The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 766: The Truth About Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with Mark Rudd, Michael Chamberlain, and Ryan Callaghan.  Topics discussed: The premier of MeatEater Sheds; back to the 101 of what CWD is and the myths surrounding it; it’s just not a hoax; the slow, cryptic nature of the disease; are we still going to be able to grow old, big deer?; how there's no test for live deer; filling up space in the brain stem; high prevalence rates; how the skeptical public wants an answer; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's F-I-R-S-T-L-L-I-T. all right real quick right up right up top for anything happens uh you know it's hunting season when phil starts prepping for a theater production that's how i mark the seasons too yeah yeah phil he fell stepped away from theater i never really stepped away it's just tough it's tough on the family for me to do shows because i miss bedtime for months and uh it's just a lot of commuting you know i live out of town so and that one year he was kissing the other lady besides his wife a whole bunch. I was.

In the play, he had to kiss the lady. It was scandalous to no one besides Steve, but yeah. Rehears that for all fall. Well, I did one. As long as you keep it to the regularly scheduled rehearsals. That's correct.

I did a play in January, Steve. You just weren't there. You didn't see it. I think the only person at the company who saw it was Randall. So you're prepping up now to do. I'm doing Christmas Carol again, round two. You're doing it straight. Yeah, I think we're doing it straight.

No, no, no steampunk icing on it. Which I think you were referring to. That's why I wanted to touch on this very quickly. Okay. There's one modification. Yeah. When they're always talking about buying that goose, you know? Sure, yeah, the big Christmas goose.

A farthing. A shilling for a farthing. Like, is that an expensive goose or not? You know what I mean? I think it's supposed to be an expensive goose. I know, but if they would, if you would just try this this year. Okay. Switch it to U.S. currency and adjust for inflation.

Okay. So I'm listening. The kids are like, $300 for a goose. Or maybe they just. People would probably be like, oh, shit. That's a very expensive goose. Sure. Or they could say, you know, a shilling and a farthing and then just turn to the audience,

break character and just kind of whisper. By the way. It's like $300 today. Uh-huh. Isn't that nuts? Can you, okay, back to the program. Is it? I would enjoy that.

that place so much more. Okay. Is the line long? Yeah, currency conversion live. Does he, is it an actual liner? Is it from Scrooge where he says the biggest goose in all of London? Because when that imply, it's going to be expensive. Yeah, yeah, when he's, I had a change of heart, I think, you know,

bug go by the, the biggest goose you can find, yeah, something like that. A farthing. That's a great accent. Oh, I could do that whole day in play. Yeah. I'm like. You should. Christmas tour's coming up.

all right uh the wild turkey doc is back now we're actually starting the show the wild turkey doc is back mike chamberlain very popular uh guest on the show it came in and then tells you everything you ever want to know about turkeys today we're not talking about turkeys though except we're going to talk about turkeys a little bit of course we're here to talk about chronic wasting disease um and an interesting some some interesting findings about that which is going to stir the old pot uh the hoax the c wds the hoax the hoax the w d's a hoax cw is a scam, pot. You know the pot.

Oh, yeah. A lot of guys stirring that pot. There are. That is a big pot with lots of spoons. Mike, Dr. Chamberlain is from the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. He's the National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor. A or the? The.

The. There's only one. Only one. This is the first endowed position that's turkey-centric. I might like to have that role. Come on. I'm a few years from retirement. And he leads the Wild Turkey Lab.

Mark Ruder. Am I saying that right? Correct. Okay. Mark Rooder's here, a colleague of Dr. Chamberlans. He's from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. You got some accolades here that I understand. South Eastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study.

What's that mean? So it's Squiddish for short. You'll hear most in the wildlife community call it Squiddis, even though it has nothing to do with squids. So we're a cooperative. So Squiddish was founded in 1957 by state wildlife agencies in the southeastern United States. Okay.

And it was really founded at a time where we had no capacity, no expertise within state wildlife management agencies for disease. and health topics. And it was actually founded in the face of one of the better known diseases of white-tailed deer, and that's hemorrhagic disease, E.H.D. and blue tongue. And so we were founded at this time to sort of provide expertise, diagnostic capacity,

and understanding of diseases in white-tailed deer at a time where restoration efforts were, you know, still kind of ongoing. Okay. Because the fear was that this disease was going to complicate the recovery of white-tailed deer. And so states couldn't individually stand up capacity to have a person or facility for just focused on disease. So they went to the cooperative model. And so that was a long time ago and we're still here. We have today we have 17 state wildlife agencies, one territory in the southeast, and then have federal partners, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Geological Survey.

Sort of provides our core sort of funding and we serve the states. And you're the director. Correct. Do you carry one of these in your wallet? Someone gave me this. Oh, not that. Your insurance card? It's this little card that if you start dying of something, it tells people at the hospital,

someone gave that to me at Cornell. It tells people at the hospital, hey, man. I do some weird stuff. Yeah, I should give that card to you. I don't have one of these cards, but all of this. I feel obligated to give you that card because it's, that we apply more to your line of work than my line of work. Oh, yeah.

Does somebody ever go, have you ever come in contact with? Have you been in contact with any animals that seems sick? Yep. That's my job. Yeah. Um, and then Dr. Callahan's here. Oh. He's not a doctor.

Got an honorary doctor. No. No. Just straight up. Straight up old Cal, uh, doc, Doc Callahan's grandkallon. Yep. I like that. Uh, yeah, we're going to talk about some.

interesting findings around chronic wasting disease. And don't be worried. We will start out by talking about what in the hell is chronic waste and disease. And why is it controversial? Not yet. Because first, let everybody know, we got a new show coming out called

Meat Eaters Sheds. It drops Thursday, September 25. We got episodes. We don't go into people's homes. We go into their sheds, barns, whatever. We profile their properties. uh we got one with jeff foxworthy's uh game room kevin murphy's exceptionally chaotic shed heather dovill's uh fur processing facilities and more one episode every thursday kicking off on september 25 all right i've been i've been thinking about for a couple

minutes at a time for days i've been thinking about how to start this conversation I think I want to start it like this. One of you guys, and you can pick, you can, you can thumb wrestler to who gets to do it. One of you guys has to very quickly, just to get people up to speed, very quickly explain what is chronic wasting disease, okay? A super quick explanation of what is chronic wasting disease. Then I'm going to explain, I'm going to devil's advocate a little bit. And I'm going to explain what guys on this. the street in the bars not so much on the street what guys in the field and in the bars

say about it okay in a way that will um capture my own concerns and then capture the other people's concerns and then we'll dig in is that fair yeah yeah because i want to do a little bit about like what are we talking about and then and then kind of why someone should be paying attention to this yeah all right yeah so chronic wasting disease is if you if you kind of think about it 30,000 foot so proteins or if you go back to grade school proteins are comprised of amino acids right they're the building blocks I believe you okay so these amino acids that build these proteins are supposed to fold naturally and though they fold to support basic cell functions in the body so what

happens with cWD is you have this particular type of protein called a preon protein, and it misfolds, and we don't know why that misfolding occurs. But when it misfolds, the body can't shed the protein through enzymatic breakdowns like it would normally shed proteins. And so the proteins accumulate, and they tend to accumulate in the brain. And what that accumulation causes is neurological impairment. If you look at the brain through microscopically, it essentially looks like it has holes in it. why does something accumulating create holes because the body cannot shed the the protein and so

i this is this is the dumb but i feel like that would make a ball not a hole if it was shedding too many it'd make a hole i mean this is not coming from a professional person yeah mark what happened yeah it'd be like a tumor build up this is a mass versus once you have this you know the normal protein in the body which we all have right now it goes through the through a sort of a recycle process, right? It's all the, a lot of proteins in our body are built. And then after it's sort of lifespan enzymes in the body, we'll kind of surgically kind of break it apart

and recycle those components and you start over with other proteins. Once this pre-on protein takes this different shape, then the enzymes that the body has to sort of snip it apart don't recognize it anymore. They can't get to those sites. And so rather than natural, really degrade and recycle this protein over time, it just persists and then it's sticky and more

sort of kind of can glob onto it. And so you end up accumulating these proteins that your body can't break down anymore, or the deer's body can't break down anymore. And so it's that accumulation of material in a very sensitive space, neurons around neurons in the brain. This year information superhighway controls everything in your body. And you start to put stuff in there that's not supposed to be in there. It's going to be less efficient. Okay. Have you ever tried to fold?

But when you say a hole, do you mean a hole? So how that start, what they're talking about is when you're looking at tissue microscopically. So if we were to take a deer's brain out and cut it into super thin chips, you know, we put that on a microscope slide, we stain it, we look at it under a microscope, then you can see the individual cells. Oh, at that level. At that level. So we're talking about in a neuron, which is right, it's kind of the workhorse of your the central, like the brain and sending, you know, information down to everywhere in your body. Those neurons that are the cell, you know, you can get, we call them vacuels, clear spaces,

basically, when you're looking at it in the neuron and around the neuron. And when you do a special stain to look at that, you'll see that's where this prion is accumulating. So you can see a lot of these prion proteins as abnormal preons accumulating in a very sensitive spot in the body. I use the bed sheet analogy. Have you ever tried to fold a fitted bed sheet? Oh, you know what? It's funny you mention that. My wife is yelling at me a whole bunch of year or night about that. Yep. There's only if you think about it. And I was almost going to look it up. There's only one way to do it. I don't understand how she gets a legit fold. Right. And so I was in my early 30s when we had a literal bar room discussion on what a duvet cover is.

And that's when I learned what it was. Yeah, I hate them. We use them and I hate them. Yeah. How I thought that that was an option. Yeah. It's not a mandatory piece of bed kit. It's a blanket for your blanket.

Years ago when I started reading about CWD, I was trying to think of an analogy that would allow me to conceptualize it in dumb Mike speak. And I was like, okay, so these proteins are they're folding and it's misfolded. And the fitted bed sheet came to mind because I've never understood why I can't fold it and my wife can. But all I know is the way she does it is perfect and it fits. And the way I do it and Mark does it and you do it is all wrong. I mean to fold it up and put it on like a shelf. Yes, it never fits in the same space.

I might fly down there and see what she's got going on. That her sheet fits in. And that's the way I kind of, in my dumb mic brain, that's how I kind of think about it is when it's folded perfectly, it works every time. When it misfolds, it never functions the same. Okay. Plus, it's just another level of a household, too, to have more than one of those or more than one per bed. Yeah, we've got a lot of beds now because a lot of people living there. Okay.

So keep going. So that's what that is a preon disease. Yes. and humans we call is there only one preon disease in humans? There's Crozfeld-Jacob's disease. Okay, that's it yeah. And I didn't understand

that we all carry these preons currently either. For whatever reason I think that's the first time I've heard that. We all have normal in animals as well. Normal preon proteins. The functions aren't entirely known

but their fate is right. They recycle and they have a lifespan and they move on and when when they don't and it's that accumulation slowly over time that that leads to the actual disease got and we they're in cattle there's a preon disease called mad cow disease and sheep there's a preon disease called scrapey um humans yacob yacob crutch felt was it what is it crutch felt yacups crutch you always yeah yeah screw up which one comes first. These are all kind of the same thing. It's just manifest a certain way in cattle, manifest a certain way in sheep. Is that a fair way to think about it? It's a family. It's basically

a category of pathogen, right? So we think, you know, normally, more commonly about bacteria or a virus or a fungus or a parasite. So the preons are sort of in this umbrella category known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy or TSE. Transmissible meaning, you know, moving from one animal to the other, spongiform gets at what we just talked about with those preons accumulating and kind of creating holes more or less in the brain. Encephalopathy just means

disease of the brain. Okay. And so cattle, BSC, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, scrapies, CJD Inhumans, one of the earlier described was Cooroo in Papua New Guinea, some ritualistic cannibalism that led to inhumans. you know a prion disease there's transmissible mink uh encephalopathy so there's there's mink so there's there's others but they all kind of share similar traits the one that makes c wd so

wicked is that it it's shed and passes from animal to animal efficiently so scrappy does as well those two kind of set apart as far as uniqueness among some of the the tse's and And Scrapey is, is preventable through a vaccine, right? Not a vaccine. It's really through, so one thing, Scrapy and CWD share some similarities relative to, you know, like I just said, that the prions actually leave the animal's body and can transmit to one another. there's environmental components so animals can get infected from the environment or they can get infected from their buddies. But one thing that Scrapey had sort of that that led to some effective management for the domestic livestock industry is that genetically there are some

different genotypes of sheep related to that, you know, the prion protein that I mentioned. Well, that preon protein is encoded by a gene. And so there's, of there's a particular genotype in domestic sheep that they're they're pretty resistant very resistant to CW or to Scrapey and so through intensive um you know breeding management in domestic sheep and then culling of everybody else they've been able to get on top of it um and so that that's a tool that scrapey has that we don't we don't have access to deer got it got it I didn't realize that. I do know the culling part of that in the domestic world is severe.

There's no, uh, nobody gets left behind. And when we talk about chronic wasin disease, we're talking about one of these preon diseases that afflicts members of the deer family. Yeah. So servants. Deer, white tail deer, mule deer, elk, moose, caribou, servants. If you're sitting there at home, think of things that have antlers

and shed those antlers. Yes. And it's a 100% fatal disease. This has been, now we're going to lay out. I want to briefly lay out what different, what you hear different hunters say about this situation.

It's part of why we're here. Yeah. Um, it was first identified in the 70s in Colorado. 1967 was a 67 yeah on a research facility. That's right. I think it was formally described in 80, 1980, I believe. Yeah. So we found out about it.

Um, not to say it, you know, who knows the history of it. Who knows? Did it emerge one day? Did it emerge that year? And we found it. That's like an outstanding question. But it was identified on a research. facility in Colorado.

And as we've looked for it more, we find more of it, though it definitely seems to spread. It's not just detection. Right. Fair? Yes. We tend to find a lot of CWD in places that have a lot of deer. Which leads people, has historically led people to say. if it's in a place

that has a lot of deer then it must not be that much of a problem because how could it be that bad if the places they have the most deer have CWD? I'm still shooting bucks. I'm still shooting big bucks. We got some of the highest deer densities in the country

where's the problem? And in fact, at times, people have come in early on in the battle against CWD, you'd have an outbreak in an area and wildlife managers would propose, well, let's try to go in and eradicate every deer in the area to stop the spread, which struck people as like quite counterintuitive. Here we're talking about a disease that could potentially kill the deer, but there's a ton of them around, and the remedy is to kill them all.

Right. That seems odd, right? So that strikes people as odd. Another thing will come in and they'll say, hey, we have this disease that seems to be spreading from animal to animal. And so we're going to make it that you're not supposed to bait out on the ground because that'll make deer come together. And people might point out, I don't use bait, but I see deer together all the time. They have sex. They hang out.

They nurse from one each other. They socialize. They're always together. They feed under the same tree. Yeah. They play grab ass, whatever. Like, they're always in contact. I don't see how me not putting, like, how I don't see how me putting bait out is making deer socialize when I've been watching deer my whole life and socialize.

So what's the big deal? Another thing guys might come and say. And again, this is all stuff from like well-meaning people that love deer. Guys might come and say, they're advising me against eating deer that, that, that, you know, that, you're, that, you know, you know, I should, no deer, no deer test negative. A deer might test not detectable, right? Meaning you get either, if you submit, if you kill a deer and you want to be like, hey, I want to find out if it's got CWD, you don't get negative, you get not found. You get not detected.

So often guys will say it tested negative and people will point out it didn't test negative, it tested not found. Okay. So we have no case We have no case ever In the history of the United States of America The world, whatever, there's no case ever Where it has been shown that a human Has contracted chronic wasting disease

So people will say, why is my game agency Why is Centers for Disease Control? Why are they saying don't eat positive meat because of a health risk but there's no demonstrative health risk right it winds up smacking a little bit

of to people it winds up smacking a little bit of COVID right be really afraid be really afraid but we don't really know what you're supposed to just be afraid right and that is the thing that strikes people is like you keep telling me not to do it but no one's gotten it right

um various versions of this the annoyance around baiting restrictions. The idea that we're going to coal or eradicate deer in certain areas. The restriction like you're not supposed to bait, you can't put bait down anymore

has, in my view, has turned people a lot where they don't want to hear about research anymore. They just want to say it's all bullshit. Right. Yep. To bring COVID back, I'm about done setting this whole thing up, but I'm just trying to

tell you like to bring COVID back would be there was a thing people were getting sick people were dying of COVID-19 at the same time people were like oh if someone brings a box your house don't touch the box your kids can't go to school you can't fly in an airplane your business needs to go out of business you need to change your behavior yeah right and then in the end people are like man I'm not going to listen to anything anybody says I'm just fed up Yep, I'm done. And then they're done. Yep.

We've hit a, I, in my, this is my view. In my view, we've hit a dangerous spot around conversations around chronic wasting disease because we've had a lot of guys are like hit the done phase. They're done. And I don't think we should be done. Right. Like, we should be asking questions and looking at what's going to happen because I think that this conversation, the conversations about this could be very different in 20 years.

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wherever you get your audio books and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14 I think it would be worthwhile to kind of dissect the done like what done looks like

well because there's as with everything there's people who get there through for a bunch of different reasons right yeah like self like like selfish reasons. Yeah, there's like the, um,

the, what we talk about in hunting all the time, which is like the, the heritage part. It's like, well, grandpa managed white tails this way. Grandpa was awesome. How could anything he do be wrong?

And that offends me personally. We can't change. Um, there's the, I don't care what anybody says. I just want big bucks. This is the way that, we get big bucks and then there's the vein of folks who are like well what's the bigger crime here eating c wd meat or throwing it away right and there's people who are like this is my my time

in the deer woods and the meat is a huge part of it and and they struggle and i run into these people a lot They really struggle with having to face that decision. So instead of facing that decision, they just go full ignorance. They're like, I will not get this thing tested because I don't want to face that decision. Right. Yeah. And notify me and if things change. All of that that you just brought up as context is what Mark and I have been talking about for weeks.

Okay. And is largely why we're here sitting with you is to have that conversation because as researchers, we look at CWD through a certain lens. As a deer hunter, I look at CWD through an entirely different lens. I understand the frustration that you just mentioned Cal. And then I have to I have to step back and realize that one thing we're seeing with CWD is it doesn't function the same across the landscape. It can affect certain populations differently. We're also seeing that it takes this disease has a long incubation period and it takes decades to run its course, not months or years, decades. And so within a population,

so not within an animal, but within a population. Within a population. Yeah. So within at the animal level, you're talking, you know, 18 to 24 months for this disease to progress. And at the population level, you're talking decades for the population to, so in it, in essence, kind of think about it like this, you have these two axes on a graph. Okay.

On the bottom, you have time. You have years. and on the vertical axis you have prevalence right and what you're seeing is that in in low prevalence a population can literally trend through time at one percent prevalence almost undetectable for years and then it slowly starts to increase in prevalence and when I say slow I'm talking a decade to go from one to two percent okay and then two to three 3% and then to 5% and then to 20% and you start seeing this exponential increase in prevalence rates and we don't know at what give me like a place give me a place in the country

where we could be talking about we're like 1% for a decade so and then there but you said there is like a takeoff point yeah so what so what mark and I run into is we do research like this Arkansas study, we just finished. And you don't know when you start to study where you are on the curve. Oh, yeah. And so you have prevalence data. So in other words, as we can talk about, you know, an agency collects prevalence data and they, let's say they think they're at 5% prevalence. Well, then they start expanding testing and they realize, yeah, we are at 5 or maybe we're at 15 or maybe we're at 20. And then you have other situations where you have we think we're at 20 and we're at 35 or 40 and then you have other

situations where you have a single detection and then after lots and lots of testing in that area you have two or three or five animals that that are positive so the the disease is functioning differently across the landscape and so that creates confusion and frustration and uncertainty because This disease, as Mark can explain, didn't read the book on how to be a disease. So that creates a lot of uncertainty. And so when we go design these field studies trying to get information to assist agencies with their decision making, we don't really know where we are on that curve. And once we think we figure out where we are, sometimes, you know, some of the work that's coming out now, Arkansas, West Virginia, Wisconsin,

and they're seeing that they're at a different point along this curve than they believe they were when the research project started, which is what we saw in Arkansas. We thought we were at a point, and in reality, we were much farther up the curve to where prevalence was extremely high, and that just speaks to the complexity of the disease. Yeah, just to follow up on a couple things. I think at the root of so much confusion relative to CWD is adjusting our time scale. Okay. Right.

So hemorrhagic disease, for instance, there's not a deer hunter who doesn't fear hemorrhagic disease, you know, messing up a season, right? And it's sweeping through and that's actively happening right now. Yeah. So like just for people that know some terms, you might hear E.H.D. You might hear blue tongue. Yep. which comes in and just wham yes it's it's it comes in you know it's a flood a quick one right

you can go from zero to 60 in in the span of weeks right and you'll have it's very visible it's explosive it's clustered so you can you see death you smell death it's everywhere right it's very jarring very alarming and so you know and i've spent a long time studying that disease and it's you know it's a it's it's got a lot of sort of um it'll grab your attention really quick right it's very concerning c wd and it's in it's all boom right it's in it's in a matter of weeks or months yeah dead deer floating in ponds exactly yeah exactly people find in huge bucks they didn't know we're around yeah yeah you're wondering about how do i deal with all these carcasses they're starting to smell bad right flip that to c wd it's

It's completely opposite. There's multiple examples in the country of it hiding in plain sight, not for years, but for decades, right? It's cryptic on the landscape. You don't see it until you see it. And so when I think about CWD, I think about it in individuals and I think about it in populations. At the individual level, you know, we're talking about, we think of it in terms of months and

years, not days and weeks like we would hemorrhagic disease. So months and years for an individual. But like Mike said, for a population, we think in terms of years and decades. And so it's that slow cryptic nature of the disease that just, I think that is the root of so many challenges for people to wrap their heads around in terms of, you know, do we need to care about it? Why do I need to care about it? I'm not seeing anything on the landscape. Hemorrhagic disease just stacked up a bunch of bodies in my property. CWD, I don't see anything.

Yeah, meaning some guy turns in a deer. for testing. First time in his county, there's a deer that's positive in his county. Wildlife managers are then like, good Lord, let's rewrite the rulebook. And people at home, deer hunters at home are like, I just don't see the issue. Right? That might be a thing that they come away with because they're like, I don't get it. I saw all kinds of deer.

Yeah. And I can't. I'm having great hunting. Why is there a problem? Right. I can't speak for a state agency, but Mark and I can both, you know, state agencies take a very, most state agencies take a fairly scripted approach to dealing with CWD. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to reduce transmission rates amongst individuals. They're trying to prevent the transport of the disease outside of the immediate local area because what we do know with CWD is it starts out.

as a focal spot on the landscape and then it slowly spreads outward from that spot. And so what agencies are trying to do, you'll see common responses be the creation of a CWD management zone, right? So they'll delineate an area, a geographic area, and they'll create restrictions on import and export of carcasses or parts of carcasses. They will ban, sometimes, you know, ban or alter how feed is applied to the landscape. Yeah, baiting bans. Yep. They'll often liberalize regulations.

Exactly. And remove antler point restrictions and things like that because what they're doing. And here's like one of those major friction points is like the state is actively working against the quality of my personal deer hunting. Yep. And what, what's at play there? And I get it as a deer hunter. I totally get that. But you have to look at it through their lens.

They are publicly by law charged with managing for conservation and sustainability of the species of wildlife in their state. And so they're dealt this gut punch of being told, you have this disease on your landscape. They have two approaches. They could be nihilistic and just say, I'm not doing anything. or they could take this approach that we don't know where we are on the curve. So we're going to create this zone. We're going to expand our surveillance and testing. And meanwhile, we're going to try to reduce transmission, right?

We know that deer are licking each other, and we know that they're feeding under the same tree and all of that. But what, for instance, what feeding is doing is putting animals at the same spot on the landscape repeatedly and therefore changing how the preon can get into the environment and then remain in the environment. So an animal coming to a feeder every day and eating at that feeder every day

is very different from a preon accumulation standpoint than if he's walking around in a food plot or going under an oak tree and the acorns are there. He's around other deer for a couple of weeks and then he's gone. That's not the way a feeder functions. So that's what the agencies, I'm not, I'm not trying to justify their actions. I'm simply explaining that that's the logic is that, yeah, yeah, let's put this

zone out more deer from farther away and puts them on the same, like literally the same square foot of ground. You're mixing social groups that normally wouldn't have those interactions. That has been showing that, you know, you, you will bring multiple social groups think about those for instance matriarchal family groups you will bring multiple family groups to the same location and otherwise would not be there at that time the one of the issues is like just like how i personally contextualize these things and when um we talked about like preons are on the landscape forever you can't get rid of them um my visual my mental visual right is like

that little tiny sucker group of them is sitting there on the tip of that forb or grass forever and then i somebody produced something that showed like how those preons eventually like work their their way down into the soil to where they're they're just effectively not able to come in contact with any sort of a grazer right which makes like it rains there's due in the morning. It starts, like, working its way down into the soil. And that, to me, was one of those, like, really, like, boy, you're kind of stupid for not having thought about this yourself moments, right?

But it, that is how you kind of think about these things on first glance, right? It's like, oh, it's there forever. Which means then what's the point in controlling this? Yeah. Right. I wanted to revisit one of the things you said, Cal, about, sort of the disruption that CWD has once it's detected in an area to someone's here and now opportunity, right? And I think a lot of those, those, you know, common actions that an agency

takes, it does. It seems restrictive. It's how CWD has kind of become vilified in some ways. But really, those actions target trying to lower the risk of other deer getting CWD. So again, time scale, it's got to adjust it. Those actions are, they're further now, but they're also for the future, to Mike's point about stewardship and sustainability of the population, because we've got these examples now of when we're at the end of that curve, like when we're way towards decades down the road, we have glimpses into what that picture looks like. And so a lot of those actions are trying to prevent or slow the movement in time along

this sort of, what phase of disease is the population at? I desperately wanted to get into what you guys found when you did your work in Arkansas, but I want just a little more, we're very heavy on front loading here, so apologies. But has it ever been demonstrated? This is a huge question. Apologies. Have any of these early detection restrictions, has any of them ever been demonstrated? demonstrated to be effective.

Yeah, you want to talk about it? Is that yes, they have or yes, you understand the question? I do. I think that I do is to both as well as the, uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. That's, it's, that's challenging, right? Because that, that's a big desire among many, right?

Is in the, and we, and we often will sort of isolate one, right? We'll isolate, you know, carcass movement or will isolate baiting restrictions or feeding restrictions or faunery, or removal of APRs or whatever, you know, it's sort of the all-a-cart menu of options for these are the tools we got in the toolbox. The challenge with evaluating one at a time is that's not how they've really been deployed. When you apply, let's say, I'm saying, does applying the whole toolbox, I don't mean to carve out what restriction was effective. Have we ever had a situation where there was a detection? of the disease of a novel detection so a detection of the disease in a in a place that had been

previously unknown the toolbox is applied and then lo and behold we never get another detection yeah there was new york or is it always it's just full blast ahead no it's not always there are successes right so there's you know there's you also have to kind of reframe the the version of success too like the best example of success would be new york right where they they had a detection um there there was a captive facility involved uh there was the population of those facilities and aggressive you know removal of deer in a in a tight radius around that area um that was sustained for several years and they did not have another detection despite having detections not only inside the fence but also in wild deer outside the fence so

that's kind of you're that's reminding me i'm familiar with that story so they caught it early they caught it early enough as that epicenter was growing that that focal area was small enough around that captive facility that they could catch it in time and with that intensive culling around that facility they caught the spread before it had gotten too far which is what we're finding in a lot of our wild populations by the time an animal's detected as being positive the follow-up surveillance is showing that it's more widespread and more prevalent in some situations in that situation to Mark's point, that is incredibly challenging to try to manage that disease when you realize that you're farther along that curve than you thought you were. Yeah. Like you get a county, I keep talking about a county level, but a county, say a county and, I don't know, pick a state. A county in Missouri gets its first ever CWD hit from a hunter submitted deer. That's the first.

But then you're saying, then they'll come in and be like, okay, let's go test. a thousand deer and they test a thousand deer and they're like well shit there's 50 there's 50 positives so they didn't catch the first deer it had been there for some time like yeah yeah so at that point you're like is it the

first and then like oh no it's not the first this has obviously been here we just never caught it we weren't looking and now that we're looking it's all over the damn place right it's too late it's too late to it's too late to isolate that little square mile that's right of ground yeah yeah so it changes

the options, right? If you, because that's, you know, if you have, say, robust surveillance in a state and you really have some confidence that like, this might not be the first, but maybe it's really early, right? That that could, that could sort of justify some pretty severe aggression to try to like, okay, if we got a chance, let's try to stamp this out. And to that, to that point, to your victory point earlier, you know, there are examples, Minnesota, like a, you know, within a state, sometimes we get we get focused on the state but but there are victories within states too right so you might have an endemic region in a state or an area that has c wd established and you get a spark somewhere else and through you know it's early through aggressive action they kind of stamp it out

and there's no new cases right and so that shouldn't be lost i think in terms of of a victory even within an unaffected region of a state states are big areas and the disease moves slowly so as long as we can be aggressive on those outliers, you know, that will save, you know, it will reset the time scale of this disease in those areas, right? Then we're not marching up that path. We're, we're kind of starting over again and waiting until the next one. As far as other successes, that's where it gets a little bit more challenging with some of these regulations in areas where CWD is established. It's about living with CWD, right? And so, So our goals might be different.

You know, some agencies are controlling, you'll, you'll hear, you know, the term managing for prevalence, right? So basically these actions are just trying to keep that prevalence down to the, to that, like as Mike was talking about earlier, like, you know, 1% to 5%, you know, trying to prevent it from increasing sort of exponentially up that slope, the, the more you can keep it suppressed down, the more you suppress the very negative consequences at the population level, right? And so a lot of agencies are doing that. That's a hard, that's a hard, like, happy pill to swallow sometimes, right?

It's like we're sort of redefining what success means. Yeah, because success is no longer putting it back in the bottle. No, no, no. Yeah, and that's a hard one to swallow. As a deer hunter, I think about it like, like this. Okay, so the agency is telling me I have to behave differently. Why are they doing that? to Mark's point, they're trying, if the prevalence is low, they're trying to keep it low

because a deer that contracts CWD is going to die. And so that is an animal that is not, as we're going to talk about, they're not going to have the same reproductive potential as other deer. They're going to have lower survival. They are not going to contribute to the population in the same way as a CWD negative animal. And therefore, they're not part of that surplus, that harvestable surplus moving forward, particularly if they contract the disease when they're young. And so what the agencies are trying to do is keep CWD from not being a relevant form of mortality.

Got that makes sense. They're trying to keep it to where it's really not relevant in a population scale. And if they can do that, then that is in many ways a success. Like, Steve, to your point, you're not putting it back in the bottle. But what you're doing is you're minimizing the impacts of the disease at a population scale so that you don't go to where some of these populations are going, which is there is no more harvestable surplus. The disease has affected the population in a way.

The prevalence has gotten so high that there is no more surplus there. Meaning any hunter harvest is going to have. a population level effect? You start getting to a point where harvest is truly additive. Like you have such a significant percentage of animals that are dying solely from CWD that when you start tacking on harvest and predation and these things that just affect deer populations, you've changed, you've tipped the pendulum to the point where the lens doesn't look at all like it looked if the prevalence was 2% when you get to 20 or

percent or 30 percent or even higher as we see in some populations that's what the agencies are trying to do is keep it low enough to where it's not relevant and that's that's scary well mike is outlining there but i think it's really important for listeners to understand it that that can happen at the same time even in the same state in different areas as record harvest you know everything you would want as a deer hunter is available to you in one area and then in another It's this focal nature of these very severe impacts and that slow sort of expansion over time. And that's where it's like that, that can happen, you know, in the same state or in the same general area for a long time where you have great opportunity, great abundance, sort of juxtaposed

with this other scenario. It's hard to, I think that that's challenging for people because unless you've been on the ground and you see sort of some of the stuff Mike's talking about, you're on the landscape and you see some of these these population level impacts of c wd you just hear about them it's different from seeing it you know and experiencing it and so um i think that's a challenge for people because you know you harvest the buck and it tests positive it was you know it was a healthy that you know totally normal looking deer that's your experience as a hunter with cwd the real experience you hear all this stuff but then your real experience was that was a great looking deer and to

What is all this noise about CWP? Yeah, and to Cal's point, now I have to, I have to discard that deer. Right. Yeah. Yeah. That's extremely frustrating. And it causes confusion. Yeah.

I shot a dough at Doug Durin's place that you were just like, like people stopped and looked at it. And they were like, that is a damn good looking animal. Mm-hmm. Right. You're just like, she's mature and just big and healthy and always. And she tested positive for CWD. And that was just a gut punch, you know. And what Doug is experienced.

And I spoke with Doug. prior to coming here and what he's experiencing is very comparable to what's going on in northwest Arkansas or you've got parts of the landscape where to Mark's point where you're in these focal centers and and you flip a coin and every other deer is testing positive or more particularly for bucks and then in the next county over they're testing positive and the prevalence is lower, but the pendulum hasn't swung far enough to start seeing these population level consequences. You still see deer.

You're still harvest deer. They're not all positive. And so the chatter at the local feed store is different from this county to this county because it's taken 30 years for this disease to get to where the snapshot that we as human beings are seeing right now today. And we can't, I suck at this. I think about today and tomorrow. That's just the way I'm wired.

It's hard for me to think about 20 years from now. What, you know, what's my camp in Louisiana going to look like 20 years from now versus today? What's a client's property going to look like 30 years from now? Now the prevalence on, you know, in that area that he manages that property is 1%. But what's it going to look like in 30? years if we just throw our hands up and do nothing versus if we try to minimize transmission potential and try to do these things that that logically would impact preon accumulation in the environment that's hard to conceptualize and wrap your head around 30 years from now

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I think there's like these kind of camps. We're talking about Doug Duren. Like Doug Duren and I sit in sort of different camps. He gets frustrated with my camp. Because I have always looked at it. I've always looked at it as primarily a food safety issue, how heartbreaking, how like culturally devastating for American hunters it would be. If all of a sudden a deer wasn't like a good source of venison, wasn't something people

were excited to see on their property, wasn't something that we celebrated, but all of a sudden And they were like, the way you'd look at a rat. Ugh. Like, oh, get that thing out of here. Yeah. Shoot. Like, shoot the deer. There's a deer in the yard.

Right? Before we all get sick. Like, that it would just, what a deer stands for would change from a human safety standpoint. That, that haunts me. And my own, the diet that my family eats. Sure. Which is like, me too.

Like, the bulk of the protein we take in is from servants. Right. It'd be devastating. It'd be heartbreaking. I've looked at it like that. Doug looks at it, one, just animal welfare, meaning, you know, he grew up with a farm background. Sick animals equals no good, okay? So he just instinctively doesn't like the thought of sick animals, loves deer, doesn't like the thought of sick deer.

So that turns them on. Two, he's often said, we will get to a point, and he reads more and studies more than I do, we will get to a point where this does impact deer hunting. He feels we'll get to a point where we don't see big bucks anymore. And it used to be kind of like I felt like it was like he was predicting

or prophesizing or trying to crystal ball it, right? But that's like two different things. And I think there's probably a lot of people to hold both those at the same time where they're like very concerned with food safety and then very concerned down the road of, are we going to have big white tails?

Yeah. And are we still going to be able to grow 70-year-old bucks? I also think part of Doug's frustration is what I see with private landowners all over the south is that they buy these recreational properties. They put so much of themselves and their resources into creating this recreational opportunity for them and their families. They want their kids and their grandkids to come experience. and to have this legacy of deer hunting.

They have it all written out. And they've got this grand plan. I'm envisioning one of my clients at 72. He has this like exactly what he's wanted forever. He finally worked his ass off enough to be able to afford this property to put the resources on it. He hires a biologist. He does these things. And his deer herd is terrific.

And the thought of that being undermined. by this disease is something that causes him incredible frustration and angst. And because, and then having clients that own properties in CWD zones, that is what they tell me. They're like, I, I, I'm having a hard time thinking through what the future is going to look like because I'm 60 and I want my grandkids, you know, I have two new grandsons. and this is theirs. This is, I've been working all these years to create this opportunity for them so that I can facilitate the next generation of hunters and land managers and conservationists. And now you're telling me that there's a chance that could be undermined by this disease.

And that is incredibly frustrating and upsetting for them. That's what I hear. Not so much the food, although that is incredibly frustrating, is the legacy, the property, the, the property. legacy, the generational impact that this disease could have on land management, on land value, on the deer hunting, you know, fraternity, that's what I hear with the, the conversations that I have. Okay. So is the guy that's worried, how warranted is someone who's worried about the future big buck

potential in their area? Well, there's no question like what we're seeing with these, with the Research that is occurring in populations with high prevalence, the age structure, which Doug is seeing in his area as well, the age structure is getting progressively younger, meaning that you're just not, you're not carrying older males over into the five and six year old age class. And so I know we're going to talk about Arkansas, but yeah, let's talk about Arkansas. So what we found in Arkansas, which we'll circle back to. but you know we found that 50% of all two and a half year old males tested positive more than 50% of three and a half year old males and so if you look across the south a lot of the buck harvest is comprised of three and a half year old males so if you're in a you know you think about this population in Arkansas super high prevalence which we'll talk about most of your bucks by the time they're three have the disease well over 60% have the disease well over 60% have the disease when they're four and if half of them have it at two they're not surviving past four and so you know i'm thinking and that that timeline is so crucial to these arguments as well right it's like

sure because he's a jumbo at five or six well i mean in my world working with landowners you know we're not we're not harvesting at least southern white tails we're not we're not harvesting many of our bucks until they're at least four. And most were going to five. And so in that vein, you know, under that scenario I just described, which is on the ground in northwest Arkansas, you're not going to have five and six year old bucks. And well, I guess I bring up that timeline too, because you do hear in certain areas of the country, they're like, well, who cares? Our beer don't live till six anyway. Right. Right. And so if they're, If they're showing signs of the disease at six, what is it, again, to me?

Like, why is this a backyard issue to me and how I hunt and manage deer? Right. But you're saying that it progresses to where by the time they're showing signs of the disease, that that gets younger as well, right? Another thing is the farther, we keep talking about that time scale, right? And the farther down that path you get and sort of the percentage of animals infected in the population is that increases, the age at which those animals get infected tends to be earlier in life. And I was just talking with Mike about this morning. There's a particular spot in the Arkansas study site where the prevalence is very high. We suspect it's been on the landscape for the longest.

And we've got, you know, all these collared deer, we, you know, we investigated the, you know, the death site, you know, full field necropsies, lots of photos, you know, sent back lots of laboratory analysis to sort of understand why these deer died, individual causes of death. So there's a, there's a particular buck that was, that was captured in this area. He was about eight or nine months at the time of capture, just as kind of a normal average looking body weight. did a rectal biopsy so this is a common diagnostic test that you could use for CWD you take a little snip of sounds kind of weird but like of

the rectal like tissue it was positive right and so is that how did you get this deer in your hands tranquilize it yeah so let you want we'll revisit it later let's cover this I'll come back to that yeah that's a big deal

I'll come back to the end of his life Okay. Yeah. So what we did in Arkansas is, so Arkansas Game and Fish Commission first detected CWD in 2015 in an elk. Okay. They subsequently detected it in a white tail in 2016. A farm milk? No, this was a wild elk. Wild elk. Okay. And so they as an agency decided to submit an RFP request for proposals a few years later to solicit proposals from researchers to solicit proposals.

to try to understand. As soon as they started testing, once these two positives occurred, they realized their prevalence was well over 20%. And that's from Hunter's submissions. Yes. Okay. And so suddenly they went, oh, wow, we need to understand where we're at. What's going on?

So they found one. Started testing. Promptly started taking a lot of samples. Yep. People turn in their deer head. Well, some of it was agency collection, too. in that initial response their goal was to shoot they basically so they had that positive elk and they also had a positive white tail deer that was clinically affected and so they kind of

drew big circles around these used them together and their their goal was like we're going to go shoot 300 deer within this area because we need to understand what we're facing and in that area is that a lot it's a lot of deer yeah it had been more than they had sampled there previously yeah but they didn't even get to 300 because by 260 they saw that they were facing this 20% plus prevalence. Yeah. So they're like, okay, it's a bad deal. So they wanted to go get an immediate snapshot.

Yes. And their immediate snapshot was like one in five deer. Yeah. Are positive for chronic wasting disease. Yeah. It was a gut punch. Yeah. And Mark was living that.

I was not involved at that time. I was hearing about this peripherally. Uh-huh. And then I got this email with a request saying that we would like you, among others, it was sent to a number of researchers. We'd like you to consider. putting together a research project, excuse me, that would answer these relevant questions we have.

And so what I did, excuse me, what I did was I reached out to Mark and colleagues at the University of Georgia. We reached out collectively to colleagues at Colorado State at the Preon Research Center there, and we put together this very large five-year study to try to help the agency do everything from understand abundance or deer density prevalence rates to look at behavior of CWD positive and negative deer to look at survival and habitat use and all these things that you would get from just capturing and collaring deer and then we designed this study plan to come back at the end and to also collect coal animals that were radio marked at the end

of the study to try to figure out if their disease, if their disease, you know, prevalent, oh, I'm sorry, if they're positive or negative would change at the, you know, by the time the end of the study occurred. So what we did is we, we captured and GPS collared hundreds of deer. We, we ended up trapping them or what? We would dart them, rocket net them and drop net them. Okay. And what we were trying to do is put GPS collars on adults.

And we put vaginal implant transmitters and doze, which are these, as you know, these transmitters that when they give birth, it kicks the transmitter out, alerts the researcher that there's fawns on the ground. We would then go in and collar the fawns. At every capture, of course, to Mark's point, which he can explain, we would take a rectal biopsy for CWD testing. We would then track these deer. We programmed the collars to have battery life over several years. because we were interested in obviously studying the deer for as long a term, you know, time frame as we could. We tried to recapture as many deer as we possibly could from year to year so that we could

repeatedly test them. We set up camera arrays all over the study site. And the way this, the initial study site came to fruition is through the testing that Arkansas Game Fish had already done, they had evidence to show. that there was a progression of prevalence from higher to lower as you went from west to east. So we set our study design up to where we captured that variation. We had sampling in the highest, what appeared to be the highest prevalence all the way to the lowest prevalence, and we captured deer and put camera arrays and did all of this work

the same across all kind of three study sites that span from high prevalence to lower prevalence, certainly not low. And we did this for four years and then we had a fifth year where we went in and tried to collect marked animals off public lands. At the same time, which Mark can talk about because he saw this with his own eyes. We're deer are dying while this study is ongoing. Deer with your collars on them. Yes, are dying and we're recovering those animals and we are field knee crops seeing in beyond. We are testing them for CWD, and we are seeing that this disease is becoming more prevalent right before our eyes.

And so we did this. We recently provided the findings to the agency. The penultimate piece of information from this study was a population model, an integrated population model, where we took all of this data, and we used it to model to tell the, agency where are you at on that curve and more importantly where's the what's the future for you given where you are on the curve what is the next 10 years or 20 years look like for for you as

as an agency relative to this population and what we realized pretty quickly is we were we as a research group and the agency were farther along on that curve than we thought and so as of 2025, the prevalence rate is about 50% in that part of Arkansas, about 35% for Do's and about 68% for bucks. So most bucks have CWD in that area. And so incredibly high prevalence, which is that's context the listener needs to understand that CWD had been on this landscape for years before it was ever detected. And so this population had gone, quote unquote, unmanaged, just normal harvest regulations that the state would implement.

There were antler point restrictions in place, trying to improve age structure and allow animals to grow to be older. And so what was occurring is for decades, prevalence was just slowly creeping up. And then suddenly an animal is detected positive because they're clinical. and the agency realizes, oh, wow, we're farther along. Sorry, when you guys say clinical, are you saying, like, it visually is showing signs of CWT? Like a sick deer shows up someone's yard or something. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, and that's not something, you know, that's something Mark and I talk about a lot is these clinical animals, you're not likely to see this.

Unlike a hemorrhagic disease outbreak where you've got animals laying everywhere, as we saw with our movement data. These animals, as they're becoming positive, as the disease is progressing, so I'll give you a scenario, you catch a two-year-old buck, you put a radio collar on him, and he test positive. He looks fine. Everything, he looks great, but he tests positive. Now we're tracking his movements over the next two years as the disease progresses, and he starts becoming compromised. And so what we saw is they don't behave like uninfected deer. They are less vigilant.

They move differently. They will expand their home range. Which is interesting if you think about preon transmission, they're actually expanding their area. That puts them in contact with other animals that they may not. Why are they doing that? Don't know. If they're sick.

Don't know. The preon wanting to spread. It's like a sci-fi magazine. It's hard to say. I mean, I would think. that they would hunker down. Oh, sure, man. But we didn't see that.

We saw the opposite, that they actually expanded their home range. And you should have thought just like it's function of his age? No. No, I mean, so we, we control for age in our. Oh, because you got all kinds of other ones that aren't positive. Right. Yeah, got you. We also saw that, interestingly enough, they started interacting as they became positive.

They started interacting with other deer differently. And they were much more likely to interact with another positive deer. And so they start changing kind of. Because of the change in their behaviors and movements. Maybe, maybe. They're less likely to run with. They're more likely to be around another deer, which makes sense. Why does that make sense?

He's sick. They're letting them do the thinking, maybe. I don't know. I mean, I don't, I don't know. I mean, could it be, could it be a combination of the change? in vigilance behavior with, hey, I don't, I'm not, things just aren't clicking with me. So, for instance, we had a, you remember that polar vortex, we had a severe weather outbreak. Was that the first year or the second year?

We had a couple polar vortexes. Don, in Arkansas, the one that fools all the woodpeckers and everything. Yeah, I was down there for that. So we had positive deer that just lay down in the woods and died. like they didn't seek refuge at all. Got it. And so there's something that... Is that where the term stiff as a pecker comes from?

I don't know, but you know this, you don't remember that massive cold snap? We went down to hunt squirrels and out in the woods. I mean, it was like national news cold. Yeah. Freezing everything to death. But out in the woods all over the place, it's just birds, totally fine, except dead on the ground. Not a feather ruffled. Fries into death

And the trees Falling to the ground I mean we like all day long Yeah So there's Killed Clay's whole bamboo patch Something that you know Their behavior is becoming compromised in some way

Which makes sense with Yeah that like that clicks Yeah Like that click did it that it doesn't have the wherewithal to do what it needs to stay alive But just like increased social Unless that somehow is attributed to its lack of vigilance or It's paranoia's collapse Some of that we couldn't possibly understand with the resolution of this data we have because our vigilance data are coming from cameras, from observing animals, you know, head up, head down.

The spatial and interaction data are coming from GPS locations, and we know we don't have all deer marked, right? So there's inherent bias there. Well, I can tell you, a sick kid is more likely to end up in his mom and dad's bed. Yeah, yeah. I don't know why. been a long time since I was exposed to that. Marketing communications folks for the state agency saying, like, are you sure you want to capture sick deer and then let them go again? Yeah.

So, Mark and I talked about this this is morning. We wanted to understand how this disease looked without intervention. So we wanted to see exactly what was going on with these animals. So yes, we were capturing. animals and we were allowing this to proceed as it would like what would have happened if you weren't doing the study yeah yeah yeah and so we we do we collect all this information we see you know for instance one of the more kind of concerning outcomes was the prevalence is so so high another outcome that was interesting um if you look at dough

survival like annual survival of negative dose it was about 80% pretty high it was 60% for positive dose got it if you looked at buck survival annual survival if it was a negative cohort it was about 70% pretty high it was 40% positive and and that is is above and beyond normal is that above and beyond just the disease killing them Because, you know, like, like, if you think back to, like, HIV-AIDS, right, people that die are dying from pneumonia, or they're dying from complications from other things, right? They're more likely, like, they die from the flu. Yeah. So if, if, if it takes two years to kill a deer, if the disease takes two years to kill a deer, then, of course, from one year to the next, 50.

percent of the deer that have it should be dead because it kills them it's always fatal so yes so like no shit like like of course they're dead because they have a disease that always kills them but are they but if they get hit by a car yeah yeah so what we did is we categorized if they even if they were c wd positive but they died from a car a vehicle a collision or harvest or predation we considered that not c wd related oh okay wow okay well i got you We only categorize mortalities to CWD that had no other links. And Mark was the one. Like it lays down and dies.

Yes. That's fascinating. I see. And so that's what I was. Yeah. That addresses what I was getting at, meaning he's positive and gets smoked by a car. That's car.

Maybe he's a little bit less vigilant, but how do you factor that in? Right. So we, we were trying to be a conservative in that vein to not link mortalities to CWD that had approximate, you know, some other type of cause. And what we found was about 20%, just under 20% of all mortalities were linked directly to CWD. And so that's, that's in addition to predation and harvest and these other things. Mega important announcement. In fact, the most important announcement you ever heard. The third volume in our Meat Eaters American History audiobook series is available for pre-eastern

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East. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. Pre-order Meat Eaters American History, The Hide Hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your audiobooks, and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14. Have you ever tested a live deer with the rectal thing you're talking about? That's what we do. Yeah. But have you ever tested a live deer? And then had it be that that deer was still alive 25 months later.

Are you asking if you, if it tested positive at the rectal? I'm sorry. Have you ever had a deer test positive? And then 25 months later, that deer is still running around alive. I'd have to look. I'd have to look at the data. I would think that would be the, you know, that would be the exception, not the rule, but not impossible. Well, this, based on the incubation period of the disease.

I wanted to ask this, too, because this test is pretty darn new, right? I mean, I feel like I just was talking about this last week, and I'm like, but there's not a test for CWD for live deer that, um, so is there a, and, and this was because that it takes a while for the preons to build up to a detectable stage unless you're taking biopsies from the

brain, brain stem, spinal column, then lymph nodes. So is the rectal test is that only giving you positives at a certain progression point of the disease?

Yeah, there's a lot of nuance here with the testing, but it also gets back to that time scale that I was talking about with, in an individual deer, we're talking about, you know, months and years. And so a lot of that has to do with the progression of the disease, the movement of the abnormal preon in the body. So, you know, if a deer gets exposed to, you know, infected with CWD, the first place where we're typically going to have a detectable amount in there is in the lymph nodes right and everybody's probably familiar with the retroferential lymph nodes um that's part of what people will call the lymphoid system so like you know there's lymph nodes all around the body so that little piece of the rectum that we're taking there happens to be like little tiny they're not

lymph nodes they're a little almost like little islands of lymph lymphoid tissue that's what we have those all throughout our all throughout our intestinal tract and so that's what we're grabbing there but But that's typically a little bit later in disease. So you could easily have, if we were to just have a deer that, you know, several months or, you know, three months, four months, five months after infection, we test its lymph node and we test its rectal biopsy, there'd be a decent chance that that lymph node sample is positive and that rectal biopsy is not positive. Got it, got it.

And a lot of that just has to do with the timing. The last place that it goes is going to be the brain, right? the brain stem, the OBEX, people will have that referred to, the information is super highway for us, right? And so that process takes a long time. That's the months and years process, right? So you can have an animal, it's, you know, where that preon is kind of just slowly accumulating in these tissues and it's doing normal deer stuff and it looks totally healthy.

That's why you can harvest an animal that tests, positive for CWD, it's hard to say does that animal have CWD the disease? Well, probably not exhibiting any signs of it yet, but he's test positives on the path to disease, right? And so, you know, by the time, by the time you get, you know, a year sometimes, two years, sometimes there's been experimental studies where they don't really see disease out until three, four years. So the time is pretty weird sometimes. Okay. So why do people say, that CWD is always fatal Because you start

Like life always like life ends Yeah we're all gonna die right Everything's fatal And so if he can have it for four years Why do people also often say That they're dead in two years? I guess it's like you can predict Okay so if something else

You can start a clock The deer gets CWD test positive for CWD It's like I don't know when If you evade all other causes of mortality This is what you're gonna die from. There's very few of us that can say that. Yeah, okay, but at what point?

So I'm saying like, if he if. Yeah, the point would have to be prior to the naturally natural average mortality mark. Right. So yeah, so when they say it's always fatal, meaning if he doesn't get shot, doesn't get hit by a car,

doesn't get killed by a coyote, whatever, that will be his cause of death. Correct. Correct. But if it could be that he carries it for four years, it almost kind of doesn't matter because most, like, deer don't live that long. Do you follow me? Like, if you could, if you tested a deer, like, if you guys go out and put, if you go out and test deer and collar them and you're like, okay, here's a positive deer. I would expect you to say, since that he's already had it, he's already somewhere along the line, I would expect you to say that mortality, CWD mortality, mortality,

in and of itself is 60% or 70% or certainly more than 50% because it's always fatal and it kills them within a couple of years. So any deer that's already positive, the clock has already started ticking, he's already into his two years of life. So why is it not that by two years, every one of them is dead?

Yeah, well, that's part of the, you know, Mike mentioned earlier, like this disease is just atypical. It doesn't read, read the book. You know, there's not a, you know, with most infectious diseases, there's a highly predictable time course. It's a little bit unpredictable once you get into sort of that, when is a deer going to start to show clinical signs, right? Usually, once that happens, you know, whether it's 16 months, 18 months, 20 months, once they start to, you, if you were watching a deer and you're like,

that deer's off, it's not doing, not doing right. That course is going to be pretty quick, probably within weeks or a couple months. So once they hit that point is downhill. And those are the deer that you can, you know, like some of those subtle changes that Mike was talking about relative to vigilance or home range size, all that stuff, that's probably even something different than we can perceive visually sometimes even. You know, it's the classic deer everybody sees in the pictures. It's a frame stands, head drooped, slobbering, zombie kind of stare, just like looking into space, nothing. Like, those deer are circling the drain. Those deer are so far down this path. Yeah. You know, they, a lot of them would have died earlier. You know, I look at animals as like,

wild animals as akin to professional athletes, right? They, they have to be at their peak constantly to migrate, spar, evade predators, evade threats. If you're, if you're just like a little bit off, about how many professional athletes sit on the bench when they're just um just not a little bit right you know so that's where it gets really hard those other mortalities you know killed by a hunter nabbed by a predator hit by a car whatever you know what role did it have in sort of sealing its fate yeah into that like there is there is something there's hard to quantify there have been studies that have shown you know more prone to predation more prone to harvest more prone to vehicle strike um there seems to be regional differences with that stuff but certainly gives us the impression

that like this stuff matters right that when you're when you're adjusting an animal's ability to interact with its environment perceived threats move all these things it's going to be more prone to an unthrifty life you know we one time saw a coyote that must have got hit by a road going up the hill by our house got hit by a car but eagles were killing them so did eagles kill him right This is tricky. And your question is, you're just dragging himself along and they're just like taking advantage of the situation. So yeah, it's hard to sort it out.

But I'm just trying to get to, again, I'm trying to get from the perspective of someone looking at someone looking at it and saying like, like if I took a human, like you take an American male, like, okay, if he doesn't die of, you know, he doesn't die of an opioid overdose. If he doesn't die in a vehicular car accident, if he doesn't die from lung cancer, he will die from heart disease. Right? It's always fatal. Because, like, of course, something will end up getting you. And if you take all the other things that kill shit and set it aside, it's like, of course, it'll be heart disease.

But I think that I think the point that that argument misses is that these animals, on average, are not living as long as non-diseased animals. Therefore, their net reproductive potential is less than negative animals. And therefore, you factor in that reduced lifespan. That's the answer to that question from my perspective, is these animals are not going to live as long on average as a negative animal. And therefore, the consequences to the population are going to be potentially impact. that curve, you go from a population that on average, you can take like one of those crazy Maryland deer, remember, learn about those.

Well, the white tails on like the, all the weird government ground in Maryland, they, you know, they have like ancient white tail does that live to regularly like 16 or whatever. Oh, I don't know about this. Yeah. But like on average, the population starts as like, they live to eight years old. And then a decade goes by and it's like, well, it's seven and a half. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, on average, everybody lives till five.

On average, everybody lives till three and a half. Right. And then you got serious problems because you're not producing deer at that point. That's why the agencies are trying to keep that prevalence so low is because at a low prevalence, this discussion that we're having about, you know, mortality causes, it becomes largely irrelevant because only a tiny percentage of animals have the disease to begin with and therefore an even smaller percentage of that are dying specifically just from CWD. You're killing big bucks. People are getting food to eat. But as you get up closer, farther up that

curve, then this conversation becomes more relevant because now you're losing a significant percentage of your population to just the disease. And so if we looked at, at, of all the positive deer that we put our hands on, a third of them died just from CWD. So about 20% of the total population was impacted. Okay. But a third of the animals that were positive died solely from CWD. And so, again, that's why we-

And because prevalence rates are so high, you're losing 20% of the population to the disease, strictly to the disease. Yes. And harvest wouldn't even be that high, would it? Hunter harvests. It was. So the most impactful, you know, from a population perspective, you had three competing mortality sources. You had harvest, predation, and CWD.

Okay. Whereas in a normal population, you would have harvest and predation. Yeah. Okay. Right. And so you're adding this mortality source that's becoming increasingly more relevant as prevalence increases. And so not surprisingly, the final product that we produced with this, with this study was this population model. And what we, what we showed clearly is this population is declining about 13 to 14% per year.

And so now you're looking at deer densities that are in the one to five deer per square mile range. From a high of what? Well, we came in at a, we only have a snapshot, right? We came in and we. Oh, because you don't trust. other you can't trust other other guesses well you don't know where i mean we don't know 20 years ago what the i mean we we come in as researchers and we get a snapshot of where we are right now and that's another problem with this with with trying to understand this disease it's kind of like

the other analogy i have it's kind of like wild turkey declines i mean you're you're coming in and you're trying to study something that's been occurring in the south over 25 years and you come in and you get a little snapshot of data from a population. And now you're trying to figure out from a snapshot what the bigger picture is. And we're dealing, you know, you're talking about a disease that takes decades to kind of operate. And we come in and a five-year study is a pretty long field study in my world. And even in, that's not near enough. I would have loved to have had 15 years of data before. And I'd like to keep studying the population. But that's just not, that's just not realistic but and so we we show clearly that this population is is declining and it's going to

continue to decline and now you have prevalence that you know is exceeding you know is that 50% across the population which is incredibly high and now you start thinking through scenarios of what what does the agency do right and so back to where kind of where we started when the agency detected this disease, they took a fairly standard approach. Let's create his own. Let's increase harvest or opportunity. Let's liberalize bag limits. Let's remove antler point restrictions. Let's ban feeding. And what they're trying to do is control the spread of the disease, but they didn't know where they were on the curve. So now that they know it's too late to do that, and they know that the population is declining, at what point do they reverse strategy?

I think that speaks to the complexity of this disease is, you know, in some situations, and this is certainly not doom and gloom, but when you get to prevalence as high as what you see in northwest Arkansas, your management options have changed from where you are if you're at 2% prevalence. At two or three or, you know, on the low end of the curve, you have these options, Mark and I've talked about, when you get up to 50%, now your options are limited because now your population is declining, and now you're thinking about the future sustainability of the population. Yeah, that's what, yeah.

So if you go to a place that has 30, 40, 50 percent prevalence, you're not going to shoot your way out of it. No. No, because you're not going to get rid of the disease. That's the version of living with it. Yeah. At that prevalence, it's there. And so is there an argument that you'd want more deer on the landscape to have a higher amount of deer and test more that you'd have some sort of natural selection play out?

Do you have more deer, more genetic diversity, and you'd start some new strategy of seeing who's resistant? Did one of the, were you asked this at that here? You know, there's, there's, yeah, the deer there are, it's basically trying to establish a new normal. Okay. Right, it's trying to, the theory with CWD is that you're eventually going to hit some equilibrium, right? Where you have, your prevalence is so high, that percentage of deer that are positive is so high. And you have this continual, you know, sort of, you know, the clock ticks and deer, die, but you still have recruitment into the population. And so you really can't, at some point,

you'll have that percentage of positive deer is going to kind of like, yeah, because if it's good habitat, right, like it's going to suck in other deer who are like, oh, there's not deer here. Lots of food around. Yeah. And there is that. There are studies ongoing. And this is like real world mother nature experiments right now, like trying to look at these populations that are at this state and start to understand genetics like what is that equilibrium what's the new balance is there shifting of you know like we talked about that that preon gene the pr np gene that's kind of a metric that some places will use to sort of monitor um you know how how a population is maybe shifting based on a new selection pressure right like this is a relatively new selection pressure

for most um most populations and so the All that work is sort of, you know, ongoing. I think we're a little bit down the road from understanding it, but it's a very important area to sort of understand is what do we expect from these populations once they get to that point. I do want to circle back to one thing we were talking about dead deer,

because that's my jam. So yeah, like say a buck, you can definitely have a scenario where, okay, he first tests, you know, he gets infected at two and a half. Okay, yeah, he'll live to four and a half and, you know, honky, everything's great you know um but i'll go back to that original story i was talking about with one of our collar deer okay in sort of the hot zone where we are and i i do this not to like

i i fear that sometimes this is the kind of stories that you know you get accused to fear mongering but i'm very sensitive to that i'll tell you it's really not you know because like i just said you can also have a scenario where you harvest the four and a half year old buck right gets to these ages that are desirable. The opposite is also true. And we know that as prevalence increases in a population, that percent increases, you get to this point where the age at which you're infected, early in an infection cycle, you know, it's usually like those, the males are at greater risk of becoming infected, older males are more likely

of being tested positive, but as it becomes a highly endemic area, so you've had preons shed into the environment into that habitat for many years lots of direct contact between animals the age of like the writ there's accumulation of risk right your chances once you are born of encountering c wd are greatly increased right if you're born into that environment chances are you're going to see cd sooner rather than later and so that to that point you know there was a buck that was uh captured in 2022 he was about eight or nine or nine nine months old at the time of capture relatively normal body condition wasn't thin wasn't you know super chunky just kind of kind of average we got the rectal biopsy um and that's not an immediate

test right months go by before we get that answer ended up testing positive so that was in march okay we got a mortality signal in september okay he was dead along the buffalo river um right on the shoreline And to say emaciated is kind of an understatement. You know, this is a 1.5-year-old deer at this point died of chronic wasting disease. He was completely wasted away. I can show you guys a picture later. No muscle mass, no subcutaneous fat, no visceral fat, fat inside, you know. And he had aspiration pneumonia, which is a common problem.

You see an end stage clinical, CWD, you know, as you, as this disease begins to affect pretty much everything, right? Because it's, it's, it's filling up the space in that brainstem, like your information superhighway for your body. They lose control of their, you know, reflexes, right? So they're swallowing reflex goes away. So they aspirate feed, and then that settles down into the lung. So he had aspiration pneumonia, and he had an old injury on his foot, which I necropsy a lot of deer.

and an old injury on a foot dear do fine for a long time putting up with little pesky problems like that yeah but by it was it was kind of an eye-opening you know and i'm a disease nerd i you know i like i like i like this stuff but there's these certain moments where you see and touch something and it kind of hits different and that was one of those moments you know like here's here's a year and a half old male you know in this area that that literally fell over dead in a riparian corridor on the Buffalo River from CWD you know and that's just a kind of a jarring moment

but again that can happen but you can also harvest in the same population a four and a half old male that you know looks okay but both things happen and over time as you get more one of the hallmarks of as it sets in that young those younger age classes start to become a little more commonly infected

and then that clock ticks earlier mega important announcement in fact the most important announcement you ever heard the third volume in our meat eaters american history audio book series is available for pre-order right now meat eaters american history the hide hunters 1865 to 1883 tells the story of the commercial buffalo hunters who drove north america's most iconic large mammal to the brink of extinction in the years after the civil war You'll learn all about these guys, guys like Dirty Face Jones, Skunk Johnson, and Charles Squirrel Eye, Emery, how they organized their hunting expeditions, what they took with them, how they hunted, what rifles they shot, how they processed their kills, how they suffered and died in the field, and the true stories of what drove them to do it in the first place. You'll also learn about the economic factors that made this a viable profession and what happened to those millions of buffalo skins once they were shipped east. And like we do in all of our Meat Eaters American History projects, you'll hear a ton of wild stories and bizarre details from this era. And don't worry, we didn't leave out any of the gory details. pre-order meat eaters American history, the hide hunters, 1865 to 1883, wherever you get your

audiobooks, and you'll be ready to dig in when it's available to listen on October 14. How much of the conversation, like legitimate conversation, is there around CWD resistant deer? Obviously, state of Oklahoma is going great guns in a way that I think is concerning, and I don't honestly know how it's legal to release game farm animals that are quote, unquote, CWD resistant, that unless they know also how to read state boundaries and maps and things to stay in Oklahoma, how much, like, is there a, conversation there of of identifying deer that do have a resistance or are long-term carriers to the point where it just never manifests or like what is the thing there so we know we know with c wadd you know saying in white-tailed deer like that again that that pre-on protein gene they'll refer to it as the pr np gene we've known for a long time that certain genitial so the basically the configuration of that gene certain genotypes are less susceptible doesn't mean resistant it means they don't they aren't as commonly infected and when they are infected typically what happens to your point steve earlier that incubation period is longer so those deer with certain genotypes might rather than you know heading downhill

it two years after maybe that pushes out to three years after four years after right so that's been known that's that's a thing right but they ultimately will to our conversation earlier if they live through all if they you know dance through all the other flaming hoops of deer mortality causes they'll ultimately bite it from chronic wasting disease so you know we can't manipulate that but mother nature can if there's adequate selection pressure those more favorable like less susceptible genotypes historically in most, like, free-ranging populations are not well-represented, right? It's the exception. Those more, like those less susceptible CWD genotypes are the exception, not the rule. So kind of in a simple sense, I'm not a geneticist, but it tells you

that there's not adequate selection pressure on that, right? Fitness is greater in some of these other ones. So there's concern there. But as CWD sets in and selection pressure hits, you know maybe i would anticipate that in some of these populations we start to see that and they've they've started to do some of that um work in in in mule deer populations in in Colorado you know where they've seen a little bit of a shift maybe to some of these less susceptible um you know genotypes but again this is this is it takes time takes time and i there's a lot of smart people working on that but i do think it's going to take time to your point though relative to the issue in Oklahoma.

So on the farm servant industry, that's where that sort of desire originated, right? Let's try to selectively breed white-tailed deer that are resistant to CWD. They're doing some new approaches. It's genome-wide, so they're looking at the whole genome and all the other genes within the body that might impact susceptibility.

And so that has bled out into, you know, it's kind of been talked about as the great hope in some degree, right? And I think that's because this is a, it sucks to talk about this disease. It's just not, it's not a great disease to talk about. We don't have clear solutions. And so here, let's, let's try to march down this path of, you know, let's breed our way out of this. okay um you know that's because it can seem more proactive in certain circles than uh well there's this naturally occurring uh test that's going on in colorado mule deer and in a few decades or longer we might have something that comes out of we want a silver bullet that's the

bottom line we want something that will fix this and i think you know a few things that that mark said i think are important there's a difference between resistant and less susceptible there's context there the other thing to go back to Steve's question is you know so if you have if you have an animal that lives an extra two years longer because he has a different genotype he's he's still spreading the pre-on in the environment for two additional years that that I get it from the standpoint of that those deer are living longer but If they have the disease, they're still contributing to a transmission.

They're still, you know, there's still preons that they're putting into the environment. And, you know, I think my perspective from the genetics standpoint is, I think the scientific community recognizes that genetics may be one tool that we have at our disposal. But we're not there yet as a scientific community. And the idea that you're going to, I look at it as like antlers, antler quality, that you're going to take deer of a certain antler quality and release them into the environment and expect them to elevate the antler quality for the entire herd, given that deer white tails are promiscuous, is kind of crazy to think that. And when I looked at kind of this scenario, I thought, okay,

So the idea that you're going to release animals into the wild, regardless of where they go from when they're released, and that's going to immediately change how this population is functioning, I think that logically, to me, doesn't make sense. Do you think it might have that that might have an application if the worst fears come true? And we wind up that areas that have CWD, whether it's 20 years down the road, 30 years down the road, 40, whatever, that it's going to wind up being that you're going to have, you know, 70% prevalencey, and you're going to have a deer or two per square mile. Right. Like if it lands there, at that point, that might become, we might land in a place where that is a conversation that warrants happening. the thing that you know with i think within the fence inside the fence you know they're going to go down this path right and if that leads to lowering risk of things getting out of control inside the fence um you know that that could be a favorable thing um i would not prefer it to be happening

in replacement of surveillance biosecurity all of these these routine standards methods we do to prevent and manage disease in animal populations, that stuff has to invigorate and maintain in the face of this new tool if it's potentially, you know, useful. The fact is, is right now, it's still in that investigation phase, right? Science is going to take time to understand if this is a tool that can be leveraged within captive survey populations. And so that research should continue, but, but I think people are so desperately wanting an answer and a solution, a silver bullet, whatever the case may be, that we elevate it before

it should be elevated as a tool. It's not a tool in the toolbox right now. Yeah. Yeah, because at one point in time, if there was CWD, it was almost certainly associated with a captive servant facility. now we're much further down the road and the state of Oklahoma is very serious about allowing the captive servid industry in that state

to grow and sell deer that those breeders have determined to be tolerant or resistant to CWD by their own standards, meaning that they're just going to live a little bit longer and then sell those outside of the fence for 600 bucks a pop

to people in the state of Oklahoma yeah and it's that feels a little crazy like if you were trying to control a typhoid outbreak and you had you're like well listen man normal people get typhoid and they die in six months

uh this guy he'll he'll die in a year but he's got typhoid the whole time we'll send them over to your area for for decades it does seem like someone would be like wow yeah for decades to your point the whole focus of you know the from from USDA state agriculture agencies and state wildlife agencies has been separation of captive cervids and wild cervids right we need separation of these two populations for disease purposes. So to start suddenly talking about the idea of opening the fence and releasing captive

bred animals that are selectively bred for the traits that humans think are favorable, not for what Mother Nature thinks is favorable. There's no place for that, in my opinion, right now. It's just, we live in a world with wildlife disease of unintended consequences. There's always unintended to consequences that are hard to predict. Um, and it's, it'd be super challenging to, to have a, um, have enough assurances that, that, that those animals are, you know, not going to put the populations at, is it plausible that you're releasing something else into the environment? Oh, yeah.

I mean, listen to that. I mean, we, you hear that? That's, Cal's Wildlife Disease book. That's, that's a whole book of wildlife diseases just found in the, southeast we're only talking about one all right let's go let's take uh northwest is it northwest arkansas okay northwest arkansas southwest wisconsin here you got prevalence you know hunters they're the 40% of the deer they kill 50% of the deer they kill have sub c wd deer populations um had a new form of mortality used to be hunting and predation

now it's hunting predation CWD. CWD is killing 20% of the deer herd The deer herd is going down, down, down, down, down. What is a recommendation? I mean, like, what do you wind up doing with that information? I mean, do you say no more hunting

because we're going to run out of deer? Do you say, hey, kill more deer because somehow that'll fix the problem. Like, what do you tell people? Well, as a scientist, what we told the agency is we don't design regulations or till i know but i'm asking you to stay outside of that yeah but what what we did is we told the agency this is where you are you know this is where you're headed and this is how many deer per square a mile you have we think and this is what the

future looks like and how you figured they had how many per square a mile about one to five depending on unbelievable and then you think they're headed where it really does Depends on, you know, various factors, but I think... Potentially lower than that? Well, I mean, right now in urban, in the one, the highest prevalence area, Mark and I talked about this over coffee this morning. From spending time there, you can't, you can't find deer. They're like, you can drive around at night. You don't see deer.

You can drive around looking for deer and you don't see deer. And so, you know, what Mark alluded to. this earlier. I mean, you're going to get to some point where the population is going to stabilize and it's going to increase, but it's not going back to where it was. And so where it goes and how quickly it gets there could be influenced by by regulations. So to your question, should the agency, I'm not going to tell the agency, but could the agency consider basically taking the foot off harvest and instead of liberalizing harvest like many agencies do, thinking they're low on the curve, now when they're up high on the curve, do we take

our foot off the gas, do we reduce dough harvest, do we, you know, do we change our behavior because now we're in a new normal? Yeah. And I think the answer is yes. Because you're going to try at that point the agency's goal i would think logically would be recovery now now what's this going to look like in the next few decades and and we know we're not going back to where we were 40 years ago but we we have to get this population sustainable and from the standpoint of you know i'm thinking about this as a deer hunter i grew up in an area of virginia when at the time if you saw a deer you had that was a great hunt if you killed a deer I was telling Mark we would take polaroids brown deer we shot brown deer we would take a polaroid and go to school on Monday and show it

and it was like you you had struck the lottery you know and and then I fast forward to to where I am now and and trying to raise kids and mentor young people through becoming deer hunters, they have to be successful, they have to see animals, they have to be able to grasp the fraternity of what you're doing and the success. And you build off of that. And then they want to learn about the process of managing for deer and all this, that goes away if you can't see animals and you can't harvest animals. So as a deer hunter, I would look at the agency and say, I need you as an agency to think about how to get, what does the, what is the future need to look like to recover this population to the point where I can I can

see animals I can harvest animals and we know that prevalence is not going to stay at that super super high level it's going to it's going to reduce through time you think so yes and we hope to get it you know it's some something where you're you're not dealing with what you're dealing with now which is you know every every other animal and Most box are testing positive. You think it will go, you think it has the capacity to then go the other direction, to climb, climb, climb, climb to 50, 60, 70 percent and then it hits some point when

prevalencey goes down. I don't think it would go back down to, it will still, it'll be chronically high. Yeah. You know, it might come up and then just kind of level out and then wobble back and forth as you get recruitment and whatnot and that would happen. But the effect there, Michael, to use. your point is like people aren't going to want to hunt in that area. And so like the the hunting participation in in that zone and the culture around hunting is going to suffer alongside the

low population prevalence. And this is the challenge with CWD is you hit that that chronic steady state of this is the new normal, right? We hear a lot about EHD, right? And so we've had multiple large-scale EHD outbreaks where, like, even in a given county, thousands of deer like that, right? In one transmission season, you might kill thousands of deer indiscriminately, right? The sky's falling. People back off a hunting that year. We've got multiple examples, though, through time of within a few years, that population is right back to where it was, or even beyond where it was. Yeah, I've, like, personally, I'm old enough where I personally live through the cycle.

Mm-hmm. Right. And that's where this is so different, right? And this is why this matters is like with EHD, you can get on the other side of it and get back to the normal state. With CWD, you don't. You just go to this new state of normal. And that's what we're trying to define of what that is.

And that's where, like, you know, parts of Wisconsin, parts of Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming, part of West Virginia, like trying to figure out what that new normal state looks like. And I do think it's important, too, to mention, like you mentioned back, off a doze for instance I think it's a confusing point to hunters that that don't have the misfortune or pleasure whatever the case may be of of of seeing the bad spots and and the not so bad spots if if because you might be in an area in your interaction with CWD is very early in that scale right you

there's just a couple detections in the state or in a county and what do they do they liberalize most take right and so they're doing the opposite and i think i think many folks that's a little bit confusing based on you know what what phase of the disease you are in the management agency seemingly from like on the surface level doing completely different things they're telling me not to shoot those they're telling me to shoot those it can be a little bit confusing but it's all relative to that long protracted time scale and in the early phase you're trying to prevent from getting to that bad and that's what all those actions are doing and we don't know like if this place in

in Arkansas, it's got one to five per square mile. I just can't picture that they'd still be in the mind frame of we're going to do earn a buck. We're going to do, um, you can hunt deer through February. Right, right. Like, because you're playing with fire at that point. Right. And we don't know.

I mean, we tried to simulate what prevalence would look like, you know, through time. But again, we, we kept, we capture a five year snapshot of this population in Arkansas. And it was extremely well done, science is rigorous, but it's five years of data. And we're trying to predict out, you know, to Mark's point, prevalence gets to some level. It's 50% right here. And then in the next county over, it's 30% or whatever. You know, so you've already got some complexity there. So we're trying to inform the agency on where are you going to be.

It's not going to disappear. but where are you going to be is prevalence going to remain high in parts of the landscape? It's probably going to remain high. In other parts of the landscape, when it kind of starts oscillating to Mark's point and going up and down slightly, it very likely will remain at a prevalence that is at least palatable moving forward. You're still going to have situations where you're going to have a deer that you harvest a test positive, but it's not going to be.

at the scale at which it is now, which is most are prevalent. Do you think there's a way that you could have, do you think there's a way you could have a county, Texas, Illinois, wherever to help.

We'll say there's a county in Texas that has 1% prevalencey today. Okay? Is there a way that in 40 years that county will have the same deer density

and 1% prevalencey see that's why we're having this conversation those questions are incredibly difficult

almost impossible to answer because there's so many factors that influence the transmission and accumulation I mean we know

vegetative communities soil types deer density social behaviors there's so many factors that influence how this disease is operating on the landscape that there could literally be a thousand

different scenarios and that's part of why it's so difficult to have these conversations with hunters to mark's point is like well i see that this is occurring over here and i see that this is occurring over here and that doesn't make any sense to me they should be doing the same thing and so to to mark's point you know northwest Arkansas that the content that the context needs to be that this population is so far along on this curve and the disease has progressed the way it has here, but it's not going to operate like that everywhere. Yeah. There's going to be situations where it's going to operate very differently.

And then so that context is lost on us as hunters. And I see the frustration as a hunter. And you see me getting frustrated over here. Well, as a scientist. I want to do. As a scientist, damn it, I want to solve. I want this to be solved. And as a deer hunter, I don't want to deal with this.

I don't want to deal with this. I don't want you to tell me that I have to behave differently. I don't want you to tell me that this thing that I've worked, let's say, 50 years to groom this piece of property suddenly is all undermined by the president. You got to be all scared of your burgers. Yeah. And I don't want, I don't want there to be conversations where there are people that are telling the public that the science is a lie. I don't, I don't want to be in that discussion either, but that's where we are with this disease. And all of this creates confusion.

And the confusion creates nihilistic kind of attitudes. Nothing's worked, the hell with it. Let's just quit. And I just, I don't see that looking through the two lenses I'm looking through as an option. And to your 1% question, my wheels had to turn for a minute on that. I'm a thinker. No. it's not going to stay the same you know if you mother nature's done that experiment for us right

you know if it because it's operated you know it cryptically underneath hiding in plain sight right in front of us right no interventions um status quo right what did it do goes up it climbs i mean you know there's just nothing you know without without intervention c wd has proven to us over time that it will do two things. It will, the percentage of deer in that population that are infected with CWD, it's going to increase. And then the geographic footprint of where it is on the landscape, that's also going to increase.

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Yeah, I don't see a scenario where, you know, if it's just one deer on the landscape, right, and it, it dies, it's not consumed and somebody covers it up with a driveway, okay, maybe it's sealed in there. It's not coming anywhere. But like, but other than that, you know, these will, will fester, it will smolder until it's visible, you know, years down the road. Can you guys, is it, what blocks someone? What prevents someone? What prevents? a researcher from getting some white tail deer in captivity and experimenting with different transmission things meaning it's only it like you take a deer it never comes in contact with another deer you allow an infected deer to graze a one acre pasture for a week pull that deer way and kill it then you take a known clean deer um that doesn't have interaction in their deer and you let it go graze on that pasture and then you see does it get c wd from grazing on the pasture like did it happen that way it's that's been done that that kind of work

gets done and is it because do you remember a few years ago all this hysteria came out like if you took stainless steel and you like cut a deer up on stainless steel and then scrubbed it and bleached it. It could still, I'm like, oh, bullshit. Do you know what I mean? Like, theoretically sure, but like people aren't getting it that way. Or like, deer aren't getting it off stainless steel. Right. Like, like, how are they getting it? I'm, that's a, it's a, you know, for as much as we know about chronic waste and disease, there's a lot we don't know about chronic disease. Does the, does the deer get it who only goes and grazes on the pasture?

well that's one possibility and it's been shown so so Colorado Parks and Wildlife they did a study where they had you know a decomposed carcass okay from a clinical CWD animal like by decompose I mean bleach white bones okay gone years put deer in there and they get infected they do they do just not other deer in there just go into that clean deer in clean deer in dirty deer come out yeah that's what I'm saying so this is been demonstrated. That has been done. But the exact mechanisms, right? Is it eating soil? Is it chewing on a bone? Is it getting it in a plant? Exactly how it gets in there. They don't understand yet. But most of the evidence suggests that it's like oral nasal. So like the highest chance is oral nasal. Through the nose, through the mouth is the highest chance. But there's multiple modes of transmission, you know, potentially. And so, you know, so deer can get it through their social direct contacts with one another. which obvious, you know, a lot of transmissible diseases are like that. The thing, the curve, one of the curveballs that CWD has is exactly what we just talked about,

the environment, the habitat, right? And that's where, you know, if, if you can become sick or infected just from the habitat, which almost acts like a host, when I look at, through my lenses, I look at the landscape, I look at the habitat as a host, just like I look at a deer as a host. And the importance of that host, based on, you know, what we've seen so far in some literature is that the importance of that habitat as a source of infection for deer becomes greater the farther up that curve and the timescale you get. The more deer die, the more deer pee and poop and just, you know, live on the landscape, the more of those CWD preons are going to be put into that environment. And so as you get those prevalence, you know, of 30%, 40%, 50% of the deer, that's a lot of, it's a lot of pee, that's a lot of poop. That's a lot of saliva. That's a lot of flesh. It goes on to the landscape and those preons just stick around. And so trying to control prevalence, right? Trying to keep lower down that scale will, will in theory hopefully help minimize that environmental contamination, right? And so like Mike mentioned earlier, feeding and baiting, right? Those, focal spot on the landscape put a lot of deer which also pee and poop and other things so you're

you're potentially depositing like sort of a hyper-focused area of preons on the landscape that would put a deer at greater risk of infection yeah if it forages there that's what all those regulations try to sort of get at is like okay let's try to lower that risk and that's why baiting and feeding are a common you know a common point of intervention for the state because you know you're just trying to break the chain of infection right like what can we do that will try to lower risk on the landscape for deer encountering c wd whether it's from another deer or from its habitat someone should make a handy chart the chart would be zero to five here's what you do try this five to 10 or like zero to three try this right well what would help and when you get to 30

30 or 40, that's, I guess that's where I'm, like, I find my confusion is that 30 or 40 is it just say, like, try to enjoy your last bit of great deer hunting. Well, and I think that, yeah, say like, more information to come soon. The suggestions kind of run out. Well, and I think that's, I mean, that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation is, is that there is no blanket prescription for this. Uh-huh.

And that just. creates complexity and confusion, and so that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation is where you're at on the curve matters. And some of these prescriptions that agencies are taking, like the banning feeding and liberalizing harvest, those are applicable at the bottom of the curve. But when you get up to the top of the curve, as we now see, because the data are emerging from these populations that are high up the curve now. It's taken some time to get those field studies. That's an unfortunate takeaway for some of our naysayer crowd.

Yeah. Right? Like, well, you better be testing and turning in your deer because that's your best shot of being able to bait again. Well, is if the prevalence, if you show the prevalence is high. And the bottom line is, you know, there was a recent summary National Academy of Sciences put this kind of state of the state of where we are with CWD. And in the, in the preface, it says basically to parisional. phrase, albeit not perfect, efforts to manage the disease, the progression and spread of this disease are our option right now. So you have this group of scientists that come from all

these different perspectives that collectively agree that it's not perfect. The management strategies that agencies are implementing, they're not perfect, but they are where we need to be right now given how much we don't know about this disease and there's just so much we don't know and it takes so much time yeah because i mean the blue sky scenario really could be to uh be able to manipulate the new normal right so like right now you're like yeah we probably if if the new normal uh levels out at 40 percent prevalence we're probably not going to get lower than that but maybe that is the ultimate goal is to be able to

reduce those new normals or be able to manipulate them to some degree. Ideally, right, if you through people turning in voluntary testing and good communication, you establish that new normal

at 5, 10% prevalence. Is that realistic sounding? I mean, it all sort of depends on where you're at in the scale. I think some of those sort of real world experiments, you know, can be, can be happening, especially sort of in, you know, in parts of the West with some mule deer populations where you have, okay, you're at this high prevalence now. What, you know, what management actions or harvest, you know, sort of quotas could we, could we get to try to drop this back down?

A lot of like where that intervention happens a little bit, the goal would be happened earlier, right, before you get to this sort of 30, 40%, like you're up at the 5, 8, 10, 12, like, okay, let's, let's, you know, be aggressive and try to knock this, see if we can, through harvest and through our hunters, you know, decrease prevalence and stabilize prevalence, right? And so that's where a lot of the effort comes in

is, again, trying to prevent the climb up, you know, and I think now there will be, like, once we get to that mountaintop, I guess, and trying to understand the new norm, then it's like what triggers are there what levers can be pulled to manipulate that are there some you know can we bring it back down i got two yes no questions for you guys but you can only do yes no man we don't that's tough for scientists it always depends because that's it's guessing it's just guessing no one's going to hold you to this it's just crystal ball guessing we both know that that is

fundamentally a lie in 25 years in 25 years will there be counties In the eastern half of the United States, where CWD has not been detected. Yes. I agree. That was fast. If I made you a hamburger, I keep wanting to do this. I have five CWD positive deer. And I handle them just like normal.

I bone them out. I make burger. Which is a mix between the five. I got five CWD positive. I'm not going to be a burger. This is my thing for wow. I was like the only CWD deniers I'm interested in talking to are the ones that eat this burger. I take 5CWD positive deer.

I grind it all up. I make a normal old burger. I grill that burger to medium. I know it doesn't matter, but I can grill to medium. And I'm like, would you like a bite of that burger? The ones that eat the burger, I'm like, I'd like to hear what you think about. cWD the ones that don't eat the burger

I understand how you feel right but the ones that are like it's no big deal I'm like you eat that burger and tell me it's no big deal okay if I made said to burger would you take a bite no no you wouldn't

me either that's all kills me would you eat it Phil oh no I don't think so get me the biggest burger in London five quid it's so funny though

because the biggest CWD burger in London meat side of thing like the it's in a direct attack on my ability to make stock which is horrible right you actually do all the shit you're not supposed to do you're like got the backbone in there

and everything oh yeah spine turns all white and for the longest time like all everything I I did came out of the woods on my back, typically a long way. So some of this, you'd be like, oh, yeah, no bones, no problem. But then, like, you get that big bull elk in a CWD management zone right on the side of the road magically. You're like, oh, my God.

Yeah, I'm making like T-bones and shit, you know, and then you get all scared about it. That's what continues to kill me. Yeah. I totally understand it. It continues to kill me. And I know that's not what you guys are here to talk about, but. Like, I worry about, like, I propose this to a bunch of people. And I don't know if there's a little good way to do it.

It'd be like, I wish someone would have started a long time ago. Go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin. Okay. Used to be like, for a while, that was like Big Buck Central. You know what Big Buck Central moves around the country? Like Big Buck Central was Alberta. Big Buck Central was whatever, Illinois. Big Buck Central, Kansas.

You know, it hops around. There's multiple Big Buck Centrals at any given time, but they move. the places people are excited about move buffalo county had like a for a while they were big buck central like go into areas i wish they'd done it 10 years ago and start being like man let's track like boon and crockett entries and overlay boon and crockett entries countywide statewide statewide whatever with c wd prevalence and be like or some way like is if you just like to hunt big bucks in you're an antler guy and I'm like 50% an antler guy and 50% of burger guy

but like are we seeing that like antlers are going away from CWD if someone demonstrated that it would change a lot of the conversation people were having but it would need to be like not need to be

that would that would impact people's behaviors it would impact people's perspectives to see where it's headed. But just the uncertainty is just like it just kills me. But you know, it's been killing me now for how many years has it been killing me?

It's been killing me for my entire adult life, the uncertainty. Exactly. And this, the fact that this disease is so complex, we want answers. We don't like working under uncertain conditions. No, we don't like being told. well you can't do this the way you've been doing it well why well you know we can't give you an answer a precise answer for this question that you're asking because we don't know and when somebody particularly a scientist says we don't know i've said i don't know several times today it's because we don't

know and if you i mean all we can do is acknowledge what we know and what we can demonstrate with with rigorous data and if we don't have the data we just have to say we don't we don't know the answer to that that doesn't sit well with us as it's society no that's why the one certainty i have is um whatever we're spending on research i'd be like uh let's quadruple it i'll find the money somewhere i'll find something dumb that we spend money on and make that go away so we can spend four times as much money on research so they're like i don't me, my kids don't have to be paranoid about this shit for their entire adult life. Yeah, and one thing that doesn't help with SWD at all, counterproductive, is you have narratives, you have myths, you have nonsense that, that gets, that, Mark and I were talking about this on the drive over here, that just consumes state agency personnel and resources and time.

They spend more time dealing with bullshit than they do trying to actually do do their, job and try to understand what's going on. And you put all that, you know, in a hat and you have something that's so complex that is cryptic to Mark's point that you don't see it, that it takes generations to kind of manifest itself and really get going. And you and I think in year to year, month to month terms. And now you're talking, you know, now you have COVID and the skepticism of science in general. And you put all of that together. And you've, got a soup of crap that surrounds this disease. And then that's what we work in. We work in that soup. We're trying to provide data to inform decisions and have conversations that are difficult

to have. Nobody wants, I don't want to think about this in the future, but it's an unfortunate reality on the landscapes that I hunt and that I do science on. And so you put all that together and it's it's it burns your energy and that that's what you see when you talk to state agency personnel in these states that have these high prevalence rates it is a gut punch to them i mean they their morale is down they just are like what what do we do like there there's no answer that's going to work today and the skeptical public wants an answer yesterday and that's just not the way that this works and that as a colleague to these agency biologists that's frustrating to me because i see what they're going through and i see that there are people in the public saying that the agencies

you know this is a positive because they can get federal money for god's sake oh i yeah give me a break yeah that that that idea like i know plenty of people that are in wildlife management the fact that like That there's this idea that someone, that some biologist, some deer biologist sitting there and they get a positive in his region. Yeah. And he's like, oh, goody. Yeah. Now I'll be able to buy that new car. It's like, are you kidding me?

Their shoulders. It's so, it's like so cynical and grotesque. Yeah. It's like they just found out that, think about it like this. You're the director of a state agency that just discovered CWD in your state for the first time. everything just changed everything and he's like oh good everything just changed for that that man or woman and not and if you're a director of a state agency you're already well aware that the subtlest changes in your state regulations for anything yeah cause yes

quite the public uproar and backlash my license went up two dollars yeah yeah and now they're doing what was snapping turtles i don't i don't catch them but boy i got an opinion on it now everything changes for these biologists and it trickles down from the director all the way to the field staff everything changes about the way they do their jobs the resource flow within the states change everything changes and the idea that that is a positive the amount of federal money that's allocated to deal with cWD is literally pennies to what it cost state agencies to deal with the consequences of this disease so this this this this this this this myth that it's a money grab, it's ludicrous. It's absolutely ludicrous. It's the exact

opposite of that. It is a money loss. It's a morale killer. It causes these state agency biologists to put their hands up, particularly in states like you see in Arkansas, where you know, you can feel it. Like in the room, you can feel it. You can feel the conversations about how exasperated they are. It's like, my gosh, this is where we're at and this is where we're headed. And it's just, you can feel it sucked the air out of the room. Well, I mean, you're not on controllable timelines, right? And it's like the old gentleman that you talked about, like made his dream become a reality.

He's been planning and scheming on this legacy white tail property or just family ranch, right? It's like, how much of the planning has. been done in the absence of real nature and real conditions, right? But it's like, yeah, this is the way it's going to be and this is the way it's going to be. And like it just takes time. It's not going to happen on our timeline no matter what. I think about the other side because I have friends that are on the other side. Well, then what do we do?

Nothing's working. Hell with it. Let's just. And the science shows that if you can keep prevalence to where CWD is not a relevant source of mortality. If you can keep prevalence low, then the future is not going to look like it's going to look if you put your hands up in the air

and turn around and walk off. That's just the reality. Yeah, that's clear. And I guess what people are going to be waiting on is if you don't do that and things go to hell, what do you try? And maybe sometime down the road,

there'll be some clarity about that. Yeah, but I think if you're in the low area, I'd aim for low. Right. If you like the way things are right now. Yeah. And your best chance of getting somewhere close to that is. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's where like, you know, across the landscape, you know, in these areas where, you know, we don't think CWD exists, even if it's part of a state that has CWD, you know, all of the effort and energy should be at prevention still. You know, I think, I think there's this other narrative out there of, you know, we look at the states. What are we up to? 35. I don't even remember because it's changes. But then it's like, okay, well, that's 35 states where it's been detected. Where it's been detect. Right. Okay. So it's like, okay. 50. It's been hard to follow because we keep almost getting new states. Right, right, right. Right. But, you know, like, it's almost like, you know, some people are like, up, that state's positive now, whatever it's done. Yeah. I got you. it's a bad way of thinking about it's a bad way of thinking about it because to your question earlier Steve about in 25 years is you're going to be a county that's not detected in the state or in the in the southeast right those places where we know it not exist you know the whole effort of of people in that

area should be to prevent it from coming so we often throw prevention to the side because it's a pain in the ass and it's you know it interferes with our way of doing things and what we want to do and how we've done it in the past, but the alternative is not great. I would much rather live in a shroud of prevention than one of reaction and frustration and control. Yeah, meaning the fight shouldn't start when you find your first case. The fight should start before you find your first case. That's an excellent point. Very good point. All right, guys, we got to wrap up, man. I appreciate you coming on. Thank you for having us. And I appreciate just like the, you're talking about,

Wildlife Managers being frustrated, you know, like, I appreciate you guys entertaining a conversation that just, like, is, it's hard. It is. Like, it is frustrating because, like, you're coming on, you know, you're coming on with having done research and expert opinion, and you're just in a situation where you got to have a lot of, like, I don't know. I don't know. It's got to feel a lot better when you come on and be like, here's a deal. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to do X. We're going to do Y. We're going to do Z. We're going to fix this. But what is like the at home takeaway right now for folks going into their dear season? I always say, I mean, and I appreciate you for entertaining this topic with, you know, your audience because I think as much as individuals can just be engaged, care, you know, and understand sort of the, you know, it's not, you know, some of these restrictions. and quirky regulations and confusion around that it's it's all from a place of trying to prevent a really big problem in the future and so trying to just

you know embrace that and you know be an active participant in what the wildlife agencies need that's one of the things I always lean into and be willing to I mean from my perspective I talked to hunters all the time that that have various narratives that we've talked about today their minds you know, their mindset is, is different than mine. I don't expect you to listen to this podcast and change everything you think about CWD. But if you will just sit back and just think carefully about the issues we've talked about and recognize that there's no, there's no answer, there's no clear answer right now.

This is going to take time. There's always context involved. But if you're willing to at least entertain that there is work going on, that showing these things that we've talked about, that this is a problem that is not going to just go away to Mark's point, you not getting it in your area is important. And so I kind of look at it from the deer season framework is, one, I don't want CWD where I'm trying to hunt. And if I have it there, then I'm going to have to behave differently because the agency is going to implement changes to try to keep prevalence low and that is key not getting it and keeping prevalence low if

you have it that's that's kind of where i see it all right ma'am thanks again guys thank you well thank you for the book field manual of wildlife diseases in the southeastern united states which my first response upon seeing it is it shouldn't be that thick unfortunately it is holy i'm going to read this to my kids at night I wouldn't recommend that. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, if you want a real, uh, real eye burner, I don't know what you call this. Well, it's a professional level book based off the intensity of the pictures, right?

It's a professional book, but I'm taking a non-professional gander through here and it's an alarming collection of photos, which I think my kids would like. Yeah, we're still on. Okay. I was actually going to ask Mark, Mark, there's a, there's a disease. there's something that causes wild turkey feathers to be like soaking wet with like an oil all over them. Whoa.

Have you seen that? No, I haven't seen that. It's not in this book. It's not in that book. This book isn't complete. You haven't sent this one, Mike? No, we caught a hen in Louisiana in 2008, and she was soaking wet, like, not wet.

She had this oil all over her to the point where she looked terrible. And I put her in a caption, box and it was greasy on the inside of the box. She was part of a brood. She had Polts with her. And I've searched for that and I meant to ask you the other day about that. Is that your only encounter?

Only encounter ever. Yeah, weird things happen. I mean, is there any chance she got into a bin of oil? A bin of oil. Something he was an unusual country so she could have encountered anything. Right, right. Yeah, she ran through the deep fat fryer before she got to you. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Good Lord this book. Yeah, we make that for, that's intended for field biologists. So those, you know, most of our agency personnel in the southeast kind of refer to that. So it's written for biologists, but no, I'm going to. Any hunter would enjoy it, I think. Put this in the camper. We're going to take my buddy's, my buddy's 10-year-old kid. We're hunting with us this year. I'd be like, well, you just got to flip through that first before we. But there's also some. There's also some normal stuff in there. because disease is a part of life with wildlife, right? So you can have a healthy deer that also has a disease. And so there's lots of, you know, parasites we commonly see in wildlife and other things that would be of interest for hunters when they're dressing an animal.

Not quite enjoying this book, man. All right, guys, thanks again. Thank you, much. Thank you. See y'all. First Lights Navigator hoodie was built and tested where plans fall apart and weather doesn't ask permission. It's built to perform, built to last, breathable insulation that dumps heat fast on the hike-in, stretch fabric that stays silent for close encounters,

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That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. This is an I-Hart podcast.