency. If they are not able to accommodate it, and I believe most can, but if they're not, you could talk to a veterinarian, a local veterinarian who has the ability to collect the tissue samples for a hunter and then submit them to a state diagnostic laboratory. So it's doable any place. Yeah, here in the cheese state, what do you guys call this state? Wisconsin. Yeah, I mean, you know, I was trying to be like a bad writer who uses like little synonyms here and there. Oh, so let's just call it.

Like this 20-year-old crooner, like that kind of line. Wisconsin. Yeah, but what is this? Help me out, man. The cheese state. I hate that expression. America's Dairyland. America's Dairyland.

Okay. That's on the license plate. Thank you, Doug. expression. America's Dairyland. America's Dairyland. Okay. That's on the license plate. Thank you, Doug. Here in America's Dairyland, it's free. Yeah, and I would say this. I know in our area, over at Rockbridge at the Rockbridge store, an old and dear friend of mine, Sharon Miller, is one of the testing facilities. And her son has gone through the training and takes out the lymph nodes and does all that work.

And it's real simple. You can just drop the head off. Now, obviously, if you've got a big old monster buck and stuff that you're going to want to get mounted. Yeah, you've got to figure it out. But they'll work with you on that. And then, so that's on this side of the county, or it's just a few miles this way, but then a few miles the other way

over in Sauk County in Bear Valley, which is one of the high prevalence areas, a live look taxidermy over there. Bill, I can't think of Bill's last name right now, but he mounted the standard. He also is a testing, not a testing facility, but a drop-off facility. And they too will take out the lymph nodes and do that whole thing. They get paid for it. All you got to do is bring the whole damn head down, fill out a piece ofoff facility and they too will take out the lymph nodes and do that whole thing. So get paid for it. All you gotta do. Yeah. Bring the whole damn head down,

fill out a piece of paper and then, then it's like, you'll get to test your watch. Your results were sent, uh, was sent to you. I, so I'll give my concluding thought.

How's that? Hit it, man. Uh, I feel better, uh, listening to you today. And I thank very, thank you very much for that. I mean, I feel like listening to you today, and I thank you very much for that. I mean, I feel like I've been spending a lot of time learning about it as much as I can,

and then there is a lot of misinformation. But most of what I have read, you explained today in some of the ways that I didn't quite get it. And then boiling it down, which I think is so important. And so this has been a really important discussion for me. And like you're an oak guy, that makes a big difference too. I saw Doug lose a big bet on oaks one time. That was true. But I'm not sure about the person who decided

you're still not happy with the result i'm still not happy with how we decided that but continue thought um if it's about 10 years ago i need to hear this how many acres does an oak tree drop you know it's one of those. It was one of those. So, and I think you gave, you reinforced much of what I'm trying to promote. One of the things I did want to clarify, though, is that in the state of Wisconsin, that the Department of Natural Resources, yes, enacts what the legislature, in most cases, legislature tells them to. But deer farms are under the purview of the Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection. It's farming, not... That's a common problem. Yeah, and those two things are very...

Those two agencies seem to be very different. And the relationship varies depending on what state you're in. In some states, the agricultural and the natural resource agency work very, very closely together. And in others, they don't work so closely together. And in other states, they have diametrically opposed opinions about how management should go. Yeah. Yeah, there's multiple. Some states, management of the captive industry is under the Natural Resource Agency.

Others, it's under agriculture. It just depends on where you go. Man. Well, anyway, thank you very much. This is fabulous. You guys are welcome. This was enjoyable. My concluder.

Brian, thank you for being a federal researcher, man. There have been better times to be a federal scientist. We're going to bring it back. We're going to bring it back to where you guys get the credit you deserve. It's intriguing. Because you're able to look at stuff. You're able to look at stuff and look at problems that we're going to be facing down the road. And oftentimes, private industry just isn't on their radar yet. And you need to have some people who are able to exercise a level of curiosity and look

out at what might be coming down the road and have the funding necessary to do so to fill in some of the blanks for us and give us a sense of what's coming because we would still be nowhere on this if we were relying on private industry. Who the hell is going to put money into this? We'll go back to the case of plague in prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets.

It took over a decade to develop a vaccine candidate and to be able to then create an oral formulation in order to solve an endangered species problem. Where is the incentive outside of government research facilities to have the wherewithal and the capability to be able to do that and the patience to be able to do it. There is no place else. So there's value. I believe there's definitely value. And success stories are not that common, but you have to work on these problems. If we value our natural resources and our wildlife, we're posed today with more diseases than ever before. Emerging infectious diseases are rampant out there on the landscape. And if we don't learn

about them more, we will not learn about those diseases. We will not learn about what caused those diseases. And we will not, maybe most importantly, learn how to effectively deal with, to mitigate or manage those diseases. So I appreciate the compliment. Yeah, well, I feel, you know, I'm indebted to you for the lifestyle I have and the natural resources I enjoy. I feel indebted to people like you in generations past who committed themselves to a professional occupation of working on natural resources. It's enjoyable. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us. You're welcome. I appreciate the opportunity. And Doug, thanks for hosting us at your house, man. Always a pleasure. Or your family. Even if this might be the last time. The family farm home, even though I just met a new person today where I'm going to start

hanging out instead of Doug's place it's just down the road though so we're going to stop by to use your phone I told Doug I'd come use the bathroom and get an internet connection on him alright thanks for joining hey folks exciting news for those who live

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