The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 937: What Happens If We Let CWD Rip?

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with director of the Missouri Department of Conservation, Jason Sumners, about: honest updates on the state of chronic wasting disease in America; managing deer herds; what other states can learn from Missouri; keeping hunters at the core of conservation; whether we might be seeing the end of big bucks; and more! Follow Jason Sumners on Instagram: @huntmo_jason 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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who's the director of Missouri's state fishing game agency, which is called the Missouri Department of Conservation. He's a deer biologist by training, worked his way up, from being a guy, a biologist out in the field to running the whole show there, also sits on the board of National Deer Association. What we're going to talk about primarily, we're going to talk about whitetail deer and deer management mostly going to focus on what I think, what in my mind is the number one issue impacting deer and deer hunting

and deer hunters today, which is chronic waste and disease. And when I say that it's the number one issue is even for you listeners, and I know there are many, even for you listeners that feel that it's overblown, it's all hysteria, it's like it's, it impacts all conversations about deer. It impacts decisions about deer management. It impacts how money is spent on deer management. For people out there that are worried about the future of deer herds, you know what I'm talking about. For people that are worried about the potential for human transmission, that a disease would jump from dear to humans, you know what I'm talking about. Even people that the whole subject of CWD drives them nuts, they spend time and energy explaining why the conversation drives them nuts. There is no other issue that comes close to chronic waste and disease.

when it comes to impacts again to deer, deer hunting, deer management. It is the issue of the moment and at this point the moment is decades long. Agree? No, no, I completely agree, Steve. It's one of those that I've, you know, we found chronic waste and disease in Missouri in 2010. And I often tell folks that there's pre-CWD state fish wildlife agency and there's post c wd fish wildlife agency just because of yeah the very things that you mentioned it is a challenging topic and and it's one that we just have to deal with it's challenging and it's challenging

and it and it is we'll touch on this it is from my view this is me talking right i don't want to i don't want to conflate my viewpoint your viewpoint but it is also contentious and it's contentious And it's contentious different than kind of the playful arguments that we have around deer, where, you know, you could have, like, I'll debate buddies of mine about whether you should be shooting crossbows at deer during archery season or not. Like, these are like the old debate. Should you, is the guy that shoots forkeys? Is he a bad player because he's not letting deer grow up? Are the big buck blowhards ruining deer hunting for everybody else because they're chasing numbers and not quality of experience? It's like all these little pet fights.

There's all these little pet fights about deer. But this one is like, this one takes on an existential, it has an existential tone to it. Because we're talking about, in some ways, we're talking about what will the future of deer hunting look like beyond any kind of regulatory question. Like it's gone to, will there be deer around?

Right. And these are some of things I want to explore with you. And we've had, if you listen to this show, you might have noticed over the years that this show, there's some things we talk a bunch about. I was just talking with Jason before the show began. We talk a bunch about Ice Age hunters, which is not existential.

That's just interesting. And we have talked over the years a lot about SWD. And a listener might be like, Well, what more is there to say? But I feel that I feel strongly enough about educating people on this subject. And by that I don't mean telling you what to think. I mean, I feel strongly enough about exposing listeners to the different viewpoints and the research on CWD that if someone came and told me that we took a major ratings hit

every time we talked about CWD, I would talk about CWD more. Because I'd be like, okay, if less people listen to the CWD episodes, I'm going to do more of them to make sure that more people get exposed to this information. And I am not trying to sit here on the CWD debate. I am not trying to sit here as a host

and be like, here's what you ought to think. Here's what you ought to think. I'm trying to, like I try to bring in people that have a rational, educated perspective about what's happening

and what we need to do about it and you are regarded among the wildlife biology community as a person that ought to be listened to and that you have an educated

perspective and so I want to hear what you think right? I'm like, I'm not here to tell you what I think about CWD.

But to start that conversation, why don't we back up to where you were at when was it two you said a 2010? Yeah, 2010.

Okay. What were you doing? Where were you at? What was your career looking like? And how did you first conceptualize this thing? You had to have some pre-awareness. But tell me like

what you thought then about CWD. Yeah. So I, I think you're absolutely right in terms of this interconnecting so many, like, challenging topics. And for us, it hit directly at one of those. So I grew up in Missouri, a country kid, loved nothing more than hunting and fishing. We had coon hounds growing up, right?

So I grew up chasing coon hounds and all that kind of stuff and wanted a field and conservation, but wanted a job in conservation. And I went south, got a master's degree at Mississippi State working on deer biology. And so I was in Mississippi, in 2001. when CWD was found in Wisconsin. Oh, okay. So in graduate school, right at that turn of like, okay, this is kind of big, something's going to happen, don't know what, right?

God, it hasn't been a quarter century? Isn't it hard to believe? Yeah. It's been a quarter century since people started talking about CWD in Wisconsin. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to believe that's been that long. But yeah, so that's where I was, wanting nothing more than be a deer biologist and work on deer and deer management.

And so at that time, CWD was sort of just kind of a curiosity thing in many ways. Hey, this is something here. It certainly created some fears, no doubt, but one that I was just kind of peripheral, too. Got a chance to go to Texas, was a Texas A&M for a while, working on private deer ranches, doing research in South Texas. When in 2000, late 2008 got the chance to come back to Missouri, you know, where I grew up and did a deer biolish, right? Like, man, this is awesome. Nothing more than wanting to be a deer biologist, then the opportunity to do it in your home state. state.

When I got, do you mind real quick saying like pre-CWD or just what, like when you say, oh, deer biologist, tell people what, what all that means? Yeah. So for the state, you're responsible for all establishing or recommending all the rules and regulations that manage the deer population in the state, right? And so in Missouri, we just, we have a very small statewide deer management team at the time. And we just had one statewide deer biologist. I came to Missouri to stand up a private lands deer program.

How are we going to work with private landowners to implement good management practices on the ground, right? Try to meet their management objectives while also addressing concerns of agricultural producers and all those kinds of things that we can set these statewide season frameworks that kind of push a population one direction or the other in a big way. But to really dial it in on a small scale, you got to work with private landowners. So that's where that's where my frame of mind was, and especially across a lot of these. That was your initial assignment. Yeah, yeah, that's what we're going to do. But I got to Missouri, and so CWD, you know, had just been found in, you know, West Virginia in like 2005. And so for the first time kind of outside of Wisconsin in the eastern U.S.

And so folks are starting to pay attention. I got to Missouri and it's like, so what's our CWD plan? Should we get it? And effectively it just said that we'd play nice with the Department of Agriculture. Should it be found in a captive facility? And they'll play nice with us. Should it be found in a free range? population but it really didn't detail what we would do what what I don't understand

when you say that play nice what do you mean in in terms of dual regulatory responsibility that kind of exists between the departments of agriculture and the state fish and wildlife agencies okay got a lot of states got right so deer and elk and a lot of captive service kind of sometimes fall into this space where the state agriculture department may have some responsibility and the state fish and wildlife agency may have a responsibility I see so what you're getting on which side of fence they're on yeah Right. And so how are we going to just make sure that that relationship was good and that we worked together?

I see. And got to the same space. Meaning if you knew if it first popped in a captive servant facility, right. There'd be communication with the wildlife people and vice versa. Yep. And that's about all it said. Okay. Because they hadn't really, they'd been doing sampling. So in Missouri in 2002 to 2004 did really extensive CWD sampling. Sampled 22,000 deer across the state. And the idea was that we would try. to sample enough deer that if the disease was present, we would detect it at some reasonable level. Okay. Turns out in that three-year period, there was like a 98% probability that had the CWD been present in a county, it had to have been present at like less than 1%. So that gave us a baseline, right?

In the early 2000s that says, we've done a ton of sampling. If it's here, we should have detected it unless it's a relatively recent introduction. Okay, that, that's interesting. And I want to, I want to just stop on that from it. Because this is a question I've always had. You remember like COVID testing? Yep. I remember someone saying like a great way to find COVID is to do a lot of testing.

Right. Like, right. Like, meaning sort of the perception was after a while it's just there. Yep. Right. COVID was there. And if you test a bunch, you're like, oh, it's all over. And it would just generally be like testing reveals that it's there.

And I've always wondered on that percentage you just said, as I always felt that as CWD started to hit and seemed to spread, was it that any time a state said, well, let's go check, and they really checked heavily, they'd always find it. Yeah. But you were saying you were checking heavily. Yeah. In what year again?

In 2002 to 2004. So you were looking heavily those years and in fact not finding it. Exactly. It wasn't like once you looked, there it was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's massive. You know, the staff that worked for the department at that time, they were collecting heads and barrels and haul them everywhere.

I mean, and not finding it. And we didn't find any. Okay. Right. And so this whole idea that, well, it's always been there. You're just doing more testing. So you're detecting more is just not true. Huh.

And so from that time. And then in 2006, we shifted really hard, kind of the first state to really shift hard to using taxidermis to do sampling. Okay. Because it started to become clear that adult males showing it at a higher prevalence, which meant that if we were sampling adult males, we'd have better likelihood of detecting it really early in that sample. So from 2006 on, we started using taxidermis statewide, collecting several thousand samples a year. Got it. Meaning because it's sort of like selective. Right. That, you know, some dudes do.

My dad did one time, but most dudes aren't bringing doughs down to get, aren't bringing dews down to get stuff. So you're like, let's go look at mature bucks. Yeah. Three and a half, four and a half, they turn up at the tax therapist. Absolutely. And so it was a way that we could sort of wait towards that group that's most likely to have the disease.

Okay. And increase the likelihood of detecting it early. So so much about CWD and CWD management is about the time of introduction. to the time of detection as to how you can do it. Okay. So several of the states that, you know, are pretty notorious for having found it and then found a lot like Arkansas. Arkansas was doing testing, but they weren't doing really intensive testing. Yes.

So the likelihood of it setting there at a higher prevalence and going undetected is higher. Yeah. That's what I was kind of getting at. That's the sort of strategy I was getting at, which means that a state's like, damn let's go look all over and all sudden there it is and they go like well it must have got here yesterday right and i'm like well i don't know did it you know or hasn't been there for forever no one looked right right right but yeah i get the i get the point you're saying where you feel like you're you're confident that you were finding it in its early stages in the population

yeah and that's played out through time right that that has repeated itself over and over again when we've detected c wd in a new location you know and we go in and do even more intensive sampling oftentimes it is extremely rare huh right very very few okay so what we're seeing is slow spread so it it gives confidence back to that early sampling period understand yeah if it was there is it really low prevalence so so some of these southern states that they were doing testing but they may have only been doing you know 1,500 a year yeah kind of statewide and what's the big number for a state like Missouri.

So we've been 25 to 30,000 samples a year. Got it most recently. And it really is about trying to detect that first spark, that first introduction or the slow spread, right? So the management action can be more effective. When you were looking, if you go back to those days, when like here you are, your dear biologist, clear mandate on herd health. here it is

you're finding that it's popping up it's spreading. Are you looking at it at that time? Are you seeing it as a human health concern or a herd health concern? Yeah, most of our folks is a herd health concern. I mean, we can talk about the human health side of it, but it's really for the herd health thing.

But yeah, I mean, like at that time. Absolutely. Yeah, because as much as I told you, I wasn't going to tell you what I think. Yeah. At that time, for me, and to some degrees remaining, still today, at that time for me, it was virtually all human health. Just purely personal, purely personal.

Yeah, yeah. But you were viewing it like a dear issue. And we heard from, I heard from a lot of folks with that same kind of concern. I didn't recognize the number of folks had been, you know, in the military or whatever and had been in Great Britain and England at the time of the BSE situation. Yeah. And finding themselves having to make some of those. our decisions and then calling and saying, hey, what do I do?

And so, yeah, certainly recognize the concerns that folks had, but it was really from a herd health standpoint that we were concerned about it because we were just starting to see some of the data starting to creep out of the West, things that were happening in Colorado with population reductions and lower survival and that kind of stuff. But to kind of back up, so we had this background history of we think it's relatively, if it's here, there's not much of it. So when we found our first detection, before that, I was looking to other places to say, what are folks doing?

So we had what was emerging to the difference in management approach to what was happening in Wisconsin and what Illinois was doing. So Illinois had taken a very aggressive, very localized approach, whereas Wisconsin had taken a much more broad sweeping kind of management regulation-based approach. Yeah. And lay those two approaches out. Yeah. So Illinois, what they did when they'd find it.

CW positive detection is they'd identify a couple they'd identify the section the one square mile section in which the positive deer was around and then to find a core area around it another block so it ended up being three miles by three miles around any positive and then they would go in they would issue additional permits but following the hunting season contracting with USDA wildlife services and their staff they go in and try to do additional localized removals yeah to try to remove the social groups where a A positive female, for example, has been.

So we know most likely other positive dears, ones that are related to a positive deer. Okay. So where they interact and engage with one another. Whereas Wisconsin's approach was to be a lot more broad brush, you know, the Erna Buck program was in place, trying to massively reduce deer populations. A lot of additional opportunities outside of the season. Less kind of surgical, I would say. Got it. So you could start to see the trends and indicators, especially after Earned up.

Burnerbuck went away, that population trajectory was changing between the approach Wisconsin was taken versus Illinois. Who was right? Well, Illinois has been able to maintain relatively low prevalence rates through this past 25 years post-introduction. Through the little, through the very localized, very intensive approach in working with landowners. But man, did that one piss people off, though? Yeah, it has. Yeah, it has. And so that was the approach we took.

So we wrote the plan to say, okay, what can we learn from Illinois, very localized management, trying not to tremendously negatively impact hunters outside of where CWD is, right? So this is a little bit of this balancing that has to occur. How do you address the disease without negatively impacting everybody? And so that was our approach in 2012 when we had our first detection, a free-ranging herd, very localized, work with landowners, try to give them additional authorizations, during the season. And then with their permission, we would come in after the season and do additional removals.

With the objective of, how big is the box? How big is a box in Missouri that you're talking about at this time? Well, they vary in size because some of them are pretty big because we've had slow spread. Okay, give me a medium-sized box. The medium-sized box would be 40 square miles. 40 square miles. You know? And at that time, and tell me the year roughly that this is.

Yeah, 2012. 2014 that time frame at that time when you had a box let's say you got a 40 square mile box okay um how many like a township six by six right yeah okay yeah yeah so picture like a roughly township size township for for those of you in the eastern u.s a township basically six by six square miles um you you would the objective would be to reduce the population by what percent we really didn't set a target no at that time just reduce Just reduce it. And a lot of the focus was, hey, do you have a positive on your property? How can we try to reduce some of the deer that likely would have came into contact with that individual?

Okay. Right. And so kind of both during the season, we gave, we gave landowners the opportunity to get what we at that time called CWD management seals, which would allow them to even shoot additional bucks. Okay. During the regular hunting season. And then after the season, we say, hey, do you want to shoot some additional deer? Okay. If you do, great, we'll give you that authorization. If you don't, would you let MDC staff do that? Okay.

And if you don't want to be involved, that's fine too, right? Like completely voluntary from their standpoint. So then we would go through about a two-month period. The thing we also did is we offer those deer back to the landowner. So we take them, get them tested. If they test not detected, offer them the opportunity to have that deer back. If they didn't want it back, then we donated all those to share the harvest. So one of the things that also goes around is that, well, those deer got wasted, they got shot, nothing got done with them, and that's just not true either.

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shouted, boys, I'm killed. And keeled over dead. From notorious killers to blood feuds in Texas, gunfighters strips away the myth to get at the reality. Who these men really were and what they actually did. The first great gunfighter, John Wesley Harden, killed at least 26 men before he turned 21 years old. It helped you know that he was pretty much a complete psychopath. Listen to gunfighters starting on September 15th on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and get your shooting irons these stories don't miss so i know you didn't have an objective but

can you find can you think of an example again of a township size chunk of ground for roughly 40 square miles can you think of an example during that time when you wanted to do a reduction what like just looking back what did you ever achieve for percent reduction yeah so probably 30 to 40 percent reduced it yeah and so because i think when we talk about population we've always targeted in the eastern U.S., about, if you remove about 25% of your adult females on an annual basis, you're kind of keeping the population steady. Okay. And so when you look at historic harvest trends, we could look at the historic harvest trend of a county and say, what does that look like? We were shooting for another 10% reduction potentially, right?

Just trying to get over that hump of just normal harvest probably wasn't going to be enough, some additional. localized focus would be or should help and that patterns played out through time where we've had good landowner cooperation where we had that box was smaller and we got more intensive harvest those prevalence rates and those core areas is still flat or steady even now a decade is that right absolutely what let's play the y game you'd at that time you'd go to a landowner and you'd say we want to we're looking to reduce deer herds and he says why and you're like well because we're trying to slow the spread of c wd why what was that why yeah that why was because the long-term impacts of c wards on the population okay because everywhere else we'd seen it we knew kind of three things were happening it kills deer it spreads and it increases in prevalence we know that to sort of be uniformly true you know everywhere we found it with the excessive of, you know, New York where they probably got super lucky and shot the three deer that

were actually positive, right? And we've had some core areas where we've detected a positive, shot one or two more positive deer, and haven't had any more. Really? It's really rare, right? Like, really rare. And we continue to monitor those kinds of things, but, but it does happen, but you don't count on it. I want to, I want to stick with, I want to stick with the timeline. but I want to take them in and jump out of the timelines we're talking about the whys, okay? And like the why you gave is probably still relevant today, long-term impacts.

But let me hit with like what would be a paradox, okay? I think this is a paradox. It'd be, we have a fear that CWD will cause a decline in the deer herd. Therefore, to stop it, we will do the very thing that we fear will happen from CWD, which is decline the deer herd.

Help me through that. No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, like, help me through that puzzle. Yeah. And to me, it's about sort of attempting control the fate of the herd. Okay. Right.

And continue to have prevalence relatively low that it is not. impacting the population and that we by reducing the population can keep prevalence rates low and we continue to maintain a healthy deer herd that folks can use and enjoy and appreciate and not have a high proportion of sick animals on the landscape got it you know the idea that you know we had we've had two deer in a small rural community along the mississippi river missouri just crawl up in folks yard and and die right like yes c wd we don't want c wddd to control the herd in that way Yeah. We want hunters to be in a position where they continue to appreciate having these deer on the landscape.

And then whatever other concerns folks have, whether it is human health or otherwise, but that it's just an important part of the landscape. So is it fair to say, like, I'm just going to use rough numbers, is it fair to come and say to somebody or a community of hunters, a county or whatever, where deer hunting is popular? Be like, right now we have a ton of deer. we have 100 deer per unit of space and you would say to a group of hunters in a region, you would say if we just let CWD rip and we don't do anything and we just let it run

you could feasibly wind up in a situation where we don't really know but let's say there's a situation where there's 20 deer per unit of space instead of 100. There's 30 deer per unit of space instead of 100. And those 20 or 30 deer, 50% of them are going to have this disease. Blank percent of them are going to be dying from this disease, and that's what it's going to look like. Or we hunt them down to 20 or 30, and those are disease-free, and those demonstrate the age class we want to see, and those have mature bucks in them. and that is the thing.

But yes, either way we're talking about, you're going to see less deer from your tree stand. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. Because people look, I'm telling you, man, like, you know this. People look and they'll be like, how can someone try to tell me that me seeing fewer deer from my tree stand is good? Yeah.

Like, I don't know. Person comes in, excited. They're like, how was your hunt? Awesome. didn't see nothing. Right. Like, no one's chasing that evening. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think that collided with the rise of trail cameras, the rise of the intensity of deer management that happens today. Folks understanding what age means to potential of antler development. Yeah. Sort of this possessive nature of the way that we feel about deer now because we get them on camera. I got a deer on camera. That's a bit of it's my deer.

Yeah. kind of the intensity of management. And we also had folks because of that investing a ton of money in recreational land. Okay. I mean, some of the most valuable land of Missouri for recreational opportunities to hunt deer turkeys. Yeah. And that's very true across much of the Midwest. Oh, yeah, man.

You can't grow crops on it, but it can grow good deer turkeys. It's extremely valuable. So you've got folks who invested or made lifetime sacrifices to buy land to be able to shoot giant bucks. and then this idea that, well, I'm going to have a fewer deer. Now what are we going to do? It's a tremendous ask, and it's one that we had some really challenging conversation with folks about. The other thing that with CWD, if CWD is controlling the population, it'll be a much younger herd too. Right, because it's going to crop off that older age class.

And we know even when we had smaller deer populations, we were shooting them pretty hard. We still had bucks in older age classes. We didn't have as many numerically, but we still had them. They were present. Yep. Yeah. So let's go back to that. Let's go back to that chronology a little bit.

You were taking this what we'll call the Illinois model. Yeah. If we're setting it up like two different perspectives, Wisconsin generally trying to use programs to generally lower deer statewide, Illinois being like, no, man, we're going to find a hot spot. We're going to shoot them out. and you were doing that Illinois model and finding that you could sort of keep prevalence low or lower

walk through how these prevalence move meaning you find a spot with one or two percent how does it grow when it's unchecked and what does it look like when you're taking steps to check it yeah so what you see is it's you know, those deer have to come in contact one another to spread it, right? So it's that social interaction and engagement that occurs.

Fewer deer on landscape, fewer deer spreading it to one another, especially in the east where they don't move a ton. Right. It's not like the migration corridors we see in the west or they might be moving long distances, especially when you get into like the eastern Ozarks, home ranges are pretty small. Really? In the agricultural parts of the state, you know, the movement between habitat patches might be longer, right? So you'll see a very different dispersion of the disease in those kinds of landscapes. No kidding.

Well, just based on deer movement. West Virginia is a great example. Hampshire County, they found CWD in 2004 or 2005. It hasn't spread all over West Virginia. It's still pretty localized and contained largely because deer in those landscapes just don't move a lot. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So you'll see some of that.

So that's the way it spreads up. They move more in ag areas than they do in mountain areas. Yeah. Yeah. Any heavily forested landscape, they move far less. Really? That's pretty well known. What are you?

At the risk of this being a huge tangent. Why? Why is that? Available resources and cover. Okay. Right. You know, you think about an ag country while there's food everywhere, there's bedding cover and an escape cover may not be in those spots.

So they're traveling longer distances for this primo food sources. and cover, right? That being the big limiting thing. In a forested landscape, they're using terrain and topography. They're using small, you know, woody cover. They're more of a home body. I never knew that. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

So you see that. But what we see is through the first several years of a detection, a really early detection, is really slow increase in prevalence. I mean, less than like a half a percent per year kind of really. slow. But then once it hits about 5% in any reasonable sized area, you start, it's like an inflection point. Okay. And prevalence starts to really speed up. Because I think you've got enough deer then that are infected, that that contact rate almost becomes exponential. Got it. And this is played out in a lot of places. Mike Miller, you know, I mean, I think some of the work Mike's done in

Colorado and a lot of the early research, they talk about 5%, somewhere between 5 and 7% really being this tipping point. Got it. So can we detect it before that? Before that's the point where we can actually have management interventions that are probably meaningful and impactful. Before that. Before that.

Okay. Yeah. So we published a couple papers in 2020, 2020, 2021, really looking at what is that window of opportunity? And it really gets back to your detection, your ability to detect and the intensity of sampling that you've done to be on the front end of it. Once it gets past that point, the general. graphic spread has started to become wide enough that your area of impact and influence

become so large it's an entire county it's a couple of counties right yeah and the ability to do this localized management like illinois had been doing and like we had been doing really gets diminished so we've had to take a different approach in a lot of places like where c wd drifted up into southern missouri from arkansas it's much more widespread it's not like it was just a single introduction where we could go track that. Okay. Spread out over across, you know, half the southern border. So are there cases where,

are there cases where you just walk? Yeah, we have. Yeah. Yeah. When you look at Southwest Missouri, south of Taylor Rock and Bull Shoals Lake, where it is kind of the northern edge of the Arkansas outbreak, because of access,

because small landowner acreage, because tough terrain and hard to get in and do additional deer management. We just don't even get made deer killed in that area anyway. Yeah, we've chosen to let it run its course outside of just carcass movement regulations, some testing to monitor prevalence and that kind of stuff. Well, how with, I understand coming to that decision because you have limited resources. I guess you didn't even mention that in your list of reasons, but that's got to be on there somewhere. Like you've limited money and limited people.

But how does that edge not just march? We got a couple big reservoirs. Oh, so physical barriers. Create a bit of a physical barrier. They're not an incomplete, and they're not a complete barrier. We know deer swim the rivers and the lakes, but it at least is going to slow it down. Okay. So it gives us the opportunity to say, okay, well, on the north side of the lake, if one does come across, it's probably a relatively new spark, right?

It's jumped the line, right? Got it, got it. then we could be a little more aggressive in addressing those. What? Tell me a little bit about how, um, tell me a little bit about what you're hearing through this, what you're hearing from deer hunters in Missouri.

If you had to make that there's, if you had to say that there's two groups or four groups or whatever the number, like, what are the groups? that are coming to the meetings, right, that are articulating a viewpoint. Like, what are their viewpoints? And you can, you know,

you don't even, you can disparage the ones you want to disparage or you can just give it in their words. Like, who's coming to talk to you? Yeah, I don't think folks do it intentionally, right? Like, so I'm not going to disparage anybody. Yeah. I value their perspectives and their opinions

and based on what they know. So we've got, so interestingly, so we parked along with a few additional detections kind of from 2012 to 2018 and then started to detect it in a couple of other spots and then post and i felt like we had pretty good communication we had pretty good understanding what was going on with local landowners okay and then really post-covid attitudes and perceptions and perceptions changed pretty dramatically a lot of mistrust a lot of questioning of intentions that we just didn't face before that is a really different

time period. But we've got folks who I don't believe it, right? Like, show me the facts. You got to spend time trying to share information with them. You got folks that inherently just trust and will believe, you know, the agency voice as experts. And a lot of folks who are just complacent or not aware. Okay. It, it was really hard for our team and myself, too, as we'd find new detections, it felt like Groundhog Day. I'm talking about CWD management in Missouri since 2010. I couldn't tell you how many thousands of people I've talked about it, how many articles in the conservationists, how many news programs,

right, like all the things talking about CWD, you find it in a new place and it's like, they had no idea. Oh, is that right? Right. So. Like people not following it. Not the way passionate folks. Or state conversation.

They're following it like, my dear. My dear. And when it's my county, they're like, no, what? They wake up to it. Yeah, absolutely. And it just, and I've used this, the Bill Murray slide of ground all day numerous times in presentations because it feels that way. It's like, oh my gosh. Like, you know, sir, with all due respect, like, I don't understand where you've been.

Right. Right. And so that's really hard. And from a communication standpoint to say, here's where information is advancing. And then you got a bunch of folks, a large number of folks who aren't as tied in and paying attention. And so then, and then you got those that are paying attention, but they get fixated on certain issues or certain parts of it, which I think is where this sort of broader concern starts to creep back in. Things like, well, it's clearly just the captive guys moving deer around the landscape.

It's all their fault. Sure. Right? Or not what's not one. fault no it's it's it's all the deer hunters fault right like it's where it's the guys pouring urine on the ground it's their fault or right like that those things that start to say well that's part of it in this case it might have been in this case it wasn't but it creates these lines for for us to be tribalistic in some ways hugely right and and but but you the you the you feel the tribalism

emerged with COVID or was it was it taking shape a new one a new a new tribal and that was a skepticism that was a skepticism from of like being skeptical of like officialdom and science yeah because because elements of that like

because elements of that community on the human health end of the landscape really made some big mistakes yeah right yeah and then it became I'm done with all y'all yeah all of you all right and so then any egghead scientist guy is out right and so then you then then the then the the consp the real conspiracy start to you know to creep in yeah well what's their motivations what's their intentions why are they doing this there must be something

more we don't understand yeah right but but an early to to stick this timeline a little bit like I appreciate what you're saying about a heightened skepticism. But I don't have these dates down. But I know that there was a lot of that prior. And it would be. And maybe you can visit with me or try to remember with me pre-COVID. Back more in the timeline we're talking about like 2014, 2015. It's on the ground.

You're dealing with it. Are you doing baiting restrictions? yeah because i feel that one of the earliest in my recollection one of the earliest sort of tribalism things that came up and i'm thinking particularly of michigan where i grew up baiting restrictions okay where there was a narrative spun there that the same the view would be the same kind of people who are worried about herd health and who are worried about human health are the same kind of people that have kind of always looked down on deer baiting they've always felt that it was deer baiting was beneath them or deer baiting wasn't sportsman like and hunting high

fences wasn't sportsman like like this community and now they're able to go aha gotcha gotcha got you got It is bad. It's bad because it's spread CWD, and I'm going to use it now to do a thing I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to get rid of deer baiting. I've always thought it was bad. I always thought you guys were rednecks. I always wanted to get rid of shooting high-fenced deer

because I've always thought you guys are rednecks. And now here I got my thing. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And that was on the ground pre-COVID in Michigan. Right? And in all clarity, like, I grew up sitting over piles of carrots and apples, but I didn't have that. I didn't get that feeling because I was out of there by that.

I had moved away, but I just observed it happened in Michigan, you know? Yep. So there was like a tribalism. But I guess the question to you is, did you guys do that? Did you guys do restrictions that in those? years that created these little camps. Yeah. So for us, the first one that emerged was the captive servant industry.

Okay. And then our first CWD positive was found in a captive facility. Got it. And then our first free ranging posse was found right outside of it. I want to get to this. Right. And so, yeah, that whole, yeah, here's the chance. Here's the space where it got projecting on us.

Oh, because you never liked me. You never liked me anyways. And it's never been one of those. I'm not, you know, it's like they, they existed on the landscape for a long time, but we need to do it right, right? Like, we need to try to keep hurt health safe. So in Missouri, though, the baiting thing wasn't as big of an issue. Okay. Because it was prohibited back in the 1980s.

Oh. So baiting was actually legal in Missouri. Nobody did it. We didn't have robust deer populations. And quite honestly, through the 60s and 70s. 70s and early age. I grew up hunting deer like rabbits, right? Like a lot of drive hunting because there just wasn't very much deer. So Missouri was a no bait state. So we didn't have bait. But we're in a no bait. We're in a no bait state right now. So it's not part of the conversation.

Right. Right. So that wasn't a space where we had sort of controversy. We had, we did prohibit the placement of food salt and minerals. Okay. And a core area. Right. And with the rise of placement of minerals on the landscape and stuff like that. Certainly that was challenging. But not one that was like died in the wool. We've been fighting over it for decades kind of thing. Yeah. Like some places have certainly had.

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places, some of the lessons we learned in making in Linn County, we sort of took with us to the, to when we'd get a new detection. Okay. Well, where we found ourselves a couple years ago is, is the disease kept spreading. We kept finding additional detections. Again, all of them very low prevalence. So from, from a management standpoint, it's like, well, we've only got a couple. We've sampled hundreds or in some cases thousands of deer in this area.

We've only got a couple. Well, we need to be working there because we've got, yeah. opportunity to do that. You start to spread that out over, you know, 50 or 60 or 70 different core areas across the state. And while we have a relatively large team to help work on that, it gets really diluted. And so we were starting to have asked the hard questions of where do we, where do we continue to work? Who do we work with? How do we continue to incentivize landowners and hunters to do that? Yeah. So at that same time, so, that's where we find ourselves in the early, you know, 2020s is starting to have these kinds of conversations,

the distrust, declining participation. Anywhere we, anytime. Are you seeing that for real? Yeah. So we, with these additional detections and the spreading and diffusion of it, our ability to continue to manage the disease was being really challenged. Okay. So you add to that, the growing narratives through social media and other places about ulterior motives, ulterior intentions,

tensions started to get pretty high, right? Like real serious questions and mistrust of why we were doing what we were doing. Hit me with a, when you say that, hit me with an idea, an ulterior motive idea. I don't really, I don't get who, no, I do, I do, I do get it.

I hear that it's like, you all make your living doing deer management and this means more funding. Right. What are the other ones? Like, well, you're incentivized to create an issue because you'll get, because somehow even though you're like out of set state salary, there's somehow money to be made?

Like, what is it? Yeah, the federal funding is supporting the work and the more dear the test positive, the more federal funding we get it. And so the more money the agency can generate, that's the only reason we're doing the work. Okay. That was not true in Missouri because for a long time in the 20 teens, there was no federal money at all. It had completely gone away and we'd continue to do the work.

We were doing the work with commission funds and resources to do that work. There's the, you know, well, it's good for the insurance companies. The insurance companies are happy because this means there are fewer deer on the landscape, right? Like it's these things that start to creep in. And another one that I think is completely legitimate is folks who say, Well, I get it, but it's not going to work in the end. Yeah. We're still going to get to the same end point.

Sure. Right. I think we'll get to that end point on very different time scales and different time horizons, based on whether we're doing something or we're not. Yeah. And then, again, back to I don't want to impact my hunting today. Yeah. And that really hard conversation.

Yeah. I'm alive now. I'm a lot. I'm hunting now. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe the world will be done in 20 years. Like, I don't know. I want to go on my tree stand now and see a bunch of deer.

Yeah. I'm not interested in playing long-term, like, deer management games that are uncertain. Yeah, exactly. Unknowns into an unknown time period. Yeah. And folks say, well, you've got to have an exit strategy. I'm like, there's no exit strategy. There's just changing and adapting our management approach.

That's not an exit strategy. It's just recognizing where we are. And so last fall, we made the tough decision to say, it's gotten spread far enough. We've got enough positives on the landscape. We've had enough loss of support from landowners in core areas that were likely no longer being as effective as we were. So we're going to stop what had become the most controversial part of our program. That's the postseason target removal work. Yep.

And say, how do we then work inside the hunting season to support hunters and landowners harvesting more deer? So that's where we are today. it's like re-engaging trying to have new conversations with folks to say this is a reality we we've just got to address like all other sources of things that killed deer how do we recognize this in the kind of the broader deer mansion landscape your move in some circles um in some circles your move was that was treated as Missouri has decided to again they've decided decided just to let it rip. Yeah, and that's not true. Yeah, I think it's a realization that the disease has been introduced in our state enough times, and we had enough areas that our ability to have enough pressure and impact on the population of the local scale, the way we were doing it, was getting extremely diluted.

And it was causing a lot of additional mistrust, a lot of additional concerns. So if you're not going to be effective and all you're doing is pissing people off, it doesn't seem like that's the path you ought to continue to charge down. And so this last winter, we went to, we went back out, myself and others went back out and had a lot of conversation with folks that, help us understand where you are. What are you willing to do? What do you want to work together to try to accomplish? This isn't just something the Missouri Department of Conservation is trying to force on you. We're going to determine the fate of the deer herd together.

Because ultimately, hunter's willingness and ability to harvest deer is what dictates and regulates the deer population across the eastern U.S. What percentage, if you just take Missouri, what percentage of the state is, in your view, what percentage of the state is in a position where doing these targeted removals, we're doing enhanced management strategies won't be effective? because the disease is so prevalent. Small area along the southern border and then a small area in St. Genevieve County, south of St. Louis. Okay. So so what we've got? Oh yeah. Yeah. Less than five percent of length. Less than five percent. Yeah. That's the other thing is that we still got a lot of really healthy deer

populations across the state, right? We've got it in a number of spots. And when you start to put management zones on a map or you start imposing, you know, restrictions on feeding and things like that, carcass movement, it starts to make it look like the whole state's covered up. But part of it's because we're slowly getting sparks everywhere. But in terms of kind of maybe above that tipping point, only a couple areas. One of the things that seems magical about SWD is the pop-up, the isolated, positive pop-ups. the kind of out of nowhere spots, right? We talked about COVID earlier.

You had air travel. So air travel made it that once COVID got cooking, you anticipated the weird pop-up spots, and it became global. And you're like, well, why is it global? Because humans move around. It's just a fundamentally different situation than you'd expect with deer,

where deer aren't flying around. Okay? What is your understanding of when it jumps? Yeah, this is one of those places. And then you test and you find that there's a moat of negativity around a new positive. I traditionally, I traditionally would look at that and be like, that has to be captive servants. And I would also look and be like, I don't believe, I don't believe that it's some guy with a bottle of deer piss. I don't believe it's a guy who like

you know boned out a deer and threw a shoulder blade out in his ditch and all of a sudden now there's a bunch of pot CWD positive I'm like I don't think like I can't even tell you why just my biases where my head would work I would say to myself it's not a deer pee it's not a bottle of deer pee yeah

I'm right there with you but I'm not to I don't think I'm right. I'm just saying like where how a person's head works and how they're and how their assumptions go like that's where I would fall in years past as I would be like there's no it wasn't this you know that that whole thing for a while that once you cut a deer up on a cutting board the cutting board unless you melt it with an oxyacetylitelline torch it'll always be I'm like yeah that's not spreading cWD right I don't know why but I just know that it's not Right. And that's where, you know, my thoughts on it have evolved some too, right, through time as to what really is driving this.

And one of the reasons. Yeah, the ones where it jumps the border. Yeah. And part of that is because folks outside of Missouri have have been asked us like, well, what's going on in Missouri? Right. Because we do have like a number of these what very much would appear to be probably independent introductions of the disease. Yeah. But I agree with you. there's this thing that we haven't quite figured out, and it's what is an infectious dose? So how much of the preons does an animal actually have to get

that results in them getting infected at a point where they become a CWD afflicted animal? Yes. And so the things that you're describing are all on that spectrum of a carcass. I've had folks worried about hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and then coming home. I'm like, if you're dragging it in the dirt on your boots, it would be everywhere. Right?

That's why it just seems like such nonsense. If you drove through a pasture and then drove across somebody else's pasture, that is not the way this is spreading. I had an awkward. I just, sorry to interrupt, but I had a awkward conversation. I don't want to name the name. I had an awkward conversation with someone one time, and I was saying, you guys got to stop. with the cutting board like the cutting board stuff

you got to stop i felt you were creating a like you were creating a level of fear and hysteria that but you have no ability to back this up yeah i felt the same way telling people yeah i felt the same way about some of the um urine conversation and again not to say that we haven't gotten to a much better place

place with that. If you're a far away place like Alaska, like the likelihood of the disease getting there through the live importation of an animal is nearly zero, like nobody's likely to carry a carcass all the way to Alaska and introduce it there. And the like, this is one more hole in the bucket that you could, would, could close. Then absolutely. Sure. Right. Like completely understand it. But if you're in the eastern U.S. and the biggest fight that you're doing, and now is over whether we all do urine-based bans, there's other higher-risk activities that are occurring on landscape. It feels like a distraction.

How do you, yeah, how do you have the conversation about what really matters and what's really impactful? Got it. And in some cases, you know, it's not disparaging to my colleagues in other states. They pulled the levers. They felt like they had authority and public will to pull, where some of these other ones are really hard. Yeah. Okay. So get back in what you're saying about what is going on when one jumps the line. Yeah. So I think early on it very much was and could likely have been pointed to captive servants moving the disease across the landscape.

I mean, we knew that, right? Like it was in elk well before we understood what was happening. It doesn't show up in Toronto in the zoo. randomly. It got moved in there by an elk. It got moved to South Korea in an elk, right? So, like, we know those things were absolutely happening. Yeah, it wasn't a cutting board. Wasn't a cutting board, right? Like, it's the whole biological package moving around. Yeah. And so I think that's absolutely true. But then what I don't think we appreciated soon enough was that hunters likely were unintentionally moving it around to and in the form of carcasses. You think so?

I do think so. I don't know how else we would explain that it has moved to other places the way that it has. Yeah. And I think you feel fairly confident. I know you can't, like, I know you can't say for certain because we don't have that understanding yet. You feel fairly confident that there has been movement of non-live, that you've had infections come from something other than contact with a living, breathing, deer?

Yeah, I think so. I think it's completely reasonable. Okay. But it's not just the, hey, I went to Colorado and hunted West and dumped one carcass on my property. Okay. I likely think it's folks who were very consistently doing it. And what? Or doing it as a tax onerner.

Doing what? That were consistent. Hey, we go to Colorado every year. meal deer and we bring them home every year, right? Like in a way that you concentrate enough material or you concentrate enough of that material in a particular spot, I think that's the only way that you can reasonably explain how it's jumped. Really?

Yeah. Either that or it was so prevalent in captive servids way beyond what we believe it was. Yeah. And that there were more captive servants on the landscape than we appreciate and they didn't have to be there very long for them to create an information. which I just don't think is necessarily true. But it's definitely the first one that folks jumped to. They want to say, oh, well, there used to be an old deer pin down this road.

Yeah, they were there for like five years. We don't know what happened. Yeah. It gets really touchy as to whether that's the real source of it moving around. Okay. But I think it, I think it's not so easy that carrying dirt on your boots or pouring pee on the ground is the most likely way that it happens. But I don't think it is so hard that it has to be a live animal. Really?

Right? So it's somewhere in between there that I don't think we understand it. Because you don't understand how much dose it takes. Right, exactly. Is anybody looking at how much dose it takes? There have been a number of trials trying to look at it. And it's only until more recently that we've been able to quantify how much prions are even in something. So only with the modern technique.

all of our diagnostic stuff was just detected or not detected. Yeah. Not quantify how many preons are in saliva or urine. Okay. Or, you know, bone or the muscle tissue. Yeah. And all that depends, likely depends on the stage of progression of any individual animal. Okay.

As to how far along the disease progression is. So it's just a super complicated one that I don't know that we'll get to. Yeah, it's like, it's totally different. I don't in any way you want to conflate it, but I remember looking at completely different. It's not a preon disease, completely different. I remember looking at like trichinella larva. Right?

There's a number per unit of weight, and you can measure, like, how infected a tissue is with trichnella larva, which brings about trichnosis, be like, there are blank larva per blank ounces. And there's things that are very infected, and there's things that are not very infected. infected, right? Is it, is it, with a deer, is there a thing like that?

There's a deer that really has it and a deer that kind of has it and a deer that doesn't really have it? You talked to pathologists and they, yes, and that's that stage of progression. And how, but, but there's no way to measure like the thing. Not, not that I'm, that's a whole other realm of, this person is riddled with cancer. Right. They have cancer and their lymph nodes. And this person kind of barely has cancer.

Well, we do see this, though. Okay. We do see this. And you see it one of the reasons why we shifted the tissues that we test. In the early 2000s, you had to test the obax. It was believed that that was a gold standard. Had to test the obax. What is that?

Base of the brain. Okay. That's where the preons were accumulating. That's where they were seeing it, mule deer and elk. Well, through looking at other tissues, what they recognize, that it actually accumulates in the lymph nodes, especially the medial retroferringal lymph nodes, like these, the ones that set right up here, which again, suggests some sort of an ingestion of the preons as part of that pathway.

So what you'll see is when they do necropsys of animals that are in like really early stages versus very late stages, you'll see progression of that disease through different tissues. Okay. And the presence of them in different tissues as a result of that. But that's like internal spread. Right. Right. Like that's it that it running its course.

Right. And once, I guess it's kind of a little bit ties into it. It would be like once a deer gets some. Yeah. Once it's detectable in a deer somewhere. It's a matter of course that as far as we know, it's a matter of course that that disease will spread. Yeah. Throughout its body.

Yes. Meaning he never gets, you know what you think you're getting a cold? and you swear you're getting a cold but then all of a sudden the next day you're like oh it didn't take right or whatever you know what I mean like right like I beat it I don't know

like I didn't get it I never got sick this isn't a thing with CWD as far as we know as far as we know that is absolutely the case there is its immune system can't beat it there is no immune response to preons the body recognizes them

as a protein that's all it recognizes it has it doesn't recognize it as some foreign body that needs to be attacked. Okay. So you don't get any sort of an immune response. So discussions around like vaccines and treatments and all that kind of stuff, it's like a lot of other neurological diseases and people and animals otherwise, there's no reversing the course of.

Yeah. And so with advanced testing techniques where we're able to detect them kind of in those earlier stages, which is what's allowed, you know, there to be an understanding of the in-utero transmission. So a fetus can actually get CWD from a heavily infected female, right? Like when... Can or can not? They can. Okay.

Like they're just now starting to be able to demonstrate that. That fawn hits the ground with CWD. Right. And if they're born to an infected female, even if they don't hit the ground infected, through all the social grooming and all those kinds of things, the likelihood that they will then be infected is extremely high. Got it. Got it.

that a little bit answers that question of mine about again and so much like I guess so much my understanding about disease comes from thinking the things that are pathogen or not pathogens but like viruses and bacterial infections that that it doesn't make you well equipped to understand like a preon disease it's so different right yeah because we think oh well

they'll just develop resistance to it right we'll figure out some other way to deal with it we talk about amorrhagic disease in that same way right like that's the deer disease everybody knows about well it's a virus deer develop antibodies to it they provide protection they're able to push those antibodies female that gets infected they will to push those antibodies through her colostrum to her fawns which give them protection right that that is not known to happen with cwd because the body doesn't recognize it in that same way and yeah i think it in and of itself is a huge communication challenge because we think of it in our typical disease or pathogen-based approaches.

I'm glad you brought up Blue Tongue and EHD because I feel like the people I talk to and the people I kind of follow who would tip on the CWD that on the spectrum of people's perception of CWD

of hunters and deer enthusiasts that would be if from lookers if you imagine this spectrum and from lookers the lookers right perspective being the sky is falling the end of the world is nigh on the extreme of lookers left um which i will call and i don't mean to and i don't mean to to diminish the perspective but i would call it like the c wd denier end but what it means to be a c wd denier has evolved over the quarter century that we're talking about talking about yeah it's evolved it went from it's not actually a thing it's a make it's make believe to it is a thing probably always been there it's a thing um and there's emerged in this end of it not as bad as the hd yeah like why are we talking about cd why are we not talking about about E.D. And there's kind of become this rhetorical

strategy they use of all a sudden being like hyper-focused on E.H.D. die-offs. How bad E.HD is as a way to sort of demonstrate these people, the eggheads, are

missing the story. There's an E.H.D. story. E.H.D. comes and kills all the damn dear. But it's fine. Because they come back. why are you guys so focused on this CWD thing this is what's killing deer yeah because they come back yeah that's the big difference we've been dealing with EHD outbreaks the best you can track back is kind of the early 1900s where

were reports of late fall unexplained deer mortalities that we believe probably was some of the first indications of it but yeah in in Missouri you know from anywhere a seven to ten year cycle of of an E.HD outbreak that we've been dealing with through time. And those populations recovered. Three to five years, very localized and impact. Like I was describing, passing on of antibodies, they get the disease. Does it kill all of them despite the belief that some have?

It can be extremely lethal, especially where they're really naive to it and haven't been previously exposed. But the pattern of EHD is changing too. Is it? In terms of where we see it and how we see it. In the south, E.HD is present or one of the hemorrhagic diseases are present in the midge flies, kind of there all the time. Okay. And so in a lot of those southern latitudes, the times that you see more significant outbreaks is when kind of presence of the antibody starts to dip.

Okay. And then you'll get a little bump in mortality, but you'll have sick deer all the time. Okay. Like nearly every year in a lot of the southern states, they'll have deer diet of E.H.D. And that's an area, that would be an area where there's been EHD for a long time. Long time. Okay. Been there for a long time.

And what I think we're seeing is we're seeing that line drift north. Because Missouri, we used to have just massive outbreaks. Okay. 1987, 1997, 2012 was unbelievable. I bet we lost a quarter of a million deer statewide. Is that right? It was awful and across much of the Midwest. But most of the time, it's in a corner of a county.

Yeah. Or it's two parts of a county. And yeah, a lot of sick deer and a number of them die. Ohio made the news last year, right? Small area of southeastern Ohio. I say small area, but an area in southeastern Ohio. Really significant mortality. Yeah.

But in almost every scenario, you shoot a few less dose for a couple of years. Deer population respond and recover. And what often folks see is that they actually see a little. bit better buck production in those next couple of years. Oh, is that right? Because there's less social stress. There's less nutritional stress on them. Yeah.

And they respond. But what we're seeing is now as, as weather patterns and climate's changing a little bit, we see the impacts of the massive impacts of the HD occurring even farther north. In places it hadn't dealt with before. And so it is more dramatic. It is a little scarier. But it gets back to that conversation we started on is, is to you. individually, it has a heck of an impact.

If you've been getting a bachelor group of bucks on camera and they're all dead like that, then yeah, it has a real direct impact. But that happens. You go to a dirt tank and there they're all floating in the dirt tank. But that happens once a decade at most. We had a research project a number of years ago in which had a bunch of deer collars, this before I worked in the department, had a bunch of deer collared. And they think they lost somewhere between 7 and 10% of those.

collar deer to a fall EHD outbreak, never got a single report from the public of a sick or dead deer. So it's something that's kind of always happening. It kind of happens in the background. A deer disappears and you don't know why. But we definitely get pulses. And so I'm not, I'm not discounting the fact that EHD can have a huge impact on populations. It's that we can then regulate that through backing off of antloose harvest for a few years. We can do something about that. CWD is just kind of slowly take more and more of the deer population. Got it. So you view these two things as just like fundamentally different conversations?

Fundamentally operating very differently from a population dynamic standpoint. I mean, I think about it in the same way that if a new predator gets introduced onto the landscape, right, that imposes a new mortality factor as those populations increase, what's the impact of that on the deer population, the ability of that deer population to grow? CWD is the same way. It's now there. It absolutely kills deer. It's going to kill older age class deer disproportionately, which is going to make your age structure a lot younger. And it's going to make it less resilient.

And the ability of it to thrive will just be sort of topped off. The music you love. Your favorite radio stations. Everywhere you go. The podcasts, everyone's talking about, all in one place. And it's free. Whatever you want to hear. Listen anytime.

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One winner will be selected to win the entire prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends Monday, October 12, 2026 at 1159 p.m. Crystal ball it for me, if you're comfortable. What, let's go down to that. What percentage of the state did you say it's just like? I'd say 5%. Okay, 5% of Missouri is, there's diminishing.

public will to address it or a lack of public will to get aggressive about it. Percentages are high enough that the tools that you have at your disposal have become not really helpful. Right?

And you could picture the same thing with other issues. Like I remember just we keep going back to these COVID things. I remember one of the greatest emails I ever got from our public school system here in Bozeman was when they finally like we're throwing in the towel on it we got an email because for a while they're trying to track you know little johnny had it and so little johnny doesn't you know can't go to school

and eventually they we got an email that said if your kid goes to school consider them a direct exposure right we're done we're done they all got it it's like we're done well we can't yeah we tried all that stuff sending johnny home he can't come and at this point it's just if you kid goes to school their direct exposure we're not telling anybody anymore like we're done because whatever they had at their disposal they had like reached the end of public will and they reached the end of there was no tricks to try anymore it was just there it's they got to where it's like it's like them having colds it's like it's just whatever we're done we're done we walked away um very different than this disease but like it was like a public will thing and

you hit that in 5% of the state you're done for kind of yeah i suppose you could always go revisit it with some kind of new understanding right but like take that 5% in crystal balling what what does that area look like in 10 years what does that area look like in 20 years minus some scientific breakthrough that i can't even picture what the breakthrough would be i don't know what it would be yeah so i think we're seeing especially in eastern white till deer popular that trajectory push a little quicker than we may have thought. I may have thought it was going to take decades to play out. Yeah, I think if you, because we have this, we have this opportunity now to kind of jump in the time machine and say, oh, well, states are now finding it at, you know, 20, 25, 40% prevalence.

Yeah. And here's what they're seeing in these localized places, whether that's, you know, southwest Tennessee, northeast Mississippi, where they're going, wow. they're just aren't as many deer here. Okay. And what's happening, right? Like mortality. Not as many deer and it's not because we're sharpshooting them. And it's not because we're sharpshooting them.

Because in a lot of those places, it was farther progressed than they ever understood it to be. Okay. In terms of kind of low surveillance and kind of low diligence. Yeah. So I think what plays out is that you lose the older age structure of bucks because most of them become, infected and died at a relatively early age. And you have a younger age. Are you saying you think what plays out?

Or is it like, does that seem like? That seems like that's what's playing out. Like, yes. Okay. It's not theoretical. No,

it's not theoretical because you can look at the harvest data from like Eastern Wyoming and Eastern Colorado. Okay. Age structure is absolutely shifted. They're shooting far fewer, older age class books. Okay. So there's just fewer deer on the landscape.

The herd is younger because of that. Okay. The primary mortality is killing deer at older age clot. CWD is the primary factor drive mortality, so it's killing deer at older ages. Like CWD has passed up cars. It's passed up hunters. Pretty close to it. Yeah.

Yeah. West Virginia's current research project. That's what they're demonstrating. CWD is like next to hunters. It's the next highest source. Okay. So it's number two to hunters. It's number two to hunters.

but it might be there pretty quick in terms of once that population continues to draw itself down farther. Okay. So my concern is that, yeah, that opportunity for recreational harvest gets diminished. Every deer that gets killed by CWD is a deer. A hunter can't kill and eat and enjoy and appreciate, right? So the number of deer on the landscape will just be fewer. Do you feel that CWD, because earlier you mentioned like, a buck, a mature buck is the most likely deer within a population to get CWD.

Probably he travels more. I don't know. He's around more. Does CWD kill big bucks at a higher rate than hunters kill big bucks? Do you know what I'm saying? Like if we're looking at a populate, like whatever, there's a population of, there's a population where hunters are killing 13, 14, 20% of the deer and blank percent of those are big bucks. And then within that same population, CWD,

kills 13, 14, 20% of the deer, is it whacking off more bucks than hunters? Like, is it better at selecting bucks than hunters are? Well, there's some interesting data. If you look at the long-term research Wisconsin has done, it's fascinating. And what they've been able to do is through time, track deer that not detect positive, and then deer that have been positive. positive, right? Separate them out into those two groups. During the fall hunting season, you see a disproportionately high number of CWD infected deer get shot.

Oh. Like the mortality on CWD infected deer through hunter harvest is substantially higher than the mortality of an uninfected deer. Like they're easier to do? Yeah, right? And so it, it, it, I think in ways can send this perception, well, we're still shooting a lot of nice antlered bucks, right? you're shooting the slower three and a half and four and a half year old bucks. But at some point, CWD will just crop them off. And the proportion of them that are infected that are going to survive to the next fall, it's going to be really low.

I mean, the progression of disease. This is prophecy. I think it's just a numbers game. Okay. Right? It's like how much infection do you have and how many deer are infected is a deer itself infected? Because, you know, the data certainly suggests that 18 to 20, four months post infection that we can detect a deer's dead it finally goes through the process

and succumbs to the disease okay so if you got two and a half year old buck that is c wd positive the odds of him making it to four and a half are extremely low okay that that's just it just isn't gonna happen and so that's gonna crop it off hunters are gonna kill some of those in the meantime yeah right and those are the cwd positives when we remove through hunter harvest have you are you aware of anyone or is this possible to fill a research facility with with a bunch of infected animals and take totally good care of them and just see what happens like can this be done because what a way to either to demonstrate to the public or just like to to support these ideas or disprove these ideas is you have a population in a fence to area with triple fence, whatever the hell you got to do. It might be just unethical to do this, I don't know. And within there, you're going to say, like, no, we're going to put, we're going to have

a hundred deer in here. And it's just balls out infested. They all got it. And we're going to take care of them. We're going to do all the things. And we're just going to watch. Do what happens to the age class within this population? Is that unethical?

It's been done. And what happens in those situations? They die. And they don't make adults. They don't make, yeah, they don't make adults. It's just as a young population. It would be, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's been done.

I mean, Colorado's been doing this kind of work for a long time in terms of what does it mean to cause disease transmission, what's a progression of the disease. That's how we know, 24, you know, 18 to 24 months until clinical symptoms start to show up. That's how they die. This work's been done. Okay. So that's been done in a closely observed population. Not wild animals. Yeah.

And a closely observed population. And so this is part of that like, well, there's no research. We don't know what's going on. No, we know a lot. Yeah. A lot has been done. And this isn't just speculation as to what will happen, how the disease will progress and what some of these other questions are.

But some of that reproduction just trickles on because you have some animals making it to two, three years old. Yeah. And they're dropping fauns. I think that's what does happen. Reproduction trickles on. Right. It will trickle on and so long as young females will be responsible for a disproportionate amount of the reproduction.

Got it. So your ability for that population to really grow and thrive is going to be based on the condition and ability of younger individuals. Whereas a four and a half, five and a half, six and a half year old adult female, really good mom, right? Like really highly likely to be able to produce two fawns, get them, you know, through the tough parts of early recruitment. into the population. Younger females, not as good, right? Like they'll more likely to only have a single fawn, more likely to have not both fawns survive to kind of recruitment into the fall population. And so it's just a real dampening of the population through time. And so that's the concern. As it gets younger, they're not able to withstand it. What's the highest prevalence you've seen

in a wild population? So there are reports of adult males prevalence in like Alberta and Saskatchewan in the neighborhood of 75%. Damn, really? Right. And you think about that that's likely got to be a population that's pretty heavily infected, which means that at some point the environment has become so infected that they just can't help but get it. They're interacting and engaging with one another. And then by the time they get to two and a half plus, they've been exposed.

There's just no way around it. Got it. I don't know that that's how it plays out everywhere. And again, that's a little bit of the numbers game. I think some of their data is from adult males. But some of the stuff seen from southeastern Wisconsin or southwest Wisconsin, you know, 50% of the two plus year old males and females have it. That's where my buddies, that in the hunt in those hot areas down there, that's where my bodies are at. And so they're at that like, they're at some years.

it's when you tally up all the bucks that everybody got in your social circle, when you tally them all up and you're doing testing, it's going to be that more, the numbers vary, but it's going to be the assumption is half, more than half of the bucks that the people in your community got were positive bucks. Yeah, yeah. And that's the story.

But within those box, and here's the deal, though, where they're at still within those bucks is some damn nice bucks. Yeah, yeah, because of white tail and really good, condition and great habitats like exist in southwest Wisconsin, like exists across much of the northern

two-thirds of Missouri, three and a half, four and a half with a little more food on the landscape because there's fewer deer. They do have some of that opportunity to express their potential. Yeah. Right. So you can still have bucks into older age. I mean, nice antlers. Not old, but big.

Not old, but big. Yeah. but not as many either understood right yeah what is your what does your guys take on this this conversation that's going on now i should call it a conversation that's going on research and other things suggesting that within the captive deer world they're finding that some of these deer maybe aren't immune but there's some segment of the population that it doesn't hit him as hard as quickly. Yeah.

And that through simple, like, survival of the fittest, like through classic Darwinian evolution, eventually will emerge this population of deer that it doesn't hit him as hard, it doesn't hit them as quick. Maybe they get it, but they do live to be six or seven years old by the time it takes them down. And that you could speed this up by pumping these deer into wild populations to be like,

hey, it'll happen, it'll likely happen in time that there's going to be some deer that for whatever reason don't die in two years. They die in four. So part one of my question is, what do you think of that? Does that seem to be true or not? And then what do you think of the idea that you would speed this along or help this along by injecting these identified deer into wild populations? Yeah, so we've known for some time that the 96SS deer have a little higher survival.

little less susceptible to the disease. That's not, that's been known for, you know, what was the term you used? I never heard of name. 96 S S. So it's a Preon protein, um, coding gene. Okay. And, and again, I don't know that we know all of it and you'd have to talk to

preon biologist and a geneticist to completely describe all of it. Mm-hmm. But they have, uh, they have a G or an S at the 96 codon. Codon. Those that are SS do appear to show delayed effects of the disease. We've known that for some time. Okay. And the G.G. or show the shortest duration of the disease. Okay.

So if a 96 G.G. deer, let's say it has 18-month incubation, right? An SS might have 36-month incubation. Okay. Right. There is some time scale difference there. What exactly it is? I don't know. And there's some stuff published.

They published in 2017 about this. And then the GS, through Darwinian selection, right, like the GS, somewhere in between. Okay. So having one of those s alleles gives it some greater, slower progression of the disease. Okay. Interestingly, though, a lot of the early survey work suggested that the presence of the s allele is relatively low in the wild populations. Okay. So it's rare for some reason and we don't understand why.

And some work done like Colombian white tails, it's not even present. Key deer, I don't believe it's even present. So there's some of these small isolated populations where it's not even known to occur. Okay. So something through selection has kept that relatively low. Okay. If there's somehow a superior deer, something's kept them relatively low. But we just don't fully completely understand what all the other attached survival impacts.

are. Yeah. And, and this is work that's, I think, starting to come to light. And certainly Chris C. Berry and his work on the genetic breeding value things that's been funded by USDA to try to understand what this looks like. So it has, it has merit. Okay. And that we know that in scraping, right?

The way that we eradicated scrapy and sheep or largely eradicated scraping and sheep was through very intensive breeding programs. Okay. In which they identify this delay. or this resistance to the disease, it still pops back up. Yeah. It still comes back. But that's through very, very extensive animal husbandry kind of activity.

Got it. Tracking lineages and being very intense in that breeding. So the ability for that to happen to free range population is, it's limited to scope and scale. I would also say that I don't know that we can speed it up. and I don't know what speeding it up does. Yep. So they live longer. They spread more prions onto the landscape,

which will probably advance the disease, maybe quicker. So that's some of the questions that we have. Well, I think that what you're looking at is you're looking at, you're looking at that you've arrived at that a manager, such as yourself,

arrives at an idea where they look back at the landscape and they look at the history, and they arrive at a thing that this is, always it's it's a one way trip we can slow it right we've had a couple of victories you mentioned New York went from a pot like being one state

that at one point in time went from a positive to a negative state there's been some victories we can slow it but you get to a point where you're like it's there's really when we're talking about decades nothing anybody's going to do it would be the last

hope. Yeah, yeah. And I think it's a matter of how quick, how can through management and the way that we're shooting deer change the trajectory of the disease? Or do we just got to let it play out? Yeah. And I think the way that we manage deer, we can change that endpoint by decades. Really? In terms of thinking about the way that we hunt deer, the way that we shoot them. But it's counter to where we are in a deer hunting culture today. in terms of wanting to make you clarify your point management

okay if we if we sit here and agree that if we sit here and agree that if we do nothing if all testing and all everything stops right now no management's no nothing we never talk about CWD again and we would say in a century

we land at like the in a century this country will just be like, like, dear, in America are 50, 60, 70% positive for CWD. Are you uncomfortable with that statement? We do nothing. Yeah, if we do nothing. In a hundred years. Oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. In a hundred years in America, deer writ large are 50, 60, 70%. Okay. Do you feel that if we say like, no, no, no, we're going to manage, we're going to continue management. We're going to try to do what we can do. Do you feel that in a century, we could have a different result in a century's time?

Yeah, I don't know. Or do you think just in 10 or 20 years we could make it be different? Yeah, I think in decades we can make it be different. I don't know in a century, right? A century's crazy. It's crazy. Forget a century. A quarter century.

Yeah, I think decades for sure. Okay. And I think what's starting to come together, there was, you know, Wyoming recently, the co-op unit recently published a paper looking at different trends in hunt units in eastern Wyoming based on buck harvest rates. And the West has really leaned into adaptive harvest management strategies about the timing of the seasons and what are buck harvest rates look like?

And they've sort of plateaued in a few places where they had higher buck harvest rates. Are they turning the population over a little quicker? Are they suppressing some of the transmission as a result of that? So those are some of the questions we're asking about inherently the way that we hunt deer and the way that we turn the population over is that, are there things we can do that will help minimize prevalence? Well, you're talking about even,

and this is, I didn't know this, is I imagine that in any given population, it's always up. Prevalency is always up. But you're saying that you could have a given population, and not like the New York example, where maybe there's three deer that had and they killed them all.

But you're saying within a population, there can be a down? Yeah, or it can be stable. Yeah. Or slowly growing. Yes, by having enough harvest on the population where you remove deer faster than they can get infected from other deer. And you have a higher likelihood of removing those positive individuals from the landscape. Yeah, no, it's played out through time. And that's a lot of what Illinois data suggests, too.

But once it does spread, and if you don't stay on top of it long, enough then prevalence takes off yeah but I think there is inherently something about and this has been demonstrated through some modeling stuff right trying to think about how do we predict some of this stuff out that certainly the age structure of the population the sex ratio of the population all dictate how quickly that might happen so there's probably some underlying things that we just need to understand about how do we manage eastern white-tailed deer populations in a way that tries to minimize the progression of the disease

yeah so i guess i mean i per now i'm realizing you kind of clarified this point earlier but i didn't pick up on it is that maybe i'm putting words your mouth but i don't think so i think you were saying that and i didn't get the ramifications of it but that that five percent is that the number where it seems to just that it's going to grow it does yeah that's the point at which got you you have enough infected individuals on the landscape that they're just going to continue to spread it at a rate faster than you can remove them from the landscape. So a 3% can become a 2, but a 10 probably doesn't become a 9 or a 3, right? And because it gets back to, okay, if it were at 3% in a relatively small area, it's because there's a small chunk of land somewhere where there's a small little pocket of doze that has the disease.

And if you can remove a high proportion of those doze in that spot, you've got the opportunity to set it back. And that's where that time of detection becomes really important. Small scale, low level of prevalence. By the time it's gotten widespread, the idea, the other thing is that folks think we're trying to eradicate deer. We're absolutely not trying to eradicate deer. That is not the intent or purpose, right? I know people say that, but I don't know any. really serious people that don't have some big ax to grind i don't know any serious people to think that yeah yeah yeah but it's in the psyche right like that when you're going in no it's like trying to figure out how we remove a high enough proportion of those that were likely infected yeah but back to the

question on on kind of the next steps of the genetics work yeah and is it possible to then reintroduce individuals with the 96 SS gene and a high breeding value into a population. The only way that's going to be successful would be as if we get to a spot where we have pulled populations way down. Got it. Right? The idea that, you know, with hundreds of thousands of deer in a state, a million, right, like we probably got a million and a half deer in Missouri, what it would take to shift the genetic

makeup of that population by introducing deer into the population would be astronomical. So from a practical standpoint, I appreciate where the captive deer folks are, and I encourage them to continue to try to like study it, understand it, figure out if there are ways that we can make the populations more resilient, I think it's good work and somebody needs to be doing it to continue to build our understanding. The practical application of it and the idea that somehow we could we could get enough deer to put back out on the landscape that we would change that back to the century sort of thing that we would change the trajectory of the disease by reintroducing some of these deer um i just the numbers don't add up yeah so you know how some humans have like

a connected earlobe and some have a like my kind whatever you call that right it'd be like if you like said like hey we're going to take two people with connected earlobes and move them into town here Right. And we'll see. Right. We'll see what happens. In a few years, are there way more people that? Yeah. You'd be like, dude, come on. Well, nature's doing it, though, right?

Like, we, you know, there's definitely data suggests that in some of these free range of populations, as prevalence is creeping up, they're seeing a higher percentage of 96 SS in the population. So it's like, okay, something's going on. That's happening. I add, and so folks have concerns like, well, then shooting deer in those spots. Are you risking shooting those that are advantaged? The good ones. Yeah. The good ones.

I point back to the Wisconsin data. I point back to the Wisconsin data, which suggests no, in fact, if you got CWD, you're probably more susceptible to harvest. Yeah. And so maybe thinking about the two of them together is probably where we'll end up at some point in time. It's not a one or the other. Yeah. I think there's a reason why really intensive localized harvest can still be very

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of ways. If CWD deer are easier to do, they're easier to get, is perhaps hunter samples, hunter submitted samples, skewing the data. Meaning 50% of the bucks getting harvested

in X county are CWD positive is that may be not an indicator that 50% of the bucks on the landscape are positive. They're getting the sick ones because the sick ones are dumber and easier to get. Yeah, this is a whole conversation that drives statisticians completely crazy. Oh, it does.

Oh, yeah. It drives them crazy, and it drives me crazy sometimes. We talk about apparent prevalence versus observed prevalence. Okay. And what the real prevalence is. Okay. Right. And it's this thing, right?

It's like the sampling mechanism in which you get at are their inherent biases, which is what we started this conversation and talking about, we inherently biased our CWD sampling towards adult males. to try to better detect it. And what we try to report is that of the samples we've collected, this is the percentage that are positive. Not that this is what, if you randomly sampled on the landscape,

randomly sampled all age classes, represented them as their proportion of the population, would you get a different number? Absolutely. You think so? Yeah. But it doesn't matter, right? Like, whether it's 23%,

plus or minus 2%, or it's 30% plus or minus 2%. I got you. Doesn't matter. Yeah. You know? It ain't zero.

It ain't zero. And what's the trajectory? And so that's a lot of the way, it's even the way we manage deer populations, right? Like, we can argue over, well, are there 35 deer per square mile, or are there 40 deer per square mile, or are there 50 deer per square mile? What I care about is what's the trajectory? Yeah. And what are the attitudes around that population? That gives you a better handle on as a manager what levers can and should you pull to change the direction.

This is very ancillary, but it's interesting. I've had it explain to me that when you look at doll sheep harvest in Alaska, year-to-year rates, you know what you're mostly looking at? You're mostly looking at the weather. Yeah. It's 10-day seasons. right and more than an indicator of how many sheep around the landscape it's primarily an indicator of like was it a high ceiling people could fly yeah could glass people could hunt because in a 10 day season if six days are fogged in and it's raining the whole time it's like there's no doll sheep left if you look at harvest data yeah right it's just like a way of understanding it yeah we see that our our november portion of firearms deer season can't and start as early as november 10th and as late as november 16th you know you see a very different composition of the harvest based on six days in that narrow window of difference of the

peak of buck movement activities we start on the 16th we shoot more doves we start on the 10th we shoot more bucks it's completely a product of that yeah so yeah so you'd look at like okay i see that you're seeing that you think there's deer trends but there's also it's just like you're looking at a calendar. Yeah, yeah, in some ways, folks will get all up, kind of up in arms. They're like, oh, why was the harvest down? Well, weather was bad on opening weekend or something like that can absolutely drive that. It's become less and less of an issue as seasons have expanded as opportunities have increased. Oh. But it's, you still see it. Because those little blips get leveled out, but it's long seasons. Yeah. An early antlers kind of, you know, masks some of those kinds of things

or longer, you know, more participation in a late muzzle loader season can kind of mask some of those things. But what do you feel? We've talked a lot about hotspots. We've talked a lot about areas that have it. Let's go to where you got a pristine area. Okay. You got a, you got a island, a pristine island, and it seems like there's nothing going on there. And it's got a good moat around it.

What do you want to do there? Are you like, no, we're just going to kick it? back and hunt deer like normal. Yeah. And we're not going to bring anything with us, right? Do everything we can and make sure we don't introduce the disease. So you don't go to that area. You don't go to that county and be like, let's get out ahead of it and knock these

suckers back now. It's an interesting conversation. And it's one that we found ourselves in very early on. I'm sure you find it all the time. Right. So we had, we had, we implemented an antler point restriction. So four points on one side. We started that work in early 2000.

and trying to encourage folks to shoot more antlers deer, let bucks grow to older age classes. Even in CWD. Before CWD. Okay. So that really changed hunter behavior, hunter harvest, age structure, starting to get older age class bucks. Okay. You introduced CWD into the equation in 2012. We removed that in six counties.

They went back to shooting deer like the handler point restriction. It never existed. Certainly there's been some slow trends since that. time. But we started asking the question of, is it a good, proactive, preemptive step to take the antler point restriction away from other areas where we had not yet detect it? To remove it. Because we were new, we were protecting bucks into older age classes. Yeah. Which, again, from a disease manager standpoint, is not what you want to do. Yeah. And so we chose not to, and I many times, same thing on the feeding and placement of mineral

restrictions, right? Like, are we setting ourselves up where you're creating a deer population is more susceptible to it once it gets there? And I don't know that there's a right answer to that question. Well, Holman, you've leaned, I'm sorry, I got confused. In those cases, those, those, those, those, those, those, SWD free areas, you've leaned toward adjusting, we didn't. Okay. We did not. We left them in place until we had a CWD positive detection in the county. But you don't, you can't, you don't know that that was old. I don't. I don't. know that that is the right thing to do or not yeah where do you sit right now on it i don't know that we can answer that question yeah yeah because i don't think we know enough about how the

structure of the herd might impact the way that the disease takes off in early stages okay yeah but yeah i made the argument if there are good deer management techniques in the absence of disease then we should continue to promote them we shouldn't shy away from good deer management for fear of something that's not yet happened. No, I got what you're saying. And so, so we did not proactively remove them. Recently, we did do away with antler point restriction statewide. And part of that was because we were down to like 14 or 15 of our 80 counties that still

had the antler point restriction in place. It's just another level of regulatory complexity. We're starting to have enough spread where we're catching four or five or six additional new counties every year kind of expanding into that. Oh. So from a simplicity standpoint, we're like, look, this doesn't make sense anymore. But very early on, yeah, there were folks that were like, no, we should, we should increase the buck harvest bag limit, we should remove the antler point restriction. We should proactively do these things.

And we chose not to. And I don't know that that was the right decision or not. How much to have you felt you've been able to influence hunter behavior? Like I hear again and again and again all around the country that. that people, they don't want to shoot those. They don't want to shoot those. They don't. Like the days of people living off, venison and stuff,

it's not like it was in the old days. And it's just ingrained in people, like they don't want to shoot those. You can't incentivize them to shoot those. How true, how true have you found that to be? We don't rely on venison as our coarse horse protein anymore. Right.

Or it's so small. And the number that do are insignificant in the grand scheme. Not to say people that shoot deer, don't eat them. They'd eat them. Right. Or they give them away. They turn me into snack sticks. They get really expensive to shoot one. So, yeah, no, there's no question that that is shifted deer management. Missouri had long been one of those states where we did not have a problem having folks shoot antelous deer. We've been very successful through time with folks shooting a high number of antelous deer. And it goes back. Today still.

It's gotten, it's a little more challenged today than it was. but yeah some of the perspectives have just got to shoot a buck just weren't present in Missouri as a hurdle to get over it's a more modern shift in perspectives yeah and part of that you know I think goes back to the history of deer management in Missouri I've got notes of folks in the 50s when we had still had very few deer certainly didn't have them statewide that we're already starting to talk about we need we need dough harvest to start to manage some of these populations yeah so it was a

very early part of the conversation introduced antlers harvest very early and kind of the deer management progression in Missouri. And so I think it become adopted as a, as a normal practice, something we needed to do. Folks were excited when they got to shoot one antelisk deer and then really excited when they got to shoot two antlers deer. Now they're saturated with opportunity. There are so many deer. I think procrastination is one of our bigger challenges. They got all kinds of time to shoot a deer. And they don't really want to shoot one anyway, unless it's got big antlers because they're not hungry. They're not hungry in the same way. It's the craziest thing. I've had an old-timer in the township where I grew up in Michigan. I remember old-timer

telling me about growing up and they used to rig their own deer snares, the garage cable. Oh my gosh. Living off deer. Yeah, absolutely. And they were trying to, this is back in the day when you were like, you had a problem with people poaching those. Now it's so funny that you're sitting on the other. extreme. Yeah. You can't talk people into getting those. And back then you couldn't talk people out of stopping killing those.

Yeah. Yeah. It is a huge. So it's a bit of a paradox, right? We've got this disease issue that's more than happy to kill deer. Yeah. And we got some really big deer management challenges in places where we don't have CWD, where we need hunters to be able and willing to shoot more deer.

And so states, you know, like Missouri and others, are trying to find ways that they make easier for hunters to donate deer. Simplify that process. We've just hired a detailed position to work for two years, trying to better understand what the relationship with meat processors looks like. What does a, what does a meaningful deer donation process actually look like? What's that experience for a hunter? How do you get there and how do you make it economically viable for processors to participate? It's a challenge. It's a huge challenge. It brings up a thing that I hate even talking about because I don't fully understand the impacts and I think the impacts would be many particularly in terms of access but it brings up this conversation that it's like

that's like anathema to American deer management would be what about if you could sell them yeah yeah and there's I just came back from Florida we're down Florida gator hunting and they we go to the gator processor guy that does the leather and stuff you know he's got to a big sign not buying gators but he said that's this is the first year I've ever had the sign meaning prior to this year and it's not illegal

just he's not doing it prior to this year you went gator hunting one option is you take that sucker down and they measure it is 10 feet long it's 60 bucks a foot and you walk out the door with cash in your hand

if you brought a system If you introduce the system where you're like, no, dude, you got it and bring it to me, $200. People are shooting those. My kid and his buddies, like, they're young enough or they don't have all this history. If you told my kid and his buddies, hey, I'll give you $200 for every dough. You bring me, they're, dude, they're bringing you those.

Yeah, and I think this is this wide-ranging. They're like quitting their job. Yeah, this is this wide-ranging conversation that the true believers in the North American model would string us up for having that conversation, right? To be intellectually honest, I can't not talk about it. The director of the guy in your position in Michigan, we read the letter on the show, the guy in your position in Michigan sent a letter. It was printed in newspapers, sent a letter begging people to kill those.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the one thing you look at, like, I'll tell you the one thing that will get them to do it. and it's the same thing that tanked American wildlife populations in the old days. It was you put a value, you incentivize the meat harvest. And I don't even know, you'd have to bring in a whole different team of people to go and look at, well, what is the commercial demand?

If we're incentivized to do this because of CWD, how hungry is the market for CWD meat? Yeah. Do people in grocery stores, one, CWD meet. If we're going to do this in an area with 50% prevalence, does that mean that the 50% that come to us by the hunters that are hunting them for market,

do they not get paid? For those, do they get their money for those? But then they go into a dump. Do they get their money for those? And then they go to the grocery store. In the grocery store is the bag labeled CWD positive, CWD negative? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. It's like you'd have to, there's so much to figure out. No, but it's, it's, that's what you would do. And all of a sudden you would have, you did, your dough killing problem would be over. Yeah. And that's why, as I indicated earlier, we've sort of tried to double down on these conversations, local landowners and hunters and say, look, guys, hunters have been the original tool for managing deer populations in the regulated way that we've been doing it.

It may not be sustainable into the future. Yeah. And you have a part in that, right? Like we together share the fate of the outcome of deer and deer management. And how are we going to work together to do that? Because an alternative that will be very real for some folks and probably not in the terribly distant future. If you have fewer hunters and they are unwilling to shoot antless deer, they create enough problems and enough incentive for others to change the system.

Yeah. And we can either be part of informing the way that change happens. or we can be subjected to it. Yeah. And so I think that's where my mind is on that conversation. And what what's it going to take for us as hunters to take some responsibility in this effort and a state agency is trying to work with hunters to manage a deer population that is challenging? I have a dear friend and I and I know I've known him a long time and I know him well. And he's like he's uncorrupted.

Okay. And where he's landed is he's. is he's landed just he sort of landed at just a general sense of dismay and disappointment with the American deer hunter and he's like stop talking to me about all this conservation bullshit and your pitman Roberts and money and you're all this and that managers ask you again and again and again to kill some dows and you can't be bothered you can't be troubled that much like you can't be trouble as much as what it takes the gut of dough in the woods i'm envious to the west a lot right where where you have way more demand and pressure for tags than then there are animals to provide that opportunity right in the east you you can't give out enough tags or create an incentive and you can't give them enough days to hunt to create an incentive to harvest what would be an appropriate number of deer yeah the other thing

thing we face is small land ownership, private landowner, you know, decisions that dictate what a local deer population looks like, right? There's a non-migatory species that exists based on what the pressure locally does to that population. So rules and regulations can't really help address this challenge. It really is about individuals taking some level of ownership of managing their deer herd together and with their neighbors, especially in. states that have small land ownership. You got tens of thousands of acres in South Texas, right? Like you control the way everything happens.

But in much of the east, you've got small land parcels. And you've got to be working with your neighbors to figure out what your population is going to look like. Yeah. And folks just aren't terribly willing to work with one another. But we can't do it through regulatory. We just can't. Regulations aren't going to get us out of this problem. They haven't got us into it and won't get us out of it.

I judge hunters by what they're eating at dinner. yeah if i go to a big hunter's house and i'm like dude what you're eating stuff from the store you're eating chicken breasts right dude you could be shooting those for eight bucks a piece right right right right they're begging you it's eight it's eight dollars right right right to get a dough day yeah we're not hungry right like we don't rely on that for what you pay for that state dude you could have bought a whole deer yep yep yeah not hungry not hungry so what is there anything that i should I didn't ask you about that I didn't ask you. Gosh, we've covered the wide range of things.

I thought the thing I didn't ask you about. We don't need to spend time on it. Earlier I was saying my early perception of it was human health, which is shifting over time. How much does that linger around in your head? So I think the mountain of data suggests that the risk to humans from consuming a CWD infected deer is pretty low. Yeah.

If there is one. Well, at this point, it's zero. Yeah, yeah, we don't know. We don't know. I shouldn't say zero risk. There's... Yeah, yeah, there's no known evidence that it's been transmitted to people. And so I think in a lot of ways that we need to remain diligent and understanding.

It's one of those, also the space where what's possible and what's probable, right, is a really hard one to have that conversation. But ice be petrified. I used to be petrified by it. And now I'm also, now I know that I've, like, I'm sure I have all along. Now I know for a fact that I've eaten positive meat. So I used to be petrified of it. Now I've just, now it just sort of lives in the back of my head. Yeah.

I mean, I think we have to communicate what the public health officials tell us they want communicated in terms of out of an abundance of caution. We tell you not to eat any sick deer regardless of what. Is that your state stance? Yeah. Yeah. I get why you have to do that. but I'm also I don't think the agency

used to be saying that without simultaneously saying but no one's ever gotten it. Yeah and I think we try to do that too and it's your decision right like we don't tell you you shouldn't we see here's what is communicated it's recommended not to

you choose to that that's your decision to make. I don't even know what the asterisk is is it should it be no one's ever contracted SWD the asteric being but there's a recommendation you don't eat it or should it be we recommend you don't eat it and the asterisk is

no one's ever gotten it right what's the headline right yeah i don't think i used think the headline was don't eat it and the asterisk was no one's ever gotten it in my head it switched the headline is no one's gotten it yeah yeah and the asterisk is maybe don't eat it i don't know yeah and so then those that drift down the you know the extremely cautious approach you know are somewhat fearful that ask more folks consume more of them. Our behavior of consuming deer, you know, when you, when you shoot a deer, the likelihood of you consuming the vast majority of it is much higher than, than, for example, when they were dealing with BSE in England when you were eating one meal of an infected cow, right? And so that's some of the concerns those folks have.

It's the repeat potential for repeated exposure. Yeah. And then through time to the whole damn deer. Yeah, right. And through time, there's significant. suggestions that the preons are changing, right? That the confirmation of the preon protein is looking a little different or there's slight variations, which may interrupt some of that species specific barriers.

But again, we don't have any evidence that that's happened yet. Got it. Yeah. Anything else I should have asked you about? Not that I can think of. Right. There's probably something, but. Thanks for coming on, man.

Again, this is, you've been listening to Jason Sumner as the director. of the Missouri Department of Conservation. And on all that, last note, on all that subject of whitetails, all deer in general, it's White Tail Week at Meat Eater. September 28 to October 4, we got a big giveaway.

We got the ultimate White Tail giveaway, which is live at the Meat Eater store. So check this out. We got the headline prize where you win a guided whitetail hunt with Mark Canyon and our friend Jordan Budd as a guide of whitet hunt. as a guide away to hunting Nebraska.

I've been out there hunting a place of sweet. There's a Matthews bow, a tethered saddle, a meat brand meat grinder, a grill of smoker, Sig Binoes, and dude, Sig, binos are the best binos. First Light Whisper Down, crispy boots, annex membership. So keep an eye on Meat Eater channels all week for everything,

White Tail. And head to the Meat Eaters store to sign up for the ultimate White Tail giveaway. If you get to hunt Jordan's place, you're going to be loving it. and once again Jason Summers thanks for coming on man I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something I care about a lot of the white tail deer and it's an important topic and it's one we're just going to have to continue to talk about it. If you hate hearing about it you people that listen, tough titty. We're going to keep talking about it. Thanks everybody.

It's Steve Rinella here and it is Whitetail Week at Meat Eater. That's right. The most anticipated week of the year. Whitetail week at Meat Eater. Both seasons are open, are making rubs and all week we're going deep on the most hunted big game animal in America. We're also running the ultimate white tail giveaway. The sort of the premier part of this package is you win a hunt with Mark Kenyon and Jordan

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