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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
This is the meater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Listening past, you can't predict.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise,
gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
just gear that works. Check it out at first light
dot com. That's f I R S T L I
T E dot com. All right, real quick, right up

(00:44):
right up top for anything that happens. You know, it's
hunting season. When Phil starts prepping for a theater production.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
That's how I mark the seasons too.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, yeah, Phil, Phil stepped away from theater. I never
really stepped away. It's just tough.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
It's tough on the family for me to do shows
because I missed bedtime for months, and it's just a
lot of commuting.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
You know, I live out of town.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
So and that one year he was kissing the other
lady besides his wife, a whole bunch. I was in
the play. He had to kiss a lady.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
It was scandalous to know one besides Steve.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
But yeah, rehearse that for all fall.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well I did.

Speaker 5 (01:19):
I did one, as long as you keep it to
the regularly scheduled rehearsal.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
That's correct. I did a play in January, Steve, you
just weren't there.

Speaker 4 (01:27):
You didn't see it. I think the only person at
the company saw it was Randall.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
So you're prepping up now to do I'm.

Speaker 3 (01:31):
Doing Christmas Carol again straight? Yeah, I think we're doing
it straight. We're no no steampunk icing on it, which
I think you were referring to.

Speaker 1 (01:40):
That's why I wanted to talk touch on this very quickly. Okay,
there's one modification. Yeah, when they're always talking about buying
that goose.

Speaker 5 (01:48):
You know, sure, yeah, the big Christmas goose.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Farthing a shilling for a farthing, like is that an
expensive goose or not? You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (02:00):
I think it's just supposed to be an expensive get.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
If they would, if you would just try this this year, okay,
switch it to US currency and just for inflation.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Okay, So I'm the kids like three dollars for a goose,
or maybe they.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Would probably be like, oh, ship, that's a very expensive goose.

Speaker 3 (02:24):
Sure, or they they could say, you know, a shilling
and a farthing and then just turn to the audience
break character and just kind of whisper.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
It's like three hundred dollars today.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
Isn't that nuts?

Speaker 4 (02:34):
Can you? Okay?

Speaker 5 (02:35):
Back to the program? Is it?

Speaker 1 (02:37):
I would to enjoy that place so much more? Talk
about that?

Speaker 5 (02:41):
Yeah, currency conversion live? Does he? Is it an actual liner?
Is it from Scrooge where he says the biggest goose
in all of London? Because then when that imply it's
going to be expensive?

Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yeah, yeah, when he's I had a change of heart.
I think you know, bud go buy the biggest goose.
You can find something like that.

Speaker 4 (03:00):
That's a great accent.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Oh I could do that whole damn play?

Speaker 4 (03:03):
Yeah, I might.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
You should.

Speaker 5 (03:06):
Christmas Tours coming up?

Speaker 1 (03:08):
All right, The Wild Turkey Doc is back. Now we're
actually starting the show. The Wild Turkey Doc is back.
Mike Chamberlain, very popular guest on the show. It came
in and then tells you everything you ever want to
know about turkeys. Today, we're not talking about turkeys though,
except we're gonna talk about turkeys a little bit, of course.
We're here to talk about chronic waste and disease and
interesting some interesting findings about that, which is gonna stir

(03:32):
the old pot, the hoax. The c w d's a hoax.
C w d's a scam pot. You know the pot.
Oh yeah, a lot of guys stirring that pie there.
It is a big pot with lots of spoons. Uh, Mike.
Doctor Chamberlain is from the Warnell School of Forestry and
Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. He's the National

(03:57):
Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor sir A or the the
the the is only one.

Speaker 4 (04:04):
Only one. This is the first endowed position that's Turkey centric.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
I might like to have that role.

Speaker 4 (04:10):
Come on. I'm a few years from retirement.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
And he leads the Wild Turkey Lab.

Speaker 4 (04:18):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Mark Ruter? Am I saying that right?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Correct?

Speaker 1 (04:21):
Okay? Mark Ruter's here a colleague of doctor Chamberlain's. He's
from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia.
You got some accolades here that I don't understand. Southeastern
Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study. What's that mean?

Speaker 2 (04:40):
So it's squiddest for short. You'll hear most in the
wildlife community call it squidis, even though it has nothing
to do with squids. So we're a cooperative. So Squidist
was founded in nineteen fifty seven by state wildlife agencies
in the southeastern United States, and it was really founded
at a time where we had no no capacity, no

(05:00):
expertise within state wildlife management agencies for disease and health topics.
And it was actually founded in the face of one
of the better known diseases of white tail deer, and
that's hemorrhagic disease HD and blue tongue. And so we
were founded at this time to sort of provide expertise,

(05:24):
diagnostic capacity, and understanding of diseases in white tail deer
at a time where restoration efforts were still kind of ongoing.
Because the fear was that this disease was going to
complicate the recovery of white tail deer, and so states
couldn't individually stand up capacity to have a person or
facility for just focused on disease. So they went the

(05:46):
cooperative model. And so that was a long time ago
and we're still still here. We have today we have
seventeen state wildlife agencies one territory in the Southeast, and
then have federal partners US fishali Life Service and US
Geological sort of provides our core sort of funding, and
we serve the States and.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
You're the director, correct. Do you carry one of these
in your wallet? Someone gave me this.

Speaker 5 (06:13):
Not that your insurance card.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
It's this little card that if you start dying or something,
it tells people what you did at the hospital. Someone
gave that to me at Coronell. It tells people at
the hospital, Hey, man.

Speaker 2 (06:28):
I do some weird stuff.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Yeah, I should give that card to you. I don't
have one of these cards, but I feel obligated to
give you that card because it apply more to your
line of work than my line of work.

Speaker 5 (06:38):
Oh yeah, does somebody ever go have you ever come
in contact with.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Have you been in contact with any animals that seems sick?

Speaker 2 (06:46):
And that's my job.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
And then doctor Callahan's here.

Speaker 5 (06:51):
Oh he's not a doctor, got an honorary doctor, straight.

Speaker 1 (06:57):
Up, old cal doc Doc Doc Callahan's grandkid Callahan.

Speaker 4 (07:03):
I like that.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Yeah, we're gonna talk about some interesting findings around chronic
wasting disease, and don't be worried. We will start out
by talking about what in the hell is chronic wasting
disease and why is it controversial? Not yet, because first
let everybody know, we got we got a new show
coming out called Meat Eater Sheds. It's drops Thursday, September

(07:26):
twenty five. We got episodes. We don't go into people's homes.
We go into their sheds, barns, whatever. We profile their properties.
We got one with Jeff Foxworthy's game room, Kevin Murphy's
exceptionally chaotic shed, Heather Duville's fur processing facilities, and more.

(07:51):
One episode every Thursday, kicking off on September twenty five.
All right, I've been thinking out for a couple of
minutes at a time. For days, I've been thinking about
how to start this conversation. I think I want to
start like this, one of you guys, and you can
pick you can you can thumb wrestler, So who gets

(08:12):
to do it? One of you guys has to very quickly,
just to get people up to speed, very quickly, explain
what is chronic wasting disease. Okay, the super quick explanation
of what is chronic wasting disease. Then I'm gonna explain
I'm gonna Devil's advocate a little bit. And now I'm

(08:32):
going to explain what guys on the street in the bars,
not so much on the street. Well, guys, in the
field and in the bars, say about it, okay, in
a way that will capture my own concerns and then
capture the other people's concerns, and then we'll dig in.

(08:55):
Is that fair?

Speaker 4 (08:55):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:56):
Yeah, because I want to do a little bit about
like what are we talking about? And then and then
kind of why someone should be paying attention to this.

Speaker 4 (09:03):
Yeah, all right, Yeah. So chronic wasting disease is, if you,
if you kind of think about it, thirty thousand foot
so proteins or if you go back to grade school,
proteins are comprised of amino acids, right, They're the building clocks,
I believe you. Okay, So these amino acids that build
these proteins are supposed to fold naturally, and though they

(09:27):
fold to support basic cell functions in the body. So
what happens with CWD is you have this particular type
of protein called a preon protein, and it misfolds. And
we don't know why that misfolding occurs, but when it misfolds,
the body can't shed the protein through enzymatic breakdowns like

(09:48):
it would normally shed proteins, and so the proteins accumulate
and they tend to accumulate in the brain, and what
that accumulation causes is neurological. If you look at the
brain through microscopically, it essentially looks like it has holes
in it.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
Why does something accumulating create.

Speaker 4 (10:08):
Holes because the body cannot shed the protein, and so
this is this is the dumb.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
But I feel like that would make a ball, not
a hole. If it was shedding too many, it make
a hole. I mean, this is not coming from a
professional person.

Speaker 4 (10:25):
Yeah, Mark, what happened like a tumor build up.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
Once you have this, you know, the normal protein in
the body, which we all have right now, it goes
through a sort of a recycle process, right it's all
a lot of proteins in our body are built and
then after it's sort of lifespan, enzymes in the body
will kind of surgically kind of break it apart and
recycle those components and you start over with other proteins.

(10:51):
Once this prenom protein takes this different shape, then the
enzymes that the body has to snippet apart don't recognize
it anymore. They can't get to those sites. And so
rather than naturally degrade and recycle this protein over time,
it just persists, and then it's sticky and more sort

(11:14):
of kind of can can glob onto it, and so
you end up accumulating these proteins that your body can't
break down anymore, where the deer's body can't break down anymore.
And so it's that accumulation of material in a very
sensitive space neurons around neurons in the brain, that's your
information super highway controls everything in your body. And you

(11:35):
start to put stuff in there that's not supposed to
be in there, it's going to be less efficient.

Speaker 1 (11:39):
Okay, have you ever tried to when you say a hole,
do you mean a whole?

Speaker 2 (11:43):
So how that starts. What they're talking about is when
you're looking at a tissue microscopically. So if we were
to take a deer's brain out and cut it into
super thin chips, you know, we put that on a
microscope slide, we stain it, we look at it under
a microscope. Then you can see the individual cells and.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
Oh, at that level, at that level.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
So we're talking about in a neuron, which is right.
It's kind of the workhourse of your the central like
the brain and sending you know, information down to everywhere
in your body. Those neurons that are the cell you know,
you can get we call them vacuoles clear spaces. Basically
when you're looking at it in the neuron and around

(12:26):
the neuron, and when you do a special stain to
look at that, you'll see that's where this preon is accumulating.
So you can see a lot of these these preon
proteins and abnormal preons accumulating in a very sensitive spot
in the body.

Speaker 4 (12:41):
I use the bed sheet analogy. If you ever tried
to fold a fitted bed sheet.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Oh, you know what, it's funny you mentioned that my
wife is yelling at me a whole bunch of sat
Night about that.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
Yep, there's only if I was.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Almost gonna look it up.

Speaker 4 (12:54):
There's only one.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
I don't understand how she gets a legit fold right.

Speaker 5 (12:59):
And and so I was in my early thirties when
we had a literal barroom discussion on what a duvet
cover is, and that's when I learned what it was.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
Yeah, I hate them. We use them, and I hate them.

Speaker 5 (13:14):
Yeah, how I thought that that was an option. Yeah,
it's not a mandatory piece of bedkit.

Speaker 1 (13:19):
It's a blanket for your blanket.

Speaker 5 (13:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:21):
Years ago when I when I started reading about CWD,
I was trying to think of an analogy that would
allow me to conceptualize it and dumb Mike speak and
I was like, okay, so these these proteins are they're
folding and it's misfolded. And then the fitted bed sheet
came to mind because I've never understood why I can't

(13:42):
fold it and my wife can't. But all I know
is the way she does it is perfect and it fits,
and the way I do it and Mark does it
and you do it is all wrong.

Speaker 1 (13:52):
I mean to fold it up and put it on
like a shelf.

Speaker 4 (13:54):
Yes, it never fits in the same space. And see
what she's got going on that her sheet fits. And
that's the way I kind of in my dumb mic brain,
that's how I kind of think about it. Is when
it's folded perfectly, it works every time. When it misfolds,
it never functions the same.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
Well.

Speaker 5 (14:11):
Plus, it's just another level of a household too, to
have more than one of those or more than one
per bed.

Speaker 1 (14:18):
Now we got a lot of beds, a lot of
people living there. Okay, so keep going. So that's what
that is. That's a preon disease. Yes, and humans we
call there's is there only one preon disease in humans?

Speaker 4 (14:34):
There's krutz Felt Jacob's disease.

Speaker 1 (14:36):
Okay, that's it.

Speaker 4 (14:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (14:38):
And I didn't understand that that we all carry these
these preons currently either whatever reason. I think that's the
first time I've heard that.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
We all have normal in animals as well, normal prion proteins.
The functions aren't entirely known, but their their fate is
right there. Recycle and they have a lifespan, and they
move and when when they don't, And it's that accumulation
slowly over time that that leads to the actual disease.

Speaker 1 (15:08):
And we they're in cattle, there's a prion disease called
mad cow disease, and sheep there's a prion disease called
scrapy humans yaka crutch felt.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
What is it?

Speaker 4 (15:24):
Utch felt?

Speaker 1 (15:25):
Crush? I always screw up which one comes first. These
are all kind of the same thing. It's just manifests
a certain way in cattle, manifest a certain way in sheep.
Is that a fair way to think about it.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
It's a family, it's it's basically a category of pathogen, right,
So we think, you know, normally more commonly about bacteria
or a virus or a fungus or a parasite. So
the prions are sort of in this umbrella category known
as transmissible sponge of form encephalopathy or t SE. Transmissible
meaning you know, moving from one animal to the other.

(16:00):
Bunge of form gets at what we just talked about
with those prions accumulating kind of greeding holes more or
less in the brain. In Cephalopathy just means the disease
of the brain, and so chattle b sc bovine sponge
of form, and cephalopathies, scrapies c j D, and humans UH.
One of the earlier described was kuru in Papua New Guinea,

(16:23):
some ritualistic cannibalism that led to in humans, you know,
a prion disease. There's transmissible mink uh encephalopathy. So there's
there's banks, so there's there's others. But they all kind
of share similar traits. The one that makes CWD so
wicked is that it it's shed and passes from animal

(16:49):
to animal efficiently, so scrapey does as well. Those two
kind of set apart. As far as uniqueness among some
of the t ses.

Speaker 5 (16:57):
And and scrapy is is preventable through a a vaccine, right.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Not a vaccine, it's it's really through so one thing,
scraping and scraping and cwds share some similarities relative to
you know, like I just said that the prions actually
leave the animal's body and can transmit to one another.
There's environmental components, so animals can get infected from the environment,

(17:29):
or they can get infected from their buddies. But one
thing that that Scrapey had sort of that that led
to some effective management for the domestic livestock industry is
that genetically there are some some different genotypes of sheep
related to that that you know, the preon protein that

(17:51):
I mentioned, Well, that preon protein is encoded by a gene,
and so there's a there's a particular genotype in domestic
sheep that they're they're pretty resistant, very resistant to cw
or to scrapey. And so through intensive you know, breeding
management and domestic sheep and then culling of everybody else,

(18:16):
they've been able to get on top of it. And
so that's a tool that scrapeye has that we don't
we don't have access to.

Speaker 5 (18:23):
God, dear God, I didn't I didn't realize that I know.
I do know that the culling part of that in
the domestic world is severe. There's no nobody gets left behind.

Speaker 1 (18:35):
And when we talk about chronic waste disease, we're talking
about one of these prion diseases that afflicts members of
the deer family. Yeah, so servants, deer, white tailed deer, mule, deer, elk, moose, caribou, servants. Ye,

(18:57):
think of things that if you're sitting there at home,
think of things that have antlers and shed those antlers.

Speaker 4 (19:06):
Yes, and it's it's a one hundred percent fatal disease.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
This has been Now we're going to lay out I
want to I want to briefly lay out what what different,
what you hear different hunters say about this situation. It's
part of while Yeah, it was first identified in the
seventies in Colorado, nineteen sixty seven. I was a sixty
seven on a research facility.

Speaker 4 (19:33):
That's right. I think it was formerly described an eighty
nineteen eighty, I believe.

Speaker 1 (19:36):
Yeah, So we found out about it, not to say it,
you know, who knows the history of it. Who knows
did it? Did it emerge one day? Did it emerge
that year? And we found it. That's like an outstanding question.
But it was identified on a research facility in Colorado,

(19:57):
and as we've looked for it more, we find more
of it. Though it definitely seems to spread. It's not
just detection, right fair, Yes, we tend to find a
lot of CWD in places that have a lot of deer,

(20:20):
which leads people has historically led people to say, if
it's in a place that has a lot of deer,
then it must not be that much of a problem,
because how could it be that bad if the places
that have the most deer have CWD. I'm still shooting bucks.
I'm still shooting big bucks. We got some of the

(20:42):
highest deer densities in the country. Where's the problem? And
in fact, at times people have come in early on,
in the early on in the battle against c w D,
you'd have an outbreak in an area and wildlife managers
would propose, well, let's try to go in and eradicate
every deer in the area to stop the spread, which

(21:05):
struck people as like quite counterintuitive. Here we're talking about
a disease that could potentially kill the deer, but there's
a ton of them around, and the remedy is to
kill them, all right, that seems odd, right, So that
strikes people's odd. Another thing will come in and they'll say, hey,

(21:26):
we have this disease that's spreading from seems to be
spreading from animal to animal, and so we're gonna make
it that you're not supposed to bait out on the
ground because that'll make deer come together. And people might
point out, I don't use bait, but I see deer
together all the time, right, They have sex, they hang out,

(21:47):
they nurse from one each other, they socialize.

Speaker 4 (21:51):
The same tree.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, they play grab ass whatever, like, they're always in contact.
I don't see how me not putting out and see
how me putting bait out is making deer socialized when
I've been watching deer my whole life in the socialize.
So what's the big deal. Another thing guys might come
and say, and again this is all stuff from like
well meaning people that love deer. Guys might come and

(22:15):
say they're they're advising me against eating deer. That that
you know I should no deer. No dear test negative.
A deer might test not detectable, right, meaning you get
either if you submit if you kill a deer and
you want to be like, hey, I want to find

(22:35):
out if it's got CWD. You don't get negative, you
get not found, you get not detected. So off of
guys will say it tested negative, and people will point out,
it didn't test negative, it tested not found. Okay, so
we have no case. We have no case ever in
the history of the United States of America, the world, whatever.

(22:58):
There's no case ever where it has been shown that
a human has contracted chronic wasting disease. So people will say,
why is my game agency, Why is centers for Disease Control?
Why are they saying don't eat positive meat because of
a health risk, but there's no demonstrative health risk. It

(23:24):
winds up smacking a little bit of to people, it
winds up smacking a little bit of COVID. Right, be
really afraid, be really afraid, but we don't really know
what you're supposed to. Just be afraid. And that is
the thing that strikes people's like, you keep telling me
not to do it, but no one's gotten it. Various
versions of this, the annoyances around baiting restrictions, the idea

(23:50):
that we're gonna coll or eradicate deer in certain areas,
The restriction like you're not supposed to bait, you can't
put bait down anymore, has, in my view, has turned
people a lot where they don't want to hear about
research anymore. They just want to say it's all bullshit, right, yep.

(24:12):
To bring COVID back, I'm about done setting this whole
thing up. But I'm just trying to tell you, like,
to bring COVID back would be there was a thing.
People were getting sick, people were dying of COVID nineteen.
At the same time, people are like, oh, if someone
brings a box your house, don't touch the box. Your
kids can't go to school, you can't fly in an airplane,

(24:33):
your business needs to go out of business.

Speaker 4 (24:35):
You need to change your behavior.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
Yeah, right, And then in the end people are like, man,
I'm not going to listen to anything anybody says. I'm
just fed up.

Speaker 4 (24:46):
Yep, I'm done.

Speaker 1 (24:47):
And then they're done.

Speaker 4 (24:48):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (24:50):
We've hit this is my view. In my view, we've
hit a dangerous spot around conversations around chronic waste and
disease because we've had a lot of guys are like
hit the done phase. They're done, and I don't think
we should be done right, Like we should be asking

(25:12):
questions and looking at what's going to happen. Because I
think that this conversation, the conversations about this could be
very different in twenty years.

Speaker 5 (25:23):
I think it would be worthwhile to kind of dissect
the done.

Speaker 1 (25:27):
Like what done looks like? Yeah, well, because.

Speaker 5 (25:30):
There's, as with everything, there's people who get there through
for a bunch of different reasons, right.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah, like self like selfish reasons.

Speaker 4 (25:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (25:40):
There's like the the what we talk about in hunting
all the time, which is like the the heritage part.
It's like, well, Grandpa managed white tails this way. Grandpa
was awesome. How could anything he do be wrong? And
that offends me personally, can't change. There's the I don't

(26:03):
care what anybody says. I just want big bucks. This
is the way that we get big bucks. And then
there's the vein of folks who are like, well, what's
the bigger crime here? Eating CWD meat or throwing it away?

Speaker 4 (26:21):
Right?

Speaker 5 (26:21):
And there's people who are like, this is my time
in the deer woods and the meat is a huge
part of it. And they struggle And I run into
these people a lot. They really struggle with having to
face that decision. So instead of facing that decision, they

(26:42):
just go full ignorance. They're like, I will not get
this thing tested because I don't want to face that
decision right and notify me and if things change.

Speaker 4 (26:53):
All of that that you just brought up as context
is what Mark and I have been talking about for
weeks and is largely why we're here sitting with you,
is to have that conversation because as researchers, we look
at CWD through a certain lens. As a deer hunter,

(27:15):
I look at CWD through an entirely different lens. I
understand the frustration that you just mentioned cal and then
I have to I have to step back and realize
that one thing we're seeing with CWD is that it
doesn't function the same across the landscape. It can affect
certain populations differently. We are also seeing that you it

(27:42):
takes this disease has a long incubation period, and it
takes decades to run its course, not months or years, decades,
And so within a population, within a population, so not
within an animal, but within within a population. Yeah, so
within at the end animal level, you're talking, you know,
eighteen to twenty four months for this disease to progress.

(28:06):
And at the population level, you're talking decades for the population.
So in essence, kind of think about it like this.
You have these two axes on the graph. On the
bottom you have time, you have years, and on the
vertical axis you have prevalence, right, And what you're seeing

(28:29):
is that in low prevalence, a population can literally trend
through time at one percent prevalence, almost undetectable for years,
and then it slowly starts to increase in prevalence. And
when I say slow, I'm talking a decade to go
from one to two percent, and then two to three percent,

(28:52):
and then to five percent and then to twenty percent.
And you start seeing this exponential increase in prevalence rates
and we don't know.

Speaker 1 (29:04):
What. Give me like a place, give me a place
in the country where we could be talking about we're
like one percent for a decade.

Speaker 5 (29:12):
So and then there but you said there is like
a takeoff point.

Speaker 4 (29:17):
Yeah, so what So what Mark and I run into
is we do research like this Arkansas study we just finished,
and you don't know when you start to study where
you are on the curve. Oh yeah, and so you
have prevalence data, so in other words as we can
talk about. You know, an agency collects prevalence data and

(29:38):
they let's say they think they're at five percent prevalence. Well,
then they start expanding testing and they realize, yeah, we
are at five, or maybe we're at fifteen, or maybe
we're at twenty. And then you have other situations where
you have we think we're at twenty and we're at
thirty five or forty. And then you have other situations

(29:59):
where you have a single detection and then after lots
and lots of testing in that area, you have two
or three or five animals that are positive. So the
disease is functioning differently across the landscape, and so that
creates confusion and frustration and uncertainty because this disease, as

(30:22):
Mark can explain, didn't read the book on how to
be a disease. So that creates a lot of uncertainty.
And so when we go design these field studies trying
to get information to assist agencies with their decision making,
we don't really know where we are on that curve.
And once we think we figure out where we are, sometimes,

(30:45):
you know, some of the some of the work that's
coming out now Arkansas West Virginia, Wisconsin. They're seeing that
they they're at a different point along this curve than
they believe they were when the research project started, which
is what we saw in Arkansas. We thought we were
at a point and in reality we were much farther

(31:06):
up the curve to where prevalence was extremely high. And
that just speaks to the complexity of the disease.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, just to follow up on a couple of things,
I think at the root of so much confusion relative
to c TOWD is adjusting our time scale. Right, So
heemorrhagic disease, for instance, there's not a deer hunter who
doesn't fear haemorrhagic disease. You know, messing up a season, right,
and it's sweeping through and that's actively happening right now.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yes, So like just just for people that know some terms,
you might hear EHD, you might hear blue tongue YEP,
which comes in and just wham.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yes, it's it's it comes in. You know, it's a flood,
a quick one, right. You can go from zero to
sixty in the span of weeks, right, and you'll have
it's very visible, it's explosive of it's clustered, so you
can you see death, you smell death. It's everywhere, right,
it's very jarring, very alarming. And so you know, and

(32:10):
I've spent a long time studying that disease, and it's
you know, it's a it's it's got a lot of
sort of it'll grab your attention really quick. Right, it's
very concerning c w D and it's and it's all boom, right,
it's it's in. It's in a matter of weeks or
months exactly exactly.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
They didn't know where.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah, you're wondering about how do I deal with all
these carcases. They're starting to smell bad, right, Flip that
to CWD. It's it's completely opposite. There's there's multiple examples
in the country of hiding in plain sight, not for years,
but for decades. Right, it's cryptic on the landscape. You
don't see it until you until you see it. And

(32:56):
so when I think about CWD, I think about it
in individuals and I think about it in populations at
the individual level. You know, we're talking about we think
of it in terms of months and years, not days
and weeks like we would hemorrhagic disease. So months and
years for an individual, but like Mike said, for a population,
we think in terms of years and decades. And so

(33:18):
it's that slow, cryptic nature of the disease that just
I think at that is the root of so many
challenges for people to wrap their heads around in terms of,
you know, do we need to care about it? Why
do I need to care about it. I'm not seeing
anything on the landscape. Heemorrhagic disease just stacked up a
bunch of bodies in my property. I don't see anything.

Speaker 1 (33:40):
Yeah, Meaning some guy turns in a deer for testing
first time in his county. There's a deer that's positive
in his county. Wildlife managers then like, good lord, let's
rewrite the rule book. And people at home, deer hunters
at home, are like, I just don't see the issue, right,

(34:00):
that that might be a thing that they come away
with because they're like, I don't get it. I saw
all kinds of deer, yeah, and I can't. I'm having
great hunting. Why is there a problem?

Speaker 4 (34:10):
Right? I can't speak for a state agency, but Mark
and I can both. You know, state agencies take a
very Most state agencies take a fairly scripted approach to
dealing with CWD, and what they're trying to do is
they're trying to reduce transmission rates amongst individuals. They're trying

(34:31):
to prevent the transport of the disease outside of the
im mediatet local area. Because what we do know with
CWD is it starts out as a focal spot on
the landscape and then it slowly spreads outward from that spot.
And so what agencies are trying to do, you'll see
common responses be the creation of a CWD management zone, right,

(34:55):
So they'll delineate in an area, a geographic area, and
they'll create restrictions on import and export of carcasses or
parts of carcasses. They will ban sometimes you know ban
or alter how feed is applied to the landscape.

Speaker 5 (35:12):
Yeah, beating bands, yep.

Speaker 4 (35:13):
They'll often liberalize exactly and remove antler point restrictions and
things like that because what they're doing.

Speaker 5 (35:21):
And here's like one of those major friction points is
like the state is actively working against the quality of
my personal deer hunting yep.

Speaker 4 (35:31):
And what what's so what's at play there? And I
get it as a deer hunter, I totally get that,
but you have to look at it through their lens.
They are publicly, by law charged with managing for conservation
and sustainability of the species of wildlife in their state,
and so they're dealt this gut punch of being told

(35:51):
you have this disease on on your landscape. They they
have two approaches. They can They could be nihilistic and
just say I'm not doing anything, or they could take
this approach that we don't know where we are on
the curve, so we're going to create this zone. We're
going to expand our surveillance and testing, and meanwhile we're

(36:15):
going to try to reduce transmission. Right, we know that
deer are licking each other, and we know that they're
feeding under the same tree and all of that. But
for instance, what feeding is doing is putting animals at
the same spot on the landscape repeatedly and therefore changing

(36:38):
how the preon can get into the environment and then
remain in the environment. So an animal coming to a
feeder every day and eating at that feeder every day
is very different from a preon accumulation standpoint than if
he's walking around in a food plot or going under
an oak tree, and the ac warns are there, he's

(37:01):
around other deer for a couple of weeks, and then
he's gone. That's not the way a feed or functions.
So that's what the agencies I'm not I'm not trying
to justify their actions. I'm simply explaining that that's the
logic is that let's put this.

Speaker 1 (37:15):
More dear from farther away and put them on the
same like literally the same square photograph.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
I'm mixing social groups that normally wouldn't have those interactions.

Speaker 4 (37:24):
That has been shown that you know, you will bring
multiple social groups, think about dose, for instance, matriarchal family groups.
You will bring multiple family groups to the same location
and otherwise would not be there at that time.

Speaker 5 (37:38):
One of the issues is like just like how I
personally contextualize these things. And when we talked about like
preon's around the landscape forever, you can't get rid of them.
My visual my mental visual right is like that little
tiny sucker group of them is sitting there on the

(37:58):
tip of that forber grass forever. And then I saw
some body produced something that showed like how those preawns
eventually like work their their way down into the soil
to where they're they're just effectively not able to come

(38:22):
in contact with any sort of a grazer, right, which
makes like it rains, there's dew in the morning, it
starts like working its way down into the soil. And
that to me was one of those like really, like, boy,
you're kind of stupid for not having thought about this
yourself moments, right, but that is how you kind of

(38:44):
think about these things on first glance. Right, it's like, oh,
it's there forever, which she means then then was the
point in controlling this?

Speaker 4 (38:52):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (38:52):
Right, I wanted to revisit one of the things you
said cal about sort of the disruption CWD has once
it's detected in an area to someone's here and now opportunity, right,
And I think a lot of those those you know,
common actions that an agency takes it does it seems restrictive.

(39:13):
It's how CWD has kind of become vilified in some ways,
but really those those actions target trying to lower the
risk of other deer getting CWD. So again, timescale, it's
we've got to adjust it. Those actions are they're further now,
but they're also for the future. To Mike's point about

(39:33):
stewardship and sustainability of the population, because we've got these
examples now of when we're at the end of that curve,
like when we're way towards decades down the road, we
we have glimpses into what that picture looks like, and
so so a lot of those actions are trying to
prevent or slow the movement in time along this this

(39:55):
sort of what phase of disease is the population at?

Speaker 1 (40:00):
I desperately want to get into what you guys found
when you did your work in Arkansas, but I wanted
just a little more. We're very heavy on front loading here,
so apologies, But has it ever been demonstrated this is
a huge question, apologies, have any of these early detection restrictions.

(40:21):
Has any of them ever been demonstrated to be effective?
Is that yes they have? Or yes? You understand the
question I.

Speaker 6 (40:30):
Do that I think that I do is to both
as well as the uh yeah, that's it's that's challenging, right,
because that that's a big.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Desire among many, right, is in the and we and
we often will sort of isolate one, right, will isolate
you know, carcass movement, or will isolate baiting restrictions or
feeding restrictions or faun rehabilitation or or removal of aprs
or whatever. You know, it's sort of the all la
carte you of options for these are the tools we

(41:02):
got in the toolbox. The challenge with evalue, like evaluating
one at a time, is that's not how they've really deployed.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
When you apply it. Let's say I'm saying does applying
the whole toolbox? I don't mean to carve out what
restriction was effective. Have we ever had a situation where
there was a detection of the disease of a novel detection,
so a detection of the disease in a in a
place that had been previously unknown, The toolbox is applied,

(41:34):
and then lo and behold, we never get another detection
New York Or is it always it's just full blast ahead?

Speaker 2 (41:43):
No, it's not always there. There are successes, right, so
there's you know, there's you also have to kind of
reframe the version of success too, Like the best example
of success would be New York right where they had
a detection there there was a captive facility involved, there
was depopulation of those facilities and aggressive removal of deer

(42:05):
in a in a tight radius around that area. That
was sustained for several years, and they did not have
another detection, despite having detections not only inside the fence
but also in wild deer outside the fence.

Speaker 1 (42:17):
So that's that's reminding me. I'm familiar with that story.

Speaker 4 (42:21):
So they caught it early. They caught it early enough
as that epicenter was growing that that focal area was
small enough around that captive facility that they could catch
it in time. And with that intensive culling around that facility,
they caught the spread before it had gotten too far,
which is what we're finding in a lot of our
wild populations. By the time an animals detect that is

(42:44):
being positive, the follow up surveillance is showing that it's
more widespread and more prevalent in some situations. In that situation,
to Mark's point, that is incredibly challenging to try to
manage that disease when you realize that you're there along
that curve than you thought you were.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, Like, you get a county. I keep talking about
county level, but a county's a county, and I don't know,
pick a state. A county in Missouri gets its first
ever CWD hit from a hunter submitted deer that's the first.
But then you're saying, then they'll come in and be like, okay,
let's go test a thousand deer, and they test a

(43:24):
thousand deer and they're like, well, shit, there's fifty there's
fifty positives. So they didn't catch the first deer. It
had been there for some time, like yeah, we at
that point, you're like, is it the first, and they're like,
oh no, it's not the first. This has obviously been here.
We just never caught it. We were looking, and now
that we're looking, it's all over the damn place. Right.
It's too late to it's too late to isolate that

(43:46):
little square mile of ground.

Speaker 4 (43:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
Yeah, So it changes the options, right, and if you
because that's you know, if you have if you have
say robust surveillance in a state, and you really have
some confidence that like this might not be the first,
but maybe it's really early, right, that that could that
could sort of justify some pretty severe aggression to try
to like, okay, if we got a chance, let's try

(44:11):
to stamp this out and to that to that point,
to your your victory point earlier, you know, there are
examples Minnesota, like a you know, within a state. Sometimes
we get we get focused on the state, but but
there are victories within states too, right. So you might
have an endemic region in a state or an area
that has c to BED established and you get a

(44:33):
spark somewhere else and through you know it's early, through
aggressive action, they kind of stamp it out and there's
no new cases, right, and so that shouldn't be lost,
I think in terms of victory even within an unaffected
region of a state. States are big areas, and the
disease moves slowly. So as long as we can be
aggressive on those outliers, you know, that will save you

(44:57):
know it, it will reset the time scale of this
disease in those areas. Right, then we're not marching up
that path where we're kind of starting over again and
waiting until the next one. As far as other successes,
that's where it gets a little bit more challenging with
some of these regulations. In areas where c TOBD is established,

(45:18):
it's about living with CWD, right, and so our goals
might be different. You know, some agencies are are controlling
you'll you'll you'll hear you know the term managing for prevalence, right,
So basically these actions are just trying to keep that
prevalence down to the to that likes as Mike was

(45:39):
talking about earlier, like you know, one percent to five percent,
you know, trying to prevent it from increasing sort of
exponentially up that slope. The more you can keep it
suppressed down, the the more you suppress the very negative
consequences at the population level. Right, and so a lot
of agencies are doing that. That's a hard that's a

(45:59):
hard like happy pill to swallow sometimes. Right, It's like
we're sort of redefining what success means.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
When we're talking success, we're no longer putting it back
in the bottle.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
No, no, no, yeah, thats As a deer hunter, I
think about it like like like this, okay, so the
agency is telling me I have to behave differently, Well,
why are they doing that?

Speaker 4 (46:18):
To Mark's point, they're trying if the prevalence is low,
they're trying to keep it low because a deer that
contracts CWD is going to die, and so that is
an animal that is not as we're going to talk about,
They're not going to have the same reproductive potential as

(46:39):
other deer. They're going to have lower survival they are
not going to contribute to the population in the same
way as a CWD negative animal, and therefore they're not
part of that surplus, that harvestable surplus moving forward, particularly
if they contract the disease when they're young. And so
what the agencies are trying to do is keep CWD

(47:02):
from not being a relevant form of mortality, if that
makes sense. They're trying to keep it to where it's
really not relevant at a population scale, and if they
if they can do that, then that is in many
ways a success. Like to see to your point, you're
not putting it back in the bottle, but what you're
doing is you're minimizing the impacts of the disease at

(47:25):
a population scale so that you don't go to where
some of these populations are going, which is there is
no more harvestable surplus. The disease has affected the population
in a way the prevalence has gotten so high that
there is no more surplus there.

Speaker 5 (47:44):
Any hunter harvest is going to have a population level effect.

Speaker 4 (47:49):
You start getting to a point where harvest is truly additive,
Like you have such a significant percentage of animals that
are dying solely from CWD that when you start tacking
on harvest and predation and these things that just affect
deer populations, you've chained, you've tipped the pendulum to the
point where the lens doesn't look at all like it

(48:13):
looked if the prevalence was two percent. When you get
to twenty percent or thirty percent or even higher as
we see in some populations, that's what the agencies are
trying to do is keep it low enough to where
it's not relevant.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
And that's that's scary what Mike is outlining there. But
I think it's really important for listeners to understand that
that that can happen at the same time, even in
the same state, in different areas as record harvests. You know,
everything you would want as a deer hunter is available
to you in one area and then in another. That

(48:47):
it's this focal nature of these very severe impacts and
that slow sort of expansion over time. And that's where
it's like that that can happen, you know, in the
same state or in the same general area for a
long time, where you have great opportunity, great abundance sort
of juxtaposed with this other scenario. It's hard to I

(49:08):
think that that's challenging for people because unless you've been
on the ground and you see sort of some of
the stuff Mike's talking about. You're on the landscape and
you see some of these these population level impacts of CWD.
You just hear about them. It's different from seeing it,
you know, and experiencing it. And so I think that's
a challenge for people because you know, you harvest the

(49:30):
buck and it tests positive. It was you know, it
was a healthy that, you know, totally normal looking deer.
That's your experience as a hunter with CWD, the real experience.
You hear all this stuff, but then your real experience
was that was a great looking deer. And to cow
it is all this noise about.

Speaker 4 (49:47):
CW and to Cal's point, now I have to I
have to discard that deer, right, Yeah, that's extremely frustrating
it and it causes confusion.

Speaker 5 (49:54):
Yeah, I shout to know at Doug Duran's place that
you were just like, like people stopped and looked at
it and they're like, that is a damn good looking animal, right,
You're just like, she's mature and just big and healthy
and always and she tested positive right for CWD, And
that was just a gut punch, you know.

Speaker 4 (50:13):
And what Doug is experienced, and I spoke with Doug
prior to coming here, and what he's experiencing is very
comparable to what's going on in northwest Arkansas, where you've
got parts of the landscape where to Mark's point, where
you're in these focal centers, and you flip a coin
and every other deer is testing positive or more particularly

(50:36):
for bucks. And then in the next county over they're
testing positive and the prevalence is lower, but the penulum
hasn't swung far enough to start seeing these population level consequences.
You still see deer, you still harvest deer. They're not
all positive. And so the chatter at the local feed

(50:56):
store is different from this county to this because it's
taken thirty years for this disease to get to where
the snapshot that we as human beings are seeing right
now today, and we can't. I suck at this. I
think about today and tomorrow. That's just the way I'm wired.

(51:18):
It's hard for me to think about twenty years from now.
What you know, what's my camp in Louisiana going to
look like twenty years from now versus today? What's a
client's property going to look like thirty years from now? Now,
the prevalence you know in that area that he manages
that property is one percent, Well, what's it going to

(51:40):
look like in thirty years if we just throw our
hands up and do nothing versus if we try to
minimize transmission potential and try to do these things that
that logically would impact pre on accumulation in the environment.

(52:00):
That's hard to conceptualize and wrap your head around thirty
years from now or fifty years from now.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
Among people that are among guys such as myself, that
are concerned about CWD, that want more information about CWD,
that want us to pay attention to CWD, I think
there's like these kind of camps we're talking about. Doug Durn,
Like Doug Durn and I sit in sort of different camps.
He gets frustrated with my camp because I have always
looked at it. I've always looked at it as primarily

(52:33):
a food safety issue. How heartbreaking culturally devastating for American
hunters it would be if all of a sudden, a
deer wasn't like a good source of venison, wasn't something
people were excited to see on their property wasn't something
that we celebrated, right, But all of a sudden, they

(52:55):
were like the way you'd look at a rat, like, ah,
get that out of here, shoot like shoot the deer.
There's a deer in the yard right before we all
get sick. Like that, it would just what a deer
stands forward change from a human safety standpoint, that haunts
me and my own the diet that my family, which

(53:16):
is like me too, like the bulk of the protein
we take in is from servants. It'd be devastating, it'd
be heartbreaking. I've looked at it like that. Doug looks
at it one just animal welfare, meaning you know, he
grew up with a farm background. Sick animals equals no

(53:37):
good okay, So he just instinctively doesn't like the thought
of sick animals. Loves deer, doesn't like the thought of
sick deer, so that turns them on two. He's often said,
we will get to a point, and he reads more
and studies more than I do, we will get to
a point where this does impact deer hunting. He feels,

(53:58):
we'll get to a point where we don't see big
bucks anymore. And it used to be kind of like
I felt like it was like he was predicting or
or you know, prophesizing or trying to crystal ball it, right.
But that's like two different things, and I think there's
probably a lot of people to hold both those at
the same time, where they're like very concerned with food

(54:19):
safety and then very concerned down the road of are
we going to have big white tails? Yeah, we're still
gonna be able to grow seven year old bucks.

Speaker 4 (54:27):
I also think part of Doug's frustration is what I
see with with private landowners all over the South, is
that they buy these recreational properties. They put so much
of themselves and their resources into creating this recreational opportunity
for them and their families. They want their kids and

(54:47):
their grandkids to come experience and to have this legacy
of all and they've got this grand plan. I'm envisioning
one of my clients at seventy two, he has this
like zat actually what he's wanted forever. He finally worked
his ass off enough to be able to afford this property,

(55:07):
to put the resources on it. He hires a biologist.
He does these things, and his dear herd is terrific
and the thought of that being undermined by this disease
is something that causes him incredible frustration and angst and
because and then having clients that own properties in CWDS owns,

(55:32):
that is what they tell me. They're like, I'm having
a hard time thinking through what the future is going
to look like because I'm sixty and I want my grandkids.
You know, I have two new grandsons, and this is theirs.
I've been working all these years to create this opportunity

(55:55):
for them so that I can facilitate the next generation
of hunters and land managers and conservationists. And now you're
telling me that there's a chance that could be undermined
by this disease, and that is incredibly frustrating and upsetting
for them. That's what I hear, Not so much the food,
although that is incredibly frustrating. Is the legacy, the property legacy,

(56:19):
the generational impact that this disease could have on land management,
on land value, on the deer hunting, you know, fraternity.
That's what I hear with the conversations that I have.

Speaker 1 (56:35):
Okay, so is the guy that's worried, how warranted is
someone who's worried about the future big buck potential in
their area.

Speaker 4 (56:44):
Well, there's no question like what we're seeing with these
with the research that is occurring in populations with high prevalence,
the age structure which Doug is seeing in his area
as well, the age structures progressively younger, meaning that you're
just not you're not carrying older males over into the

(57:08):
five and six year old age class. And so I
know we're going to talk about Arkansas, but so what
we found in Arkansas which we'll circle back to, but
you know, we found that fifty percent of all two
and a half year old males tested positive, more than
fifty percent of three and a half year old males.
And so if you look across the South, a lot

(57:30):
of the buck harvest is comprised of three and a
half year old males. So if you're in a you know,
you think about this population in Arkansas super high prevalence,
which we'll talk about, most of your bucks by the
time they're three have the disease. Well over sixty percent
have the disease when they're four, and if half of

(57:51):
them have it at two, they're not surviving past four.
And so you know, I'm thinking that.

Speaker 5 (57:58):
That timeline is so crucial to these arguments as well.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Right, it's like, sure, because he's a jumbo at five
or six.

Speaker 4 (58:05):
Well, I mean in my world working with landowners, you know,
we're not we're not harvesting at least southern white tails.
We're not. We're not harvesting many of our bucks until
they're at least four and most we're going to five.
And so in that vein, you know, under that scenario

(58:27):
I just described, which is on the ground in northwest Arkansas,
you're not going to have five and six year old bucks.

Speaker 5 (58:34):
And well, I guess I bring up that timeline too,
because you do hear in certain areas of the country
they're like, well, who cares our beer don't live till
six anyway?

Speaker 4 (58:42):
Right, right? Right?

Speaker 5 (58:43):
And so if they're if they're showing signs of the
disease at six, what is it again to me? Like
why is this a backyard issue to me? And how
I hunt and managed here? Right? But you're saying that
in it progresses to where when by the time they're
showing signs of the disease, that that gets younger.

Speaker 4 (59:06):
Yeah as well?

Speaker 2 (59:07):
Right, Another thing is the farther we keep talking about
that time scale, right, and the farther down that path
you get and sort of the percentage of animals and
infected in the population is that increases. The age at
which those animals get infected tends to be earlier in life.

(59:28):
And I was just talking with Mike about this this morning.
There's a particular spot in the Arkansas study site where
the prevalence is very high. We suspect it's been on
the landscape for the longest and we've got you know,
all these collar deer. We you know that we investigated
the you know, the death site. You know, full field

(59:50):
nee cropsies, lots of photos, you know, sent back, lots
of laboratory analysis to sort of sort of understand why
these deer died. Individual causes of death. So there's a
there's a particular buck that was that was captured in
this area. He was about eight or nine months at
the time of capture, just this kind of a normal,
average looking body weight. Did a rectal biopsy he was

(01:00:16):
So this is a common diagnostic test that you could
use for CWD. You take a little snip of sounds
kind of weird, but like of the rectal like tissue,
it was positive, right, And so.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
How did you get this deer in your hands, tranquilise it.

Speaker 4 (01:00:33):
Yeah, so let you want.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Visit it later.

Speaker 4 (01:00:36):
Let's cover this.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
We'll come back to that.

Speaker 5 (01:00:38):
Yeah, that's a big deal.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
I'll come back to the end of his life.

Speaker 4 (01:00:41):
Okay, yeah, yeah. So what we did in Arkansas is
so Arkansas Game Fish Commission first detected CWD in twenty
fifteen in an elk. They subsequently detected it in a
white tail in twenty sixteen far milk. No, this was
a wild wow though, and so they as an age
and decided to submit an RFP Request for Proposals a

(01:01:05):
few years later to solicit proposals from researchers to try
to understand as soon as they started testing. Once these
two positives occurred, they realized their prevalence was well over
twenty percent and so.

Speaker 1 (01:01:23):
And that's from Hunter's submissions.

Speaker 4 (01:01:24):
Yes, and so suddenly they went a while, we need
to understand where we're at, what's going on.

Speaker 1 (01:01:31):
So they found one, started testing promptly, started taking a
lot of samples. Yep, people turn in their deer head
some of it.

Speaker 2 (01:01:39):
Was agency collection too, and that initial response their goal
was to shoot they basically so they had that positive
elk and They also had a positive white tailed deer
that was clinically affected. So they kind of drew big
circles around these used them together, and their goal was, right,
We're going to go shoot three hundred deer within this
area because we need to understand what we're facing.

Speaker 5 (01:02:00):
Where that area. Is that a lot?

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
It's a lot of deer. Yeah, it had been more
than they had sampled there previously. Yeah, but they didn't
even get to three hundred because by two sixty they
saw that they were facing this twenty percent plus prevalence. Yeah,
so they're like, okay, aout.

Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
They wanted to go get an immediate snap shot. Yes,
and their immediate snapshot was like one in five deer, Yeah,
are positive for chronic waste and disease.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Yah. It was a gut punch.

Speaker 4 (01:02:24):
Yeah, and Mark was living that. I was not involved
at that time. I was hearing about this peripherally. And
then I got this email with a request saying that
we would like you, among others. It was sent to
a number of researchers, We'd like you to consider putting
together a research project. Excuse me, they would answer these

(01:02:45):
relevant questions we have and so what I did, excuse me,
what I did was I reached out to Mark and
colleagues at the University of Georgia. We reached out collectively
to colleagues at Colorado State at the pre owned Research
Center there, and we put together this this very large
five year study to try to help the agency do

(01:03:09):
everything from understand abundance or deer density UH prevalence rates,
to look at behavior of CWD positive and negative deer,
to look at to survival and habitat use, and all
these things that you would get from just capturing and
collaring deer. And then we designed this study plan to

(01:03:33):
come back at the end and to also collect coll
animals that were radio marked at the end of the
study to try to figure out if their disease trying
if their disease you know, prevalent I'm sorry, if their
positive or negative would change at the end, you know,
by the time the end of the study occurred. So
what we did is we we captured and GPS collared

(01:03:58):
hundreds of deer. We ended up trap we would dart them,
rocketing at them and dropping at them. And what we
were trying to do is put GPS collars on adults
and we put vaginal implant transmitters in doors, which are
these as you know, these transmitters that when they give birth,
it kicks the transmitter out, alerts the researcher that there's

(01:04:20):
fawns on the ground. We would then go in and
collar the fawns at every capture. Of course, to Mark's point,
which he can explain, we would take a rectal biopsy
for CWD testing. We would then track these deer. We
programmed the callers to have battery life over several years.
Because we were interested in obviously studying the deer for

(01:04:42):
as long a term, you know, timeframe as we could,
we tried to recapture as many deer as we possibly
could from year to year so that we could repeatedly
test them. We set up camera arrays all over the
study site. And the way the initial old study site
came to fruition is through the testing that Arkansas game

(01:05:05):
Fish had already done. They had evidence to show that
there was a progression of prevalence from higher to lower
as you went from west to east. So we set
our study design up to where we captured that variation.
We had. We had sampling in the highest prep what
appeared to be the highest prevalence all the way to

(01:05:25):
the lowest prevalence, and we captured deer and put camera
arrays and did all of this work the same across
all kind of three study sites that that span from
high prevalence to lower prevalence certainly not low. And we
did this for for four years, and then we had
a fifth year where we went in and tried to

(01:05:47):
collect marked animals off of public lands at the same time,
which Mark can talk about because he saw this with
his own eyes. He you know, where deer dying while
this study is ongoing.

Speaker 1 (01:06:02):
Deer with your collars on them, yes, are.

Speaker 4 (01:06:05):
Dying and we're recovering those animals, and we are field
nee crop seeing and beyond we are testing them for CWD,
and we are seeing that this disease is becoming more
prevalent right before our eyes. And so we did this.
We recently provided the findings to the agency. The penultimate

(01:06:28):
piece of information from this study was a population model,
an integrated population model, where we took all of this
data and we used it to model to tell the
agency where are you at on that curve and more importantly,
where's the what's the future for you? Given where you
are on the curve? What does the next ten years
or twenty years look like for you as an agency

(01:06:50):
relative to this population. And what we realized pretty quickly
is we were we as a as a research group
and the agency were farther along on that curve than
we thought. And so as of twenty twenty five, the
prevalence rate is about fifty percent in that part of Arkansas,

(01:07:13):
about thirty five percent for doze in about sixty eight
percent for bucks, So most bucks have CWD in that area,
and so incredibly high prevalence, which is that's context. The
listener needs to understand that CWD had been on this
landscape for years before it was ever detected, and so

(01:07:35):
this population had gone quote unquote unmanaged, just normal harvest
regulations that the state would implement. There were antle point
restrictions in place, trying to improve aid structure and allow
animals to grow to be older. And so what was
occurring is for decades, prevalence was just slowly creeping up

(01:07:57):
and then suddenly and animals detec acted positive because they're clinical,
and the agency realizes, oh, wow, we're farther along.

Speaker 5 (01:08:06):
Sorry, when you get to say clinical, are you saying
like it visually is showing signs of.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
A sick deer shows up someone's yard.

Speaker 4 (01:08:12):
Yes, sorry, yeah, And that's not something you know that market.
That's something Mark and I talk about a lot. Is
these clinical animals. You're not likely to see this unlike
a heemorrhagic disease outbreak where you've got animals laying everywhere.
As we saw with our with our movement data, these
animals as they're becoming positive as there as the disease

(01:08:37):
is progressing. So I'll give you a scenario. You catch
a two year old buck, you put a radio collar
on him, and he tests positive. He looks fine, everything,
he looks great, but he he tests positive. Now we're
tracking his movements over the next two years as the
disease progresses and he starts becoming comprom mist. And so

(01:09:01):
what we saw is they don't behave like uninfected deer.
They are less vigilant, they move differently. They will expand
their home range. They which is interesting if you think
about pre on transmission, that they're actually expanding their area
that puts them in contact with other animals that they
may know.

Speaker 1 (01:09:22):
Why are they doing that? Don't know if they're sick, I.

Speaker 5 (01:09:24):
Don't know the preon wanting to spread. It's like a
sci fi magazine.

Speaker 4 (01:09:27):
It's hard to say. I mean, I would think that
they would honker down. Oh sure, man, But we didn't
see that. We saw the opposite, that they actually expanded
their home range.

Speaker 1 (01:09:37):
And you should have not just like its function of
his age.

Speaker 4 (01:09:42):
No, no, I mean, so we we control for.

Speaker 1 (01:09:46):
Age, and our got all kinds of other ones that
aren't positive.

Speaker 4 (01:09:51):
We also saw that, interestingly enough, they started interacting as
they became positive. They started interacting with other deer differently,
and they were much more likely to interact with another
positive deer. And so they start changing kind because.

Speaker 5 (01:10:07):
Of the change in their behaviors and movements. Maybe maybe
they're they're less likely to run with uh.

Speaker 4 (01:10:15):
They're more likely to be around another deer, which makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:10:19):
Why does that make sense? He's sick.

Speaker 5 (01:10:22):
They're letting them do the thinking.

Speaker 4 (01:10:24):
Maybe I don't yeah, I mean, I don't. I don't
know the I mean, could it be could it be
a combination of the change in vigilance behavior with Hey,
I don't, I'm not. Things just aren't clicking with me. So,
for instance, we had a you remember that polar vortex.
We had a severe weather outbreak? Was that the first

(01:10:45):
year or the second year we had a couple Yeah,
so we had positive deer that just laid down in
the woods and died like and they didn't seek refuge
at all, got it? And so there's something that that.

Speaker 5 (01:11:02):
Where the term stiff as a pecker comes from.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
I don't know, but you know this. You remember that
massive cold snap we went down to hunt squirrels and
out in the woods. I mean it was like national
news cold, yeah, freezing everything to death. But out in
the woods all over the place, it's just birds totally fine,
except dead underground, not a feather ruffle, freezing to death

(01:11:27):
in the trees, falling off the ground, I mean, we
like all day long. So there's Clay's whole bamboo patch.

Speaker 4 (01:11:34):
And something that you know, their behavior is becoming compromised
in some way, which makes sense.

Speaker 1 (01:11:39):
With yeah that like that clicks Yeah, like that click
did it? Did it did? It doesn't have the wherewithal
to do what it needs to stay alive. But just
like increase social unless that's somehow was attributed to its
lack of vigilance or it's paranoia.

Speaker 4 (01:11:53):
Is some of that some of that we couldn't possibly
understand what this resolution of the data we have because
our vigil and data are coming from cameras from observing animals,
you know, head up, head down. The spatial and interaction
data are coming from GPS locations, and we know we
don't have all deer marked, right, so there's inherent bias there.

Speaker 1 (01:12:13):
Well, I can tell you a sick kid is more
likely to end up in his mom and dad's bet.

Speaker 4 (01:12:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:12:18):
Yeah, I don't know why.

Speaker 5 (01:12:20):
In a long time, uh, marketing communications folks for the
state agency saying like, are you sure you want to
capture sick deer and then let them go again?

Speaker 4 (01:12:33):
Yeah? So Mark and I talked about this this is morning.
We wanted to understand how this disease looked without intervention, like,
so we wanted to see exactly what was going on
with these animals. So, yes, we were capturing animals and
we were allowing this to proceed as it would.

Speaker 1 (01:12:55):
Like what would have happened if you weren't doing the study?

Speaker 4 (01:12:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so we we do we collect
all this information we see. You know. For instance, one
of the more kind of concerning outcomes was the prevalence
is so high. Another outcome that was interesting. If you
look at dough survival, like annual survival of negative dose,

(01:13:24):
it was about eighty percent pretty high. It was sixty
percent for positive dose. God, if you looked at buck
survival an your survival, if it was a negative cohort,
it was about seventy percent pretty high. It was forty
percent positive.

Speaker 1 (01:13:42):
And that is above and beyond normal. Well is that
above and beyond just the disease killing them? Because you know,
like like like if you think back to like HIV AIDS, right,
people that die are dying from pneumonia or they're dying
from complications from other things right there, they more likely

(01:14:05):
like die from the flu.

Speaker 4 (01:14:07):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (01:14:08):
So if if if it takes two years to kill
a deer, if the disease takes two years to kill
a deer, then of course from one year to the next,
fifty percent of the deer that have it should be
dead because it kills them. It's always fatal. So yes,
so like no shit, like like of course they're dead

(01:14:28):
because they have a disease that always kills them.

Speaker 5 (01:14:31):
But are they but if they get hit by a car?

Speaker 4 (01:14:33):
Yeah, So what we did is we categorized if they
even if they were CWD positive, but they died from
a car, a vehicle collision, or harvest or predation. We
considered that not CWD related.

Speaker 1 (01:14:48):
Oh well, okay, wow.

Speaker 4 (01:14:50):
We only categorized mortalities to CWD that had no other links.

Speaker 1 (01:14:56):
And Mark was it lays down and dies.

Speaker 5 (01:14:58):
Yes, that's fascinating, and.

Speaker 1 (01:15:00):
So that's what I was. Yeah, that addresses what I
was getting. A meaning he's positive and gets smoked by
a car. That's maybe he's a little bit less vigilant.
But how do you fracture that in?

Speaker 4 (01:15:10):
Right? So we were trying to be a conservative in
that vein to not link mortalities to CWD that had approximate,
you know, some other type of cause. And what we
found was about twenty percent, just under twenty percent of
all mortalities were linked directly to CWD. And so that's

(01:15:33):
that's in addition to predation and harvest and these other things.

Speaker 1 (01:15:40):
Have you ever tested a live deer with the rectal
thing you're talking about, that's what we do. Yeah, but
have you ever tested a live deer and then had
it be that that deer was still alive twenty five
months later?

Speaker 4 (01:15:58):
Are you asking if you if it tested positive at.

Speaker 1 (01:16:01):
The rect Have you ever had a deer test positive
and then twenty five months later that deer is still
running around alive.

Speaker 4 (01:16:11):
I have to look at the data.

Speaker 2 (01:16:13):
I would think that would be the app you know,
that would be the exception, not the rule, but not impossible. Well,
this based on the incubation period.

Speaker 5 (01:16:20):
I wanted to ask this too, because this test is
pretty darn new, right, I mean I feel like I
just was talking about this last week and I'm like,
there's not a test for CWD for live deer that so,
is there a And this was because that it takes

(01:16:41):
a while for the prions to build up to a
detectable stage unless you're taking biopsies from the brain, brain stem,
spinal column. Then lymph notes, So is the the rectal test?
Is that uh only giving you positives at a certain

(01:17:05):
progression point of the disease.

Speaker 2 (01:17:08):
Yeah, there's there's a lot of nuance here with the testing.
But it also gets back to that time scale that
I was talking about with in an individual deer, We're
talking about you know, months and years, and so a
lot of that has to do with the progression of
the disease, the movement of the abnormal preon in the body.
So you know, if a deer gets exposed to, you know,

(01:17:29):
infected with CWD, the first place where we're typically going
to have a detectable amount in there is in the
lymph noodes, right, And everybody's probably familiar with the retroferringial lymphodes.
That's part of what people will call the lymphoid system.
So like you know, there's lymph nodes all around the body.
So that little piece of the rectum that we're taking

(01:17:51):
there happens to be like little tiny they're not lymph nodes.
They're a little almost like little islands of lymphoid tissue.
That's what we have those all throughout our all throughout
our intestinal tract, and so that's what we're grabbing there.
But that's typically a little bit later in disease. So
you could easily have if we were to just have
a deer that, you know, several months or you know,

(01:18:14):
three months, four months, five months after infection, we test
its lymph node and we test its rectal biopsy, there'd
be a decent chance that that lymph node sample is
positive and that rectal biopsy is not positive.

Speaker 4 (01:18:26):
Got it, got it.

Speaker 2 (01:18:27):
And a lot of that just has to do with
the timing. The last place that it goes is going
to be the brain, right, the brain stem. The obex
people will have that referred to the information super Highway
for us, right, And so that process takes a long time.
That's the months in years process. Right. So you can

(01:18:48):
have an animal it's you know, where that preon is
kind of just slowly accumulating in these tissues and it's
doing normal deer stuff and it looks totally healthy. That's
why you can harvest an animal that tests positive for CWD.
It's hard to say does that animal have CWD the disease, Well,

(01:19:09):
probably not exhibiting any signs of it yet, but he's
test positives on the path to disease, right, and so
you know by the time by the time you get
you know, a year, sometimes two years. Sometimes there's been
experimental studies where they don't really see disease out until
three four years, so the time is is pretty weird sometimes.

Speaker 1 (01:19:31):
Okay, So why do people say that CWD is always
fatal because you start like like life, always like life.

Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
As yeah, yeah, we're all gonna die, right, suthing's fatal
and so.

Speaker 1 (01:19:44):
If he can have it for four years. Why do
people also often say that they're dead in two years.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
I guess it's like you can predict. Okay, so if
something else you can start a clock. But here gets
CWD test positive for CWD. It's like, I don't know
when if you evade all other causes of mortality, this
is what you're going to die from. There's very few
of us that can say that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
Yeah, okay, but at what point? So I'm saying like
if he if.

Speaker 5 (01:20:13):
Yeah, the point would have to be prior to the
naturally natural average mortality mark.

Speaker 1 (01:20:20):
Right, So yeah, So when they say it's always fatal,
meaning if he doesn't get shot, doesn't get hit by
a car, doesn't get killed by kyo, whatever, that will
be his cause of death.

Speaker 2 (01:20:31):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
But if it could be that he carries it for
four years, it almost kind of doesn't matter because most
like dear, don't live that long. Do you follow me?
Like if you could if you tested a deer, like
if you guys go out and put if you go
out and test deer and collar them and you're like, okay,
here's a positive deer. Uh, I would expect you to

(01:20:54):
say since that he's already had it, he's already somewhere
along the line. I would expect you to say that
mortality CWD mortality in and of itself is sixty percent
or seventy percent, or certainly more than fifty percent, because
it's always fatal and it kills them within a couple
of years. So any deer that's already positive, the clock

(01:21:16):
has already started ticking. He's already into his two years
of life. So why is it not that by two
years every one of them is dead?

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
Yeah, well that's part of the you know, Mike mentioned earlier,
like this disease is just atypical. It doesn't read read
the book. You know, there's not a you know, with
most infectious diseases, there's a highly predictable time course. It's
a little bit unpredictable once you get into sort of
that when is a deer going to start to show

(01:21:47):
clinical signs?

Speaker 1 (01:21:48):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:21:50):
Usually once that happens, you know, whether it's sixteen months,
eighteen months, twenty months, once they start to you if
you were watching a deer and you're like that years off,
it's not doing not doing right, that course is going
to be pretty quick, probably within weeks or a couple months.
So once they hit that point, it's downhill, and those

(01:22:11):
those are the deer that you can you know, like
some of those subtle changes that Mike was talking about
relative to vigilance or home range size, all that stuff.
That's probably even something different than we can perceive visually.
Sometimes even you know, it's the classic deer everybody sees
in the pictures. It's a frame stance, head drooped, slobbering,
zombie kind of stare, just like looking into space. Nothing

(01:22:34):
like those deer are circling the drain. Those deer are
so far down this path, you know, they a lot
of them would have died earlier. You know, I look
at animals as like wild animals as akin to professional athletes, right.
They they have to be at their peak constantly to migrate,
spar evade predators, evade threats. If you're if you're just

(01:22:56):
like a little bit off. Think about how many professional
athletes sit on the bench and they're just I'm just
not a little bit right, you know. So that's where
it gets really hard. Those other mortalities, you know, killed
by a hunter, nabbed by a predator, hit by a car, whatever,
you know, what role did it have in sort of
sealing its fate into that like there is there is

(01:23:18):
something there. It's hard to quantify. There have been studies
that have shown, you know, more prone to predation, more
prone to harvest, more prone to vehicle strike. There seems
to be regional differences with that stuff, but certainly it
gives us the impression that like this stuff matters, right
that when you're when you're adjusting an animal's ability to
interact with its environment, perceived threats, move, all these things,

(01:23:42):
it's going to be more prone to an unthrifty life,
you know.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
And and we one time saw a kylete that must have
got hit by a road going up the hill by
our house, got hit by a car, but eagles were
killing them. So did the eagles kill them?

Speaker 4 (01:23:55):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:23:56):
This is tricky And your question is he's just.

Speaker 1 (01:24:00):
Dragging himself along and you're just like taking advantage of
the situation. So yeah, it's hard to sort it out.
But I'm just trying to get to again, I'm trying
to get from the perspective of someone looking at someone
looking at it and saying like like if I took
a human like you take an American male, like okay,
if he doesn't die of you know, he doesn't die

(01:24:24):
of an opioid overdose, if he doesn't die in a
vehicular car accident, he doesn't die from lung cancer. He
will die from heart disease. Right, It's always fatal because like,
of course something will end up getting you, and if
you take all the other things that kills shit and
set it asides, like, of course it'll be heart disease.

Speaker 4 (01:24:46):
But I think that I think the point that that
argument misses is that these animals on average are not
living as long as non diseased animals. Therefore their net
reproductive potential is less than negative animals, and therefore you
factor in that reduced lifespan. That's the answer to that

(01:25:08):
question from my perspective is these animals are not going
to live as long on average as a negative animal,
and therefore the consequences to the population are going to be.

Speaker 5 (01:25:20):
Yeah, you get along that curve. You go from a
population that on average you can take like one of
those crazy Maryland deer. Remember learning about those, well the
white tails on like the all the weird government ground
in Maryland that you know they have like ancient white
tail doughs that lived to regularly like sixteen or whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:25:42):
I don't know about this, yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:25:44):
But like on average, the population starts as like they
lived to eight years old, and then a decade goes
by and it's like, well it's seven and a half,
and then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, on average,
everybody lives till five. On average, everybody lives till three
and a half. Right, And then you got serious problems

(01:26:05):
because and that's you're not producing deer.

Speaker 4 (01:26:07):
That's why the agencies are trying to keep that prevalence
so low is because at a low prevalence, these this
discussion that we're having about you know, mortality causes, and
it becomes largely a relevant because only a tiny percentage
of animals have the disease to begin with, and therefore
an even smaller percentage of that are dying specifically just

(01:26:31):
from CWD.

Speaker 5 (01:26:32):
You're killing big bucks, people are getting food ea.

Speaker 4 (01:26:35):
But as you get up closer farther up that curve,
then this conversation becomes more relevant because now you're losing
a significant percentage of your population to just the disease.
And so if we looked at at of all the
positive deer that we put our hands on, a third

(01:26:55):
of them died just from CWD. So about twenty of
the total population was impacted, but a third of the
animals that were positive died solely from CWD. And so
again that's why.

Speaker 1 (01:27:11):
Because prevalence rates are so high, you're losing twenty percent
of the population to the disease strictly to the disease, Yes,
and in harvest wouldn't even be that high hunter harvest's uh.

Speaker 4 (01:27:24):
It was so the most impactful. You know, from a
from a population perspective, you had three competing mortality sources.
You had harvest, predation, and CWD, whereas in a normal
population you would have harvest and predation, right, and so
you're adding this mortality source that's becoming increasingly more relevant

(01:27:47):
as prevalence increases. And so not surprisingly, the final product
that we produced with this with this study was this
population model, and what we what we showed clearly is
this population's declining about thirteen to fourteen percent per year.
And so now you're looking at deer densities that are
in the one to five deer per square.

Speaker 1 (01:28:09):
Mile range from a high of what well.

Speaker 4 (01:28:12):
We came in at us we only have a snap shot, right,
We we came in and.

Speaker 1 (01:28:17):
Well, because you don't trust other you can't trust other guesses.

Speaker 4 (01:28:21):
Well, you don't know where I mean, we don't know
twenty years ago, what the I mean. We come in
as researchers and we get a snapshot of where we
are right now. And that's another problem with this, with
trying to understand this disease. It's kind of like the
other analogy I have. It's kind of like wild Turkey declines.
I mean, you're you're coming in and you're trying to
study something that's been occurring in the South over twenty

(01:28:44):
five years, and you come in and you get a
little snapshot of data from a population, and then now
you're trying to figure out from a snapshot what the
bigger picture is. And we're dealing, you know, you're talking
about a disease that takes decades to kind of operate.
Eight And we come in and a five year study
is a pretty long field study in my world, and

(01:29:06):
even in that's not near enough. I would have loved
to have had fifteen years of data before, and I'd
like to keep studying the population, but that's just not
that's just not realistic. But and so we we show
clearly that this population is declining and it's going to
continue to decline. And now you have prevalence that you

(01:29:27):
know is exceeding you know, is that fifty percent across
the population, which is incredibly high. And now you start
thinking through scenarios of what does the agency do right?
And so back to where kind of where we started.
When the agency detected this disease, they took a fairly

(01:29:47):
standard approach. Let's create his own let's an increase harvest
or opportunity. Let's liberalize bag limits, let's remove antler pointler restrictions,
let's ban feeding. And what they're trying to do is
controlled the spread of the disease. But they didn't know
where they were on the curve.

Speaker 1 (01:30:07):
So now that they know it's too late to do
that and they know that the population is declining, at
what point do they reverse strategy?

Speaker 4 (01:30:19):
I think that that speaks to the complexity of this disease. Is,
you know, in some situations, and this is certainly not
doom and gloom, but when you get to prevalence as
high as what you see in Northwest Arkansas, your your
management options have changed from where you are. If you're
at two percent prevalence at two or three or you know,

(01:30:40):
on the low end of the curve, you have these options. Mark,
and I've talked about when you get up to fifty percent,
now your options are limited because now your population is declining,
and now you're thinking about the future sustainability of the population.

Speaker 1 (01:30:56):
Yeah, that's what. Yeah, So if you go to a
place that has thirty for prevalency, you're not going to
shoot your way out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:31:09):
No, no, because you're not going to get rid of
the disease. But that's the version of living with it.

Speaker 4 (01:31:14):
Yeah, at that prevalence, it's there, and so.

Speaker 1 (01:31:18):
So would you Is there an argument that you'd want
more deer on the landscape, to have a higher amount
of deer and test more that you'd have some sort
of natural selection play out. Do you have more deer,
more genetic diversity, and you'd start some new strategy of

(01:31:39):
seeing who's resistant?

Speaker 4 (01:31:41):
Did one of the were you asked this at that here?

Speaker 2 (01:31:44):
You know there's there's yeah, the deer there are. It's
basically trying to establish a new normal. Okay, Right, it's
trying to the theory with CWD is that you're eventually
going to hit some equilibrium right where you have your
prevalence is so high, that percentage of deer that are
positive is so high, and you have this continual you

(01:32:07):
know sort of you know, the clock ticks and deer die,
but you still have recruitment into the population, and so
you really can't. At some point you'll have that percentage
of positive deer is going to kind of like yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:32:20):
Because if it's good, right, like, it's going to suck
in other deer who are like, oh, there's not deer here,
m h lots fo Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:28):
And and there is that there are studies ongoing and
this is like real world Mother Nature experiments right now,
like trying to look at these populations that are at
this state and start to understand genetics, like what is
that equilibrium, what's the new balance? Is there shifting of
you know, like we talked about that that preon gene,

(01:32:50):
the pr NP gene. That's kind of a metric that
some places will use to sort of monitor, you know,
how how a population is maybe shifting based on a
new selection pressure. Right like this is a relatively new
selection pressure for most most populations, and so all that

(01:33:10):
work is sort of you know ongoing. I think we're
a little bit down the road from understanding it, but
it's a very important area to sort of understand, is
what do we expect from these populations once they get
to that point. I do want to circle back to
one thing we were talking about dead deer, because that's
my jam. So yeah, you like, say a buck, you
can definitely have a scenario where Okay, he first tests,

(01:33:33):
you know, he gets infected at two and a half.
Yeah he'll lift to four and a half and you know,
honky dory, everything's great, you know. But I'll go back
to that original story I was talking about with one
of our collar deer in sort of the hot zone
where we are. And I do this not to like
I fear that sometimes this is the kind of stories

(01:33:55):
that you know, you get accused of fear mongering, but
very ill tell you it's really not, you know, because
like I just said, you can also have a scenario
where you harvest be four and a half year old
buck right gets to these ages that are desirable. The
opposite is also true, and we know that as prevalence
increases in a population, that percent increases you get to

(01:34:17):
this point where it the age at which you're infected
early in an infection cycle, you know, it's usually like
those the males are at greater risk of becoming infected.
Older males are more likely of being tested and positive.
But as it becomes a highly endemic area, so you've
had preons shed into the environment, into that habitat for

(01:34:40):
many years, lots of direct contact between animals, the age
of like the writ, there's accumulation of risk. Right, your
chances once you are born of encountering CWD are greatly increased. Right,
if you're born into that environment, chances are you're going
to see CBD sooner rather than later. And so that
to that point. You know, there was a buck that

(01:35:02):
was captured in twenty twenty two. He was about eight
or nine months old at the time of capture, relatively
normal body condition, wasn't thin, wasn't you know, super chunky,
just kind of kind of average. We got the recto biopsy,
and that's not an immediate test. Right, months go by
before we get that answer. Ended up testing positive. So

(01:35:24):
that was in March. Okay, we got a mortality signal
in September. He was dead along the Buffalo River, right
on the shoreline. And to say emaciated is kind of
an understatement. You know, this is a one point five
year old deer at this point died of chronic wasting disease.

(01:35:45):
He was completely wasted away. I can show you guys
picture later. No muscle mass, no subcontinuous fat, no visceral fat,
fat inside, you know. And he had aspiration pneumonia, which
is a common problem you see an end stage clinical CWD.
You know, as as you as this disease begins to

(01:36:07):
affect pretty much everything, right, because it's it's it's filling
up the space in that brain stem like your information
super highway for your body. They lose control of their
you know, reflexes, right, so they're swallowing. Reflex goes away,
so they aspirate feed and then that settles down into
the lung. So he had aspiration pneumonia. And he had

(01:36:29):
an old injury on his foot, which a crops you
a lot of deer and an old injury on a foot.
Deer do fine for a long time putting up with
little pesky problems like that, but by it was it
was kind of an eye opening, you know. And I'm
a disease nerd, you know, I like I like, I
like this stuff. But there's these certain moments where you

(01:36:51):
see and touch something and it kind of hits different.
And that was one of those moments, you know, like,
here's here's a year and a half old male you
know in this area that literally fell over dead in
a riparian corridor on the Buffalo River from CWD, you know,
And that's just a kind of a jarring moment. But again,

(01:37:11):
that can happen. But you can also harvest in the
same population a four and a half old male that
you know looks okay. But both things happen, and over time,
as you get more one of the hallmarks of as
it sets in that young those younger age classes start
to become a little more commonly infected, and then that
clock ticks earlier.

Speaker 5 (01:37:34):
How much of the conversation, like legitimate conversation is there
around CWD resistant deer? Obviously, State of Oklahoma is going
great guns in a way that I think is concerning.
And I don't honestly know how it's legal to release
game farm animals that are quote unquote CWD resistant that

(01:37:58):
unless they know also know how to read state boundaries
and maps and things to stay in Oklahoma. How much
like is there a conversation there of identifying deer that
do have a resistance or long term carriers to the

(01:38:21):
point where it just never manifests, or like what is the.

Speaker 2 (01:38:27):
So we know we know there with CWD, you know,
say in white tailed deer like that again, that that
preon protein gene. They'll refer to it as the pr
and P gene. We've known for a long time that
certain genotypes. So the basically the configuration of that gene,

(01:38:48):
certain genotypes are less susceptible doesn't mean resistant, It means
they don't they aren't as commonly infected. And when they
are infected typically what happens to your point, Steve, earlier,
that incubation period is longer, So those deer with certain
genotypes might rather than you know, head and downhill at

(01:39:12):
two years after maybe that pushes out to three years
after four years after, right, So that's been known. That's
that's a thing, right, But they ultimately will to our
conversation earlier, if they live through all, if they you know,
dance through all the other flaming hoops of dear mortality causes,
they'll ultimately bite it from chronic waste disease. So you know,

(01:39:33):
we can't manipulate that. But mother nature can if there's
adequate selection pressure, those more favorable like less susceptible genotypes
historically and most like free ranging populations are not well represented. Right,
it's the exception, those more like those less susceptible CWD

(01:39:53):
genotypes are the exception, not the rule. So kind of
in a simple sense, I'm not a geneticist, but it
tells you that that there's not adequate selection pressure on that. Right,
Fitness is greater in some of these other ones, so
there's concern there. But as CWD sets in and selection
pressure hits, you know, maybe I would anticipate that in
some of these populations we start to see that, and

(01:40:15):
they've they've they've started to do some of that work
in mule deer populations in Colorado, you know, where they've
seen a.

Speaker 1 (01:40:24):
Little bit of a shift.

Speaker 2 (01:40:26):
Maybe to some of these less susceptible you know, genotypes.
But again, this is this is it takes time, and
there's a lot of smart people working on that, but
I do think it's going to take time. To your
point though, relative to the issue in Oklahoma, so on
the farm servet industry, that's where that sort of desire originated. Right,

(01:40:50):
Let's let's try to selectively breed whitetail deer two that
are resistant to CWD, all right, and they're doing some approaches.
It's genome wide, so they're looking at the whole genome
and all the other you know, genes within the body
that might impact susceptibility. And so that has bled out

(01:41:13):
into you know, it's kind of been talked about as
the great hope in some degree, right, And I think
that's because this is a it sucks to talk about
this disease. It's just not it's not a great disease
to talk about. We don't have clear solutions, and so here,
let's let's try to march down this path of you know,

(01:41:36):
let's breed our way out of this.

Speaker 5 (01:41:39):
You know that's because we can seem more proactive in
certain circles. Then well, there's this naturally occurring test that's
going on in Colorado mule deer, and in a few
decades or longer, we might have something that comes out.

Speaker 4 (01:41:56):
And we want a silver bullet. That's the bottom line.
We want something that will fix this. And I think,
you know a few things that Mark said, I think
are important. There's a difference between resistant and less susceptible.
There's context there. The other thing to go back to
Steve's question is, you know, so if you have if

(01:42:18):
you have an animal that lives an extra two years
longer because he has a different genotype, he's still spreading
the preon in the environment for two additional years, right,
So that I get it from the standpoint of that
those deo are living longer, But if they have the disease,

(01:42:39):
they're still contributing to a transmission. There's still you know,
there's still preons that they're putting into the environment. And
you know, I think my perspective from the genetics standpoint is,
I think the scientific community recognizes that genetics may be
one tool that we have at our disposal, but we're

(01:43:03):
not there yet as a scientific community. And the idea
that you're going to I look at it like antlers
antler quality. That you're going to take deer of a
certain antler quality and release them into the environment and
expect them to elevate the antler quality for the entire herd.

(01:43:23):
Given that deer whitetails are promiscuous, is kind of crazy
to think that. And when I look at kind of
this scenario, I thought Okay, so that the idea that
you're going to release animals into the wild, regardless of
whether where they go from when they're released, and that's

(01:43:46):
going to immediately change how this population is functioning. I
think that logically to me doesn't make sense.

Speaker 1 (01:43:55):
Do you think it might have that that might have
an application if the worst fears come true, we wind
up the areas that have CWD, whether it's twenty years
down the road, thirty years down the road, forty whatever,
that it's going to wind up being that you're going
to have, you know, seventy percent prevalency, and you're going

(01:44:18):
to have a d or two per square mile, right
like if it lands there at that point that might
become we might land in a place where that is
a conversation that warrants happening.

Speaker 2 (01:44:30):
The thing that you know with I think within the fence,
inside the fence, you know they're going to go down
this path, right and if that leads to lowering risk
of things getting out of control inside the fence, yeah,
you know that that could be a favorable thing. I

(01:44:51):
would not prefer it to be happening in replacement of surveillance, biosecurity,
all of these these routine standard methods we do to
prevent and manage disease and animal populations. That stuff has
to invigorate and maintain in the face of this new
tool if it's potentially useful. The fact is, right now,

(01:45:16):
it's still in that investigation phase right. Science is going
to take time to understand if this is a tool
that can be leveraged within captive service populations, and so
that research should continue. But I think people are so
desperately wanting an answer and a solution, a silver bullet,
whatever the case may be, that we elevate it before

(01:45:37):
it should be elevated as a tool. It's not a
tool in the toolbox right now.

Speaker 5 (01:45:41):
Because one point in time, if there was CWD, it
was almost certainly associated with a captive servant facility. Now
we're much further down the road, and the state of
Oklahoma is very serious about allowing the captive service industry
in that state to grow and sell h a deer

(01:46:09):
that those breeders have determined to be uh tolerant or
resistant to CWD by their own standards, meaning that they
they're just going to live a little a little bit
longer and then sell those outside of the fence for
six hundred bucks a pop to people in the state

(01:46:30):
of Oklahoma.

Speaker 2 (01:46:31):
Mm hmm. Yeah. And it's it's that.

Speaker 1 (01:46:34):
That feels a little crazy. Like if you're trying to
control the typhoid outreak and you had you're like, well, listen, man,
normal people get typhoid and they die in six months. Uh,
this guy, he'll he'll die in a year, but he's
got typhoid the whole time. We'll send them over to
your area for for decades. It does seem like someone

(01:46:54):
would be like, wow.

Speaker 2 (01:46:56):
Yeah, for decades. To your point, the whole focus of
you know, the from from USDA state agriculture agencies and
state wildlife agencies has been separation of captive serviands and
wild servants. Right, we need separation of these two populations
for disease purposes. So to start suddenly talking about the

(01:47:18):
idea of opening the fence and releasing captive bread animals
that are selectively bred for the traits that humans think
are favorable, not for what mother nature thinks is favorable.
Is you know, there's no place for that in my
opinion right now, it's just there's we live in a
world with wildlife disease of unintended consequences. There's always unintended

(01:47:43):
consequences that are hard to predict, and it's it'd be
super challenging to to.

Speaker 1 (01:47:49):
Have a.

Speaker 2 (01:47:51):
Have enough assurances that that that those animals are, you know,
not going to put the populations.

Speaker 4 (01:47:59):
Is a plausible that you're releasing something else into the environment?

Speaker 5 (01:48:03):
Oh yeah, I mean listen to that.

Speaker 1 (01:48:06):
You hear that Kell's Wildlife Disease Book.

Speaker 5 (01:48:08):
That's that's a whole book of wildlife diseases just found
in the southeast. We're only talking about one.

Speaker 1 (01:48:15):
All right, let's go. Let let's take northwest is it?
Northwest Arkansas? Okay? Northwest Arkansas, southwest Wisconsin. Here you got prevalency.
You know, hunters, they're the forty percent of the deer
they kill fifty percent of the deer they kill. Have
some CWD deer populations had a new form of mortality.

(01:48:40):
Used to be hunting and predation. Now it's hunting predation
c w D. CWD is killing twenty percent of the
deer herd. The deer herd is going down, down, down,
down down. What is the recommendation? I mean, like, like,
what do you wind up doing with that information? I mean,
do you say no more hunt, uh, because we're going

(01:49:02):
to run out of deer. Do you say, hey, kill
more deer because somehow that'll fix the problem. Like, what
do you tell people?

Speaker 4 (01:49:10):
Well, as a scientist, what we told the agency is
we don't design regulations or.

Speaker 1 (01:49:16):
To I know, but I'm asking you outside of that.

Speaker 4 (01:49:19):
Yeah, but what what we did is we told the
agency this is where you are, you know, this is
where you're headed, and this is how many deer per
square mile you have, we think, and this is what
the future looks like.

Speaker 1 (01:49:33):
You know how many you figured had? How many per
square mile? About one to five depending on unbelievable. And
then you think they're headed where It.

Speaker 4 (01:49:41):
Really depends on you know, various factors.

Speaker 1 (01:49:45):
But I think essentially lower than that.

Speaker 4 (01:49:48):
Well, I mean right now in in the one the
highest prevalence area of Mark and I talked about this
over coffee this morning. From spending time there, you can't
you can't find deer. They're like, you can drive around
at night, you don't see deer. You can drive around
looking for deer and you you don't see deer. And

(01:50:08):
so you know what Mark alluded to this earlier. I mean,
you're going to get to some point where the population
is going to stabilize and it's going to increase, but
it's not going back to where it was, and so
where it goes and how quickly it gets there could
be influenced by regulations. So to your question, you know,

(01:50:33):
should the agency I'm not going to tell the agency,
but could the agency consider basically taking the foot off
harvest and instead of liberalizing harvests like many agencies do
thinking they're low on the curve, now when they're up
high on the curve, do we take our foot off
the gas? Do we reduce dough harvest? Do we you know,

(01:50:55):
do we change our behavior because now we're in a
new normal. And I think the answers yes that because
you're going to try at that point, the agency's goal,
I would think logically would be recovery. Now, what's this
going to look like in the next few decades, And

(01:51:17):
we know we're not going back to where we were
forty years ago, but we have to get this population sustainable.
And from the standpoint of you know, I'm thinking about
this as a deer hunter. I grew up in an
area of Virginia when at the time, if you saw
a deer you had that was a great hunt. If
you killed a deer. I was telling Mark, we would

(01:51:37):
take polaroids brown deer. We shot brown deer. We would
take a polaroid and go to school on Monday and
show it. And it was like you you had struck
the lottery, you know. And then I fast forward to
where I am now and trying to raise kids and
mentor young people through becoming deer hunters. They have to

(01:52:00):
be successful, They have to see animals. They have to
be able to grasp the fraternity of what you're doing
and the success, and you build off of that, and
then they want to learn about the process of managing
for deer and all this that goes away if you
can't see animals and you can't harvest animals. So as
a deer hunter, I would look at the agency and say,

(01:52:24):
I need you as an agency to think about how
to get what does the future need to look like
to recover this population to the point where I can
I can see animals, I can harvest animals, and we
know that prevalence is not going to stay at that
super super high level. It's going to it's going to

(01:52:44):
reduce through time. So yes, and we hope to get it.
You know, it's some something where you're you're not dealing
with what you're dealing with now, which is you know,
every every other animal in most bucks are to positive.

Speaker 1 (01:53:01):
You think it will go You think it has the
capacity to then go the other direction, to climb, climb,
climb to fifty sixty seventy percent, and then it hit
some point when prevalency goes down.

Speaker 2 (01:53:13):
I don't think it would go back down to it
will still it'll be chronically high. You know, it might
come up and then just kind of level out and
then wobble back and forth as you get recruitment and whatnot.
And that would happen.

Speaker 5 (01:53:25):
But the effect there, Michael, to your point is like
people aren't gonna want to hunt in that area, and
so like the hunting participation in that zone and the
culture around hunting is going to suffer alongside the low population.

Speaker 2 (01:53:44):
And this is this is the challenge with CWD as
you hit that that chronic, steady state of this is
the new normal. Right. We hear a lot about EHD, right,
and so we've had multiple large scale EHD outbreaks where
like even in a given county thousands of deer like
that right, in one transmission season, you might kill thousands
of deer indiscriminately right the sky's falling, people back off

(01:54:10):
a hunting that year. We've got multiple examples though through
time of within a few years that population is right
back to where it was, or even beyond where it was.

Speaker 1 (01:54:21):
Yeah, I'd like personally, yeah, I'm old enough where I
personally lived through the cycle, right.

Speaker 2 (01:54:27):
And that's where this is so different, right, And this
is why this matters. Is like with EHD, you can
get on the other side of it and get back
to the normal state. With CWD, you don't. You just
go to this new state of normal. And that's what
we're trying to define of what that is. And that's where,
like you know, in Wisconsin, parts of Wisconsin, parts of Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming,

(01:54:47):
part of West Virginia, like trying to figure out what
that new normal state looks like. And I do think
it's important too to mention, like you mentioned backing off
a doze for instance, I think it's a confusing point
to hunters that that don't have the misfortune or pleasure,
whatever the case may be, of of of seeing the

(01:55:08):
bad spots and the not so bad spots if because
you might be in an area and your interaction with
C TOBD is very early in that scale, Right, there's
just a couple of detections in the state or in
a county, and what do they do. They liberalize most
take right, And so they're they're doing the opposite. And
I think I think many folks that's a little bit

(01:55:29):
confusing based on you know, what phase of the disease
you are in the management agency seemingly from like on
the surface level doing completely different things. They're telling me
not to shoot those, they're telling me to shoot those.
It can be a little bit confusing, but it's all
relative to that long protracted time scale, and in the
early phase you're trying to prevent from getting to that

(01:55:50):
bad phase. And that's what all those actions are doing.

Speaker 1 (01:55:52):
And actually, like if this place in Arkansas it's got
one to five per square mile, I just can't picture
that they'd still be in the mind frame of we're
going to do earn a buck. We're going to do
you can hunt deer through February, right, right, like, because
you're playing with fire at that point.

Speaker 4 (01:56:10):
Right, and we don't know, I mean, we tried to
simulate what prevalence would look like, you know, through time.
But again, we we capture a five year snapshot of
this population in Arkansas, and it was extremely well done.
Science is rigorous, but it's five years of data and
we're trying to predict out, you know, to Mark's point,

(01:56:35):
prevalence gets to some level it's fifty percent right here,
and then in the next county over it's thirty percent
or whatever. You know, So you've already got some complexity there.
So we're trying to inform the agency on where are
you going to be. It's not going to disappear, but
where are you going to be? Its prevalence going to
remain high in parts of the landscape, It's probably going

(01:57:00):
to remain high in other parts of the landscape. When
it kind of starts oscillating to Mark's point and going
up and down slightly, it very likely will remain at
a prevalence that is at least palatable. Moving forward. You're
still going to have situations where you're going to have
a deer that you harvest a test positive, but it's

(01:57:21):
not going to be at the scale at which it
is now, which is most are prevalent.

Speaker 1 (01:57:28):
Do you think there's a way that you could have
Do you think there's a way you could have a
county Texas, Illinois? Where ever? To help, we'll say there's
a county in Texas that has one percent prevalency today, Okay,
is there a way that in forty years that county

(01:57:50):
will have the same deer density and one percent prevalency.

Speaker 4 (01:57:57):
Let's see, that's part of why we're having this conversation.
Those questions are incredibly difficult, almost impossible to answer because
there's so many factors that influence the transmission and accumulation.
I mean, we know vegetative communities, soil types, deer density,
social behaviors, there's so many factors that influence how this

(01:58:23):
disease is operating on the landscape that there could literally
be a thousand different scenarios. And that's part of why
it's so difficult to have these conversations with hunters. To
march point is like, well, I see that this is
occurring over here, and I see that this is occurring
over here, and that doesn't make any sense to me.

(01:58:43):
They should be doing the same thing. And so to
Mark's point, you know northwest Arkansas, that the context needs
to be that this population is so far along on
this curve, and the disease has progressed the way it
has here, but it's not going to operate like that everywhere.
There's going to be situations where it's going to operate

(01:59:05):
very differently. And then so that context is lost on
us as hunters. I see the frustration as a hunter,
and you see.

Speaker 1 (01:59:13):
If you getting frustrated over here.

Speaker 4 (01:59:16):
As a scientist. As a scientist, damn it. I want
to solve I want this to be solved, and as
a deer hunter, I don't want to deal with this.
I don't want to deal with this. I don't want
you to tell me that I have to behave differently.
I don't want you to tell me that this thing
that I've worked let's say fifty years to groom this
piece of property suddenly is is all undermined by the yeah.

(01:59:41):
And I don't want I don't want there to be
conversations where there are people that are telling the public
that the science is a lie. Don't I don't want
to be in that discussion either. But that's where we
are with this disease, and all of this creates confusion,
and the confus usion creates nihilistic kind of attitudes. Nothing's worked.

(02:00:04):
The hell with it, let's just quit. And I just
I don't see that looking through the two lenses I'm
looking through as an option.

Speaker 2 (02:00:13):
And to your one percent question, my wheels had to
turn for a minute on that. I'm a thinker. No,
it's not going to stay the same. You know, if
you mother nature has done that experiment for us, right,
you know if because it's operated you know, cryptically underneath
hiding in plain sight, right in front of us. Right,
no interventions, status quo, Right, what did it do? It climbs?

(02:00:40):
I mean, you know, there's just nothing, you know, without
without intervention, CWD has proven to us over time that
it will do two things. It will the percentage of
deer in that population that are infected with CWD it's
going to increase. And then the geographic footprint of where
it is on the landscape that's also and I increase. Like,

(02:01:01):
those are the two things that we know with absolute
certainty are going to happen, and that expansion.

Speaker 4 (02:01:07):
Is going to take time.

Speaker 1 (02:01:11):
So in your professional opinions, if you're in a like
an area that has very low prevalence here they just
found their first case, and your professional opinions is if
your option, if you choose the option of ignore it
and do nothing in your professional opinion, decades down the road,
you will be living under a new normal and it

(02:01:33):
won't just be that you wished it away.

Speaker 2 (02:01:37):
Correct, Yes, I mean yeah, I don't see. I don't
see a scenario where, you know, if it's just one
deer on the landscape right and it it dies, it's
not consumed, and you know, somebody covers it up with
a driveway. Okay, maybe it's sealed in there, it's not
coming anywhere, but like, but other than that, you know,
these will will fester, It will smolder till it's visible,

(02:02:01):
you know, years down the road.

Speaker 1 (02:02:02):
Can you guys? Is it what blocks someone what prevents
the researcher from getting some white tailed deer in captivity
and experimenting with different transmission things, Meaning it's only you
take a deer and it never comes in contact with

(02:02:24):
another deer. You allow an affected deer to graze a
one acre pasture for a week, pull that deer away
and kill it. Then you take a known, clean deer
that doesn't have interaction in there deer and you let

(02:02:45):
it go graze on that pasture. And then you see
does it get CWD from grazing on the pasture? Like,
did it happen that way?

Speaker 2 (02:02:54):
That's been done, that that kind of work gets done?

Speaker 1 (02:02:58):
And is it? Because do you remember a few years
ago all this hysteria came out, like if you took
stainless steel and you like cut a deer up on
stainless steel and then scrubbed it and bleached it, it
could still I'm like a bullshit, do you know what
I mean? Like theoretically sure, but like people aren't getting
it that way or like deer aren't getting it yeah

(02:03:20):
off stainless steel, right, like like how are they getting it?

Speaker 2 (02:03:24):
I mean that's a it's a you know, for as
much as we know about chronic waste and disease, there's
a lot we don't know about.

Speaker 1 (02:03:31):
Does the does the deer get it? Who only goes
and grazes on the pasture?

Speaker 2 (02:03:36):
Well, well that's one possibility and it's been shown so
so Colorado Parks and Wildlife they did a study where
they had, you know, a decomposed carcass from a clinical
CWD animal, Like by decomposed, I mean bleach, white bones
gone yours put deer in there and they get infected.

Speaker 4 (02:03:55):
They do.

Speaker 2 (02:03:56):
They do, just not other deer in there. Just go
into that clean deer in clean deer in dirty deer
come out.

Speaker 1 (02:04:02):
Yeah, that's what That's what I'm saying. So this has
been demonstrating, that has been done.

Speaker 2 (02:04:05):
But the exact mechanisms, right, is it eating soil, is
it chewing on a bone? Is it getting in a plant?
The exactly how it gets in there they don't understand yet,
but most of the evidence suggests that it's like oor nasal.

Speaker 1 (02:04:19):
So, but the highest chance is oral.

Speaker 2 (02:04:21):
Nay, through the nose, through the mouth is the highest chance.
But there's multiple modes of transmission, you know, potentially and
so you know, so deer can get it through their
social direct contacts with one another, which obvious. You know,
a lot of transmissible diseases are like that. The thing
the curve, one of the curveballs is that CWD has
is exactly what we just talked about. The environment, the habitat, right,

(02:04:45):
and that's where you know, if if you can become
sick or infected just from the habitat, which almost acts
like a host. When I look at through my lenses,
I look at the landscape, I look at the habitat
as a host, just like I look at a deer
as a host, and the importance of that host based

(02:05:07):
on you know, what we've seen so far in some
literature is that the importance of that habitat as a
as a source of infection for deer becomes greater the
farther up that curve and the time scale you get.
The more deer die, the more deer p and poop
and just you know, live on the landscape, the more

(02:05:27):
of those CBD prions are going to be put into
that environment. And so as you get those prevalentce you know,
of of the deer, that's a lot of it's a
lot of p that's a lot of poop, that's a
lot of saliva, that's a lot of flesh that goes
onto the landscape, and those preons just stick around. And
so trying to control prevalence, right, trying to keep lower

(02:05:48):
down that scale will will in theory hopefully help minimize
that environmental contamination.

Speaker 4 (02:05:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:05:54):
And so, like Mike mentioned earlier, feeding and baiting, right,
those a focal spot on the landscape put a lot
of deer which also pee and poop and other things.
So you're potentially depositing like sort of a hyper focused
area of prions on the landscape that would put a

(02:06:15):
deer at greater risk of infection if it forages there.
That's what all those regulations try to sort of get at,
is like, Okay, let's try to lower that risk. And
that's why baiting and feeding are a common, you know,
a common point of intervention for the state, because you know,
you're just trying to break the chain of infection, right, Like,
what can we do that will try to lower risk

(02:06:38):
on the landscape for deer encountering CWD, whether it's from
another deer or from its habitat.

Speaker 1 (02:06:44):
So much would make a handy chart. The chart would
be zero to five, here's what you do. Try this
five to ten or like zero to three, try this right,
and when you get to thirty or forty, guess that's
where I'm like, I find my confusion. Is that thirty
or forty Is it just say like, try to enjoy

(02:07:06):
your last bit of great deer hunting well?

Speaker 2 (02:07:09):
And I think that i'd say more to come soon.

Speaker 1 (02:07:13):
The suggestions kind of run.

Speaker 4 (02:07:14):
Out well, and I think that's I mean, that's part
of why we wanted to have this conversation is that
there is no blanket prescription for this, and that just
creates complexity and confusion. And so that's part of why
we wanted to have this conversation is where you're at

(02:07:34):
on the curve matters. And some of these prescriptions that
agencies are taking, like the banning feeding and liberalizing harvest,
those are applicable at the bottom of the curve. But
when you get up to the top of the curve,
as we now see that because we the data are
emerging from these populations that are high up the curve,

(02:07:56):
now it's taken some time to get those fields down.

Speaker 5 (02:07:59):
That's an unfortunate take away from some of our nas
air crowd. Yeah, right, like, well, you better be testing
and turning in your deer because that's your best shot
at being able debate again, well as if the prevalence,
if you show the.

Speaker 4 (02:08:12):
Prevalence is and the bottom line is, you know, there
was a recent summary National Academy of Science has put
this kind of state of the state of where we
are with CWD, and then in the preface it says,
basically to paraphrase, albeit not perfect, efforts to manage the disease,
the progression and spread of this disease are our option

(02:08:37):
right now. So you have this group of scientists that
come from all these different perspectives that collectively agree that
it's not perfect. The management strategies that agencies are implementing,
they're not perfect, but they are where we need to
be right now, given how much we don't know about
this disease, and there's just so much we don't know

(02:09:00):
so much time.

Speaker 5 (02:09:01):
Yeah, because I mean, the blue Sky scenario really could
be to be able to manipulate the new normal, right,
So like right now you're like, yeah, we probably if
it if the new normal levels out at forty percent prevalence,
we're probably not going to get lower than that. But
maybe that is the the ultimate goal is to be

(02:09:24):
able to reduce those new normals or be able to
manipulate them to some degree. Ideally, right if you, through
people turning, in voluntary testing and good communication, you establish
that new normal at five to ten percent prevalence.

Speaker 4 (02:09:45):
Is that yeah?

Speaker 5 (02:09:46):
Realistic sounding?

Speaker 2 (02:09:48):
I mean it all, It all sort of depends on
where you're at in the in the scale. I think
some of those sort of real world experiments you know,
can can be happening, especially sort of in you know,
in parts of the web with some of the oldier
populations where you have okay, you're at this high prevalence.
Now what you know, what management actions or harvest you know,

(02:10:09):
sort of quotas, could we could we get to try
to drop this back down? A lot of like where
that intervention happens a little bit that the goal would
be happened earlier, right before you get to this sort
of thirty forty, like you're up at the five, eight, ten, twelve,
Like okay, let's let's you know, be aggressive and try
to knock this see if we can through harvest, through

(02:10:30):
our hunters, you know, decrease prevalence and stabilize prevalence, right
and and so that's where a lot of the effort
comes in is again trying to trying to prevent the
climb up, you know, and I think now there'll be
like once we get to that mountaintop, I guess, and
trying to understand the new norm. Then it's like what
triggers are there? What levers can be pulled to manipulate that?

(02:10:53):
Are there some you know, can we bring it back down?

Speaker 1 (02:10:56):
I got two yes, no questions for you guys, But
you can only do. Yes, No, No, we don't. That's
tough for our scientists. It always depends because it's guessing.
It's just guessing. No one's going to hold you to this.
It's just crystal ball. Guests.

Speaker 4 (02:11:08):
We both know that that is fundamentally a lie.

Speaker 1 (02:11:11):
In twenty five years. In twenty five years, will there
be counties in the eastern half of the United States
where CWD has not been detected?

Speaker 4 (02:11:24):
Yes, I agree, that was fast.

Speaker 1 (02:11:28):
If I made you a hamburger, I keep wanting to
do this. I'm gonna I have five CWD positive deer,
now handle them just like normal. I bone them ount
I make burger.

Speaker 5 (02:11:44):
Which is a mix between the five.

Speaker 1 (02:11:45):
I got five CWD positives, me a burger. This is
my this is my thing for whiles like. The only
CWD deniers I'm interested in talking to are the ones
that eat this burger. I take five CWD, I grind
it all up and make a normal old burger. I
grill that burger to medium. I know it doesn't matter

(02:12:08):
by a girl to medium, And I'm like, would you
like a bite of that burger? The ones that eat
the burger, I'm like, I'd like to hear what you
think about c w D. The ones that don't eat
the burger, I understand how you feel, right, But the
ones that are like, it's no big deal, I'm like,
you eat that burger and tell me it's no big deal. Okay.

(02:12:31):
If I made said burger, would you take a bite?

Speaker 2 (02:12:36):
No?

Speaker 1 (02:12:37):
No, you wouldn't me neither, so kills me. Would you
eat it? Phil?

Speaker 4 (02:12:44):
Oh no, I don't think so.

Speaker 7 (02:12:46):
Cat they eat the biggest burger London five quid. It's
so funny though, because c w D burger in London.

Speaker 5 (02:12:57):
Meat saying a thing like the it's in a direct
attack on my ability to make stock, which is horrible.

Speaker 1 (02:13:06):
Right, you do all the ship you're not supposed to do.
You like got the backbone and air and everything. Oh yeah,
spine turns all why.

Speaker 5 (02:13:12):
And for the longest time, like all everything I did
came out of the woods on my back, typically a
long way, so some of this you'd be like, oh yeah,
no bones, no problem. But then like you get that
big bull elk and a CWD management zone right on
the side of the road. Magically you're like, oh my god.

Speaker 1 (02:13:33):
I'm making like t bones and ship, you know, and
then you get all scared about it. That's what continues
to kill me.

Speaker 4 (02:13:41):
Yeeah, I totally understand that it.

Speaker 1 (02:13:43):
Continues to kill me. And I know that's not what
you guys are here to talk about. But like I
worry about, like I've proposed the two bunch of people,
I don't know if if there's a good way to
do it, it'd be like I wish someone would have
started a long time ago. Go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin, Okay,
used to be like for a while that was like
big Bucks. You know what, big Buck Central moves around

(02:14:05):
the country, Like big Buck Central was Alberta, big Buck
Central was whatever, Illinois, big Buck Central Kansas. You know,
just it hops around. There's multiple big Buck Centrals at
any given time, but they move the places people are
excited about move. Buffalo County had like a for a
while they were big Buck Central, Like go into areas.

(02:14:26):
I wish he'd done it ten years ago and start
being like, man, let's track like Boone and Crockett Entries
and overlay Boone and Crockett Entries county wide, statewide whatever
with CWD prevalency and be like or some way like
is if you just like to hunt big Bucks and

(02:14:47):
you're an antler guy, and I'm like fifty percent antler guy.
I'm fifty percent a burger guy. But like, are we
seeing that, like antlers are going away from CWD. If
someone imustrated that, it would change a lot of the
conversation people were having. But it would need to be
like not need to be that would that would impact

(02:15:12):
people's behaviors, It would impact people's perspectives to see where
it's headed. But just the uncertainty, it's just like it
just kills me. But you know, it's been killing me
now for how many years? Has been killing me? It's
been killing me for my entire adult life.

Speaker 4 (02:15:28):
The uncertainty exactly, and the fact that this disease is
so complex. We want answers. We don't like working under
uncertain conditions. We don't like being told, well, you can't
do this the way you've been doing it. Well, why, well,

(02:15:53):
we can't give you an answer, a precise answer for
this question that you're asking, because we don't know. And
when some body, particularly a scientist, says we don't know.
I've said I don't know several times today. It's because
we don't know. And if you, I mean, all we
can do is acknowledge what we know and what we
can demonstrate with with rigorous data. And if we don't

(02:16:15):
have the data, we just have to say, don't we
don't know the answer to that. That doesn't sit well
with us as society.

Speaker 1 (02:16:23):
No, That's why the one certainty I have is whatever
we're spending on research, I'd be like, let's quadruple it.
I'll find the money somewhere. I'll find something dumb that
we spend money out to make that go away, so
we can spend four times as much money on research.
So they're like, I don't know me and my kids

(02:16:44):
don't have to be paranoid about this ship for their
entire adult life.

Speaker 4 (02:16:46):
Yeah. And one thing that doesn't help with CWD at
all counterproductive is you have narratives, You have myths, you
have nonsense that that gets that can Mark and I
were talking about this on the drive over here. That
just consumes state agency personnel and resources and time. They

(02:17:06):
spend more time dealing with bullshit than they do trying
to actually do their job and try to understand what's
going on. And you put all that you know in
a hat, and you have something that's so complex that
is cryptic to Mark's point that you don't see it
that it takes generations to to kind of manifest itself

(02:17:30):
and really get going. And you and I think in
year to year, month to month terms, and now you're talking.
You know, now you have COVID and the skepticism of
science in general, and you put all of that together
and you've got a soup of crap that surrounds this disease.
And then that's what we work in. We work in

(02:17:50):
that soup. We're trying to provide data to inform decisions
and have conversations that are difficult to have. Nobody wants.
I don't want to think about this in the future,
but it's an unfortunate reality on the landscapes that I
hunt and I that I do science on. And so
you put all that together and it's it's it's it

(02:18:12):
burns your energy. And that's what you see when you
talk to state agency personnel in these states that have
these high prevalence rates, it is a gut punch to them.
I mean, the morale is down. They just are like,
what do we do, Like, there's no answer that's going
to work today, and the skeptical public wants an answer yesterday,

(02:18:36):
and that's just not the way that this works. And
that is a colleague to these agency biologists. That's frustrating
to me because I see what they're going through, and
I see that there are people in the public saying
that the agencies, you know, this is a positive because
they can get federal money. For God's sake. Oh give

(02:18:59):
me a break. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (02:19:00):
Yeah, that that idea, Like, I know plenty of people
that are in wildlife management. The fact that like that,
there's this idea that someone that some biologists, some deer
biologists sitting there and they get a positive in his region.
He's like, oh goodie, Yeah, now I'll be able to
buy that new car. It's like, are you kidding me? Shoulders,
It's so it's it's like so cynical and grotesque.

Speaker 4 (02:19:24):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like they just found out that think
about it like this, You're the director of a state
agency that just discovered CWD in your state for the
first time. Everything just changed everything. And he's like, oh good,
everything just changed for that that man worship And and
if you're.

Speaker 5 (02:19:43):
A director of a state agency, you're already well aware
that the subtlest changes in your state regulations for anything. Yeah,
because quite the public uproar.

Speaker 2 (02:19:56):
Dollars.

Speaker 5 (02:19:56):
Yeah yeah, Now they're doing what with snapping turtles? I
don't I don't care, but I got an opinion on it.

Speaker 4 (02:20:02):
Now everything changes for these biologists and and it trickles
down from the director all the way to the field staff.
Everything changes about the way they do their jobs, The
resource flow within the states change, everything changes, and the
idea that that is a positive. The amount of federal
money that's allocated to deal with CWD is literally pennies

(02:20:25):
to what it costs state agencies to deal with the
consequences of this disease. So this this this myth that
it's a money grab. It's ludicrous. It's absolutely ludicrous. It's
it's it's the exact opposite of that. It is a
money loss. It's a morale killer. It causes these state
agency biologists to put their hands up because particularly in

(02:20:49):
states like you see in Arkansas, where you know you
can you can feel it, like in the room, you
can feel it, you can feel the conversations about how
exasperated they are. It's like, my gosh, this is where
we're at, and this is where we're headed. And it's
just you can feel it sucked the air out of

(02:21:09):
the room.

Speaker 5 (02:21:10):
Well, I mean, you're not uncontrollable timelines, right, And it's
like the old gentleman that you talked about, like made
his dream become a reality. He's been planning and scheming
on this legacy white tail property or just family ranch. Right,
It's like how much of the planning has been done
in the absence of real nature and real conditions.

Speaker 4 (02:21:33):
Right.

Speaker 5 (02:21:34):
But it's like, yeah, this is the way it's going
to be, and this is the way it's going to be,
and it just takes time. It's not going to happen
on our timeline, no matter what.

Speaker 4 (02:21:42):
I think about the other side. Because I have friends
that are on the other side. Well then what do
we do? Nothing's working fail with it. Let's just and
the science shows that if you can keep prevalence to
where CWD is not a relevant source of mortality, if
you can keep prevalence low, then the future is not

(02:22:04):
going to look like it's going to look if you
put your hands up in the air and turn around
and walk off. That's just the reality.

Speaker 1 (02:22:11):
Yeah, that's clear. And I guess what people are going
to be waiting on is if you don't do that
and things go to hell what you try, and maybe
they're sometime down the road there'll be some clarity about that. Yeah,
But I think if you're in the low area, I'd

(02:22:31):
aim for low.

Speaker 5 (02:22:33):
Right, if you like the way things are right now, yeah,
and your best chance of getting somewhere close.

Speaker 2 (02:22:38):
To that is yeah. And that's where, like, you know,
across the landscape, you know, in these areas where you know,
we don't think CWD exists, even if it's part of
a state that has CWD, you know, all of the
effort and energy should be at prevention still, you know,
I think I think there's this other narrative out there.

(02:23:00):
You know, we look at the states. What are we
up to? Thirty five? I don't even remember because it's changes.
But then it's like, okay, well.

Speaker 1 (02:23:07):
That's thirty five states where it's detect right.

Speaker 4 (02:23:10):
I guess.

Speaker 1 (02:23:10):
So it's like okay, yeah, it's been hard to follow
because we keep almost getting new states.

Speaker 2 (02:23:15):
Right, right, right, right, But you know, like it's almost
like you know, some some people are like, oh, that
state's positive now whatever, it's done.

Speaker 1 (02:23:24):
Yeah, you one, it's a bad way of thinking.

Speaker 2 (02:23:26):
It's a bad way of thinking about it because to
your question earlier, Steve, about in twenty five years is
going to be a county that's not detected in the
state or in the in the southeast right those places
where we know it not exists, you know, the whole
effort of people in that area should be to prevent
it from coming. So we often throw prevention to the

(02:23:48):
side because it's a pain in the ass and it's
you know it, it interferes with our way of doing
things and what we want to do and how we've
done it in the past. But the alternative is not great.
I would much rather live in a in a shroud
of prevention than one of reaction and frustration and control.

Speaker 1 (02:24:07):
Meaning the fight shouldn't start when you find your first case.
The fight should start before you find your first kiss.

Speaker 4 (02:24:11):
An excellent point, very good point.

Speaker 1 (02:24:14):
Yeah, all right, guys, we got to wrap up. Man.
I appreciate you coming on, thank you for having me,
and I appreciate just like the you're talking about wildlife
managers being frustrated, you know, like, I appreciate you guys
entertaining a conversation that just like is it's hard, It

(02:24:34):
is like it is frustrating because like you're coming on,
you know, you're coming on with with having done research
and expert opinion, and you're just in a situation where
you got to have a lot of like I don't know,
I don't know, it's got to be feel a lot
better when you come on and be like here's the deal, Yeah,
do X do why we're gonna do Z.

Speaker 4 (02:24:54):
We're gonna fix this.

Speaker 5 (02:24:55):
But but what is like the at home takeaway right
now for folks going into their deer season.

Speaker 2 (02:25:02):
I always say, I mean, and I appreciate you for
entertaining this topic. Yeah, with you know, your audience, because
I think I think as much as individuals can just
be engaged care you know, and and understand sort of
the the you know, it's not you know, some of

(02:25:23):
these restrictions and quirky regulations and confusion around that. It's
it's all from a place of trying to prevent a
really big problem in the future and so trying to
just you know, embrace that and you know, be an
active participant in what the wildlife agencies need. That's one
of the things I always lean into.

Speaker 4 (02:25:44):
And be willing to. I mean, from my perspective, I
talk to hunters all the time that that have various
narratives that we've talked about today, their minds, you know,
their mindset is different than mine. I don't expect you
to listen to this podcast, ask and change everything you
think about CWD. But if you will just sit back

(02:26:05):
and just think carefully about the issues we've talked about
and recognize that there's no there's no answer, there's no
clear answer right now. This is going to take time.
There's always context involved, But if you're willing to at
least entertain that there is work going on that's showing
these things that we've talked about that this is a

(02:26:26):
this is a problem that is not going to just
go away. To Mark's point, you not getting it is
in your area is important and so I kind of
look at it from you know, the deer season framework
is one I don't want CWD where I'm trying to hunt,
and if I have it there, then I'm going to

(02:26:48):
have to behave differently because the agency is going to
implement changes to try to keep prevalence low, and that
is key. Not getting it and keeping prevalence low if
you have it, That's that's kind of where I see it.

Speaker 1 (02:27:04):
All right, man. Thanks again, guys, thank you well, thank
you for the book Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases in
the Southeastern United States, which my first response upon seeing
it is it shouldn't be that thick.

Speaker 2 (02:27:17):
Unfortunately it is.

Speaker 1 (02:27:19):
Oh yeah, I'm gonna read this to my kids at night.

Speaker 4 (02:27:22):
I wouldn't recommend that. Yeah, oh, thanks man.

Speaker 1 (02:27:26):
Yeah, if you want a real uh real eyeburner, I
don't know what you call this.

Speaker 5 (02:27:32):
Well, it's a professional level book based off the intensity
of the pictures.

Speaker 1 (02:27:36):
Right, it's a professional book. When I'm taking a non
professional gander through here, and it's an alarming collection of
photo my kids would like.

Speaker 4 (02:27:45):
Yeah, we're song okay. I was actually gonna ask Marca,
there's a there's a disease. There's something that causes wild
turkey feathers to be like soaking wet with like an
oil all over them.

Speaker 2 (02:27:58):
Whoa that I haven't seen that.

Speaker 1 (02:28:00):
It's not in this book.

Speaker 4 (02:28:01):
It's not in that book. And I'm certain this book
isn't complete. You haven't said you haven't sent this one, mate. No,
we caught we caught a hen in Louisiana in two
thousand and eight, and she was soaking wet like not wet.
She had this oil all over her to the point
where she looked terrible, and I put her in a
capture box and it was greasy on the inside of

(02:28:24):
the box. She was part of a brouge. She had
polts with her and I've searched for that, and I
meant to ask you the other day about that.

Speaker 2 (02:28:32):
And is that your only encounter?

Speaker 4 (02:28:33):
Only encounter ever?

Speaker 2 (02:28:35):
Weird things happen. I mean, is there any chance she
got into.

Speaker 4 (02:28:38):
A been a ben of oil whales? She was country,
so she could have encountered anything, right, right, Yeah, she
ran through.

Speaker 5 (02:28:48):
The defat Friar before she got right, yeah, yeah, anyway,
good lord.

Speaker 2 (02:28:52):
This book, now we we make that for that's intended
for field biologists, so those you know, most of our
agency personnel in this southeast kind of refer to that.
So it's written for biologists, but any hunter would enjoy it.

Speaker 5 (02:29:05):
I think put this in the camp or un take
my buddies read kid hunting with us this year and
be like, well, you just got to flip through that
first before we But there's also.

Speaker 2 (02:29:18):
There's also some normal stuff in there, because disease is
a part of life with wildlife, so you can have
a healthy deer that also has a disease, and so
there's lots of you know, parasites we've commonly seen in
wildlife and other things that would be of interest for
hunters when they're dressing an animal.

Speaker 1 (02:29:33):
I'm quite enjoying this book, man. All right, guys, thanks good,
thank you, thank you, y'all.

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