The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 474: Animal Diseases

Episode Date: September 4, 2023

Steven Rinella talks with Krysten Schuler, a wildlife disease ecologist at Cornell University’s Wildlife Health Lab.  Topics discussed: Watch our behind-the-scenes footage from Cornell’s necropsy lab; the fungus that affects salamanders; deer ticks carrying blood that contains prions; why things die; mange; brain worm; the infection cycle of when worm larvae in deer poop is eaten by a snail, which then gets eaten by a moose; insect contamination on raw produce; liver flukes, or parasites that look like the sidecar of a liver; "found dead"; winter tick; lead in birds and incinerating fisher liver to test lead levels; making CWD smash burgers for your friends who say they don’t care about CWD; hemorrhagic diseases and floating in ponds; the time when Steve defended his family from a “rabid” squirrel; the rabid beaver that bit five people; nasal bots; and more.  Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch  See 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 hunt the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.

Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting for elk, First Light has performance apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. apparel to support every hunter in every environment. Check it out at firstlight.com. F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Hey everyone, Phil the Engineer here. We will get right to our conversation with Dr. Kristen Shuler, but I just wanted to let you all know that there is actually a video component to this podcast as well. If you would like to head over to the Meat Eater YouTube channel, you can check out a little tour that we had of the necropsy lab

at the Cornell University Animal Health Diagnostic Center. We got a tour from Kristin and a pathologist, Dr. Gavin Hichner, and he went over some of the basics of what their team does over there when studying animal mortality and trauma and whatnot, and get a look at an eagle, a bobcat, even a turtle. So again, head over to the Meat Eater YouTube channel if you want to see about 13 minutes of some really cool video footage we got over at Cornell. Thank you.

Okay, we're at Cornell University's Animal Health Diagnostic Center next to a stuffed two-headed calf with Kristen Schuller, a wildlife disease ecologist. Explain that to me. Like the ecologist part, the wildlife disease part I get. Okay. Wildlife disease expert I get. Sure. Ecologist, I don't get it. Okay.

You know what ecology is right so studying the linkages between things so with uh wildlife diseases trying to put all that together with like the biology but then also thinking about communication uh other social sciences like human dimensions there's economic elements that i pull in to my research there's political angles and things like that so trying to put the whole synthesis together um all the way from the animal to people and rules regulations and how we can make that better for wildlife populations. Got it. And explain, or I can run through it, or you can run through the scope of things you're working on?

We can run through it together, Steve. All right. Current projects, very diverse in scope and species. You head up the New York State Interagency Working Group on Chronic Wasting Disease. Yes. And you're, again, we're at Cornell in Ithaca. Yes. New York.

And New York is not yet a CWD state. Well, New York has the distinction of being the only state that has eliminated CWD once it was found in the wild. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation actually found it first in captive deer and then in wild deer in 2005 and they responded pretty aggressively and they formed a containment area. They depopulated the two herds where they found CWD. They subsequently found two deer in the wild when they were doing some management activities and in the 17 years since we haven't detected it knock on wood man the only state that's

done that yep I would I didn't even know until you just said that I wouldn't known that that had ever happened yeah it's it's I would have known that it's ever been eliminated from a state yeah I, I mean, it was, you know, either good or lucky. Either way, it's helped out New York a lot where we haven't had the disease to deal with. There have been other what we call one-and-dones where it's been found in a single location and you go in and do management activity and don't find any subsequent cases. So there are conditions where that can happen, but it isn't the norm. You feel it's, we'll come back around and talk about this a bunch more later, but do you feel that it's inevitable that it'll come back? Inevitable to New York?

Yeah, yeah. Potentially, but New York... Pretty soon all 48, like eventually all 48 states will have it. Well, even with all states having it, you know, if we say that, you know, there's 30 plus states that have it now, it's not everywhere. And there's certain conditions that seem to support it better than others. So I think if we can do regulations that prohibit movement of prions, so you don't introduce it to new areas, and then you set up the environment where the disease isn't going to take off once it's there, it's not necessarily inevitable that it's going to be everywhere and i think you can do a lot of stuff to prevent it from getting there faster i think right now we're we're helping it along quite a bit got it and i guess it's like you mentioned it's not everywhere

so the state's almost become i guess talking about it in the state sense is almost a little bit arbitrary as opposed to maybe taking, looking at it like a county wide. Exactly. Right. Like across the lower 48 that you'd look at it by county or something rather than by state because the lines are kind of arbitrary and a state could be surrounded by it, but it just hasn't turned up in the state. Right. But in often cases managed at the state level so it's in some way it is a reflection of what a state might be doing or not doing exactly yeah uh okay you do that you um

a bunch of stuff here so moose health yeah moose health in the Adirondacks. I want to talk about that a whole bunch. Geographical epidemiology of bear mange. Yep. Meaning black bears. Yep. Mange and black bears. White-tailed deer fawn survival. Historical accounts of lead and bald eagles,

which we looked at a bald eagle this morning in your lab. And how do you pronounce this? Blank fun fungus in Eastern hell benders. Kittred. Okay. Yeah. I find I've been, I kind of got into hell benders.

I didn't know that hell benders were a thing. I mean, I knew like big, you know, aquatic salamanders, but I had no idea there was one as big as a hell bender. Yeah. They seem made up, don't they? They can get up to two feet long. Yeah. And, uh, yeah. Some of the, the names for them, like snot otter. Old lasagna sides. Yeah. It's really, they're really interesting animals and they're super slimy and hard to hold on to. So what is, uh, what is like real briefly, what is going on with hellbenders?

So hellbenders throughout most of their range have been extirpated or, you know, aren't found anymore just because of things like water quality. They need really clear, clean, fast flowing streams. So, you know, damming rivers and things like that isn't good for them, sedimentation. And they are also being impacted by this chytrid fungus, which is a fungus that has decimated some frog populations all globally. And there's a new strain of chytrid called B-sal, which affects salamanders as well. So we've done some work here on captive hellbenders trying to see if we could vaccinate them against this fungus. So we had them here at the lab and, you know, gave them some topical killed fungus, just like you would get in sort of a vaccine.

And it really didn't do much to them. You know, they got sick, but they didn't die. We were expecting them to die from it. And so what we've seen in working with partnerships with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Seneca Nation of Indians is that it looks like they can survive with low levels because this chytrid fungus is found in the water. And so it's kind of ubiquitous everywhere. And so, you know, they're at low levels anyway, just because of habitat conditions. But this is just another challenge that they sort of have to deal with. But it seems like they're dealing with it okay. And that came from somewhere new?

Chytrid, it's been introduced all over the world. Basically, the way that they used to test for pregnancy was through Xenopus frogs these African clawed frogs and they had chytrid and you know hospital where they used to test for human pregnancy yeah people so I don't I don't know the intricacies of it since i'm not you know a human person a human doctor i am human person but they would use frogs and inject them to see if they would start producing eggs and it was a way to tell if uh human females were pregnant and so a lot of the hospitals that had these frog colonies um to test for pregnancy release them them after they developed new tests.

And so that sort of- When was that a thing? Oh, decades ago. A hospital would keep a little gang of frogs around. That's the story. I was not alive when this was all happening. But there's other species now that can harbor chytrid, like American bullfrogs can have chytrid,

and then it gets in the water and other species are exposed to it. So it can do a number on native frog species. So at some point they cut their frogs loose, their pregnancy tester frogs. This is perhaps an explanation. Yes. They cut the frogs loose and these frogs had developed this. They had the fungus, like they were used to it and fine with it but then

introduced it into the wild yeah we see i mean there's introduced pathogens all the time so we can talk more about that with some of these other things that come from different places and then native species can't handle them got it uh i want to hit a correction real quick from someone we both know Jim Heffelfinger the other day we did a we're standing also where did it go it was like a puppy display oh there it is

all those puppy feet on display we recently did an episode what episode number was it Crim with Dr. Perry it's the whatever the hell it's called dire wolves and ancient honey dogs

we got to talking on there about taxonomic lumpers and taxonomic splitters episode 466 episode 466 we got to talk about the taxonomy of wolves and I use an example of what i i use an example of the somewhat arbitrary divisions that will occur in wildlife meaning once upon a time you had wolves that if you just look at the western hemisphere you look at north america

let's just say north america you had wolves that existed from the top of alaska way down into mexico and there was no distinct borders between these different wolf groups so at some point you kind of divide them up even though no matter where you put a division line there's like genetic cross flow so So if you'd have traveled from Alaska, Northern Alaska down into the Sierra Madre of Mexico, let's say, um, you would have always been by wolves and you would gradually notice that

those wolves changed, but there wouldn't have been actual lines of demarcation between these wolves. They would just get smaller and different colors, but there's no, you wouldn't have been able to really say they were all Canis lupus. You would never have been able to say like, oh, these wolves are fundamentally different

than the wolves a mile that way, right? A line of continuity. I'm looking at Kristen, but this isn't her. This isn't your area. I know, I don't know where you're going, so. I use an example of the mexican wolf okay and i was using the example of the mexican wolf in i-40 meaning that they're saying that there's this sort of arbitrary division where if a mexican wolf crosses i-40 it becomes a normal wolf that was wrong wrong. I was saying if a Mexican wolf crosses I-40 going north,

he becomes a different wolf. Heffelfinger wrote in to say, frequent guest and commentator Jim Heffelfinger was saying, they're always Mexican wolves. Here's what he says, you're screwing up. When they cross I-40 going north, they leave the experimental non-essential 10J area. Okay. And become a fully endangered Mexican wolf.

So south of I-40, they have greater management flexibility. Because they're an experimental introduced population. There's just a different management structure. So that thing remains a Mexican wolf. It just enters a different management zone when it crosses I-40. He goes on to further correct. Mexican wolves are physically, genetically genetically and ecologically different from southern plains wolves that were in northern Arizona in northern New Mexico he says there's no way they could have retained those differences that they freely interchanged with wolves in the north like you

said they did Mexican wolves existed in almost complete isolation in the sierra madre of mexico and the sky islands of southern arizona and new mexico with large expanses of dry desert and a lack of ungulates between them and the wolves to the north this is why they are listed separately from other gray wolves on the esa people who are not i'm good this is all giant quote people who are not familiar with wolf distribution historically in the southwest often like to say that mexican wolves just naturally blend into other wolves without a definite break i think most of the other subspecies did blend into one another because of their adjacent distributions, but he points out that is not the case in his argument with Mexican wolves.

That was a correction, Kristen. Excellent. Good job, Jim. Okay. Let me hit you with another thing from the news. Okie dokie. Remember I told you this is a news item, but I'm moving into not a news item. Okay. Okay, let me hit you with another thing from the news. Okie dokie. Remember I told you this was a news item, but I'm moving into not a news item.

Okay. We're going to talk a bunch about CWD and some other wildlife diseases. And you and I were recently at a little conference about CWD and kind of like updates about CWD. And for you listeners who are unaware, CWD is, as we say, chronic wasting disease. It's a prion disease. It's an infectious disease, right? Yeah, you got 10 out of 10 in your quiz at the meeting.

That's great. I don't think I told Corinne about that, my high score. Did he repriority? It's an infectious disease that attacks deer, attacks all cervids. Not all cervids. Sorry, what am I saying? Not all cervids? Not all.

Yeah. It's mostly white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, moose. Okay. What cervid has never had it? Like fallow deer and some of the other, like, I mean, you can use like muntjac deer and give it to them experimentally, but like naturally infected deer, it's only those four species so far. Is that a distribution? Not caribou? Caribou, yes. Because I thought in Europe they had a caribou infection.

They do, yeah. Sorry, I was just thinking in North America. But yeah, reindeer in Scandinavia. Reindeer in Scandinavia. Okay. But so far not in any North American caribou. No. They've done some experimental trials and so there's concern about them,

but they haven't been listed by the USDA yet, they've done some experimental trials and so there's concern about them but um they haven't been listed by the usda yet even though they seem like they're susceptible okay so to date and maybe forever i don't know to date white tail deer mule deer elk moose yeah north america okay in north america uh so a news piece came out reported from, where is this damn thing? Got it. Okay. UW-Madison researchers have found that black-legged ticks, commonly referred to as deer ticks, can harbor transmissible amounts of prions.

Are you a prion or prion person? Prion. The protein particle that causes chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer. What do you make of that? Well, there's a couple different parts of it. So I guess I'm not surprised that they found prions in blood because we knew that happens already, that prions are found throughout the infected animal infected animal's body it's just different concentrations so the most prions are going to be in the central nervous

system like the brain the spinal cord and other lymphatic tissues which is why we sample the lymph nodes like the the things in the throat there that are easiest to get at um spleen are pretty high eyeballs are pretty high. Eyeballs are pretty high in prions, but they're in the blood, they're in muscle tissue, they're in urine, but in much, much lower concentrations. And now we have very sensitive assays where we can detect those lower concentrations, which weren't previously available. One that I think was used in this study is called RT-QUIC, or real-time quaking-induced conversion. If you're familiar with PCR, which is a lot of testing that we do,

it's sort of like that. So if you have one little piece of something, you can amplify it multiple times. And so they were able to feed ticks on membranes with prion-infected blood and then look at the ticks. And yeah, there were still prions in there. And they also collected prions off of deer in the wild that were CWD-infected, and they were able to find prions in that blood too. So that's another way that prions could get around, I guess. But it's not totally, I guess,

why I bring it up is something that, like I should clarify my question about it, is we can't always explain how it moves. Right. Right? It'll just, it'll emerge in some the disease will be found in some place and granted you're not able to test every deer right you know we're not testing every deer on the planet yeah we can get to that let me just finish this one thing

um where you know they say transmissible amounts but that's the issue that we don't really know what transmissible amounts of prion are yet. And we don't know that a tick feeding on something else would have the mechanism to push the prions back into whatever they're feeding on. Because usually after a tick feeds, it molts and goes through another growth phase. Or, you know, if it's an adult, it lays eggs and, you know, dies. So the odds of it, you know, a nymph that would feed on a deer that has prions, like then molts and goes through another stage and feeds on another deer that it would have enough prions to push through the skin into the blood to cause an infection. Like, I don't know that that's happening yet. I see what you're saying.

So, you know, sure, prions could be there, but whether that's actually going to do anything or not, we don't know. Do you feel that when you see that kind of story, and it makes a suggestion of that, do you feel that there's a risk of it being misunderstood? Well, I think CWD is a really complicated disease in general. And the one truth that I've kind of found with it is it always gets worse. Like all the news always seems to get worse. So I think it's hard to sometimes talk about these scientific discoveries

because they're interesting. But as far as what that means in the grand scheme of things and how we should take that as scaling it up to management for a state wildlife agency is sometimes a little bit challenging. But you asked about movement of prions, and that's something that I work a lot on and I'm really interested in because in New York, we were one of the first states to write a risk minimization plan. And it was pretty simple, you know, like one, don't bring prions into the state. Two, don't let prions be out in the environment where deer scavengers can access them. And three, educate the public about it it so by taking steps not to bring prions into the state and that could be in a live deer or dead deer you know so that involves the captive cervid industry and it involves hunters and

making sure that their steps taken so they're not bringing prions in and then don't let prions get out into the environment by educating hunters about how to dispose of carcasses. If you're going out of state to hunt, what should you bring back? What's legal? What's not? How can you process your carcass and debone it so that you're bringing back the meat, the antlers or whatever other things you want to bring back in a safe manner? Those are the type of things that I'm interested in. So like when people get all wound up about birds moving prions or, you know, coyotes or ticks, that could be a problem, but it's probably like infinitesimally small compared to what people are doing moving

stuff around. Oh, I got you. Yeah. Can you explain where we spent time this morning? Sure. We were in the necropsy lab of the Animal Health Diagnostic Center at Cornell. And that is a place where we bring in animal carcasses. So I deal with wildlife. So we bring in specimens that may be found by the public or the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation biologists want to find out why something died and they bring it in and then we go through a whole process called a necropsy which is the equivalent of an animal autopsy and we take tissues for testing and examine the animal and try to figure out why it died and collect specimens for other research or archiving. Yeah, this morning we looked at a bald eagle.

We looked at a turtle. We looked at a bobcat. We looked at a horse. Well, we looked at a horse. We didn't look at it. That's what I said, we looked at a horse. We didn't examine a horse. There you go. There was a horse that was collaterally observed there was a

collaterally observed horse and we partially examined a turtle i don't want people to think i'm looking at horses on the side no no it was there was a horse present yes other people had interest in the horse and we just observed the horse being there uh so i've done this before a person you know a hunter a fisherman a homeowner whoever comes out and they they shoot or discover or whatever something that doesn't look right yep it's acting weird a coyote shows up in their yard, it's missing its hair, it's trying to bite their dog. They call their game warden, whoever, like, something's not right with this thing. What's going on? It, by some avenue, winds up with folks like you.

Yes. So there's a whole process. And we go out and do training for the biologists in the state to tell them, you know, what to look for and try to educate them about different diseases. So if it is a coyote with hair missing, they are familiar with mange and they know what to tell the homeowner. And if it's something serious that they want us to take a look at, they'll either tell the homeowner to shoot it or they'll come out and euthanize the animal. They know how to keep it cool enough so the carcass is still in good shape to get it to us. And so there's our lab here in Ithaca, but then the New York Department of Environmental

Conservation also has a wildlife health unit over by Albany, New York. So having multiple locations makes it so they can get carcasses, the biologists can get the carcasses to us relatively quickly so we can figure out what's going on. So they let us know what species they want to prioritize looking at, which populations, which areas are important to them. And we also let them know what diseases to look out for, what might be coming down the pike that we've heard about from other surrounding states as being problematic and ask them to be on the lookout. So like for chronic wasting disease, we always want to hear about sick or abnormal deer. So those are ones that we say, yes, like if you get a call from anybody about that, go out, get that deer. We want the whole thing to come in here and take a look at it.

Whereas like bear mange, we did a pretty intensive study for a few years. We said, yes, we want to know about every report of bears with mange. And if you can get your hands on any, we want you to bring them in. We published a paper on that. We said, okay, you know, we kind of know that we have bear mange now. We know where it's happening. But right now there's sort of a larger regional study where other researchers from the University of Georgia came to us and said, hey, we want samples from all these states. Can you help us out? We said, okay. And there's different protocols. So if a biologist is out there, he or she can do different things anywhere from like taking a skin scraping to bringing in the whole animal and we'll take samples and then send them to Georgia for participation in that.

Is black bear mange killing black bears? It does kill black bears. And Pennsylvania has been doing a lot of good work on this because when we first started with mange, we kind of said, okay, if 50% of the body is hairless and the animal looks pretty bad, you should probably euthanize it. We don't think it's going to recover. But some of the work being done um now indicates that you can treat bears and they recover but some bears

even with severe mange seem to recover on their own so it's kind of a crapshoot on whether they're going to recover or not but well how is it new um It's expanded in its range. So it didn't really occur in New York until, you know, I'll probably get the year wrong, but in the last decade or so, it's Sarcopteas scabii, but is it specific to bears or is it the same Sarcopteas scabii that occurs on coyotes and foxes? Because we know red foxes get mange and it usually kills them. So did it jump from a species or did it become more speciated to just being a bear one? But it looks like it spilled over from other species and just is going through bears now. Like at some point, um, that, that happened here or at some point it happened somewhere else. Uh, it's probably spilled over multiple places because we, in New York, there's two, uh, sort of different areas of bears. So you've got the Southern tier and the Catskills,

which is continuous with Pennsylvania and bears, you know, move across the PA line. And then there's bears up towards the Adirondacks. So there's sort of the Northern population. And then there's a strip kind of where we are, bears are just sort of coming into being here. They weren't there. You're seeing more and more of them. And that, and that mange will hit them and they'll lose their hair. Yeah. Yeah. And they get, it's actually called lignification, like a lichen, where they

get really thick skin and they'll have bacterial overgrowth on their skin and, you know, their eyes might crust over and they're super itchy. So they've just got a lot of ooze and crustiness. Yeah. They smell bad too. Really? Really bad. How many of those come through here? We would see a few a year. And when we did that research study, we found it was more likely to be adult females. We would get, you know, not a ton of them, but we would probably have, you know, a dozen a year. And then there would be more reports. One of the big things is that these bears with manes usually end up in bad places where they shouldn't be.

So they'll be on like people's porches or they'll be more likely to have an interaction with a human. Because they're starving to death. Yeah. They're in bad shape. And so then we get calls about them and then they get euthanized. Hey folks, Then they get euthanized. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

And boy, my goodness, 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. Our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there OnX is now in Canada the great features that you love in OnX

are available for your hunts this season 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. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast.

Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services hand-picked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light,

Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try On x out if you visit on x maps.com slash meet on x maps.com slash meet welcome to the to the on x club y'all how does something get how does something get mange like i remember when i was a kid even or older than a kid but high school encountering um just like encountering red foxes with mange in a strong association with red foxes and mange yeah even in the trapping world it would be that

i got a red fox but it had mange and it was just taken as like you know a thing to happen they were out there but people it wasn't people weren't seemingly like alarmed by it yeah i mean red fox mange has been around for a long time and so these mites can live off the animal for a little while you know depending on the conditions and the moisture they can last in burrows and things like that for a few days so then another animal comes along and uses that burrow and might pick up the mites and then a cycle starts again so it's moved like the disease is moved from animal to animal by a mite nothing's born with mange no it's a parasite so they pick it

up and then the females you know burrow into the skin and lay a bunch of eggs and those hatch out and then they start burrowing and lay more eggs and the infection just gets worse and worse and then uh talk through what's going on with moose right now and what you're interested in moose because when Because when I read that you were looking at moose, I assumed it's what we keep hearing about with moose. Which is like some tick-borne pathogen. Winter tick. Winter tick. It's killing a lot of moose.

But you mentioned another thing killing moose. Yeah. So we have a project on moose right now. We've caught moose with a helicopter the last two years and put GPS collars on them. There's a student out there with camera traps. And within New York, it's a pretty small population. This is like throughout most of their range moose have problems with brain worm or Paralaphaestrongylus tenuous which is really long long word and that is a parasite that's carried by deer and there's an intermediate host which is a snail so if moose accidentally eat that snail they can get infected and the parasite migrates through the spinal cord up into the brain and sometimes it ends up

in the eye and it causes damage in moose. Tell me the life cycle again. So deer are infected. They poop. The larvae come out in the poop. The snail feeds on the poop and then a moose accidentally eats an infected parasite. It's a snail larvae. No, the worm, the parasite larvae is in the deer poop. Okay. And then the snail comes along and likes to feed on the poop.

Got it. The larvae actually burrow into the snail. Okay. And then the snail gets infected. Moose comes along, accidentally eats a snail, and then they get infected. Because the snail's not a piece of grass or whatever. Right. They're just cruising along.

That's a convoluted path. I know. Wait until you hear about the liver fluke. It's even crazier. Hold on a minute. I just want to make sure I got it right. So the deer that poops out the larva, how did it get infected anyway?

Same process, where it accidentally ate something that was infected. So there's enough stuff out there, there's enough stuff out there accidentally eating snails to keep this going. Apparently. Yep. But the parasite is not a snail.

Correct. It's just a carrier. It's a worm. So what is the worm? The worm is Paralapastron, just tenuous. That's the parasite is not a snail. Correct. It's just a carrier. It's a worm. So what is the worm? The worm is Paralapastron just tenuous. That's the parasite. But what, does it ever have a,

does it remain a worm? Does it ever have a bug phase? Nope. Okay. So it's just a worm. Just a worm. I got it. Yeah.

That goes into your brain. All right. So a deer gets infected. Mm-hmm. And they pass it through. Yep. Winds up in their digestive system. Mm-hmm. it through. Yeah. Winds up in their digestive system. They poop.

Yeah. There's a whole complicated process because it goes to their brain too. And then it lays eggs and that's what comes out. Lays eggs in their brain. Yes. And that actually can cause some problems with deer, but usually deer are fine with it. But yeah, they lay eggs.

The eggs end up in their lungs. They cough them up and then they poop them out. And then through the poop, through the snail and a moose accidentally gets it. But if the moose, okay. Let's say a moose ate the poop. We need to get a diagram here. We need some animals to like, okay, here's the poop. But if the moose ate the poop. We need to get a diagram here. We need like some animals to like, okay,

here's the poop. But if the moose ate the poop, that doesn't work. No, it has to go through the snail. Yeah. Just like what? Like,

yeah, I know. Right. It's, I mean, it just seems like something that, um, would just be so random.

I mean, not random, but so isolated. The fact that this is happening enough to have population level impacts yep then well i guess if you're a moose you're eating a lot of stuff so odds are you're gonna big mouthfuls of stuff and right you know i've gone out to my garden right and we're eating i remember we have a story that floats around in our family where my i used to have a little greenhouse and i didn't wash the lettuce out

of the greenhouse i thought nothing could get on it because it's in the greenhouse yep and there's a story where i look over and there's a ranch dressing coated worm making a break for it across my kid's plate oh yeah so yeah you're just eating stuff i stopped growing broccoli for that exact reason those things like the little worms that get in your broccoli are the same color as the broccoli. And I'm pretty sure I ate more worms than broccoli maybe. Yeah. And I've read that people would like to point out that like, oh, a vegan, you can't be a

vegan because of vitamin B12. But someone's saying that you need such a small amount of B12 that you're going to get it through insect contamination on produce. Yeah. Which is not a problem. Right. So back to these moose. Okay.

Back to the moose. So we're talking about the winter. Okay. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of parasites that moose are dealing with right now. So we just went over brain worm. Winter tick are one. But I want to go back to brain worm for a minute. Okay. You like brain worm. Winter tick are one. But I want to go back to brain worm for a minute. Okay.

You like brain worm. Well, no, no. I just want to make sure I'm understanding it right. It doesn't bother white-tailed deer. Mostly. Okay. So mostly doesn't bother white-tailed deer, but it mostly bothers moose? Like it's hard on moose.

Yes. Why? Because we're not entirely sure yet, but my theory on this is that the worms get lost and they think, you know, they're used to migrating a certain way in a deer and like a deer is much smaller than a moose and so they kind of um get lost along their way and will end up in weird places like the eye so um when we have moose acting abnormally or are emaciated we usually

suspect that is a brain worm associated mortality but it But moose are what's called an aberrant host, and other things like llamas and alpacas also can get brain worm and die from it. And so these species that haven't adapted with this worm may have more of a reaction to it migrating through their central nervous system and their brain than white-tailed deer do. And so that reaction may cause more problems for them. Okay. If it comes to something like this, how is the worm so picky anyways?

Why would the worm, let's say you ate the snail. What is it about your, what is it about a human's body chemistry that would make it that the worm didn't take off, that the worm didn't go into your brain? I don't know. Cause I don't study people. Okay. But like,

do we know that it doesn't? Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, I mean, there's a bunch of worms that do like, we don't hear about brain worm being a problem in people,

but there are other ones in raccoon called balus ascaris. That's problematic. That uh in raccoon called balus ascaris that's problematic that's in raccoon poop and so they tell people like cleaning out addicts and stuff to make sure that you wear um you know a respirator or something and wear gloves because if you inhale these eggs from raccoon poop then you can get infected and that one ends up in your brain and causes problems oh it does yeah and then what's one, what's the cat scratch fever one? Is that Bordetella? No, that's dog cough.

Toxoplasmosis. Oh. That's what I'm thinking of. Toxoplasmosis. Yeah. That is another one that, you know, you get from feces, like inhaling the eggs and everything. And that can be a problem for people. Yeah.

That one also can end up in your brain. It's a different type of parasite though. So it's like an intracellular one that causes a lot of problems. I did some work on sea otters and they would get that one a lot. And they think it's from cat feces washing out into the ocean. What? Yeah. And snails might be involved in that one too.

So, okay, back to brain worm for a minute now. I know we're jumping around a bunch. That's all right. I have heard, and I might be getting part of this wrong, I have heard that we're seeing that one of the problems for moose that are normally in the northern latitudes okay one of the problems for moose has been um as white-tailed deer populations

have expanded habitat changes okay warmer winters have allowed white-tailed deer to move and encroach on areas that were historically moose. Yes. They've always, you know, there's probably always been some intermingling, but there's been a more radical shift of deer moving into moose areas and that being problematic for moose. Yep.

This is what they're talking about, I gather. Exactly. The movement of these parasites into moose. And so we'll talk about the other one that we think is affecting New York moose is liver fluke. Okay. So this,

has anybody ever asked you about little livers? Like if you're eating a liver, I actually had somebody ask me this and they're like, oh, what are those other little livers? So they're kind of like leaf shape. They might get to- No, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. So those are liver fluke, giant liver fluke, bacillus magna. Oh no, I'm not talking about that. Okay. I'm talking about like, you know, there's like lobes of a liver. There's like a

little sidecar liver on there. Sure. Yeah. Okay. That's what I thought you were asking about. No, but these are parasites that are in there that some people have fry up and eat. Hold on, back up on that. Yeah. Tell me again what it looks like. It's like yay big and it kind of looks like a leaf. I'm sure I can find a picture. And it grows on the liver.

Yeah, it grows in the liver. So those migrate through the liver and make these cysts that are full of like brown gunk and they destroy the liver. And so that's the big problem. And people like eating them or they're accidentally eating them? They probably accidentally eat them. I was just curious because you get a lot of weird questions. And he thought it was the sidecar of the liver. No, the little sidecar thing I'm talking about. Right, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. No, these are parasites within the liver.

Okay. They kind of look like a liver almost, I guess. But yeah, they're different. I want to ask you later about the nasal bots. Oh, yeah. Those are fun. Are you into those? Why not?

Okay. But let's go on. Okay. We'll keep going. We'll go on to liver flukes. All right. So liver flukes also are carried by white-tailed deer and have a snail intermediate host. But these have an aquatic snail as the intermediate host.

So it's even sort of more complicated. complicated the moose have to get this aquatic vegetation um where the the fluke actually insists on the vegetation and stays there and then the moose comes along and eats it and gets infected okay so he's got to be underwater well he can you know eating in a a wetland or something you know eating some plants out of there and gets it that way. And so out of the moose that we have on the air right now, I think we've had- Explain what that means. With GPS collars on, that we've had about three already that have died from liver fluke. And these were captured as yearlings. And so we're worried about the survival of juvenile moose in the Adirondacks. So there's been a lot of studies by folks here at Cornell in the USGS co-op unit at the SUNY School of Environmental Science and Forestry doing moose work to see if the habitat's appropriate, to look at adult reproduction a few years ago, we collared a bunch of females and the, uh, all the signs

pointed to juveniles as their survivorship wasn't very good. So that's why we're doing this study. And so the fact that we've already seen three die over, you know, the course of our, our two years already. How many, how many moose do you have out there with collars on them? I forget. I want to say we caught like 15 the first year and 19 the second year. And three have died from that. How many have died from other stuff? Jen, my PhD student, would have the numbers, but I don't think too many others.

I mean, I think most of them are still on the air. So you got a mortality signal. You go out there. You get it. You dissect it. Bring it here or whatever. Dissect here whatever dissect it open it up liver flute yeah the liver's destroyed liver's destroyed um destroyed so much that someone would know when they're looking at it um i mean you have to kind of get a feel for what normal is and when you have a liver that just looks like pulp and the other thing I was, I was at one of the moose necropsies and it was full of fluid.

So like liver was failing and it couldn't process any, any thing anymore. So it was just filling up with fluid. Like we punched a hole in it and had a five gallon bucket under the table and it like was overflowing. It had so much fluid in it. Five gallons? Over five gallons. Yeah, there was so much pressure in its abdomen. The fluid was shooting out a couple feet when we punched a hole in it.

Oh. How many flukes does it take to do that? I don't know, but it was a lot. It was pretty trashed when you got to the liver. And for an animal that young to have that much damage. When you get to something like that, how do you ever make the determination that this is new, this has always been here, but we hadn't noticed it? Do you know what I mean? Right.

How do you ever go down that path? Yeah, it's hard because you're just comparing it to what you know already. And that's why we have challenges sometimes with saying things are a problem because we get so many things opportunistically where we can't go out and just sample the population like we'd like to randomly and say, okay, is this normal or not normal? So, yeah, we have to do some some creative statistics and just um doing this work over time you get a baseline so you kind of know are things you know we've never seen this before in the you know new york

has a really long history of doing wildlife health and and knowing what's normal and what's not. So those people are a really good resource of institutional knowledge to compare against to say, hey, what do you normally see? And to return that real quick to the work you guys are doing downstairs we were looking at this morning, is that gives you that influx of animals coming in, gives you a chance to look for this stuff right meaning someone hits a moose with a car the moose comes in and you'd be like oh does not or does yeah right and it allows you to start getting a snapshot

of what's going on out there even though like we looked at a bobcat this morning that obviously pretty yeah that one was fairly obviously like probably from the report or whoever brought it in but also just like at a glance

it's like this thing's been run over by a car bad but you're able to check to see its other what its health might have been like

prior to it getting hit by a car exactly was there something that may have predisposed it to getting hit by a car so it's sort of a judgment may have predisposed it to getting hit by a car? So it's sort of a judgment call.

Like we don't run every test on every animal because that would be prohibitively expensive. But by saving the tissues, if there's sort of, you know, a potential smoking gun out there that might have caused something like, you know, for some of these um animals like maybe they had something you know on board or maybe they were sick and that's why they walked in front of the car maybe they weren't quite right so you know yeah kristen was saying to me earlier you were talking about found dead and you were saying uh tell me more found dead found dead isn't really helpful like we know the animal's dead already like found dead below a power line yep found dead in a bird's nest found dead below a big window right found dead where yeah found dead after it bit your dog exactly yeah so uh one of the things when i go out and uh talk to to the biologists about sort of doing like a crime scene investigation type work,

because a lot of times they get tunnel vision on the animal and they go and pick up the animal and they're worried about putting their gloves on and doing everything right. But, you know, letting us know what the situation is, because that is really a huge part of solving the puzzle. You know, is it hot out? Is it, you know, is a species migrating? Is it, you know, we've been seeing sort of low level of mortality in this area for a long time, or, you know, we found 20 turkeys dead and there was a smoking tree because it got hit by lightning. You know, those types of things are really very helpful in getting a diagnosis because a lot of times

carcasses will come in and, you know, if it's found dead, you don't know how long this thing's been dead for. And if it's hot out, they tend to rot really quickly. And when that happens, the pathologist will call that autolyzed. And so, you know, it's different than having a pet that might be euthanized at a clinic and then you open it up and it's, you know, fresh. These things, a lot of times we don't know how long they've been dead for and, you know, they rot pretty quickly depending on the conditions. When earlier we explored the idea of being a disease ecologist and you talked about because, you know know you're looking at a complex situation with all these other inputs um if you're looking at a bunch if you're looking at a lot of moose and you're seeing that in northern new york you're having a high prevalence of liver flukes

in moose you collar moose a significant percentage of those moose die from liver flukes. You're not the one that declares that liver flukes are having a population level impact on moose, or are you? Or does that information then go down the road to someone else who's doing population level work? Oh, no. So we work really closely with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation. And so we have a PhD student working on this because it's a research project with them to try to define what's happening with the moose population. So yeah, the student will do population modeling. We'll help out with that based on the mortality information that we have collected over the years. She just sent me a manuscript about it.

We'll try to figure out what's going on with that population and then we'll feed that directly to the state agency so they can put it into their moose management plan and decide how they want to proceed. Had it been flagged prior that moose numbers are declining and that opened up a sort of investigation about what is going on? Exactly. So there was work done by a lot of other researchers looking at archery hunters sighting logs to try to estimate the population. There's been helicopter surveys for moose, trying to estimate the population over

time and see if it's, you know, stable, declining, increasing. So yeah, and then like all the mortality tracking that we've done and trying to determine cause of death. We did some preliminary modeling to say, okay, we think it's juvenile moose that are being most impacted. So those are the ones we should emphasize for putting the collars on. You know, there was a previous helicopter capture with adult females.

And with that, we were able to work with other researchers to develop a test to look for brain worm. And when we tested those adult females, it showed that they had exposure to brainworm, but they obviously survived. So that kind of changed the dogma that brainworm might be a death sentence for moose because we think that these females got infected and they were able to survive the infection. So yeah, trying to get a sense of that. We knew the females were also pregnant. Uh, the state biologists walked in on a lot of these to actually get eyes on calves to see if they had, you know, singles or twins to, to kind of get those reproductive numbers

as well. Yep. Uh, let's talk about the eagle for a minute. Oh, wait, we didn't finish winter tick though. Oh no. Okay. Let's go back to winter tick. Okay.

So, um, winter tick is a problem that they're seeing in Maine and New Hampshire and Vermont pretty significantly, also killing juvenile moose. And they're trying some new management strategies to decrease the population density of moose to see if that slows down the transmission of winter tick. Because winter tick are another thing that deer carry that deer can manage. They can groom themselves enough to get the winter ticks off, but moose don't seem to be able to do that quite as well. So they're trying to lower moose numbers to save moose. That's a logic that's going to be challenged by a lot of moose hunters yeah well i guess and others i guess if you're a moose hunter right now it's good for you right like if you're out there helping that's how they're doing the boring of density but um you know the old line uh

i don't know if it came from vietnam but the concept of burning a village to save it, that's hard for people. Oh, I know. I deal with that all the time with chronic wasting disease. Yeah. But in New York, we hadn't seen winter tick the same way that other Northeast states had until recently. So with some of the captured moose, when they do assessments for winter ticks,

so they look for them on live animals and they found more than we had seen previously. And we're starting to get some game cam pictures in that looks like the typical hair loss pattern that you see on moose where they're missing hair on the shoulder. And some of the states that have it pretty significantly like Maine and Minnesota, they actually call them ghost moose where they've lost so much hair that they appear more white because they've rubbed off all those guard hairs and everything. Oh really?

Yeah. Let's say you knew, not that you don't know, let's say we know that that has a population level impact or the brain worm, for instance, or either one of these. Like there's nothing, I mean, is there? Is there any control mechanism that would wind up being helpful? Well, if you didn't have as many white-tailed deer in moose territory that would be helpful yeah so i mean maine is is trying really hard to um talk about chronic wasting disease and and deer numbers and moose um because a lot of the towns there have started feeding

programs and those are really hard to stop once they get started because then you have too many deer and then you know people obviously don't want to see them starving in winter so they keep feeding and keep feeding and so then you just can't get people to stop it because they don't want the animals to die you know in alaska uh in eastern alaska they have like a basically a shoot on site policy for mule deer coming into Alaska. Yeah. Not welcome. Right. Around disease issues, right?

Yep. Being that those deer are getting there due to human-induced habitat changes. Yep. Falling road systems, right? I mean, you see that out west with whitetails. Disturbed ecosystems, edge habitats, right? Yeah, falling rivers up. Yeah, and it's changed, the policy on it's changed mildly,

but basically it's like, if you see it, kill it. Like not wanting them in. I know, it's challenging because we've, you know, I think people forget that we've altered habitats so significantly and have an impact and that we're not, we're not separate from nature. And, um, you know, I hunt deer and, you know, eat a lot of venison, but in a lot of places there's deer densities that are way too high and they're problematic for a lot of different reasons, you know, chronic wasting disease being one of them so uh if there are ways to lower deer densities or not encourage them to

encroach in new areas that's something that i think hunters should be behind um can we talk about eagles yes go ahead okay you guys had an eagle we had an eagle your interest i we're looking we were looking at an eagle. They hadn't begun the necropsy on it yet. I asked if eagle, I could see if eagles were still an ESA species, Endangered Species Act, Endangered Species Act protected species. I could see that like every eagle that died, you'd want to take a gander at it. That's how it was for years and years.

That's not the case anymore eagles are recovered um eagle populations are increasing what is why are you guys interested in eagles and then i want to get to the turtle okay we'll talk eagles what's of interest about eagles so uh eagles are good indicator species for a lot of things because the public pays attention to them you know if people find a bald eagle they they feel compelled to report it so they feel compelled to tell you that they're seeing one when i have friends come up to my place in alaska i have to wait a few days for them to stop reporting to me that there's eagles oh i've got a good to Eagle in Alaska story for you later. I'm like, you know what?

Wait a minute. And there'll be 20 in a tree. And at some point on this trip, you're going to stop observing them. Yeah. They're just there. I had in my previous job with the U.S. Geological Survey at the National Wildlife Health Center, I would hear about these mass mortality events and do investigations on them. And one of them was about all these bald eagles in Alaska, where if a truck leaves a fish processing facility, it needs to be covered. Because if it's not, the eagles will start dive bombing it to get

all the fish parts. And so one left and was not covered eagles started going into it and just kept like piling in on top of each other and like 20 bald eagles died in this fish truck just like smothering each other like trying to get to the what happens after a soccer tournament yeah yeah so like a stampede really yeah so a bunch of eagles died just smashing each other trying to get to the fish parts. God, it's so like un-eagle-like. Everybody has these ideas of eagles being so majestic. I mean, we get eagles in. Ben Franklin didn't like them.

Yeah, he wanted the turkey, right? Well, that's a myth, but he was being, he was very disappointed in the eagle. Yeah. And when he threw the turkey thing, he was disappointed because the eagles are scavengers and didn't think it was a great symbol for the country. And the way most historians regard his comment about the wild turkeys, he was saying,

basically was like, might as well do the wild turkey. Ah, okay. At least he's vain. Right. Yeah. It wasn vain. It's much sighted, but most people are saying... They don't get the attitude with it. Yeah, because he didn't write down,

but there's an implied, just make it the turkey, at least he's vain. But it wasn't, they think it was in jest. The suggestion was in jest. Yeah, I see. But he was legitimately not happy with the eagle.

Okay, well. A scavenger bird. Right. And we see like conspecific trauma all the time, like eagles puncturing each other from fighting and things like that. So, yeah. Yeah.

I mean. But they're a good indicator species. Right. Because people take notice of them. Exactly. And I did, man. If I was walking down the road and I saw a dead eagle. Yeah. I mean. But they're a good indicator species. Right. Because people take notice of them. Exactly. And I did, man. If I was walking down the road and I saw a dead eagle. You'd do something.

I would. Let's say I was walking down the road and on the right-hand side of the road is a dead eagle and the left-hand side of the road is a dead buzzard. I'm going to pay way more attention to the dead eagle. I know. Buzzards don't get any love. To the point where I might even notify someone about it. Because I would think, is someone shooting eagles?

Exactly. Are they pissed at eagles? What happened to that eagle? Yeah. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And 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 brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. 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.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team.

Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. 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, to the on X club y'all. So we're looking at them, um, for a couple different reasons. One of them is just to keep that historic trend going where we want to keep an eye on what's happening with them. Uh, I mentioned,

we just, uh, finished a study a few years ago looking at bald eagles and lead. And so we gathered data from seven different Northeast states and it was diagnostic labs, rehabbers, state agencies, and put all that together to answer that exact question. You know, does lead have a population level impact on eagles? And so we put that together and then did some very fancy mathematics with my research associate, Brenda Hanley, and figured out that lead, you know, we all know eagles have recovered.

Like there's no debate about that. Yeah. But the long-term growth rate of eagles was depressed by three to 5% by lead poisoning. And so it wasn't that it stopped the recovery. It was just like driving a car forward with your foot on the brake. So it just kind of, you know, didn't make it optimal. Yeah. And so we used a bunch of. Slowing, like slowing recovery. Yeah.

So it still happened, but it would have been more efficient if eagles weren't getting lead poisoning. Now, would there be, we were talking about trigger warnings. I'm going to give it, I'm going to issue my first ever trigger warning. Really? Wow. Should I, do I get like a plaque or something? No, you're not going to get triggered. Okay.

But this is, I was trying to seek clarification about what, you know, I heard it all the time. I never knew what the hell it meant. And it would be that you'd notify someone if they were going to hear something upsetting. People get riled up about this subject. Oh, I know. You know, when we're talking about lead and birds,

we're talking about bullets. I know. Okay. So for you people that are going to get all, one way, like no matter what, you're going to, if you hate hate lead ammo if you love lead ammo here's a trigger warning okay because you're gonna hear something yeah i know right and like there's very few people who just want to discuss things not very few um there's a lot of people who just don't even want to talk about shit.

Oh, I know. Yeah. I know. My dad, not interested in discussing this whatsoever. They'd rather just be that I don't want to talk about it. But we're going to talk about it. Okay. So, and I'll do my best to throw in, I'll do my best to interject like, well, what about

isms? Okay. Okay. We're talking about bullet lead. Yes. And birds get bullet lead by eating shit that's been shot. With a bullet. With a bullet.

Mm-hmm. So you go, you get a deer. Let's say you shoot a deer. you're hitting the shoulder blade, you're using some kind of jacketed bullet, some kind of bonded bullet, whatever. It's probably copper sheathed around what would strike you as a very small amount of lead. Okay. So most bullets have, there's a lot of different bullet construction, but if we're going to divide two big game,

big game bullets into two classifications for our purposes here, we would talk about like monolithic, meaning that they're all copper, or there are some combination of copper and lead. there was a time when it was just lead but they've mostly most bullets are jacketed so you shoot a deer you hit in the shoulder blade that bullet breaks up sends little bits of stuff here and there deer dies everybody's happy you except for the deer yeah deer's dead everybody else is happy you got the deer maybe while you're gutting the deer you uh you have some damage some severe damage on the opposing shoulder you cut that out don't even bring that home later you butcher your deer at home. There's some parts that are shot up that you don't want.

You take those and you go out and put them out back because you like to watch birds and whatnot, whatever. You dump it in a ditch somewhere, whatever you do. And it winds up being introduced into the food chain in the wild. Things consume it and they can get let and if you're of like we mentioned earlier a bald eagle whose specialty is scavenging right and you're a long-lived bird and you get tuned into deer gut piles and you're like most things where you realize that a great place to uh there's certain great places to hang out in the fall because that's going on. I remember to give an example of how would animals ever tune into this. I remember hearing about this project where there's a particular highway in

Northern Montana where there's really high white-tailed deer populations and it would actually impact golden eagle distribution. That there were eagles who would spend their winter, they were roadkill specialists. Yeah, I believe it. They would spend their winter around 93. Yeah. It's like you could make a living

all winter flying up and down and picking off, eat one carcass, go to the next carcass. So you're an eagle, you live a long time. Over the course of your lifetime, you eat enough little tidbits of lead that you get lead poisoning.

You get a fatal amount of lead. You're shaking your head, no? Well, potentially, yeah. But the way we looked at it was, so there would be eagles that didn't have any lead on board. Then there would be exposed eagles that had you know a little bit and we have problems um sometimes people talk about like chronic and acute which you're kind of talking about like chronic over the course of your your lifetime um and then there's sort of levels that are enough to to kill you over oh in a in a dose. Yeah. I see. Okay. And then that would be like lead poisoning.

And so people would often term, like if you get a big helping, like if you use lead sinker or something, that would be acute lead poisoning and that would be a level, you know, enough to kill you. I see. So dying from a single meal.

Yeah. We can't tell that the way that we get the data. So we don't know if they accumulate enough lead over time to kill, you know, to get to that level or if they just eat, you know, happen to get a fragment that's big enough because a lead fragment, a small grain of rice is enough to kill an eagle because they have a very acidic digestive system. And so they break that down a lot more than like people eating lead, you know, it tends to pass through and not get as digested as it might in an eagle.

See, that's the thing I'll hear from people is they'll say that that lead and a lot of things that lead just passes through and you're not breaking it down. But we did, we're doing a study now looking at fisher. So mammalian scavengers to try to figure out, you know, are other animals getting lead from what we term attractive nuisances like a gut pile. And I want to say it's like 70% of the fishers we've tested from hunter, from trapped animals had some levels of lead in them so a lot of fishers are are getting led to some level lead in them in what way uh from scavenging no no but detected where in them in their liver okay so we asked trappers to to give us carcasses we took out the livers and tested them and you incinerate the liver and then it leaves behind these metal residues and you can find

the lead. Yep. And how much lead might you get out of a fisher's liver? They were like just trace amounts. So not, not super high, not enough to kill them obviously because they were trapped animals. And I'm not trying to like create like a suspicion of doubt, but what else might they have done to get that lead? Is there any other? I mean, people throw out ideas like tire weights.

You know, if there's tire weights that have been thrown off tires alongside the road. And fishers are chewing on that? Potentially. Old discarded batteries. And they're chewing on that? I don't. But these are just things that people, to create

a suspicion or to throw out some possible other explanation. Exactly. And so for some of the Eagle stuff, we did try to look at the isotopes, the lead isotopes, to figure out, is it coming from bullets or is it coming from lead paint chips or whatever? And so we did that analysis. But apparently because there's such a limited amount of lead smelting anymore that a lot of the lead is recycled. So you can't tell where that lead actually came from. So we weren't able to identify it. For bullet making, that's all recycled lead.

Right. It's all from batteries. Yeah, we did try, but it wasn't helpful. Here's the thing people say, and this isn't your area, but this is the thing people would point to. Here you have the, let's take the Eagle example. And the Eagle we looked at today will be tested for lead?

Yes. Okay. There's an argument, it's not an argument you can ignore really cuz it's a it's a sound argument to be Eagles were endangered and they were endangered because of DDT right okay they were endangered because of a pesticide that would cause their shells to be very thin and they would kill their own shells they'd break their own eggs when they incubated them uh that's simplified but that's what happened with eagles uh the use of ddt was prohibited eagle numbers started to increase they were one of these few i think one of i don't know what it is two percent of the species that go

on the endangered species list come off because of recovery it's not very common right some come off because they're gone they go extinct some come off because we realize that they didn't warrant being on there anyway but it's a rare thing to hit recovery and it's always celebrated to hit recovery. Peregrine Falk and Bald Eagle actually hit recovery and now their numbers are growing and someone would point to and say, well, bullet lead, yes, they're growing

but bullet lead is slowing the growth and an argument. And it, and it's true would be, there are many kinds of human cause mortality that are slowing recovery vehicles. Like they're increasing. Yes.

Would they be increasing faster without vehicles? Sure. Would they be increasing faster without vehicles sure would they be increasing faster without power lines would they be increasing faster without x y and z so there are many human caused things that are slowing the increase but the increase is there and they would argue this is an acceptable level, this is how the argument goes. Like I said, it can't be ignored. We, as a species, have an accepted level of human mortality. Meaning that they're growing. There's a bunch of things you could do to make them grow faster,

but we're not going to do all those things because there's an inconvenience level. Well, I think that's the rub right there is that if we're talking about lead from bullets and hunters are hunting because they're conservationists, they love the animals, to think about that you're causing, if you think about all the rules for shooting and know your target, what's beyond and one bullet, one kill, all those types of things. If you're leaving something out in the environment that's killing other animals that you didn't intend to know that that might be happening, I think is something that hunters should know about. And,

you know, I'm not sitting here saying don't use lead bullets, but knowing that this is happening to other species. And if people want to make a change in how they hunt, maybe they don't leave the gut pile out in the field. If you want to shoot lead, okay, but don't leave that out there for scavengers. If you want to change your ammo that that's okay too um but just knowing that it's a problem and and getting back to your argument like

there's a lot of things out there that they could slow the population growth that's absolutely true um this is one where hunters are are making this choice and the thing that I thought was most interesting about the work we did with the population modeling, yeah, people are like, oh, three to 5%, we can, okay, that's, it's not, you know, stop the recovery. That's not a huge number. But one of the elements that we were able to look at was the population resilience. So how much flexibility does that population have to absorb other threats and keep operating? And bald eagles are kind of maxed out. So they've stretched their population

and how much they can adjust their population parameters to make that recovery happen. And so in the paper, we talked about how if other threats come along, you know, like, you know, with climate change, we're talking about using more wind energy and if that, you know, the wind turbines are knocking down eagles and killing them or other infectious disease. And we actually put this paper out before highly pathogenic avian influenza came out. And then poof, that happened. And we saw a lot of ball eagles dying from that. So it's not that they can't absorb that stress.

It's that you might be stressing them too much. So the same thing you were talking about with DDT, like maybe having lead and DDT was just too much for the eagles. And that's why the population was crashing. So you can't just say it was just DDT that was doing that. And you also had the ban on lead ammo in waterfowl in 1991. And so bald eagles eat a lot of ducks and, you know, wounded animals. And so they, we might've actually seen less lead poisoning recently, you know, since that ban, because they weren't eating, you know, shot waterfowl.

Now there's other places that are expanding use of bullets in different areas. Like in New York, they're adding new counties that can use rifles instead of shotguns. So it's, it's not necessarily things like shots, uh, like slugs that are, are the problem. Um, even. Well, slugs have a hell of a lot more lead. Right. Exactly. A lot more lead. Yeah.

So hopefully the Eagle is smart enough that it doesn't need that, but it's, it's those small fragments, um, when a bullet shatters, you know, that go everywhere, like up to 30 centimeters away from the wound channel that can be problematic. So, um, I understand what you, I understand the point you're making that 3% from this, some percent for that, uh, years ago, I was looking at, had a conversation with someone about impacts of wolves on elk. And you start with this thing where, let's say you look and you have 100 calves, right?

And maybe you were, of those 100 calves, you were always losing, for many decades in the past, you were always losing 30 of those calves to mountain lions. And that stayed the same. And wolves come in. Wolves are reintroduced into an area and you see a real decline in elk. But the wolves aren't even eating as much. They're not killing as many calves as mountain lions are.

But that mountain lion thing had always been there. Right. You know, they were always carrying off 30%. Yeah, additive mortality. Yeah, there was some sort of equilibrium there. And you're used to that. But then you add another 7%. Yep.

And it's enough to tip it to a different direction. And then you notice this thing, but you still look, and everyone would be like, wolves are killing all the elk. And in some areas it's, well, mountain lions are killing all the elk. The wolf thing is just a new additive thing that has disrupted what we've accepted to be normal. Exactly.

But if you want to talk about when an elk calf hits the ground, its biggest risk remains a mountain lion. But that's want to talk about when an elk calf hits the ground, its biggest risk remains a mountain lion. But that's just always been so consistent. And this is a new part. Yep. So I get the point that, you know, with, I think that you can, that someone could make the decision. And I'll just say, like, I use copper ammunition. I use ammunition with lead in it still.

I'm pretty well versed on the pros and cons of it, the efficacy of it. The technology on copper ammo has come a long way, but when you get into efficacy, there's some definite arguments for, there's some real arguments for lead ammunition i have found generally that in cases where people are given um in cases where people are offered an alternative they'll often go for it voluntary compliance areas here's free ammo you know if you're going to be hunting on the kaibab plateau uh where there's a lot of condors, we'll give you ammo to use. People are eager to accept the ammo. We want you to remove your gut pile. People are eager to move the gut pile.

That goodwill evaporates when it comes to mandatory. The goodwill evaporates when it comes to mandatory restrictions and a lot of it's driven by some amount of efficacy for sure a lot of that pushback a lot of that goodwill evaporates also around cost yeah well i mean it's hard very different cost hard right now to get that to get to move away from lead ammo can be expensive. Oh, yeah, for sure. And, I mean, just having ammunition shortages in general, trying to tell people to use non-lead when they can't find anything at all. So trying to make sure that people sort of know what their options are and don't just say, oh, you know, using lead is bad.

Like, okay, if that's the only thing you can use, that's the only thing you can use. But, you know, think about what you want to do after you pull the trigger yeah i think that it's keeping all that in mind is important but i also think it's important that people realize um you make choices i make choices right and it is like lead kills rafters now does that mean that we're going to lose rafters, that they're going to vanish from the landscape? Not necessarily, but it kills rafters. Right. So it comes down

to what's your choice. It wants to be an uncomfortable reality. That it's a thing that happens. How often do they come through here that you find? And what is the symptomology so lead is really a tough thing that affects all sorts of different systems in the body so it's a neurotoxin it's bad for your kidneys like it gets circulated in the

blood and taken up into your bones so you kind of lose it constantly through your bones. I had one case a long time ago with a mountain lion that had eaten a whole bunch of lead shot from something or other. And the lion was so rotten that we actually tested the bones in its paw, and it came out screamingly high for lead. It had been metabolized. That fast that it killed it and we could find it in its bones already. So it goes throughout the body. And I mean, the main thing that people focus on,

especially like with children, is the neurological development. So it's not necessarily, you know, at this point, if you lose a few brain cells from eating lead, it's hard to tell the difference maybe. But for kids that are developing, that's the real challenge. You know that work where they looked at rural people

who had a high consumption of game meat versus urban people who had no consumption of game meat, but the urban people were having higher levels of lead from paint chips yeah yeah just environmental yeah we have had this um working group on lead in new york for a few years it's got department of health on it it's got venison donation people on it it's got autobond to talk about all these different issues and i've done work here with people in the communications department. And one of the things that we talk about is backlash. Like if you tell people like using lead is bad,

then they're just gonna dig in harder on that. So that really backfires in what you wanna do. So just making people aware of what the issue is in a nonjudgmental way and letting them make the choice about what they want to do i remember sending in some garden soil one time and um the garden soil having oh yeah it's everywhere super high lead levels nothing you could think of is back from leaded gas exactly i mean we used to have lead in everything it's kind of

interesting like leaded fuel would just like would drift down. Oh yeah. Right. And get in your soil. And then the recommendation was wash the produce. Oh. That it's like the plants aren't tanking it up. Yeah.

It's just in the soil. You're ingesting it because it's folded within the leaves of your spinach or it's like, you know, leafy like cabbage or whatever. Things where it's hard to clean. Yep. We're more likely that you're going be just consuming it you know I don't the the lead thing like one of the areas where I don't have personal concern I guess because it's me or whatever I never have personal concern about personally

ingesting it but it weighs on me about the wildlife issue yeah especially when I learned from you today about fishers. Right. And it just depends. Some people are moved by the wildlife issues, depending on what your ethos is. Some people are more concerned about it and, you know, their own human consumption.

It just, it's variable. You know, just the same way people punch for a lot of different reasons. Whatever is meaningful to them uh crystal ball me on um give me some crystal ball stuff on cwd on cwd oh man that's that's sort of tough i am i know researchers get real uncomfortable with the crystal ball i know we don't do that we. We're looking backwards most of the time. So- Just give me some thoughts.

It doesn't need to be predictions. Just give me some, you know, give me some thoughts. Well, I'll talk about one of the things that we're doing that I hope people can get behind. So right now we have a large program called the Surveillance Optimization Project for Chronic Wasting Disease. And this started out as a way, based on what we did here in New York with doing more risk-based surveillance, because there's still a lot of states that haven't found CWD and they don't necessarily know where to look.

So like New York had it in 2005, you know, sampled really intensively until 2010 for their five years. And then they're sort of like, now what, like, what do we do? So we set up this risk-based surveillance based on deer density, based on hazards, like, you know, Pennsylvania's got a lot of CWD. So we want to make sure we sample intensively along the southern tier. And then going back to the, you know, how do prions get into the state and how could they get spread? We want to sample more around those areas. And so we did this for New York and then Tennessee asked us to do the same surveillance program for them. So we did that and that was how they found CWD. And we've subsequently done it for seven other states, and now Alabama found it, and then Florida just found it.

So we said, okay, we don't want to do this just for individual states anymore. Like states are struggling, spending a lot of money on CWD. How can they do their surveillance more efficiently and effectively? anymore like states are struggling spending a lot of money on CWD how can they do their surveillance more efficiently and effectively so right now we have if you did it for a bunch more states doesn't it make sense that you'd have a bunch more states that would be CWD had CWD meaning well some of them already had CWD like Pennsylvania and Virginia but Florida just got added to the list. Yeah. And it got added to the list because they went and looked for it. Do you remember this conversation around COVID being like

there'd be these arguments that, well, yeah, there's a lot you're seeing high levels of COVID seem to go hand in hand with high levels of COVID testing. But the thing is, it's not that they're not looking for it. It's just they don't know where, like they were doing surveillance, but it wasn't like unnecessarily emphasized in the right places. I see. So like Tennessee was doing about the same numbers as they were previously,

but before they were getting samples where they were easy to get them. And so they kept coming from the same places where we're like, no, no, look in these two counties are your highest risk. And that's where they found it. Yeah, I got you. So. So they might've been conducting some number, a hundred samples kind of pulled from road kill deer.

Probably thousands of samples, but you know, just not in the places where they needed to be getting them from. And so the idea or program or whatever that you were exporting was a more precise way to survey. Collect data on where your risks are and then sample in those high risk areas. I see. And we also know from other states that have CWD, like adult males are more likely to have, you know, test positive than, you know, fawns usually don't test positive. So put the test costs the same, whether you test an adult male or a fawn. So put your money into that. We don't get a lot of adult males in just

because they usually go to a taxidermist. So how can we engage with taxidermists to help us collect samples so that we can get those in and make it more efficient for the agency where the biologist isn't having to pull samples all the time, kick some money over the taxidermist to have them do it for you. You know, they're just going to throw that stuff away anyway. So, but every state sort of recreates the wheel and how they do this. And so they're collecting data separately. They're, you know, spending a lot of time

invested in surveillance and how they should do these things when if we had a more regional or more collective approach, we could compare data across states. Other states would know, you know, like what their neighbors are doing, how much sampling they're doing, and they can have some decision-making tools associated with that so the management agency can say hey you know we're mostly worried about you know this particular area what should we be sampling in there how many should we sample so we have software now that we're giving away to state agencies or tribes or provinces for free that they can use this system and use it to whatever, you know,

if they want to upgrade from their Excel spreadsheet that they've been using, fine. If they want to run models in it to make decisions, they can do that. If they want to see what their neighbors are doing, it's useful for that. So that's sort of, as far as, you know, maybe aspirational crystal ball, I really want to see wildlife agencies sort of come together with more standardized work that can be compared across the country rather than each state sort of doing their own thing. And then if you look at a state,

let's say take Florida, which was very recently added to the list of states that had a positive case in it um they get a positive case then there's kind of a you know there's a so what or not so but what happens then or what does that mean for the public or yeah meaning meaning let's say you're doing a bunch of testing. Let's say all the states are doing the same testing. You can't expect that all the states are going to have the same response to the testing. No.

Because there's some states where the agencies have a perspective that's kind of like a little bit of inevitability. It doesn't matter. We're not going to do any kind of, we're not going to do any real extreme containment measures. So that would lead you to be like, well, then perhaps testing isn't valuable to them. So how are you, from a national perspective, how are people coping with, with that?

Yeah, I don't know. The ambivalence or great care or whatever that a state takes about the disease, right? I know. I sort of step out when it gets to management because it's so much people orientated and what they can do. So if a state finds CWD and they want to do something about it, their first detection is their best opportunity. Because from a human-centric perspective, that's when people are fired up and care about it. And like, yeah, let's get rid of it. I mean, I totally lean on New York having been the only state to get rid of it to be like, yeah, we're going to try to kick its ass again

if we find it because that's the only real opportunity you have to do something. So it just depends on the management agency and what they choose. I mean, maybe like with Tennessee, their first detection, they had over a dozen animals.

So they're kind of like crap. We're way further in it than, you know, the very first detection. So like if you get a whole bunch all at once, you're like, okay, we've had it for a while and just haven't found this pocket. Now we know what to do with it. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find any agency that wouldn't do something, you know, as far as like carcass or feeding or baiting, like bands that they would put in place on that to try not to spread

it further. Because the thing that I talk about is, you know, CWD pulls away resources from everything else in an agency. You know, in some agencies, they have their fish biologists out there, you know, pulling samples opening week in a gun season. So it's even if you don't care about deer, deer hunting, like maybe your thing is butterflies, like it's pulling resources away. So everybody should kind of care about it at that point because it's such a behemoth and it sucks so much money and time away from agencies that it's worth caring about. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And 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 our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there OnX is now in Canada the great features that you love in OnX are available

for your hunts this season the hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24 K topo maps, way points, and tracking. That's right.

You were always talking about, uh, we're always talking about on X here on the meat eater podcast. Now you, um, you guys in the great white North can, can be part of it. Be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. 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 x club y'all doesn't uh there's gotta be some part of you and i understand you know if you if you got to punt

this one that's fine there's gotta be some part of you because it definitely exists in my head that um that it's just like an inevitability meaning I know New York did it but like you said you think it's just gonna be everywhere at some point man like let's say I had to make a like a huge bet okay like every dollar I'll ever have or ever have had and I had to bet it on that it'll, meaning this isn't a demonstration of what I'd like to see. Yes. But I just had to bet on what I thought would happen.

Is there a timeframe? I just, like I hate to say it, but I hate to say it but I don't want to be dishonest. Like it just feels unstoppable. I agree with you to say it, but I hate to say it, but I don't want to be dishonest. Like it just feels unstoppable. I agree with you to some extent, but my point is, what's the timeframe on that? You know,

like are, are we going to, you know, young people right now feel that way about the earth, like that the earth is just going to die at some point. But like, what's the timeframe for that? So I feel like a little bit time frame for that so i feel like

a little bit of a way that's that's bad parenting okay well we're not here to discuss parenting um yeah i i don't know it's it's one of those like fight the good fight like do what you can while you've got it i understand that but i wasn't talking about i know i was talking and i know it's counterproductive it's counterproductive to point it out but i just wish there were more um i wish there were more victories i do too and to me and i've had friends of mine and uh my friend uh dog i'm sure is listening to every word i say right now hi dog if it pisses dog off when i say this but i've brought up to him i've said uh i used to say if i somehow knew that it would never jump to humans, I would care a lot less.

Meaning like, it's clear what I mean. Yeah. Meaning when I think about chronic wasting disease, I think about it's never happened, but I think about how catastrophic it would be to deer hunters, to deer hunting, if we suddenly had these cases, you know, some community or some family, um, that they develop some novel, uh, you know, they develop some novel version of mad cow disease and

Oh, I think it would be. Jakob Kreutzfeld, whatever the hell they call it. And it, you know, killed some family and the hell they call it and it you know killed some family and it turned out that family had you know eaten some quantity of infected deer meat and it became you know the holy cow right oh yeah it'd be catastrophic it would change the way people think about deer it would change the way people cockroachesroaches, pigeons, rats. It'd be like, you'd look at now, you look at deer and you get excited. It's great. People are excited to see deer.

They're excited to see deer tracks and new places. And if it was a disease causing animal, it's just, it's so devastating. Right. And you can look and be that. And I remember one day you and I had an argument about this where I said, and I stand by it. I've said hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD infected deer. Maybe it was you, maybe it was someone else that said hundreds, not tens. And then that caused me to think about it a bunch. And I thought about it a bunch and man, like.

Sticking with hundreds? Hundreds. Okay. Hundreds of thousands of people have eaten CWD-infected deer meat. I know. Like, it has to be true. Yeah, I don't think so, but sure.

Okay. How about 99? 99 people? 99,000. No. Come on. I don't think so. Okay, well, give me your number.

Lower. All right, tens of thousands. I'm going to wait for prices right. Tens of thousands. There's no way you're going to argue tens. There's a case for 100 people in one meal later. I know, that was in New number. Lower. All right. Tens of thousands. Price is right. Tens of thousands. There's no way you're going to argue. There's a case for a hundred people in one meal. I know. That was in New York.

Yeah. Okay. I'll give you 10,000. Okay. Hundreds of thousands. Tens of, okay. Whatever the hell it is. A lot.

Okay. People have eaten infected deer and have not gotten CWD that we know about. That we know about have not yet okay so i look at that and that's heartening i'd rather that than the opposite for sure anybody would but people there's no one that can come and tell you there's no one that can come and tell you if someone does like you can't believe them there's no one could come and tell you that it's impossible. Right. So in the past I have brought up that if I knew somehow for some, as some fact, which is impossible, but if I knew as a fact

that it wasn't possible, my concern about it would go way, way down. But now there's emerging evidence in places where they're seeing evidence of population level impacts because it used to be that you could look and you'd look at these areas of cwd and they oddly would be areas that had so many damn deer. Right. Yeah, because high density. Like there's CWD in Southwest Wisconsin.

It's like, why is Southwest Wisconsin has so many deer and they got all these giant bucks? So how do I look at that and get worried? If I'm not worried about catching it and dying and there are places that have a lot of deer and they're still shooting big bucks, I'm not going to worry about that. But this emerging stuff, and I haven't looked at it a lot, but I've seen it demonstrated by people that I have faith in, that it's beginning to see where the populations can't support it.

Exactly. And that you might wind up down the road with really damaged deer populations. Exactly. I mean, we were talking earlier about kids and hunting. And so when I first started studying CWD 20 years ago, I'd say, you know, this probably isn't going to impact you. It's probably not going to impact your kids, but it might impact your grandkids. And now the speed with which this, like the prevalence curve, you know, the exponential curve of how the disease takes off once it gets hold, like I'm worried about my son hunting and like the opportunities

that he's going to have, or if he even wants to, because, you know, it's not much fun going out and, you know, shooting a deer and you come up to it and it's all scrawny and sickly and i mean like on doug's place they can practically identify them by sight now because they know they have the disease and like yeah that one's probably infected oh yeah when you're when you're shooting deer in an area and the majority of the deer you're shooting are positive yeah if you've made the call that if you've made the call that you don't want to eat it i came up with a test i haven't done it yet okay i'm curious when i'm talking to friends of mine and i got a lot of friends who really don't they're not hostile like they'll listen to us have this conversation they're not hostile to discussing it but in the

end of the day they don don't care. Yeah. And it's like, not, these are not dumb people. It's like, they don't care because they have a hard time, um, with the population level decline. Um, especially when people say, Hey, the, the cure to CWD is the lower deer numbers or else they might get a disease that will lower deer numbers. And then it's like, okay, well, is the medicine worse than the sickness? You're telling we should kill all of our deer so that all of our deer don't die? It's like a challenging logic.

Yeah. I'm just trying to give voice. Back to the burning down the village to save it. Yeah. Burning the village to save it. And also, they're like, no one's gotten it what are the chances i'll get it and so really smart people really smart people who are not adverse to scientific information have decided that uh they're not concerned or they're not as concerned

as they are about other stuff and i'll debate this with them but i formulate like there's a test i would like to do and I've talked about this before I would like to go and get deer meat I'd like to find 20 CWD positive deer sick looking ones and get all that meat and make a burger okay and I make a big batch of burgers. And when I meet a friend that says they don't care, Feed them the burger. I make them that burger. I fry them that burger.

Yeah. Okay, this is me making the patty. Okay, good visual. I fry it just how they like it. Medium rare? Yep. Because prions aren't killed by cooking. Medium rare.

Pickles. Okay. Oh, pickles. And I would say to them, I'm like, man, the minute you eat that burger, I'll talk to you about how you don't give a shit about CWD. Exactly. And I want to know how many burger takers. Now, I've got people that said, you do it, I'll eat that burger.

Okay. But man, here's the thing. If I made that burger and someone said, okay, I want you to give those burgers to your kids now. Dude, sitting where I'm sitting right now, there's no, even if I could hide it from my wife. Which is probably not smart. There is no, I just like right now, what I know right now, and I like pay a lot of attention and I try not to be alarmist. Right. And I'm not alarmist.

I could not give that burger to my kid. Yeah. I couldn't do it. I agree. I couldn't do it either. You know, knowing that a similar disease in sheep, scrapie, they've never had a documented human case that they've known about. Even with mad cow, you know, there, I would agree with you about the hundreds of thousands people. It was only, you know, there's been 200 plus people that have ever gotten mad cow,

and they likely have some genetic makeup that you know made them susceptible to getting that and i suspect it's the same way that there is some genetic makeup in humans that would allow that prion to cross that species barrier and now you're making me want to eat the burger but how do you know right like so i don't can they yeah that's what we need to find out so you can test and they give you the green light on burgers. But it's very human centric, isn't it? Like we only care if it's going to affect us. Like why not care if it affects the wildlife population?

Why not care that deer are dying this horrible disease that puts holes in their brain? You know, we say we love these animals, but yet we're not willing to do the few steps or let the management agency take some action in the short term to try to stop that disease because it might be inconveniencing us. I'll tell you a thing. Let's move on from burgers for a minute. Let's just talk about big giant bucks.

But now you're making me hungry. I know, but let's talk about big giant bucks. Okay. This is to my friends who um aren't concerned about eating burgers they haven't yet seen or are convinced about um they haven't yet seen and are not convinced about population level declines but they love big giant bucks and all of their recreational free time is put into the finding of the making suitable habitat for big giant bucks. Now, I was recently in a room with you and we were looking at prevalence rates and the fact that it's always fatal.

Right. Always kills you. Yep. There's no getting around it. You get it. A deer gets it, that deer is going to die. Yes. Probably sooner than it would have otherwise. Takes six or seven years to make a trophy buck.

I mean, sometimes less, but like, right. Yeah. I mean, you have a trophy buck at four years, but it takes a long time to make a trophy buck. When the disease becomes so prevalent that a deer's not going to get to two years of age without getting it. Right. Because prevalency rates are like, you know, prevalency rates among two-year-olds get to like 60%, 70%. It's always fatal. It's fatal within a couple years.

The idea that you might be, that if that ideal big buck is five years old, six years old, whatever. Yeah. You're not going to get there. Um, that you get to be where they're, you're still seeing tons of deer on the ground because there's a carrying

capacity to the landscape. Right. Right. You might still be seeing there's like, yeah, you go out and see deer all the time, but you just start to be that, man,

I don't know what's going on, but they are not getting to five years old nope they're not getting to six years old because they're getting sick at one or two and they're succumbing to the illness at three or four yep so and they just aren't making it through because so few make it through anyway right remember talking early about additive mortality yep so few make it through anyway that they don't get shot by someone they don't get hit by a car they don't get killed by a coyote they don't get hung up on a fence all the shit that kills deer yeah that all of a sudden there's this other little thing that just kind of helps guarantee they never get that old. That will make people. Yeah.

And it's like that's perhaps we're already seeing that. And one of the things that I think about when I think about CWD is I wish that all areas had a lot more tracking of not just Boone and Crockett, but like a lot more scoring trafficking. It'd be very interesting if you could have gone back and looked at counties, how many Boone and Crockett entries were counties getting? And do you see Boone and Crockett entry as much anymore? Lowering in areas that have had long-term infection.

Because if what it seems to be true is true, I think that you're going to have yet another thing. We'll steal that idea for Corinne's master's project. Oh, when Corinne goes back to college? Yeah. That prevent another thing making bucks not be five years old or six years old or whatever to help. Right.

Trophy bucks. That, man, I got friends that'll go out and spend days hinge cutting trees and planting this and that. Right? Mm-hmm. And if you told them like, man, you know what your biggest problem is about making big bucks and getting big bucks? Is they're not going to live that long anyway, dude, because of a disease. That. That would change their tune yeah me it's the it's the eating i know well i mean people you're you're called meat eater for a reason right like people hunt for different reasons yeah that's not why i gave it that kid so i came up that name you know i came up that name for the

show no i had a little little teeny kid and we'd read a lot of books about animals and we'd read books about dinosaurs and you get to the t-rex chapter this ferocious meat eater that sounds a cool word very good i like the word saber tooth too oh yeah um it could have just been that all along yeah there you go either way i eat a lot of deer meat yeah me too and i get and that scares me, man. Well, that's the thing. Everybody's going to have a different, just like the lead. People are going to have different reasons for caring about something.

So you asked about ecology. I try to give people a suite of all the different why they should care about these. Maybe they don't care about deer populations. Maybe they just care about what it's going to do to them maybe they care about big bucks like try to give them enough information that they can make an informed choice about it but you mentioned a thing about eagles and lead um and i think it's true of deer diseases there's another thing i think about when I sit around worrying about CWD is like, uh, there's no doubt that human activities are increasing the spread. Yes.

I agree. It's not really a debatable point. I mean, there's other things, there's other things spreading it, but humans are facilitating increasing spread. Um, we are stewards of the landscape. Ideally. Ideally we are stewards of the landscape ideally we're stewards of the landscape um do you if you love deer and you love deer hunting is it in you to just be like really okay with the disease that kills deer. Yeah.

That's why I don't understand how people can be like, eh, no big thing. Because there's, well, someone's going to, and I want to talk about this before we close, someone, and I do it too, is going to be like, well, what about EHD? Yeah. Well, we can talk about EHD. What about EHD? I mean, here's a disease that knocks them hard. It's got to be painful.

Sure. But they- Yeah, give me the but. Okay. So I say that. We're talking about CWD and I say to you, yeah, well, what about EHD? That kills all kinds of deer. So EHD, epizootic hemorrhagic disease, and we'll throw in blue tongue, which is another hemorrhagic disease and just call them HD for hemorrhagic diseases because they function pretty much the same.

So I said, okay, what about HD? That kills all kinds of deer. There you go. Yes, it does kill deer, but not all deer. It's not fatal like CWD. And in New York, we've been doing another study on this because we had some pretty significant outbreaks in like 2000, which was super inconvenient timing since a pandemic was going on and people were in their houses and just kind of trying to deal with a big deer die-off.

So it started in the Hudson Valley. And we started tracking reports from the public. Biologists were going out and collecting deer. It's challenging. Can we include the creepy part? Sure. Which one? Floating in ponds.

Yeah. So, okay. Laying next to the creek, floating in ponds, in a water trough. So with hemorrhagic diseases, the deer get a bad viral infection. And so they get very feverish. So a lot of times they'll go to water, which is why you find these deer around water. But we have to be careful because we mentioned that we had a rabies positive deer a couple weeks ago. Rabies, a lot of times we'll find the deer in water too. Again, another viral disease, they tend to go to water when they get feverish. We got to do a big digression, I'm sorry. Okay.

Because this is the thing I've always wondered about. How can rabies at one time be that they're drawn to water, but then also in humans, it induces hydrophobia. Yeah. Well, I mean, you can be thirsty and go to water, but then the paralysis of being able to drink. So it might not be that you're afraid of water. It might be that your body stops functioning to allow you to drink. But I thought, so it's not that people get scared of water. Yeah.

I'm not up on the human. Well, they used to call it hydrophobia. I know. But yeah, it's more that they're not physiologically able to drink anymore. So they're very thirsty, they're feverish, but they can't drink. Did you know I defended my family from a rabid squirrel one time? No, but please tell. It was in this state we were at a

friend's we were visiting a friend uh-huh a squirrel came to the my kids were all swimming in the pool the squirrel ran up to the edge of the pool very agitated started running up and down the pool like if this is the pool my kids are like sprinkled throughout here and the squirrel's going like this back and forth back and forth back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, jumps in the pool, starts chasing kids around. Yeah. I grabbed the squirrel by the tail

and gave it a... Yeah? Squirrel flinger? Yeah. Good job. Had to have been rabid. Rodents, we don't see a lot of rabies in squirrels.

Rodents don't get it as often, but we just did have the beaver that was positive for rabies. Well, how else would you explain what that squirrel was doing? Squirrels have a lot of issues. I don't know if you've noticed this. I don't know. You guys just had a rabid beaver. Yeah, I know.

He bit five people. He did. You can make a movie about that. There you go. You guys just had a rabid beaver. Yeah, I know. He bit five people. He did. Make a movie about that. There you go. You're the production company. Okay, so back to EHD. Back to EHD. So deer could get rabies.

Yes. And they'll wind up in the water. Sometimes, yeah. But if I hear about deer in water, I usually think rabies or hemorrhagic disease. So why should we worry more about CWD than hemorrhagic diseases? Even though we had a big die-off, there were over 2,000 dead deer reported. We don't know how many actually died in the area that was affected. In a short period of time, huh?

Yeah, one summer. Wow. And then the next year, we also had pretty significant die-off, but it was more sprinkled around the state. So Hudson Valley up towards Lake Ontario and then on Long Island. But what we did in those hunting seasons

was we collected spleen and we collected blood from hunters and we looked for antibodies to the viruses to see if any of the deer survived. And we found a pretty good proportion of deer had been infected and then survived. So those are very sort of short-term transitory mortality events. And then last year there was like nothing, like no big, big mortality. So it might hit local areas pretty hard and knock the deer down because that virus is transmitted by a biting midge, Pula coitus, and those don't travel very far. So we're still trying to figure out the right environmental conditions, whether they like get dry they wet, for breeding in mudflats.

And the deer seem to rebound really quickly with those. So that is something that they can build up immunity to and continue on without a long-term population impact. It might be short-term, but over you know, over the long-term, it's not going to, you know, do as much damage as chronic wasting disease. And I'll point out, too, that you don't have to have

that nagging fear about catching a brain disease. That's true. Yeah, we generally recommend people don't eat stuff they find dead. So, like, hemorrhagic disease, they kind of turn mushy real fast because it's usually in the heat of the summer.

Got it. Well, I just mean, I don't mean that about finding dead deer and eating them. I just mean like. The concern about disease is the same. Yeah, why, you know, as much as I was pointing, I was playing devil's advocate to point out the, well, why not worry about EHT because that kills a bunch of deer. And I would just say added to the fact that there's some resiliency, that they bounce back quickly, that you can get it passed through a deer herd and then a couple years later it's not in the deer herd is different.

But then there's also that later when you harvest deer that had it, you're not at, well, we don't know if you're at risk. You're not at potential risk. There you go. Do you, I don't know how well you can word this. This is my last question about CWD. Do you, you don't eat it. I'm just asking you personally. Would I eat a CWD positive deer?

Yeah. No. Hmm. Why not? I don't have to. I have a choice there. So, you know, I'm not starving. Like, I think the risk to humans is very small, but why chance it?

I mean, honestly, with the field work I've done and taking CWD samples from live deer, I've been in their mouth. I was taking tonsillar biopsies when I was doing my research. So I've had CWD positive deer breathing in my face that I know they were positive. So yeah, I'm probably going to donate my brain to science when I kick the bucket just so people can check for prions. We've been talking a lot about we're trying to get someone from the body farm. Where's that place? Tennessee, I believe.

If you want to donate your body to science, we heard that they're like... Are they not taking more? Everybody wants your body there. Oh really? It's a popular thing now. Yeah. They can't accept them all. Well.

We heard from somebody. Maybe you can get on a wait list. We heard from somebody that did some work there. Did you know raccoons like, when it comes to carcass preference on raccoons, they like people who have diabetes. Interesting. Yeah.

I did not know that. Did you know that? I mean, just from this person who wrote in. Yeah, I would verify that. I didn't know raccoons were that picky about their... They like thighs and buttocks. Don't you? For sure.

Okay. Diabetes. Interesting. I'm going to have to check this one out. We're going to try to do a site visit down there. Okay. Thatabetes. Interesting. I'm going to have to check this one out. We're going to try to do a site visit down there. Okay. That'll be good. Now that you got some more dead animals, can I come with you? With where you hang out and work, you'd probably have zero problem with that.

I don't know. Humans gross me out a little bit, like animals I'm okay with, but people are kind of gross i was uh when we did our tour today i was thinking that um i i was thinking about the resiliency of of of your colleagues the ones that have to cut up the dead stuff just it's a lot oh smells it could be it's a lot it's it's like um just the environment right that lab environment and um and just the the what's coming through the door right it's a lot yeah i mean i'm sure you used to pretty quick right yeah it's just what their job is i mean you think about people working like nurses having to deal with live people complaining all the time,

like at least these are dead. So, well, there's a difference though, because I don't get that. It's a lot feeling, um, hanging out in a butcher shop or in a slaughterhouse.

That doesn't, because you, because it's like food production, but the disease element, the sickness element. But see, they find joy in that. You sound like people that really like kidneys. Exactly. You know, they, they get very excited. But see, they find joy in that. You sound like people that really like kidneys.

Exactly. You know, they get very excited. I mean, you mentioned nasal bots previously. And when I was doing the helicopter capture for my PhD to catch deer, we had a mortality. And so we euthanized it. And one of my fellow grad students who loves dead stuff, you know, started doing the necropsy. And it was chock full of nasal bots. Where was this again?

This was in South Dakota. Okay. And she was so excited. I mean, she pulled, she had two handfuls full of nasal bots and came like skipping around to show us all and just thought it was like the best thing ever. We had some guys in Sonora one time tell us, some cowboys in Sonora tell us that that thing does the thinking for the deer. Oh, interesting. It'll take over and do the deer's thinking. Huh. And the deer does its bidding.

All right. You were asking about ticks earlier at the CW conference in Denver recently. They found prions and nasal bots too. Oh. Yep. Sure. So. And the fact that one day he just goes,

it's a hacksaw. I know. A big old nasal bot. Hacks that bug out and it flies away. That'd be a good video to capture. There you go. Aspirational. So how do people,

what's the best, when you want to wake up in the morning and find out about wildlife diseases, what do you like to read? What do I like to read? Yeah, like if someone wants to track wildlife disease issues, let's say someone's so inspired.

So inspired. By your work. Your line of work. With the Cornell Wildlife Health Lab, which is part of the New York State Wildlife Health Program. You can look up Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. We've got lots of fact sheets and information about all the research that we do. You can go, you know, New York State has a great website.

There's other states out there that have really good information. Depending on where they are, it's probably more applicable to them. So check out your state agency website and see what wildlife health information. But if you want general stuff, you can always come to Cornell Wildlife Health Lab. And don't try to bring a dead animal down here. Well, you can. Just call us first. Call us first, yeah.

Yeah. We're happy to. You can't show up. Well, you can, but it's less pleasant. Just bang on that big door out there. It might take a little bit. I might get a nasty phone call and they're like, who is this person? You'll know you're at the right door.

Yeah. The door is so tall. The intake door. Yes. Is so tall. You can back a semi in. the intake door is so tall that it is known to have accommodated elephants and giraffes. Look for that door.

That's the door you want. If you say to yourself, that's not going to accommodate an elephant, you're at the wrong door. Can't put an elephant through there. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. It's fascinating work. I love wildlife elephant through there. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. Absolutely. It's fascinating work.

I love wildlife and I like to, and it's good to know that there's people out there monitoring wildlife diseases. And it becomes upsetting to me when there's things that humans, there's preventable things we're doing. Yeah. That could make it that less wildlife vanishes from the landscape because of diseases. So it's good to have a heads up. Yeah, I think remembering we're part of the ecosystem and, you know, if we can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, that's always a good thing. We're part of the disease ecology.

We are. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for coming on. Appreciate it. Kristen Schuller. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh

Ride on Ride on Ride on I wanna see your gray hair shine like silver in the sun Ride on

Ride on Ride on Sweetheart We're done beat this damn Horse to death Take a new one And ride on We're done beat this damn horse to death.

So take your new one and ride on. 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.