Ep. 937: What Happens If We Let CWD Rip?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast. You can’t predict anything.

00:00:20
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00:00:43
Speaker 2: All right, man.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: Joined today by Jason Sumners, who’s the director of Missouri’s State Fish and Game Agency, which is called the Missouri Department of Conservation. He’s a deer biologist by training, worked his way up from being a guy, a biologist out in the field to running the whole show there. Also sits on the board of National Deer Association. What we’re going to talk about primarily, we’re going to talk about Whitetail deer and deer management, mostly going to focus on what I think, what in my mind is the number one issue impacting deer and deer hunting and deer hunters today, which is chronic wasting disease. And when I say that it’s the number one issue, is even for you listeners, and I know there are many, even for you listeners that feel that It’s overblown.

00:01:36
Speaker 2: It’s all hysteria.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: It’s like it impacts all conversations about deer. It impacts decisions about deer management. It impacts how money is spent on deer management. For people out there that are worried about the future of deer herds, you know what I’m talking about. For people that are worried about the potential for human transmission, that a disease would jump from deer to humans, you know what I’m talking about. Even people that the whole subject of CWD drives them nuts, they spend time and energy explaining why the conversation drives them nuts. There is no other issue that comes close to chronic wasting disease when it comes to impacts, again, to deer, deer hunting, deer management. It is the issue of the moment, and at this point, the moment is decades long.

00:02:32
Speaker 2: Agree or disagree? No, no, I completely agree, Steve.

00:02:36
Speaker 3: It’s one of those that I’ve, you know, we found chronic wasting disease in Missouri in, in 2010. And I, I often tell folks that there’s pre CWD state fish wildlife agency and there’s post CWD state fish wildlife agency just because of, yeah, the very things that you mentioned, it is a challenging topic and, and it’s one that we just have to deal with.

00:03:00
Speaker 1: It’s challenging and it, And it is, we’ll touch on this. It is from my view, this is me talking, right? I don’t want to conflate my viewpoint and your viewpoint, but it is also contentious. And it’s contentious different than kind of the playful arguments that we have around here, where you could have, like, I’ll debate bodies of mind about whether you should be shooting crossbows at deer during archery season or not.

00:03:33
Speaker 2: These are like the old debate.

00:03:36
Speaker 1: Is the guy that shoots forkies, is he a bad player because he’s not letting deer grow up? Are the big buck blowhards ruining deer hunting for everybody else because they’re chasing numbers and not quality of experience? All these little pet fights. There’s all these little pet fights about deer. But this one is like, This one takes on an existential, it has an existential tone to it because we’re talking about, in some ways, we’re talking about what will the future of deer hunting look like beyond any kind of regulatory question. Like it’s gotten to, will there be deer around, right? And these are some of the things I want to explore with you. And we’ve had, if you listen to this show, you might have noticed over the years that this show, there’s some things we talk a bunch about. I was just talking with Jason before the show began. We talk a bunch about ice age hunters, which is not existential. That’s just interesting.

00:04:42
Speaker 2: And we have talked over the years, a lot about CWD and a listener might be like, well, what more is there to say?

00:04:50
Speaker 1: But I feel that, that, I feel strongly enough about educating people on this subject.

00:04:59
Speaker 2: And by that, I don’t mean telling you what to think.

00:05:02
Speaker 1: I mean, I feel strongly enough about exposing listeners to the different viewpoints and the research on CWD that if someone came and told me that we took a major ratings hit every time we talked about CWD, I would talk about CWD more. Because I’d be like, okay, if less people listen to the CWD episodes, I’m going to do more of them to make sure that more people get exposed to this information. And I am not trying to sit here on the CWD debate. I am not trying to sit here as a host and be like, here’s what you ought to think.

00:05:40
Speaker 2: Here’s what you ought to think.

00:05:41
Speaker 1: I try to bring in people that have a rational, educated perspective about what’s happening and what we need to do about it. And And you are regarded among the wildlife biology community as a person that ought to be listened to and that you have an educated perspective.

00:06:05
Speaker 2: And so I want to hear what you think.

00:06:07
Speaker 1: I’m not here to tell you what I think about CWD. But to start that conversation, why don’t we back up to where you were at When, was it, you said 2010?

00:06:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, 2010. Okay.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: What were you doing? Where were you at? What was your career looking like? And how did you first conceptualize this thing? You had to have some pre-awareness. But tell me, like, what you thought then about CWD.

00:06:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I think you’re absolutely right in terms of this interconnecting so many, like, challenging topics.

00:06:49
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

00:06:49
Speaker 3: And for us, it hit directly at one of those. So I grew up in Missouri, a country kid, loved nothing more than hunting and fishing. We had coonhounds growing up, right? So I grew up chasing coonhounds and all that kind of stuff and wanted a job in conservation. And I went south, got a master’s degree at Mississippi State working on deer biology. And so I was in Mississippi in 2001 when CWD was found in Wisconsin.

00:07:14
Speaker 2: Oh, okay.

00:07:16
Speaker 3: So in graduate school, right at that turn of like, okay, this is kind of big. Something’s going to happen. Don’t know what, right?

00:07:24
Speaker 2: God, it hasn’t been a quarter century. Isn’t it hard to believe? Yeah. It’s been a quarter century since people started talking about CWD in Wisconsin. Yeah. Yeah.

00:07:33
Speaker 3: It’s hard to believe that’s been that long, but yeah. So that’s where I was, um, wanting nothing more than be a deer biologist, um, and work on deer and deer management. Um, and so at that time, CWD was sort of just kind of a, curiosity thing in many ways hey this is something here it certainly created some fears no doubt but one that i was just kind of peripheral to got a chance to go to texas was a texan m for a while working on private deer ranches doing research in south texas went in 2000 late 2008 got the chance to come back to missouri you know where i grew up and be a deer biologist right like man this is awesome nothing more than wanting to be a deer biologist than the opportunity to do it in your home state you know.

00:08:13
Speaker 1: When i got do you mind real quick saying like Pre-CWD or just when you say a deer biologist, tell people what all that means.

00:08:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, so for the state, you’re responsible for establishing or recommending all the rules and regulations that manage the deer population in the state, right? And so in Missouri, we have a very small statewide deer management team at the time, and we just had one statewide deer biologist. I came to Missouri to stand up a private lands deer program. How are we going to work with private landowners to implement good management practices on the ground, right? Try to meet their management objectives while also addressing concerns of agricultural producers and all those kinds of things that we can set these statewide season frameworks that kind of push a population one direction or the other in a big way. But to really dial it in on a small scale, you got to work with private landowners. So that’s where, that’s where my frame of mind was. And especially across a lot of these initial assignments. Yeah.

00:09:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. That’s what we’re going to do.

00:09:12
Speaker 3: But I got to Missouri and, and so CWD, you know, had just been found in, you know, West Virginia in like 2005. And so for the first time kind of outside of Wisconsin in the Eastern U S and so folks are starting to pay attention. I got to Missouri and I was like, so what’s our CWD plan? Should we, should we get it? And effectively it just said that, We’d play nice with the Department of Agriculture should it be found in a captive facility. And they’ll play nice with us should it be found in a free-ranging population. But it really didn’t detail what we would do.

00:09:42
Speaker 1: I don’t understand when you say that, play nice.

00:09:45
Speaker 2: What do you mean?

00:09:46
Speaker 3: In terms of dual regulatory responsibility that kind of exists between the Departments of Agriculture and the State Fish and Wildlife.

00:09:53
Speaker 2: Agency in a lot of states. Got it.

00:09:55
Speaker 3: So deer and elk and a lot of captive cervids kind of sometimes fall into this space. where the state agriculture department may have some responsibility and the state fish and wildlife agency may have a responsibility.

00:10:06
Speaker 2: I see. So what you’re getting at. Depending on which side of fence they’re on. Yeah.

00:10:10
Speaker 3: Right. And so how are we going to just make sure that that relationship was good and.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: That we worked together. I see.

00:10:15
Speaker 3: And got to the same space.

00:10:16
Speaker 2: I mean, if you knew if it first popped in a captive cervid facility. Right.

00:10:22
Speaker 1: There’d be communication with the wildlife people and vice versa.

00:10:24
Speaker 2: Yep. And that’s about all it said. Okay.

00:10:26
Speaker 3: Um, cause they hadn’t really, they’d been doing sampling. So in Missouri in 2002 to 2004 did really extensive CWD sampling, sampled 22,000 deer across the state. And the idea was that we would try to sample enough deer that if the disease was present, um, we would detect it at some reasonable level.

00:10:46
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:10:46
Speaker 3: Turns out in that three year period, um, There was like a 98% probability that had the CWD been present in a county, it had to have been present at like less than 1%.

00:10:57
Speaker 2: So that gave us a baseline, right?

00:10:59
Speaker 3: In the early 2000s, it says we’ve done a ton of sampling. If it’s here, we should have detected it unless it’s a relatively recent introduction.

00:11:10
Speaker 1: Okay, that’s interesting, and I want to just stop on that for a minute because this is.

00:11:18
Speaker 2: A question I’ve always had.

00:11:21
Speaker 1: It you remember like covid testing yep remember someone saying like a great way to find covid is to do a lot of testing right like right like meaning sort of the perception was after a while it’s just there yep right covid was there and if you test a bunch.

00:11:39
Speaker 2: You’re like oh it’s all over and it would.

00:11:42
Speaker 1: Just generally be like testing reveals that it’s there And I’ve always wondered on that percentage you just said, as I always felt that as CWD started to hit and seemed to spread, was it that any time a state said, well, let’s go check, and they really checked heavily, they’d.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: Always find it? Yeah. But you were saying you were checking heavily in what year again? In 2002 to 2004. So you were looking heavily those years and, in fact, not finding it. Exactly. It wasn’t like once you looked, there it was. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it’s massive.

00:12:20
Speaker 3: You know, the staff that worked for the department at that time, they were collecting heads and barrels.

00:12:24
Speaker 2: And hauling them everywhere. And not finding it.

00:12:27
Speaker 3: And we didn’t find any.

00:12:28
Speaker 2: Okay. Right?

00:12:29
Speaker 3: And so this whole idea that, well, it’s always been there, you’re just doing more testing, so you’re detecting more is just not true. And so from that time, and then in 2006, we shifted really hard, kind of the first state to really shift hard to using taxidermists to do sampling. Because it started to become clear that adult males showing it at a higher prevalence, which meant that if we were sampling adult males, we’d have better likelihood of detecting it really early in that sample. So from 2006 on, We started using taxidermists statewide, collecting several thousand samples a year.

00:13:05
Speaker 2: Got it. Meaning because it’s sort of like selective. Right. You know, some dudes do. My dad did one time. But most dudes aren’t bringing yearling does down to get stuff. So you’re like, well, let’s go look at mature bucks. Yeah. Three and a half, four and a half. They turn up at the taxidermist. Absolutely.

00:13:24
Speaker 3: And so it was a way that we could sort of. sort of weight towards that group that’s most likely to have the disease and increase the likelihood of detecting it early. So, so much about CWD and CWD management is about the time of introduction to the time of detection as to how you can do it. So, several of the states that, you know, are pretty notorious for having found it and then found a lot, like Arkansas. Arkansas was doing testing, but they weren’t doing it really well. intensive testing yes so the likelihood of it setting there at a higher prevalence and going undetected is higher yeah.

00:14:02
Speaker 1: That’s what i was kind of getting at that’s that’s the sort of strategy i was getting at which means that a state’s like damn let’s go look all over and all of a sudden there it is and they go like well it must have got here yesterday And I might say, well, I don’t know.

00:14:18
Speaker 2: Did it? Or has it been there for forever? No one looked. Right, right.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: I get the point you’re saying where you feel like you’re confident that you were finding it in its early stages in the population.

00:14:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that’s played out through time. That has repeated itself over and over again when we’ve detected CWD in a new location and we go in and do even more intensive sampling. Oftentimes, it is extremely rare, right?

00:14:48
Speaker 2: Very, very few. Okay.

00:14:50
Speaker 3: So what we’re seeing is slow spread. So it gives confidence back to that early sampling period. Yeah, if it was there, it was at really low prevalence. So some of these southern states, they were doing testing, but they may have only been doing 1,500 a year.

00:15:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:15:07
Speaker 3: Kind of statewide.

00:15:08
Speaker 2: And what’s a big number for a state like Missouri? So we’ve been.

00:15:11
Speaker 3: 25 to 30,000 samples a year most recently. And it really is about trying to detect that first spark, that first introduction or the first, the slow spread.

00:15:23
Speaker 2: Right.

00:15:23
Speaker 3: So the management action can be more effective.

00:15:26
Speaker 1: When you were looking, if you, if you go back to those days when like, here you are, you’re a deer biologist, clear mandate on herd health.

00:15:36
Speaker 2: Um, here it is.

00:15:39
Speaker 1: You’re, you’re, finding that it’s popping up, it’s spreading. Are you looking at it at that time? Are you seeing it as a human health concern or a herd health concern?

00:15:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, most of our focus is a herd health concern. Okay.

00:15:52
Speaker 3: I mean, we can talk about the human health side of it, but it’s really for the herd health thing.

00:15:57
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean, like at that time. Absolutely. Because as much as I told you, I wasn’t going to tell you what I think. Yeah.

00:16:03
Speaker 1: At that time, for me, and to some degrees remaining still today, At that time, for me, it was virtually all human health.

00:16:14
Speaker 2: Just purely personal. Purely personal. Yeah, yeah. But you were viewing it like a deer issue.

00:16:19
Speaker 3: And I heard from a lot of folks with that same kind of concern. I didn’t recognize the number of folks that had been in the military or whatever and had been in Great Britain and England at the time of the BSE situation and finding themselves having to make some of those hard decisions and then calling and saying, hey, what do I do? And so, yeah, certainly recognize the concerns that folks had, but it was really from a herd health standpoint that we were concerned about it because it was just starting to see some of the data starting to creep out of the West, things that were happening in Colorado with population reductions and lower survival and that kind of stuff. But to kind of back up, so we had this background history of we think it’s relatively, if it’s here, there’s not much of it. So when we found our first detection, before that, I was looking to other places to say, what are folks doing?

00:17:12
Speaker 2: So we had what was emerging, the difference.

00:17:14
Speaker 3: In management approach to what was happening in Wisconsin and what Illinois was doing. So Illinois had taken a very aggressive, very localized approach, whereas Wisconsin had taken a much more broad sweeping kind of management regulation based approach.

00:17:30
Speaker 2: Lay those two approaches out.

00:17:32
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Illinois, what they did when they’d find a CWD positive detection is they’d identify the section, the one square mile section in which the positive deer was around and then define a core area around it, another block. So it ended up being three miles by three miles around any positive. And then they would go in, they would issue additional permits, but following the hunting season, contracting with USDA Wildlife Services and their staff, they’d go in and try to do additional localized removals.

00:18:01
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:18:01
Speaker 3: To try to remove the social groups where a positive female, for example, has been.

00:18:07
Speaker 2: So we know most.

00:18:09
Speaker 3: Likely other positive deer is ones that are related to a positive deer.

00:18:12
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:18:12
Speaker 3: So where they interact and engage with one another. Whereas Wisconsin’s approach was to be a lot more broad brush. You know, the earn a buck program was in place trying to massively reduce deer populations.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:18:24
Speaker 3: A lot of additional opportunities outside of the season. Less kind of surgical.

00:18:30
Speaker 2: I would say. Got it.

00:18:31
Speaker 3: And so you could start to see the trends and indicators, especially after Ernebuck went away, that population trajectory was changing between the approach Wisconsin was taking versus Illinois.

00:18:42
Speaker 2: Who was right?

00:18:44
Speaker 3: Well, Illinois has been able to maintain relatively low prevalence rates through this past 25 years post-introduction. Through the very localized, very intensive approach in working with landowners.

00:18:58
Speaker 2: But man, did that one piss people off, though. Yeah, it has. Yeah, it has.

00:19:02
Speaker 3: And so that was the approach we took. So we wrote the plan to say, okay, what can we learn from Illinois? Very localized management, trying not to tremendously negatively impact hunters outside of where CWD is, right? So this is a little bit of this balancing that has to occur. How do you address the disease without negatively impacting everybody? And so that was our approach in 2012 when we had our first detection of free-ranging herds. very localized work with landowners try to give them additional authorizations during the season and then with their permission we would come in after the season and do additional removals with the objective of how.

00:19:42
Speaker 2: Big is the box how big is a box in missouri that you’re talking about at this time.

00:19:46
Speaker 3: Well they they vary in size because some of them are pretty big because we’ve had slow spread.

00:19:51
Speaker 2: Okay, give me a medium-sized box.

00:19:52
Speaker 3: A medium-sized box would be 40 square miles.

00:19:56
Speaker 2: 40 square miles. You know? And at that time, and tell me the year roughly that this happened. Yeah, 2012, 2014, that time frame.

00:20:04
Speaker 1: At that time when you had a box, let’s say you got a 40-square-mile box, okay?

00:20:08
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Um, how many, like a township six by six, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

00:20:15
Speaker 1: So picture like a roughly a township size township for, for, for those of you in the Eastern us, a township, basically six by six square miles. Um, you, you would, the objective would be to reduce the population by what?

00:20:29
Speaker 3: We really didn’t set a target at that time. Just reduce it, just reduce it. And a lot of the focus was, Hey, do you have a positive on your property? How can we try to reduce some of the deer that likely would have came into contact with that individual?

00:20:42
Speaker 2: Okay. Right.

00:20:43
Speaker 3: And so kind of both during the season, we gave landowners the opportunity to get what we at that time called CWD management seals, which would allow them to even shoot additional bucks.

00:20:54
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:20:54
Speaker 3: During the regular hunting season. And then after the season, we say, hey, do you want to shoot some additional deer?

00:20:59
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:21:01
Speaker 3: If you do, great. We’ll give you that authorization. If you don’t, would you let MDC staff do that? And if you don’t want to be involved, that’s fine too, right? Like completely voluntary from their standpoint. So then we would go through about a two month period. The thing we also did was we offer those deer back.

00:21:18
Speaker 2: To the landowner.

00:21:19
Speaker 3: So we take them, get them tested. If they test not detected, offer them the opportunity to have that deer back. If they didn’t want it back, then we donated all those to share the harvest. So one of the things that also goes around is that, well, those deer got wasted. They got shot. Nothing got done with them. And that’s just not true either.

00:21:40
Speaker 1: So I know you didn’t have an objective, but can you think of an example, again, of a township-sized chunk of ground, roughly 40 square miles? Can you think of an example during that time when you wanted to do a reduction? Just looking back, what did you ever achieve for percent reduction? Yeah, so probably 30% to 40%.

00:22:01
Speaker 2: Reduce it to 30% to 40%.

00:22:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I think When we talk about population management, we’ve always targeted in the eastern U.S., if you remove about 25% of your adult females on an annual basis, you’re kind of keeping the population steady.

00:22:15
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:22:16
Speaker 3: And so when you look at historic harvest trends, we could look at the historic harvest trend of a county and say, what does that look like? We were shooting for another 10% reduction.

00:22:26
Speaker 2: Potentially, right?

00:22:28
Speaker 3: Just trying to get over that hump of, Just normal harvest probably wasn’t going to be enough. Some additional localized focus would be or should help. And that pattern’s played out through time where we’ve had good landowner cooperation, where we had that box was smaller and we got more intensive harvest. Those prevalence rates in those core areas is still flat or steady even now a decade later.

00:22:55
Speaker 2: Is that right? Absolutely. Let’s play the why game.

00:23:00
Speaker 1: At that time, You’d go to a landowner and you’d say, we want to, we’re looking to reduce deer herds.

00:23:07
Speaker 2: And he says, why? And you’re like, well, cause we’re trying to slow the spread of CWD. Why? What was that? Why? Yeah.

00:23:15
Speaker 3: That why was because of the long-term impacts of CWD on the population.

00:23:19
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:23:19
Speaker 3: Cause everywhere else we’d seen it, we knew kind of three things were happening. It kills deer, it spreads and it increases in prevalence. We know that to sort of be uniform uniformly true everywhere we’ve found it with the exception of, you know, New York where they probably got super lucky and shot the three deer that.

00:23:42
Speaker 2: Were actually positive.

00:23:43
Speaker 3: Right. And we’ve had some core areas where we’ve detected a positive shot one or two more positive deer and haven’t had any more. Really?

00:23:51
Speaker 2: It’s really rare, right? Like really rare.

00:23:54
Speaker 3: And we continue to monitor and those kinds of things, but, but it does happen. but you don’t count on it.

00:24:01
Speaker 1: I want to stick with the timeline, but I want to take a minute and jump out of the timeline because we’re talking about the whys, okay? And the why you gave is probably still relevant today, long-term impacts. But let me hit with what would be a paradox, okay? I think this is a paradox. It’d be, we have a fear that CWD will cause a decline in.

00:24:33
Speaker 2: The deer herd.

00:24:35
Speaker 1: Therefore, to stop it, we will do the very thing that we fear will happen from CWD, which is decline the deer herd.

00:24:45
Speaker 2: Help me through that. No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Help me through that puzzle.

00:24:54
Speaker 3: Yeah, and to me, it’s about sort of Attempting to control the fate of the herd.

00:25:00
Speaker 2: Okay. Right?

00:25:01
Speaker 3: And continue to have prevalence relatively low that it is not impacting the population. And that we, by reducing the population, can keep prevalence rates low and we continue to maintain a healthy deer herd.

00:25:15
Speaker 2: That folks can use and enjoy and appreciate. Okay.

00:25:18
Speaker 3: And not have a high proportion of sick animals on the landscape.

00:25:21
Speaker 2: Got it. You know, the idea that, you know, we’ve had.

00:25:24
Speaker 3: Two deer in a small rural community along the Mississippi River, Missouri, just crawl up in folks’ yard and die, right? Like, yeah, CWD, we don’t want CWD to control the herd in that way.

00:25:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:25:37
Speaker 3: We want hunters to be in a position where they continue to appreciate having these deer on the landscape. And then whatever other concerns folks have, whether it is human health or otherwise, but that it’s just an important part of the landscape.

00:25:50
Speaker 1: So is it fair to say, like, I’m just going to use rough numbers. Is it fair to come and say to somebody or a community of hunters, a county or whatever, where deer hunting is popular, be like, right now we have a ton of deer, okay?

00:26:07
Speaker 2: We have 100 deer per unit of space.

00:26:11
Speaker 1: And you would say to a group of hunters in a region, you would say, if we just let CWD rip and we don’t do anything and we just let it run, you could feasibly wind up in a situation where, we don’t really know, but let’s say there’s a situation where there’s 20 deer per unit of space instead of 100.

00:26:32
Speaker 2: There’s 30 deer per unit of space instead of 100. And those 20 or 30 deer, 50% of them are going to have this disease.

00:26:42
Speaker 1: Blank percent of them are going to be dying from this disease. And that’s what it’s going to look like. Or we hunt them down to 20 or 30. And those are disease free. And those demonstrate the age class we want to see. And those have mature bucks in them. And that is the thing. But yes, either way we’re talking about, you’re going to see less deer from your tree stand.

00:27:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely right.

00:27:12
Speaker 1: Because people look, I’m telling you, man, like, you know this. People look and they’ll be like, how can someone try to tell me that me seeing fewer deer from my tree stand is good?

00:27:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: Like, I don’t know. Person comes in excited. They’re like, how was your hunt?

00:27:33
Speaker 2: Awesome. Didn’t see nothing. Right. Like, no one’s chasing that evening. Yeah. Yeah.

00:27:39
Speaker 3: And so I think that collided with the rise of trail cameras. The rise of the intensity of deer management that happens today. Folks understanding what age means to potential of antler development.

00:27:52
Speaker 2: Sort of this.

00:27:55
Speaker 3: Possessive nature of the way that we feel about deer now because we get them on camera. I got a deer on camera. That’s a bit of it’s my deer. Kind of the intensity of management. And we also had folks, because of that, investing a ton of money in recreational land. I mean, some of the most valuable land in Missouri is for recreational opportunities to hunt deer turkeys, right? And that’s very true across much of the Midwest. You can’t grow crops on it, but it can grow good deer turkeys. It’s extremely valuable. So you’ve got folks who’ve invested or made lifetime sacrifices to buy land to be able to shoot giant bucks. And then this idea that, well, I’m going to have fewer deer.

00:28:34
Speaker 2: Now what are we going to do?

00:28:36
Speaker 3: It’s a tremendous ask, and it’s one that we had some Yeah, really challenging conversation with folks about. The other thing that with CWD, if CWD is controlling the population, it’ll be a much younger herd too, right? Because it’s going to crop off that older age class. And we know even when we had smaller deer populations, we were shooting them pretty hard. We still had bucks in older age classes. We didn’t have as many numerically, but we still had them.

00:29:03
Speaker 2: They were present. Yep. Yeah.

00:29:05
Speaker 1: So let’s go back to that. Let’s go back to that chronology a little bit. You were, you were taking this, what we’ll call the Illinois model.

00:29:12
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:29:13
Speaker 1: If we’re setting it up like, like two different perspectives, Wisconsin generally trying to use programs. So generally lower deer statewide, Illinois being like, no, man, we’re going to find a hotspot.

00:29:25
Speaker 2: We’re going to shoot them out.

00:29:27
Speaker 1: And you were doing that Illinois model and finding that you could sort of keep prevalence low.

00:29:35
Speaker 2: Or lower.

00:29:37
Speaker 1: Walk through how these prevalences move, meaning you find a spot.

00:29:44
Speaker 2: With 1% or 2%.

00:29:46
Speaker 1: How does it grow when it’s unchecked? And what does it look like when you’re taking steps to check it?

00:29:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, so what you see is those deer have to come into contact with one another to spread it. So it’s that social interaction and engagement that occurs. Fewer deer on landscape, fewer deer spreading it to one another, especially in the east where they don’t move a ton. It’s not like the migration corridors we see in the west where they might be moving long distances, especially when you get into the eastern Ozarks.

00:30:16
Speaker 2: Home ranges are pretty small. Really?

00:30:18
Speaker 3: In the agricultural parts of the state, the movement between habitat patches might be longer.

00:30:23
Speaker 2: So you’ll see.

00:30:24
Speaker 3: You’ll see a very different dispersion of the disease in those kinds of landscapes as well, just based on deer movement. West Virginia is a great example. Hampshire County, they found CWD in 2004 or 2005. It hasn’t spread all over West Virginia. It’s still pretty localized and contained. Largely because deer in those landscapes just don’t move a lot.

00:30:47
Speaker 2: Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So you’ll see some of that. So that’s the way it spreads out. You said they move more in ag areas than they do in mountain areas. Yeah. Yeah.

00:30:57
Speaker 3: Any heavily forested landscape, they move far less.

00:31:00
Speaker 2: Really? That’s pretty well known. At the risk of this being a huge tangent, why? Why is that? Available resources and cover. Okay. Right?

00:31:09
Speaker 3: You know, you think about an ag country, while there’s food everywhere, there’s bedding cover and escape cover may not be in those spots.

00:31:17
Speaker 1: Oh, so they’re traveling longer distances for those primo food sources.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, and cover, right?

00:31:23
Speaker 3: That being the big limiting thing. In a forested landscape, they’re using terrain and topography. They’re using small… you know, woody covered. They’re more of a homebody.

00:31:32
Speaker 2: I never knew that.

00:31:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. So you see that. But what we see is through the first several years of a detection, a really early detection, is really slow increase in prevalence. I mean, less than like a half a percent per year, kind of really slow. But then once it hits about 5% in any reasonable sized area, you start, it’s like an inflection point.

00:31:59
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:31:59
Speaker 3: And prevalence starts to really speed up because I think you’ve got enough deer then that are infected that that contact rate almost becomes exponential.

00:32:07
Speaker 2: Got it. And this has played out in a lot of places.

00:32:10
Speaker 3: Mike Miller, you know, I mean, I think some of the work Mike’s done in Colorado and a lot of the early research, they talk about 5%, somewhere between 5% and 7% really being this tipping point.

00:32:21
Speaker 2: Got it. So can we detect it before that?

00:32:24
Speaker 3: Before that’s the point where we can actually have management interventions that are probably meaningful and impactful before that, before that.

00:32:31
Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah.

00:32:32
Speaker 3: And so we, we, we published a couple of papers in, in, you know, 2020, 2021, really looking at what is that window of opportunity? And it really gets back to your detection, your ability to detect and the intensity of sampling that you’ve done to be on the front end of it. Once it gets past that point, the geographic spread has started to become wide enough. that your area of impact and influence becomes so large. It’s an entire county. It’s a couple of counties, right? And the ability to do this localized management like Illinois had been doing and like we had been doing really gets diminished. So we’ve had to take a different approach in a lot of places. Like where CWD drifted up into southern Missouri from Arkansas, it’s much more widespread. It’s not like it was just a single introduction where we could go track that. It’s spread out over across, you know, half the southern border. So are there cases where you.

00:33:31
Speaker 2: Just walk? Yeah, we have. Yeah. Yeah.

00:33:34
Speaker 3: When you look at southwest Missouri, south of Taylor Rock and Bull Shoals Lake, where it is kind of the northern edge of the Arkansas outbreak, because of access, because of small landowner acreage, because of tough terrain and hard to get in and do additional deer management. We just don’t even get made deer killed in that area anyway.

00:33:55
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:33:56
Speaker 3: We’ve chosen to let it run its course outside of just carcass movement regulations, some testing to monitor prevalence and that kind of stuff.

00:34:04
Speaker 1: Well, how with, I understand coming to that decision because you have limited resources.

00:34:09
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:34:10
Speaker 1: I guess you didn’t even mention that in your list of reasons, but that’s gotta be on there somewhere. Like you’ve limited money and limited people. But how does that edge not just march?

00:34:23
Speaker 3: We got a couple of big reservoirs. Oh, so physical barriers. That sort of create a bit of a physical barrier. They’re not an incomplete and they’re not a complete barrier. We know deer swim the rivers and the lakes, but it at least is going to slow it down.

00:34:37
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:34:37
Speaker 3: So it gives us the opportunity to say, okay, well, on the north side of the lake, if one does come across, it’s probably a relatively new spark, right?

00:34:46
Speaker 2: It’s jumped the line.

00:34:48
Speaker 3: Then we could be a little more aggressive in addressing those.

00:34:54
Speaker 2: Tell me a little bit about how, tell me a little bit about what you’re hearing through this, what you’re hearing from deer hunters in Missouri. If you had to make that there’s, if you had to say that there’s two groups or four groups or whatever the number, like, what are the groups that are coming to the meetings, right, that are articulating a viewpoint? Like, what are their viewpoints?

00:35:25
Speaker 1: And you can, you know, you don’t even, you can disparage the ones you want to disparage or you can just give it in their words.

00:35:32
Speaker 2: Like, who’s coming to talk to you?

00:35:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don’t think folks do it intentionally, right? Like, so I’m not going to disparage anybody. I value their perspectives and their opinions and based on what they know. So we’ve got, So interestingly, so we perked along with a few additional detections kind of from 2012 to 2018 and then started to detect it in a couple of other spots. And I felt like we had pretty good communication. We had pretty good understanding of what was going on with local landowners. And then really post-COVID, attitudes and perceptions changed pretty dramatically. A lot of mistrust, a lot of questioning of intentions. that we just didn’t face before that is a really different time period. But we’ve got folks who I don’t believe it, right? Like show me the facts. You got to spend time trying to share information with them. You got folks that inherently just trust and will believe, you know, the agency voice as experts. And a lot of folks who are just complacent.

00:36:38
Speaker 2: Or not aware.

00:36:39
Speaker 3: Okay. I, it, it, It was really hard for our team and myself, too, as we’d find new detections. It felt like Groundhog Day. Man, I’m talking about CWD management in Missouri since 2010. I couldn’t tell you how many thousands of people I’ve talked about it, how many articles in the conservationists, how many news programs, like all the things talking about CWD. You find it in a new place, and it’s like they had no idea.

00:37:04
Speaker 2: Oh, is that right? Right.

00:37:06
Speaker 1: So like people not following it, not the way national conversation or state conversation, they’re following it.

00:37:13
Speaker 2: Like, like my dear, my dear. And then when it’s my dear, they’re like, no, they’re what they wake up to it. Yeah, absolutely.

00:37:21
Speaker 3: And it just, and I’ve used this, the Bill Murray slide of groundhog day numerous times in presentations because it feels that way.

00:37:28
Speaker 2: It’s like, yeah. Cause you, Oh my gosh. Like, you know, sir, with all due respect, like, I don’t understand where you’ve been. Right.

00:37:38
Speaker 3: Right. And so that’s really hard. And from a communication standpoint to say, here’s where information is advancing. And then you’ve got a bunch of folks, a large number of folks who aren’t as tied in and paying attention. And so then and then you’ve got those that are paying attention, but they get fixated on certain issues or certain parts of it, which I think is where this sort of broader concern starts to creep back in. Things like, well, it’s clearly just the captive guys moving deer around the landscape.

00:38:10
Speaker 2: It’s all their fault. Sure. Right.

00:38:12
Speaker 3: Or no, it’s not our fault. No, it’s, it’s all the deer hunters fault.

00:38:15
Speaker 2: Right.

00:38:16
Speaker 3: Like it’s where it’s the guys pouring urine on the ground. It’s their fault or right. Like that, those things that start to say, well, that’s part of it. In this case, it might’ve been in this case, it wasn’t, but it creates these lines for. for us to be tribalistic in some ways.

00:38:35
Speaker 2: Hugely. Right? But you feel the tribalism emerged with COVID. Or was it a new one? A new one. A new tribalism. And that was a skepticism.

00:38:52
Speaker 1: That was a skepticism of being skeptical of officialdom.

00:38:57
Speaker 2: And science. Yeah, because….

00:39:00
Speaker 1: Elements of that, like, cause elements of that community on the human health end of the landscape.

00:39:09
Speaker 2: Really made some big mistakes. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And then it became, I’m done with all y’all. Yeah. All of you all. Right. And so then. Like any egghead scientist guy is out. Right. And so then.

00:39:24
Speaker 3: The real conspiracies start to creep in. Well, what’s their motivations? What’s their intentions? Why are they doing this? There must be something more we don’t understand.

00:39:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right?

00:39:36
Speaker 1: But an early, to stick to this timeline a little bit, I appreciate what you’re saying about a heightened skepticism. But I don’t have these dates down, but I know that there was a lot of that prior and it would be, and maybe you can visit with me or try to remember with me pre COVID back more in the timeline. We’re talking about like 2014, 2015.

00:40:06
Speaker 2: It’s on the ground. You’re dealing with it. Are you doing baiting restrictions? Yeah.

00:40:13
Speaker 1: Because I feel that one of the earliest in my recollection, one of the earliest sort of tribalism things that came up, and I’m thinking particularly of Michigan where I grew up, baiting restrictions, okay, where there was a narrative spun there that the same, the view would be the same kind of people.

00:40:46
Speaker 2: Who are worried about herd health.

00:40:49
Speaker 1: And who are worried about human health are the same kind of people that have kind of always looked down on deer baiting. They’ve always felt that it was deer baiting was beneath them or deer baiting. Wasn’t sportsmanlike and hunting high fences. Wasn’t sportsmanlike like this community. And now they’re able to go, aha.

00:41:12
Speaker 2: Gotcha. Gotcha. It is bad.

00:41:15
Speaker 1: It’s bad because it spreads CWD and I’m going to use it now. to do a thing I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve always wanted to get rid of deer baiting. I’ve always thought it was bad. I always thought you guys were rednecks. I always wanted to get rid of shooting high fence deer because I’ve always thought you guys are rednecks.

00:41:31
Speaker 2: And now here I got my thing. Right? Yeah, absolutely. And that was on the ground pre-COVID in Michigan. Yeah. Right?

00:41:42
Speaker 1: And in all clarity, I grew up sitting over piles of carrots and apples. But I didn’t have that. I didn’t get that feeling because I was out of there by then. I had moved away. But I just observed it happen in Michigan. So there was like a tribalism. But I guess the question to you is did you guys do that? Did you guys do restrictions that in those years that created these little camps?

00:42:14
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:42:14
Speaker 3: So for us, the first one that emerged was the captive servant industry.

00:42:19
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:42:20
Speaker 3: And then our first CWD positive was found in a captive facility.

00:42:23
Speaker 2: Got it.

00:42:24
Speaker 3: And then our first free ranging positive was found right outside of it.

00:42:27
Speaker 2: I want to get to this. Right.

00:42:28
Speaker 3: And so I want to get that whole, um, yeah, here’s the chance. Here’s the space where it got projected on us.

00:42:38
Speaker 2: Cause you never liked me. You never liked me anyways. I’ve never been one of those.

00:42:42
Speaker 3: I’m not, you know, it’s like, They existed on the landscape for a long time, but we need to do it right. We need to try to keep herd health safe. In Missouri, though, the baiting thing wasn’t as big of an issue because it was prohibited back in the.

00:43:01
Speaker 2: 1980s.

00:43:01
Speaker 3: Baiting was actually legal in Missouri. Nobody did it.

00:43:05
Speaker 2: We didn’t have baits.

00:43:06
Speaker 3: Robust deer populations and quite honestly through the 60s and 70s and early 80s man i grew up hunting deer like rabbits right like a lot of drive hunting because there just wasn’t very much deer so missouri was a no bait state so we didn’t have bait but we weren’t we’re in a no bait we’re in a no bait state right now so it’s it’s not part of the conversation right right so that because it’s always been nobody yeah so that wasn’t a space where we had sort of controversy we had i see We did prohibit.

00:43:32
Speaker 2: The placement of food, salt, and minerals. Okay. In a core area, right?

00:43:37
Speaker 3: And with the rise of placement of minerals on the landscape and stuff like that, certainly that was challenging. But not one that was like dyed in the wool, we’ve been fighting over it for decades kind of thing.

00:43:49
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:43:50
Speaker 3: Like some places have certainly had.

00:43:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. So pick that. I want to return to The spread. Yeah.

00:44:05
Speaker 1: But pick up this kind of evolution through time of mid-teens and sort of walk through from there to where we are now.

00:44:13
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:44:14
Speaker 3: So one of the things, so mid-teens, we started to slowly detect it in a couple of additional places. Some of the lessons we learned in Macon and Linn County, we sort of took with us to when we’d get a new detection.

00:44:26
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:44:26
Speaker 3: Well, where we found ourselves a couple years ago is the disease kept spreading. We kept finding additional detections. Again, all of them very low prevalence. So from a management standpoint, it’s like, well, we’ve only got a couple. We’ve sampled hundreds or in some cases thousands of deer in this area. We’ve only got a couple. Well, we need to be working there because we’ve got the opportunity to do that. You start to spread that out over, you know, 50 or 60 or 70 different core areas across the state.

00:44:57
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.

00:44:58
Speaker 3: And while we have a relatively large team to help work on that, it gets really diluted. And so we were starting to ask the hard questions of where do we continue to work?

00:45:11
Speaker 2: Who do we work with?

00:45:13
Speaker 3: How do we continue to incentivize landowners and hunters to do that?

00:45:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:45:17
Speaker 3: So at that same time, so that’s where we find ourselves in the early, you know, 2020s is starting to have these kinds of conversations. The distrust, declining participation. Are you seeing that for real?

00:45:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:45:31
Speaker 3: So with these additional detections and the spreading and diffusion of it, our ability to continue to manage the disease was being really challenged.

00:45:39
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:45:40
Speaker 3: So you add to that the growing narratives through social media and other places about ulterior motives, ulterior intentions, tensions started to get pretty high, right? Like real serious questions and mistrust of why.

00:45:55
Speaker 2: We were doing what we were doing.

00:45:57
Speaker 1: Hit me with a when you say that hit me with an idea, an ulterior motive idea. I don’t really, I don’t get who, no, I do.

00:46:08
Speaker 2: I do. I do get it. I hear that.

00:46:10
Speaker 1: It’s like, um, you all make your living doing deer management and this means more funding.

00:46:22
Speaker 2: Right. What are the other ones?

00:46:27
Speaker 1: You’re incentivized to create an issue because somehow even though you’re out of set state salary, there’s somehow money to be made.

00:46:36
Speaker 2: What is it?

00:46:37
Speaker 3: The federal funding is supporting the work and the more deer the test positive, the more federal funding we get. The more money the agency can generate, that’s the only reason we’re doing the work. That’s not true in Missouri because for a long time in the 20 teens, there was no federal money at all. It had completely gone away and we’d continue to do the work. We were doing the work with commission funds and resources to do that work. There’s the, you know, well, it’s good for the insurance companies. The insurance companies are happy because this means there are fewer deer on the landscape, right? Like it’s these things that start to creep in. And another one that I think is completely legitimate is folks who say, well, I get it, but it’s not going to work in the end.

00:47:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:22
Speaker 3: We’re still going to get to the same end point.

00:47:24
Speaker 2: Sure. Right.

00:47:25
Speaker 3: I think we’ll get to that end point on very different timescales and different time horizons based on whether we’re doing something or we’re not.

00:47:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:32
Speaker 3: And then again, back to, I don’t want to impact my hunting today.

00:47:37
Speaker 2: Yeah. In that really hard conversation. Yeah. I’m alive now. I’m a lot. I’m hunting now. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe the world will be done in 20 years. Like, I don’t know. I want to go on my tree stand now and see a bunch of deer. Yeah. Enough.

00:47:48
Speaker 1: I’m not interested in playing long-term like deer management games that are uncertain.

00:47:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.

00:47:54
Speaker 3: Unknowns into an unknown time period.

00:47:56
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:47:57
Speaker 3: And folks say, well, you got to have an exit strategy. I’m like, there’s no exit strategy. There’s just changing and adapting our management approach. That’s not an exit strategy. It’s just recognizing where we are. And so last fall, we made the tough decision to say, it’s gotten spread far enough. We’ve got enough positives on the landscape. We’ve had enough loss of support from landowners in core areas that were likely no longer being as effective as we were. So we’re going to stop what had become the most controversial part of our program.

00:48:34
Speaker 2: That’s the post-season target removal.

00:48:37
Speaker 3: And say, how do we then work inside the hunting season to support hunters and landowners harvesting more deer? And so that’s where we are today. It’s like re-engaging, trying to have new conversations with folks to say, this is a reality we’ve, we’ve just got to address like all other sources of things that kill deer. How do we recognize this in the kind of the broader deer management landscape?

00:49:01
Speaker 1: Your move in some circles, um, In some circles, your move was that, was treated as Missouri has decided to, again, they’ve decided just to let it rip.

00:49:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that’s not true.

00:49:22
Speaker 3: I think it’s a realization that the disease has been introduced into our state enough times and we had enough areas that our ability to have enough pressure and impact on the population at the local scale, the way we were doing it, was getting extremely diluted. And it was causing A lot of additional mistrust, a lot of additional concerns. So if you’re not going to be effective and all you’re doing is pissing people off, doesn’t seem like that’s the path you ought to continue to charge down. And so this last winter, we went back out, myself and others went back out and had a lot of conversations with folks that help us understand where you are.

00:50:03
Speaker 2: What are you willing to do?

00:50:04
Speaker 3: What do you want to work together to try to accomplish? This isn’t just something the Missouri Department of Conservation is trying to force on you. we’re going to determine the fate of the deer herd together. Because ultimately, hunters’ willingness and ability to harvest deer is what dictates and regulates the deer population across the eastern U.S.

00:50:25
Speaker 1: What percentage, if you just take Missouri, what percentage of the state is, in your view, what percentage of the state is in a position where doing these Targeted removals, we’re doing enhanced management strategies, won’t be effective because the disease is so prevalent.

00:50:50
Speaker 3: Small area along the southern border and then a small area in St.

00:50:53
Speaker 2: Genevieve County, south of St. Louis. Okay. So, sub 25%? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

00:50:59
Speaker 3: Less than 5% of the landscape.

00:51:01
Speaker 2: Less than 5%? Yeah.

00:51:02
Speaker 3: That’s the other thing is that we still got a lot of really healthy deer populations across the state.

00:51:07
Speaker 2: Right? We’ve got it in a number of spots.

00:51:09
Speaker 3: And when you start to put management zones on a map or you start imposing restrictions on feeding and things like that, carcass movement, it starts to make it look like the whole state’s covered up. But part of it’s because we’re slowly getting sparks everywhere. But in terms of kind of maybe above that tipping point, only a couple areas.

00:51:34
Speaker 1: One of the things that seems magical about CWD, Is the pop-up, the isolated positive pop-ups, the kind of out of nowhere spots, right? We talked about COVID earlier. You had air travel. So air travel made it that once COVID got cooking, you anticipated the weird pop-up spots and it became global.

00:52:08
Speaker 2: And you’re like, well, why is it global? It’s because humans move around. It’s just a.

00:52:14
Speaker 1: Fundamentally different situation than you’d expect with deer, where deer.

00:52:18
Speaker 2: Aren’t flying around. Okay? What is your understanding of when it jumps? Yeah, this is one of those places.

00:52:31
Speaker 1: And then you test and you find that there’s a moat of negativity around a new positive.

00:52:36
Speaker 2: I traditionally….

00:52:42
Speaker 1: I traditionally would look at that and be like, that has to be captive servants. And I would also look and be like, I don’t believe, I don’t believe that it’s some guy with a bottle of deer piss. I don’t believe it’s a guy who like, you know, boned out a deer and threw a shoulder blade out in his, in his ditch.

00:53:04
Speaker 2: And all of a sudden now.

00:53:05
Speaker 1: There’s a bunch of CWD positive deer. I’m like, I don’t think, like, I can’t even tell you why. Just my biases, where my head would work, I would say to myself, it’s not a deer pee, it’s not a bottle of deer pee.

00:53:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m right there with you, Steve. But I’m not, I don’t think I’m right.

00:53:23
Speaker 1: I’m just saying, like, where, how a person’s head works and how their assumptions go, like, that’s where I would fall in years past. as I would be like, there’s no, it wasn’t this, you know, that, that whole thing for a while that once you cut a deer up on a cutting board, the cutting board, unless you melt it with an oxyacetylene torch, it’ll always be. I’m like, yeah, that’s not spreading CWD.

00:53:49
Speaker 3: Right.

00:53:49
Speaker 2: I don’t know why, but I just know that it’s not. Right.

00:53:52
Speaker 3: And, and that’s where, you know, my thoughts on it have evolved some too, right. Through time as to what, what really is driving this?

00:53:59
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons, yeah, the ones where it jumps the border. Yeah.

00:54:02
Speaker 3: And, and part of that is because folks, folks outside of Missouri have, have, have been asked us like, well, what’s going on in Missouri? Right. Because we do have like a number of these, what very much would appear to be probably independent introductions of the disease.

00:54:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. But I agree with you.

00:54:21
Speaker 3: There’s this thing that we haven’t quite figured out and it’s, and it’s what is an infectious dose? So how much of the prions does an animal actually have to get that results in them getting infected at a point where they become a CWD afflicted animal?

00:54:37
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:54:38
Speaker 3: And so the things that you’re describing are all on that spectrum of.

00:54:44
Speaker 2: A carcass.

00:54:45
Speaker 3: I’ve had folks worried about hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and then coming home. I’m like, if you’re dragging it in the dirt on your boots… it would be everywhere, right?

00:54:57
Speaker 2: That’s why it just seems like such nonsense.

00:54:59
Speaker 3: If you drove through a pasture and then drove across somebody else’s pasture, that is not the way this is spreading.

00:55:06
Speaker 2: I had an awkward, sorry to interrupt, but I had an awkward conversation. I don’t want to name the name.

00:55:14
Speaker 1: I had an awkward conversation with someone one time, and I was saying, you guys got to stop.

00:55:21
Speaker 2: With the cutting board. like the cutting board stuff, you got to stop. I felt the same way. You were creating a level of fear and hysteria, but you have no ability to back this up. Yeah, I felt the same way. You got to stop telling people that.

00:55:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, I felt the same way about some of the urine conversations. And again, not to say that we haven’t gotten to a much better place with that, If you’re a far away place like Alaska, like the likelihood of the disease getting there through the live importation of an animal is nearly zero. Like nobody’s likely to carry a carcass all the way to Alaska.

00:56:05
Speaker 2: And introduce it there.

00:56:06
Speaker 3: And the, like, this is one more hole in the bucket that you could, would, could close then.

00:56:13
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Right.

00:56:14
Speaker 3: Like completely understand it. But if you’re in the Eastern U S and, the biggest fight that you’re doing now is over whether we ought to do urine based bands. There’s other higher risk activities.

00:56:27
Speaker 2: That are occurring on the landscape. It feels like a distraction. How do you, yeah.

00:56:31
Speaker 3: How do you have the conversation about what really matters and what’s really impactful?

00:56:35
Speaker 2: Got it.

00:56:35
Speaker 3: Um, and in some cases, you know, it’s not disparaging to my colleagues in, in other States, they pulled the levers. They felt like they had authority and public will to, to pull.

00:56:48
Speaker 2: Hmm. Whereas some of these other ones are really hard. Yeah. Okay.

00:56:52
Speaker 1: So, so get, get back into what you’re saying about what is going on when one jumps the line.

00:57:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:57:00
Speaker 3: So I think early on it very much was, and, and could likely have been pointed to captive servants, moving the disease across the landscape.

00:57:09
Speaker 2: Okay. I mean, we knew that, right?

00:57:11
Speaker 3: Like it was in elk well before we understood what was happening. It doesn’t show up in Toronto in the zoo randomly. It got moved in there by an elk. It got moved to South Korea in an elk, right? So we know those things were absolutely happening.

00:57:30
Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn’t a cutting board. It wasn’t a cutting board, right?

00:57:32
Speaker 3: It’s the whole biological package moving around. And so I think that’s absolutely true. But then what I don’t think we appreciated soon enough is, was that hunters likely were unintentionally moving it around too.

00:57:47
Speaker 2: Okay. And in the form of carcasses. You think so?

00:57:50
Speaker 3: I do think so. I don’t know how else we would explain that it has moved to other places the way that it has. Is that right?

00:58:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:58:00
Speaker 1: You feel fairly confident. I know you can’t say for certain because we don’t have that understanding yet. You feel fairly confident that there has been movement of non-live, that you’ve had infections come from something other than contact with a living, breathing deer?

00:58:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s completely reasonable.

00:58:28
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:58:28
Speaker 3: But it’s not just the, hey, I went to Colorado and hunted west and dumped one carcass on my property.

00:58:34
Speaker 2: Okay.

00:58:35
Speaker 3: I likely think it’s folks who were very consistently doing.

00:58:41
Speaker 2: Or doing it as a taxidermist. Doing what?

00:58:43
Speaker 3: That we’re consistent. Hey, we go to Colorado every year and shoot mule deer and we bring them home every year.

00:58:48
Speaker 2: Right?

00:58:48
Speaker 3: Like in a way that you concentrate enough material or you concentrate enough of that material in a particular spot. I think that’s the only way that you can reasonably explain how it’s jumped.

00:59:00
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah.

00:59:01
Speaker 3: Either that or it was so prevalent in captive cervids way beyond what we believe it was.

00:59:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:59:09
Speaker 3: And that, that there were more captive cervids on the landscape than we appreciate. And they didn’t have to be there very long for them to create an infection, which I just don’t think is necessarily true, but it’s the, definitely the first one that folks jump to. They want to say, oh, well, there used to be an old deer pen down this road. Well, now they were there for like five years. We don’t know what happened. Um, It gets really touchy as to whether that’s the real source of it moving around. But I think it’s not so easy that carrying dirt on your boots or pouring pee on the ground is the most likely way that it happens. But I don’t think it is so hard that it has to be a live animal.

00:59:50
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah. Right?

00:59:51
Speaker 3: So it’s somewhere in between there that I don’t think we understand it.

00:59:56
Speaker 2: Because you don’t understand how much dose it takes. Right, exactly. Is anybody looking at how much dose it takes?

01:00:01
Speaker 3: There have been a number of trials trying to look at it, and it’s only until more recently that we’ve been able to quantify how much prions are even in something. So only with the modern techniques. All of our diagnostic stuff was just detected or not detected.

01:00:20
Speaker 2: Yep.

01:00:20
Speaker 3: Not quantify how many prions are in saliva or urine.

01:00:26
Speaker 2: Okay. Or, you know, bone or the muscle tissue. Yeah.

01:00:31
Speaker 3: And all that depends, likely depends on the stage of progression of any individual animal.

01:00:36
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:00:36
Speaker 3: As to how far along the disease progression is. So it’s just a super complicated one that I don’t know that we’ll get to.

01:00:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. It’s like, it’s totally different.

01:00:45
Speaker 1: I don’t in any way want to conflate it, but I remember looking at, completely different. It’s not a prion disease, completely different. I remember looking at like, like trichinella.

01:00:56
Speaker 2: Larva, right?

01:00:59
Speaker 1: There’s a number per unit of weight and you can measure like how infected a tissue is with trichinella larva, which gives, which brings about trichinosis be like, there are blank larva per blank ounces. And there’s things that are very infected and there’s things that are not very infected, right? Is, Is it– with a deer, is there a thing like that, that there’s a deer that really has it and a deer that kind of has it and a deer that doesn’t really have it?

01:01:30
Speaker 3: You talk to pathologists, and they– yes. And that’s that stage of progression of the disease.

01:01:37
Speaker 2: But there’s no way to measure, like, the thing. Not that I’m, that’s a whole nother realm. This person is riddled with cancer. Right. They have cancer in their lymph nodes. And this person kind of barely has cancer. Well, we do see this though. Okay. We do see this.

01:01:53
Speaker 3: And you see it, one of the reasons why we shifted the tissues that we test.

01:01:59
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:01:59
Speaker 3: In the early 2000s, you had to test the OBEX. It was believed that that was a gold standard. Had to test the OBEX.

01:02:04
Speaker 2: What is that? Base of the brain. Okay.

01:02:06
Speaker 3: That’s where the prions were accumulating.

01:02:08
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:02:08
Speaker 3: That’s where they were seeing it in mule deer and elk. Well, through looking at other tissues, what they recognize is that it actually accumulates in the lymph nodes, especially the medial retropharyngeal lymph nodes, like the ones that sit right up here.

01:02:21
Speaker 2: Yep.

01:02:22
Speaker 3: Which, again, suggests some sort of an ingestion of the prions as part of that pathway. So what you’ll see is when they do necropsies of animals that are in really early stages versus very late stages, you’ll see progression of that disease through different tissues.

01:02:37
Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah.

01:02:38
Speaker 3: And the presence of them in different tissues as a result of that. But that’s like internal spread.

01:02:43
Speaker 2: Right. Right. Like that’s, that’s it running its course. Right.

01:02:48
Speaker 1: And once, I guess it’s kind of a little bit ties into, it’d be like once a deer gets some.

01:02:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:03:00
Speaker 1: Once it’s detectable in a deer somewhere, it’s a matter of course that as far as we know, It’s a matter of course that that.

01:03:09
Speaker 2: Disease will spread. Yeah. Throughout his body. Yes.

01:03:12
Speaker 1: Meaning he never gets, you know when you think you’re getting a cold and you swear you’re getting a cold, but then all of a sudden the next day you’re like, oh, it didn’t take.

01:03:21
Speaker 2: Right. Or whatever, you know what I mean? Right. Like I beat it. I don’t know. I didn’t get it. I never got sick. This isn’t a thing with CWD. As far as we know.

01:03:30
Speaker 3: As far as we know, that is absolutely the case.

01:03:33
Speaker 2: Its immune system can’t beat it.

01:03:35
Speaker 3: There is no immune response to prions. The body recognizes them as a protein. That’s all it recognizes it as. It doesn’t recognize it as some foreign body that needs to be attacked. So you don’t get any sort of an immune response. So discussions around vaccines and treatments and all that kind of stuff, It’s like a lot of other neurological diseases in people and animals otherwise. There’s no reversing the course of it. And so with advanced testing techniques where we’re able to detect them kind of in those earlier stages, which is what’s allowed there to be an understanding of the in utero transmission. So a fetus can actually get. from a heavily infected female, right?

01:04:21
Speaker 2: Can or cannot? They can.

01:04:23
Speaker 3: Like they’re just now starting to be able to demonstrate that.

01:04:27
Speaker 2: So that fawn hits the ground with CWD. Right.

01:04:30
Speaker 3: And if they’re born to an infected female, even if they don’t hit the ground infected, through all the social grooming and all those kinds of things, the likelihood that they will then be infected is extremely high.

01:04:42
Speaker 2: Got it. Got it. That a little bit answers that question of mine about.

01:04:48
Speaker 1: Again, so much of my understanding about disease comes from thinking of things that are pathogens. Or not pathogens, but viruses and bacterial infections. That it doesn’t make you well-equipped to understand a prion disease.

01:05:03
Speaker 3: It’s so different, right? Yeah, because we think, oh, well, they’ll just develop resistance to it. We’ll figure out some other way to deal with it. We talk about hemorrhagic disease in that same way. That’s the deer disease everybody knows about.

01:05:15
Speaker 2: Well, it’s a virus.

01:05:17
Speaker 3: Deer develop antibodies to it. They provide protection. They’re able to push those antibodies. A female that gets infected is able to push those antibodies through her colostrum to her fawns, which gives them protection, right? That is not known to happen with CWD because the body doesn’t recognize it in that same way. And yeah, I think it in and of itself is a huge communication challenge because we think of it in our typical disease or pathogen-based approaches.

01:05:44
Speaker 1: I’m glad you brought up Blue Tongue and EHD. Because I feel like the people I talk to and the people I kind of follow who would tip on the CWD that on the spectrum of people’s perception of CWD, of hunters and deer enthusiasts, that would be if from lookers, if you imagine this spectrum and from lookers the looker’s right perspective being the sky is falling.

01:06:20
Speaker 2: The end of the world is nigh.

01:06:23
Speaker 1: On the extreme of looker’s left, which I will call, and I don’t mean to diminish the perspective, but I would call it like the CWD denier end. But what it means to be a CWD denier has evolved over the quarter century that we’re talking about.

01:06:44
Speaker 2: It’s evolved. It went from, it’s not actually a thing. It’s make-believe. To, it is a thing. Probably always been there. It’s a thing. And there’s emerged in this end of it, not as bad as the HD. Yeah.

01:07:06
Speaker 1: Like, why are we talking about CD? Why are we not talking about HD? And there’s kind of become this rhetorical strategy they use. of all of a sudden being hyper-focused on EHD die-offs, how bad EHD is, as a way to sort of demonstrate these people, the eggheads, are missing the story. There’s an EHD story. EHD comes and kills all the damn deer, but it’s fine because they come back. Why are you guys so focused on this CWD thing? This is what’s killing deer. Yeah, because they come back. Yeah, that’s the big difference. We’ve been dealing with EHD outbreaks. The best you can track back is kind of the early 1900s. There were reports of late fall unexplained deer mortalities that we believe probably was some of the first indications of it. But yeah, and in Missouri, from anywhere a seven to ten year cycle of an EHD outbreak, that we’ve been dealing with through time. And those populations recover. Three to five years, very localized in impact. Like I was describing, passing on of antibodies.

01:08:21
Speaker 3: They get the disease, doesn’t kill all of them despite the belief that some have. It can be extremely lethal, especially where they’re really naive to it and haven’t been previously exposed. But the pattern of EHD is changing too.

01:08:35
Speaker 2: Is it?

01:08:35
Speaker 3: In terms of where we see it and how we see it. In the South, EHD is present or one of the hemorrhagic diseases are present in the midge flies kind of there all the time. And so a lot of those southern latitudes, the times that you see more significant outbreaks is when kind of presence of the antibody starts to dip. And then you’ll get a little bump in mortality, but you’ll have sick deer all the time. Like nearly every year. In a lot of the southern states, they’ll have deer die of EHD.

01:09:07
Speaker 1: And that’s an area, that would be an area where there’s been EHD for.

01:09:11
Speaker 2: A long time.

01:09:11
Speaker 3: Long time. Been there for a long time. And what I think we’re seeing is we’re seeing that line drift north. Because Missouri, we used to have just massive outbreaks. 1987, 1997, 2012 was unbelievable. I bet we lost a quarter of a million deer statewide.

01:09:32
Speaker 2: Is that right?

01:09:33
Speaker 3: It was awful. And across much of the Midwest. But most of the time, it’s in a corner of a county. Or it’s two parts of a county. And yeah, a lot of sick deer everywhere. And a number of them die. Ohio made the news last year, right? Small area of southeastern Ohio. I say small area, but an area in southeastern Ohio. Really significant mortality.

01:09:57
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:09:57
Speaker 3: But in almost every scenario, you shoot a few less does for a couple of years, deer population respond and recover. And what often folks see is that they actually see a little bit better buck production in those next couple of years.

01:10:09
Speaker 2: Oh, is that right?

01:10:10
Speaker 3: Because there’s less social stress. There’s less nutritional stress on them.

01:10:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. And they respond.

01:10:15
Speaker 3: But what we’re seeing is now as weather patterns and climate’s changing a little bit, we see the massive impacts of EHD occurring even farther north.

01:10:25
Speaker 2: In places it hadn’t dealt with before.

01:10:26
Speaker 3: In places it had not dealt with it before. And so it is more dramatic. It is a little scarier. But it gets back to that conversation we started on is to you individually, it has a heck of an impact. If you’ve been getting a bachelor group of bucks on camera and they’re all dead. you know, like that, then yeah, it has a real direct impact, but that happens.

01:10:50
Speaker 2: You go to a dirt tank and there, there, they all floating in the dirt tank.

01:10:53
Speaker 3: But that happens once a decade at most. Um, we had a research project a number of years ago in which had a bunch of deer collared, this before I worked at the department, had a bunch of deer collared and they think they lost somewhere between seven and 10% of those collared deer to a fall EHD outbreak. Never got a single report from the public of a sick or dead deer. So it’s something that’s kind of always happening.

01:11:17
Speaker 2: I see.

01:11:18
Speaker 3: It kind of happens in the background. A deer disappears and you don’t know why. But we definitely get pulses. And so I’m not discounting the fact that EHD can have a huge impact on populations. It’s that we can then regulate that through backing off of antlerless harvest for a few years. We can do something about that. CWD is just going to slowly take more and more of the deer population.

01:11:40
Speaker 2: Got it.

01:11:40
Speaker 1: So you view these two things as just like fundamentally different conversations.

01:11:44
Speaker 3: Fundamentally operating very differently from a population dynamic standpoint. I mean, I think about it in the same way that if a new predator gets introduced onto the landscape, right, that imposes a new mortality factor. As those populations increase, what’s the impact of that on the deer population, the ability of that deer population to grow? CWD is the same way.

01:12:05
Speaker 2: It’s now there.

01:12:07
Speaker 3: It absolutely kills deer. It’s going to kill older age class deer disproportionately, which is going to make your age structure a lot younger. And it’s going to make it less, less resilient. And the ability of it to thrive will just be sort of topped off.

01:12:26
Speaker 1: Crystal ball for me, if you’re comfortable, what, Let’s go down to that. What percentage of the state did you say it’s just like?

01:12:37
Speaker 2: I would say 5%.

01:12:37
Speaker 1: Okay, 5% of Missouri is there’s diminished public will to address it or a lack of public will to get aggressive about it. Percentages are high enough that the tools that you have at your disposal have become not really helpful, right? Um, and you could picture the same thing with, with other issues. Like I remember, uh, just that we keep going back to these COVID things. I remember one of the greatest emails I ever got from our public school system here in Bozeman was, um, when they finally like we’re throwing in the towel on it, we got an email cause for a while they’re trying to track, you know, little Johnny had it. And so little Johnny doesn’t, you know, can’t go to school. And eventually they, we got an email.

01:13:25
Speaker 2: That said, if your kid goes to school, consider them a direct exposure right we’re done we’re done they all got it it’s like we’re done we’ve done what we can yeah we.

01:13:37
Speaker 1: Tried all that stuff sending johnny home he can’t come and at this point it’s just if your kid goes to school they’re direct exposure we’re not telling anybody anymore like we’re done because whatever they had at their disposal they had like reached the end of public will and they reached the end of there was no tricks to try anymore it was just there it’s they got to where it’s like, it’s like them having colds.

01:14:00
Speaker 2: It’s like, it’s just whatever we’re done. We’re done. We walked away.

01:14:04
Speaker 1: Um, very different than this disease, but like, it was like a public will thing. And you hit that in 5% of the state. You’re done for kind of.

01:14:14
Speaker 2: Yeah. I suppose you could always go revisit it with some kind of new understanding. Right.

01:14:19
Speaker 1: But like, take that 5% in crystal ball. What, what, What does that area look like in 10 years? What does that area look like in 20 years minus some scientific breakthrough that I can’t even picture what the breakthrough would be?

01:14:37
Speaker 2: I don’t know what it would be. Yeah.

01:14:39
Speaker 3: So I think we’re seeing, especially in Eastern whitetail deer populations, that trajectory push a little quicker than we may have thought. I may have thought it was going to take decades to play out.

01:14:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:14:50
Speaker 3: I think if you, because we have this, we have this opportunity now to kind of jump in the time machine. and say, oh, well, states are now finding it at, you know, 20, 25, 40% prevalence.

01:15:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:15:03
Speaker 3: And here’s what they’re seeing in these localized places, whether that’s, you know, southwest Tennessee, northeast Mississippi, where they’re going, wow, there just aren’t as many deer here.

01:15:15
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:15:15
Speaker 3: And what’s happening, right? Like, mortality is ramping up. Not as many deer, and it’s not because we’re sharpshooting them. And it’s not because we’re sharpshooting them, because in a lot of those places, it’s It was farther progressed than they ever understood it to be.

01:15:29
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:15:30
Speaker 3: In terms of kind of low surveillance and kind of low diligence.

01:15:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:15:35
Speaker 3: So I think what plays out is that you lose the older age structure of bucks because most of them become infected and die at a relatively early age.

01:15:45
Speaker 2: And you have a younger age.

01:15:46
Speaker 1: Are you saying you think what plays out or is it like, does that seem like.

01:15:50
Speaker 3: That seems like that’s what’s playing out.

01:15:53
Speaker 2: Like. Yes. Okay. Not, it’s not theoretical.

01:15:56
Speaker 3: No, it’s not theoretical because you can look at the harvest data from like Eastern Wyoming and Eastern Colorado.

01:16:01
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:16:01
Speaker 3: And age structure is absolutely shifted. They’re shooting far fewer older age class bucks. Okay. So there’s just fewer deer on the landscape. The herd is younger because of that.

01:16:14
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:16:14
Speaker 3: The primary mortality is killing deer at older age class. CWD is the primary factor drive mortality. So it’s killing deer at older ages.

01:16:22
Speaker 2: Like CWD has passed up cars. It’s passed up hunters. Pretty close to it. Yeah. Yeah.

01:16:29
Speaker 3: West Virginia’s current research project, that’s what they’re demonstrating. CWD is like next to hunters. It’s the next highest source.

01:16:36
Speaker 2: Okay. So it’s number two to hunters.

01:16:38
Speaker 3: It’s number two to hunters, but it might be there pretty quick.

01:16:43
Speaker 2: I see.

01:16:43
Speaker 3: In terms of once that population continues to draw itself down farther.

01:16:48
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:16:49
Speaker 3: So my concern is that, yeah, that opportunity for recreational harvest gets diminished. Every deer that gets killed by a CWD is a deer a hunter can’t kill and eat and enjoy and appreciate, right? So the number of deer on the landscape would just be fewer.

01:17:03
Speaker 2: Do you feel that CWD, because earlier you mentioned like a buck, a mature buck is the most likely deer within a population to get CWD. Probably because he travels more. I don’t know. He’s around more.

01:17:19
Speaker 1: Does CWD kill big bucks at a higher rate than hunters kill big bucks?

01:17:24
Speaker 2: Do you know what I’m saying?

01:17:25
Speaker 1: Like if we’re looking at a population, like whatever, there’s a population of, there’s a population where hunters are killing 13, 14, 20% of the deer and blank percent of those are big bucks. And then within that same population, CWD kills 13, 14, 20% of the deer. Is it whacking off more bucks than hunters? Like, is it better at selecting bucks than hunters are? Well, there’s some interesting data. If you look at The long-term research Wisconsin has done.

01:17:58
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:18:00
Speaker 3: It’s fascinating. And what they’ve been able to do is through time track deer that not detect positive and then deer that have been positive, right? Separate them out into those two groups. During the fall hunting season, you see a disproportionately high number of CWD-infected deer get shot. Oh. Like the mortality on CWD-infected deer through hunter-harvest is substantially higher than the mortality of an uninfected deer.

01:18:29
Speaker 2: Like they’re easier to dupe? Yeah, right?

01:18:31
Speaker 3: And so I think in ways can send this perception, well, we’re still shooting a lot of nice antlered bucks, right? Well, you’re shooting the slower three-and-a-half and four-and-a-half-year-old bucks. But at some point, CWD will just crop them off. And the proportion of them that are infected that are going to survive to then.

01:18:50
Speaker 2: Fall is going to be really low. I mean, a deer, the progression of the disease… This is prophecy.

01:18:57
Speaker 3: I think it’s just a numbers game.

01:18:58
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:18:59
Speaker 3: Right? It’s like, how much infection do you have and how many deer are infected? Is a deer itself infected?

01:19:05
Speaker 2: Because.

01:19:07
Speaker 3: The data certainly suggests that 18 to 24 months post-infection that we can detect, a deer’s dead. It finally goes through the process and succumbs to the disease. So if you’ve got a two-and-a-half-year-old buck that is CWD positive, the odds of him making it to four-and-a-half are extremely low. That just isn’t going to happen. And so that’s going to crop it off. Hunters are going to kill some of those in the meantime.

01:19:34
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

01:19:35
Speaker 3: And those are the CWD positives when we remove through hunter harvest.

01:19:40
Speaker 1: Have you, are you aware of anyone or is this possible to fill a research facility with a bunch of infected animals and take totally good care of them and just see what happens? Like, can this be done? Because what a way to either to demonstrate to the public or just like to support these ideas or disprove these ideas is you have a population in a fenced area with triple fence, whatever the hell you got to do. It might be just unethical to do this.

01:20:21
Speaker 2: I don’t know.

01:20:23
Speaker 1: And within there, you’re going to say like, no, we’re going to put, we’re going to have a hundred deer in here. And it’s just balls out infested. They all got it. And we’re going to take care of them. We’re going to do all the things, and we’re just going to watch. What happens to the age class within this population?

01:20:42
Speaker 2: Is that unethical?

01:20:44
Speaker 3: It’s been done.

01:20:45
Speaker 2: And what happens in those situations? They die. And they don’t make adults. They don’t make, yeah, they don’t make adults. It’s just as a young population.

01:20:55
Speaker 3: It would be, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s been done. I mean, Colorado’s been doing this kind of work for a long time. In terms of what does it mean to cause disease transmission? What’s the progression of the disease? That’s how we know 24, you know, 18 to 24 months till clinical symptoms start to show up.

01:21:12
Speaker 2: That’s how they die. This work’s been done. Okay. So that’s been done in a closely observed population, not wild animals. Yeah. Yeah.

01:21:19
Speaker 3: And a closely observed populations. And so this is part of that, like, well, there’s no research. We don’t know what’s going on. No, we, we know a lot.

01:21:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:21:26
Speaker 3: A lot has been done. And this isn’t just speculation as to what will happen. How the disease will progress and what some of these other questions are.

01:21:35
Speaker 1: But some of that reproduction just trickles on because you have some animals making it to two, three years old.

01:21:42
Speaker 2: Yeah. And they’re dropping fawns.

01:21:43
Speaker 3: I think that’s what does happen.

01:21:45
Speaker 2: Reproduction trickles on. Right. It will trickle on.

01:21:48
Speaker 3: And so long as young females will be responsible for a disproportionate amount of the reproduction.

01:21:53
Speaker 2: Got it.

01:21:54
Speaker 3: So your ability for that population to really grow and thrive. It’s going to be based on the condition and ability of younger individuals. Whereas a four and a half, five and a half, six and a half year old adult female, really good mom, right? Like really highly likely to be able to produce two fawns, get them, you know, through the tough parts of early recruitment into the population. Younger females, not as good, right? Like they’re more likely to only have a single fawn. more likely to have not both fawns survive to kind of recruitment into the fall population.

01:22:30
Speaker 2: And so it’s just a.

01:22:31
Speaker 3: Real dampening of the population through time. And so that’s the concern. As it gets younger, they’re not able to withstand it.

01:22:40
Speaker 1: What’s the highest prevalence you’ve seen in a wild population?

01:22:45
Speaker 3: So there are reports of adult males’ prevalence in Alberta and Saskatchewan in the neighborhood of 75%.

01:22:54
Speaker 2: Really? Right. And you think.

01:22:56
Speaker 3: About that’s likely got to be a population that’s pretty heavily infected, which means that at some point the environment has become so infected that they just can’t help but get it. They’re interacting, engaging with one another. And then by the time they get to two and a half plus, they’ve been exposed. There’s just no way around it.

01:23:17
Speaker 2: Got it.

01:23:18
Speaker 3: I don’t know that that’s how it plays out everywhere. And again, that’s a little bit of the numbers game. I think some of their data is from adult males, but some of the stuff we’re seeing from southeastern Wisconsin or southwest Wisconsin, 50% of the two-plus-year-old males and females have it.

01:23:35
Speaker 1: That’s where my buddies that hunt in those hot areas down there, that’s where my buddies are at. They’re at some years. It’s when you tally up all the bucks that everybody got in your social circle, when you tally them all up, and you’re doing testing, it’s going to be that more, the numbers vary, but it’s going to be the assumption is half more than half of the bucks that the people in your community got were positive bucks.

01:24:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s the story.

01:24:05
Speaker 1: But within those bucks and here’s the deal though, where they’re at still within those boxes, some damn nice bucks.

01:24:11
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

01:24:12
Speaker 3: Because of whitetail in really good condition and great habitats like exist in Southwest Wisconsin. like exist across much of the Northern two thirds of Missouri, three and a half, four and a half with a little more food on landscape. Cause there’s fewer deer. They do have some of that opportunity to express their potential.

01:24:36
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

01:24:36
Speaker 3: So you, you can still have bucks into older age.

01:24:39
Speaker 2: I mean, nice. Not old, but big. Yeah. But not as many either. Understood. Right. Yeah.

01:24:49
Speaker 1: What is your guys’ take on this conversation that’s going on now? I should call it a conversation that’s going on. Research and other things suggesting that within the captive deer world, they’re finding that some of these deer maybe aren’t immune, but there’s some segment of the population that it doesn’t hit them as hard as quickly. And that through simple survival of the fittest, through classic Darwinian evolution, eventually will emerge this population of deer that it doesn’t hit them as hard, it doesn’t hit them as quick. Maybe they get it, but they do live to be six or seven years old by the time it takes them down.

01:25:49
Speaker 2: And that you could speed this.

01:25:53
Speaker 1: Up by pumping these deer into wild populations to be like, hey, it’ll happen. It’ll likely happen in time that there’s going to be some deer that for whatever reason don’t die in two years. They die in four. So part one of my question is, what do you think of that? Does that seem to be true or not? And then what do you think of the idea that you would speed this along or help this along by injecting these identified deer into wild populations?

01:26:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:26:31
Speaker 3: So we’ve known for some time that the 96 SS deer are, have a little higher survival, little less susceptible.

01:26:45
Speaker 2: To the disease.

01:26:45
Speaker 3: That’s not, That’s been known for a decade or two.

01:26:49
Speaker 2: What was the term you used? I never heard of it. It’s 96SS. 96SS.

01:26:51
Speaker 3: So it’s a prion protein coding gene.

01:26:56
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:26:57
Speaker 3: And again, I don’t know that we know all of it, and you’d have to talk to a prion biologist and a geneticist to completely describe all of it.

01:27:05
Speaker 2: But they.

01:27:07
Speaker 3: Have a G or an S at the 96 codon. Those that are SS do appear to show delayed effects of the disease. And we’ve known that for some time.

01:27:18
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:27:19
Speaker 3: And the GG show the shortest duration of the disease.

01:27:24
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:27:24
Speaker 3: So if a 96 GG deer, let’s say it has 18-month incubation, right? An SS might have 36-month incubation.

01:27:35
Speaker 2: Okay. Right.

01:27:36
Speaker 3: There is some timescale difference there. What exactly it is, I don’t know.

01:27:40
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:27:40
Speaker 3: And there’s some stuff published. They published in 2017 about this. And then the GS, through Darwinian selection, right, like the GS, somewhere in between.

01:27:50
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:27:50
Speaker 3: So having one of those S alleles gives it some greater, slower progression of the disease.

01:27:57
Speaker 2: Okay. Interestingly, though, a.

01:28:01
Speaker 3: Lot of the early survey work suggested that the presence of the S allele is relatively low in the wild populations.

01:28:08
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:28:09
Speaker 3: So it’s rare for some reason, and we don’t understand why. And some work done, like Colombian whitetails, it’s not even present. Key deer, I don’t believe it’s even present. So there’s some of these small, isolated populations where it’s not even known to occur.

01:28:25
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:28:26
Speaker 3: So something through selection has kept that relatively low.

01:28:30
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:28:30
Speaker 3: If they’re somehow a superior deer, something’s kept them relatively low. But we just don’t fully, completely understand what all the other attached survival impacts are.

01:28:39
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:28:40
Speaker 3: And this is work that’s, I think, starting to come to light. And certainly Chris Seabury and his work on the genetic breeding value things that’s been funded by USDA to try to understand what this looks like. So it has merit, right? And that we know that in scrapie, right? The way that we eradicated scrapie and sheep, or largely eradicated scrapie and sheep, was through very intensive breeding programs.

01:29:06
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:29:07
Speaker 3: In which they identify this delay or this resistance to the disease. It still pops back up.

01:29:13
Speaker 2: Yeah. It still comes back.

01:29:15
Speaker 3: But that’s through very, very extensive animal husbandry kind of activities.

01:29:19
Speaker 2: Got it.

01:29:20
Speaker 3: Tracking lineages and being very intense in that breeding. So the ability for that to happen in a free-range population is fantastic. It’s limited in the scope and scale. I would also say that I don’t know that we can speed it up, and I don’t know what speeding it up does. So they live longer, they spread more prions onto the landscape, which would probably advance the disease maybe quicker.

01:29:49
Speaker 1: So that’s some of the questions that we have. Well, I think that what you’re looking at is you’re looking at that you’ve arrived at That a manager, such as yourself, arrives at an idea where they look back at the landscape and they look at the history and they arrive at a thing that this is always, it’s a one-way trip. We can slow it, right? We’ve had a couple of victories. You mentioned New York went from being one state that at one point in time went from a positive to a negative state. There’s been some victories. We can slow it, but You get to a point where you’re like, there’s really, when we’re talking about decades, nothing anybody’s going to do.

01:30:39
Speaker 2: It would be the last hope. Yeah, yeah.

01:30:42
Speaker 3: And I think it’s a matter of how can through management and the way that we’re shooting deer change the trajectory of the disease or change.

01:30:53
Speaker 2: Do we just got to let it play out? Yeah.

01:30:55
Speaker 3: And I think the way that we manage deer, we can change that end point by decades.

01:31:01
Speaker 2: Really?

01:31:01
Speaker 3: In terms of thinking about the way that we hunt deer, the way that we shoot them, but it’s counter to where we are in a deer hunting culture today.

01:31:11
Speaker 2: I want to make you clarify your point. Management. Okay. If we, if we sit here and agree that, If we sit here and agree that if.

01:31:24
Speaker 1: We do nothing, if all testing and all everything stops right now, no management, no nothing, we never talk about CWD again. And we would say in a century, we land at like in a century, this country will just be like deer in.

01:31:45
Speaker 2: America are 50, 60, 70% positive for CWD. Are you uncomfortable with that statement? We do nothing. Yeah, if we do nothing. In 100 years. Oh, yeah. Okay.

01:32:00
Speaker 1: In 100 years in America, deer writ large are 50, 60, 70%.

01:32:06
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:32:07
Speaker 1: Do you feel that if we say like, no, no, no, we’re going to manage, we’re going to continue management, we’re going to try to do what we can do, do you feel that in a century we could have a different result in a century’s time.

01:32:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. Or do you think just in 10 or 20 years we could make it be different?

01:32:26
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, I think in decades we can make it be different. I don’t know in a century, right? Like a century’s crazy.

01:32:31
Speaker 2: It’s crazy. Okay. Forget a century. But I think, yeah, I think decades for sure. Okay.

01:32:36
Speaker 3: And I think what’s, what’s starting to come together, there was, you know, Wyoming recently, the co-op unit recently published a paper looking at different trends and hunt units in, in Eastern Wyoming. based on buck harvest rates. And the West has really leaned into adaptive harvest management strategies about the timing of the seasons and what our buck harvest rates look like. And they’ve sort of plateaued in a few places where they had higher buck harvest rates. Are they turning the population over a little quicker? Are they suppressing some of the transmission as a result of that? So those are some of the questions we’re asking about inherently the way that we hunt deer and the way that we turn the population over is that, are there things we can do that will help minimize prevalence well you’re.

01:33:17
Speaker 1: Talking about even and this is i didn’t know this is i imagine that in any given population it’s always up prevalency is always up but you you’re you’re saying that you could have a given population and not like the new york example where maybe there’s three deer that had and they killed them all but you’re saying within a population there can be a down.

01:33:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, or it can be stable.

01:33:46
Speaker 2: Yeah. Or slowly growing.

01:33:50
Speaker 3: Yes, by having enough harvest on the population where you remove deer faster than they can get infected from other deer. And you have a higher likelihood of removing those positive individuals from the landscape. Yeah, no, it’s played out through time. That’s a lot of what Illinois’ data suggests too. But once it does spread and if you don’t stay on top of it long enough, then prevalence takes off. But I think there is inherently something about, and this has been demonstrated through some modeling stuff, right, trying to think about how do we predict some of this stuff out, that certainly the age structure of the population, the sex ratio of the population, all dictate how quickly that might happen. So there’s probably some underlying things that we just need to understand about how do we manage eastern whitetail deer populations in a way that tries to minimize the progression of the disease.

01:34:39
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I guess, I mean, I.

01:34:42
Speaker 1: Now I’m realizing that you kind of clarified this point earlier, but I didn’t pick up on it. Is that, and maybe I’m putting words in your mouth, but I don’t think so. I think you were saying that, and I didn’t get the ramifications of it, but that 5%, is that the number where it seems to just that it’s going to grow?

01:35:03
Speaker 2: It does. Yeah.

01:35:04
Speaker 3: That’s the point at which you have enough infected individuals on the landscape. that they’re just going to continue to spread it at a rate faster than you can remove them.

01:35:15
Speaker 1: So a 3% can become a 2, but a 10 probably doesn’t become a.

01:35:24
Speaker 3: 9 or a 3, right?

01:35:27
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:35:28
Speaker 3: And because it gets back to, okay, if we’re at 3% in a relatively small area, it’s because there’s a, small chunk of land somewhere where there’s a small little pocket of does that has the disease. And if you can remove a high proportion of those does in that spot, you’ve got the opportunity to set it back. And that’s where that time of detection becomes really important. Small scale, low level of prevalence. By the time it’s gotten widespread, The idea, the other thing is that folks think we’re trying to eradicate deer. We’re absolutely not trying to eradicate deer. That is not the intent or.

01:36:03
Speaker 2: Purpose, right?

01:36:04
Speaker 1: I know people say that, but I don’t know any really serious people that don’t have some big ax to grind.

01:36:09
Speaker 2: I don’t know any serious people who think that. Yeah, yeah. But it’s in the psyche, right?

01:36:14
Speaker 3: Like when you’re going in, no, it’s like trying to figure out how we remove a high enough proportion of those that were likely infected.

01:36:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:36:21
Speaker 3: But back to the question on kind of the next steps of the genetics work. And is it possible to then reintroduce, um, individuals with the 96 SS gene and a high breeding value into a population? The only way that’s going to be successful would be as if we get to a spot where we have pulled populations way down.

01:36:46
Speaker 2: Got it. Right.

01:36:47
Speaker 3: The idea that, you know, with, with hundreds of thousands of deer in a, in a state, a million, right? Like we probably got a million and a half deer in Missouri. What it would take to shift the genetic makeup of that population by introducing deer into the population would be astronomical. So from a practical standpoint, I appreciate where the captive deer folks are. And I encourage them to continue to try to like study it, understand it, figure out if there are ways that we can make the populations more resilient. I think it’s good work and somebody needs to be doing it to continue to build our understanding. The practical application of it and the idea that somehow we could get enough deer to put back out on the landscape that we would change the back to the century sort of thing, that we would change the trajectory of the disease by reintroducing some of these deer.

01:37:42
Speaker 2: I just, the numbers don’t add up. Yeah.

01:37:45
Speaker 1: So you know how some humans have like a connected earlobe and some have like my kind, whatever you call that. It’d be like if you said, hey, we’re going to take two people with connected earlobes and move them into town here.

01:37:59
Speaker 2: Right. And we’ll see. Right. We’ll see what happens. In a few years, are there way more people? Yeah. You’d be like, dude, come on.

01:38:07
Speaker 3: Well, nature’s doing it, though, right? There’s definitely data suggests that in some of these free-ranging populations, as prevalence is creeping up, they’re seeing a higher percentage of 96SS in the population. So it’s like, okay, something’s going on. that’s happening. And so folks have concerns like, well, then shooting deer in those spots, are you risking shooting those that are good ones?

01:38:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. The good ones.

01:38:34
Speaker 3: I point back to the, to the Wisconsin data. I point back to the Wisconsin data, which suggests no. In fact, if you got CWD, you’re probably more susceptible to harvest.

01:38:45
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:38:45
Speaker 3: And so maybe thinking about the two of them together. is probably where we’ll end up at some point in time. It’s not a one or the other. I think there’s a reason why really intensive localized harvest can still be very advantageous in shifting the potential of the population.

01:39:07
Speaker 2: I’m sure you guys have thought of this, but this is backing up a ways. If CWD deer are easier to dupe, they’re easier to get. is perhaps hunter samples, hunter-submitted samples skewing the data. Meaning 50% of the bucks getting harvested in X county are CWD positive, as that may be not an indicator that 50% of the bucks on the landscape are positive. They’re getting the sick ones, because the sick ones are dumber and easier to get.

01:39:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a whole conversation that drives statisticians completely crazy.

01:39:48
Speaker 2: Oh, it does? Oh, yeah.

01:39:49
Speaker 3: It drives them crazy, and it drives me crazy sometimes when we talk about apparent prevalence versus observed prevalence and what the real prevalence is.

01:39:59
Speaker 2: Okay. Right? And it’s this thing, right?

01:40:01
Speaker 3: It’s like the sampling mechanism in which you get at, are there inherent biases? Which is what we started this conversation and talking about. We inherently biased our CWD sampling towards adult males to try to better detect it. And what we try to report is that of the samples we’ve collected, this is the percentage that are positive. Not that this is what, if you randomly sampled on the landscape, randomly sampled all age classes, represented them as their proportion of the population, would you get a different number?

01:40:34
Speaker 2: Absolutely. You think so? Yeah. But it doesn’t matter, right?

01:40:38
Speaker 3: Like, whether it’s 23%, plus or minus 2%, Or it’s 30% plus or minus 2%.

01:40:47
Speaker 2: I got you. Doesn’t matter. Yeah. You know? It ain’t zero. It ain’t zero. It ain’t zero. And what’s the trajectory? And so that’s a lot of the way.

01:40:55
Speaker 3: It’s even the way we manage deer populations, right? Like we can argue over, well, are there 35 deer per square mile? Or are there 40 deer per square mile? Or are there 50 deer per square mile? What I care about is… What’s the trajectory? Yeah. And what are the attitudes around that population? That gives you a better handle on, as a manager, what levers can and should you pull to change the direction.

01:41:21
Speaker 2: This is very ancillary, but it’s interesting. I’ve had it explained to me that when you look at doll sheep harvest in Alaska, year-to-year rates, you know what you’re mostly looking at? You’re mostly looking at the weather. Yeah. It’s 10-day seasons, right?

01:41:43
Speaker 1: And more than an indicator of how many sheep are on the landscape, it’s primarily an indicator of like, was it a high ceiling?

01:41:52
Speaker 2: People could fly. People could glass. People could hunt.

01:41:55
Speaker 1: Because in a 10-day season, if six days are fogged in and it’s raining the whole time, it’s like there’s no doll sheep left if you look at harvest data.

01:42:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right? It’s just like a way of understanding it.

01:42:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, we see that our November portion of the firearms deer season can start as early as November 10th and as late as November 16th. You see a very different composition of the harvest based on six days and that narrow window of difference of the peak of buck movement activities. We start on the 16th, we shoot more does. We start on the 10th, we shoot more bucks. It’s completely a product of that.

01:42:33
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you’d look and be like, Okay, I see that you’re seeing that you think there’s deer trends, but there’s also just like you’re looking at a calendar.

01:42:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

01:42:41
Speaker 3: In some ways, folks will get all up kind of up in arms. They’re like, oh, why was the harvest down? Well, weather was bad on opening weekend or something like that can absolutely drive that. It’s become less and less of an issue as seasons have expanded, as opportunities have increased. Oh. But you still see it. Because those little blips get leveled out, but it’s long seasons. Yeah, and early antlers kind of, you know, mask some of those kinds of things. Or longer, you know, more participation in the late muzzleloader season can kind of mask some of those things.

01:43:14
Speaker 2: What do you feel? We’ve talked a lot about hot spots. We’ve talked a lot about areas that haven’t. Let’s go to where you got a pristine area. Okay, you got a island area. a pristine Island.

01:43:28
Speaker 1: And it seems like there’s nothing going on there and it’s got a good moat around it.

01:43:35
Speaker 2: What do you want to do there? Are you like, no, we’re just going to kick back and hunt deer like normal. Yeah.

01:43:41
Speaker 3: And we’re not going to bring anything with us.

01:43:43
Speaker 2: Right. Do everything we can to make sure we don’t introduce the disease. We got into this. Don’t go to that area.

01:43:48
Speaker 1: You don’t go to that County and be like, let’s get out ahead of it and knock these suckers back.

01:43:53
Speaker 2: Now.

01:43:54
Speaker 3: It’s an interesting conversation. And it’s one that we found ourselves in very early on.

01:43:59
Speaker 2: I’m sure you find it all the time.

01:44:00
Speaker 3: So we had, we had, we implemented an antler point restriction. So four points on one side. We started that work in early 2000 and trying to encourage folks to shoot more antlerless deer, let bucks grow to older age classes.

01:44:13
Speaker 2: Even in, even in CWD? Before CWD. Okay.

01:44:18
Speaker 3: So that, that really changed hunter behavior, hunter harvest. age structure, starting to get older age class bucks. You introduced CWD into the equation in 2012. We removed that in six counties. They went back to shooting deer like the antler porn restriction never existed. Certainly there’s been some slow trends since that time. But we started asking the question of, is it a good proactive preemptive step to take the antler porn restriction away from other areas where we had not yet detected to remove it? Because we knew we were protecting bucks into older age classes.

01:44:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:44:54
Speaker 3: Which, again, from a disease management standpoint, is not what you want to do.

01:44:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:44:59
Speaker 3: And so we chose not to, and I many times, same thing on the feeding and placement of mineral restrictions, right? Like, are we setting ourselves up where you’re creating a deer population that’s more susceptible to it once it gets there?

01:45:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:45:13
Speaker 3: And I don’t know that there’s a right answer to that question.

01:45:16
Speaker 2: Well, Holman, you’ve leaned, I’m sorry, I got confused.

01:45:18
Speaker 1: In those cases, those CWD-free areas, you’ve leaned toward adjusting?

01:45:25
Speaker 2: We didn’t. Okay. We did not.

01:45:27
Speaker 3: We left them in place until we had a CWD-positive detection in the county.

01:45:32
Speaker 2: But you don’t. You don’t know that that was.

01:45:34
Speaker 3: I don’t know that that was the right thing to do or not.

01:45:37
Speaker 2: Yeah. Where do you sit right now on it? I don’t know that we can answer that question. Yeah. Yeah.

01:45:43
Speaker 3: Because I don’t think we know enough about how the structure of the herd might impact the way that the disease takes off in early stages.

01:45:52
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:45:54
Speaker 3: But yeah, I made the argument if there are good deer management techniques in the absence of disease, then we should continue to promote them. We shouldn’t shy away from good deer management for fear of something that’s not yet happened.

01:46:08
Speaker 2: No, I got what you’re saying.

01:46:09
Speaker 3: And so we did not proactively remove Recently, we did do away with antler point restriction statewide. And part of that was because we were down to like 14 or 15 of our 80 counties that still had the antler point restriction in place. It’s just another level of regulatory complexity. We’re starting to have enough spread where we’re catching four or five or six additional new counties every year kind of expanding into that. So from a simplicity standpoint, we’re like, look, this doesn’t make sense anymore. But very early on, yeah, there were folks that were like, no, we should increase the buck harvest bag limit. We should remove the antler point restriction. We should proactively do these things. And we chose not to. And I don’t know that that was the right decision or not.

01:46:53
Speaker 2: How much have you felt.

01:46:55
Speaker 1: You’ve been able to influence hunter behavior? I hear again and again and again all around the country that people, they don’t want to shoot does. They just don’t want to shoot does.

01:47:11
Speaker 2: They don’t.

01:47:12
Speaker 1: Like the days of people living off venison and stuff, it’s not like it was in the old days. And it’s just ingrained in people. Like they don’t want to shoot does. You can’t incentivize them to shoot does. How true have you found that to be?

01:47:24
Speaker 3: We don’t rely on venison as our core source protein anymore.

01:47:28
Speaker 2: Right.

01:47:28
Speaker 3: Or it’s so small. And the number that do are insignificant in the grand scheme. Not to say people that shoot deer don’t eat them.

01:47:35
Speaker 2: They eat them. Right. Or they give them away.

01:47:37
Speaker 3: They turn them into snack sticks and they get really expensive to shoot one. So yeah, no, there’s no question that that has shifted deer management. Missouri had long been one of those states where we did not have a problem having folks shoot antelope deer. We’ve been very successful through time with folks shooting a high number of antelope deer.

01:47:56
Speaker 2: And it goes back. Today still. It’s, it’s gotten, it’s.

01:48:02
Speaker 3: A little more challenged today than it was. Um, but yeah, some of the perspectives of just got to shoot a buck, um, just weren’t present in Missouri as a hurdle to get over. It’s a more modern shift in perspectives.

01:48:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:48:17
Speaker 3: And part of that, uh, you know, I think goes back to the history of deer management in Missouri. I’ve got notes of folks in the fifties when we had still had very few deer and certainly didn’t have them statewide that were already starting to talk about. We need, we need doe harvest to start to manage some of these populations.

01:48:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:48:33
Speaker 3: So it was a very early part of the conversation. introduced antlerless harvest very early in kind of the deer management progression in Missouri. And so I think it become adopted as a normal practice, something we needed to do. Folks were excited when they got to shoot one antlerless deer and then really excited when they got to shoot two antlerless deer. Now they’re saturated with opportunity. There are so many deer. I think procrastination is one of our bigger challenges. They got all kinds of time to shoot. And they don’t really want to shoot one anyway, unless it’s got big antlers because they’re not hungry. They’re not hungry in the same way.

01:49:10
Speaker 1: It’s the craziest thing. I’ve had an old-timer in the township where I grew up in Michigan. I remember an old-timer telling me about growing up, and they used to rig their own deer snares, the garage cable.

01:49:22
Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh. Living off deer. Yeah, absolutely. Living off does.

01:49:26
Speaker 1: And they were trying to, this is back in the day when you were like, you had a problem with people poaching does.

01:49:30
Speaker 2: Now it’s so funny that you’re sitting on the other extreme. You can’t talk people into getting does. And back then you couldn’t talk people out of stopping killing does. Yeah, yeah.

01:49:40
Speaker 3: It is a huge, so it’s a bit of a paradox, right? We’ve got this disease issue that’s more than happy to kill deer. And we got some really big deer management challenges in places where we don’t have CWD, where we need hunters. to be able and willing to shoot more deer. And so states like Missouri and others are trying to find ways that they make it easier for hunters to donate deer, simplify that process. We’ve, we’ve just hired a detailed position to work for two years, trying to better understand what the relationship with meat processors looks like.

01:50:14
Speaker 2: What does a, what does a.

01:50:15
Speaker 3: Meaningful deer donation process actually look like? What’s that experience for a hunter? How do you, How do you get there and how do you make it economically viable for processors to participate?

01:50:27
Speaker 2: It’s a challenge. It’s a huge challenge. It brings up a thing that I hate even talking about because I don’t fully understand the impacts.

01:50:38
Speaker 1: And I think the impacts would be many, particularly in terms of access. But it brings up this conversation that’s like anathema to American deer management would.

01:50:49
Speaker 2: Be what about If you could sell them. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s, I just came back from Florida. We’re down in Florida, gator hunting.

01:50:57
Speaker 1: And they, the, we go to the gator processor guy that does the leather and stuff. You know, he’s got a big sign, not buying gators, but he said, that’s the, this is the first year I’ve ever had the sign. Meaning prior to this year. And it’s not illegal. It’s just, he’s not doing it prior to this year. You went gator hunting. One option is you take that sucker down and they measure it is 10 feet long. It’s 60 bucks a foot. And you walk out the door with cash in your hand. If you brought a system, if you introduced a system where you’re like, no, dude, you got it and bring it to me, 200 bucks.

01:51:41
Speaker 2: People are shooting those.

01:51:43
Speaker 1: My kid and his buddies, like they’re young enough where they don’t have all this history. If you told my kid and his buddies, hey, I’ll give you 200 bucks for every dough you bring me.

01:51:50
Speaker 2: Dude, They’re bringing those.

01:51:53
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:51:53
Speaker 2: And I think this is this wide range of their job. Yeah.

01:51:56
Speaker 3: This is wide ranging conversation that the true believers in the North American model would string us up for.

01:52:04
Speaker 2: I hate having that conversation, right? Intellectually honest. I can’t not talk about it.

01:52:10
Speaker 1: The director of the guy in your position in Michigan, we read the letter on the show. The guy in your position in Michigan sent a letter. It was, it was printed in newspapers, sent a letter to, begging people to kill does yeah oh yeah yeah and you the one thing you look at like i’ll tell you the one thing that’ll get them to do it and it’s the same thing that tanked american wildlife populations in the old days yeah it was you and you put a value you incentivize the meat harvest and i don’t even know you’d have to bring in you’d have to bring in a whole different team of people to go and look at well what is the commercial demand if we’re incentivized to do this because of CWD, how hungry is the market for CWD meat?

01:52:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. Do people in grocery stores want CWD meat?

01:53:05
Speaker 1: If we’re going to do this in an area with 50% prevalency, does that mean that the 50% that come to us by the hunters that are hunting them for market, do they not get paid.

01:53:15
Speaker 2: For those?

01:53:16
Speaker 1: Do they like, do they get their money for those? But then they go into a dump. Do they get their money for those? And then they go to the grocery store is in the grocery store is the bag labeled CWD positive CWD negative.

01:53:27
Speaker 2: Like, I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know.

01:53:29
Speaker 1: It’s like, you’d have to, there’s so much to figure out, but it’s, it’s, that’s what you would do. And all of a sudden you would have your dough killing problem would be over.

01:53:41
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:53:42
Speaker 3: And that’s why, as I indicated earlier, we’ve sort of tried to, double down on these conversations with local landowners and hunters and say, look, guys, hunters have been the original tool for managing deer populations in the regulated way that we’ve been doing it. It may not be sustainable into the future. And you have a part in that, right? Like we together share the fate of the outcome of deer and deer management. And how are we going to work together to do that? Because an alternative that will be very real for some folks and probably not in the terribly distant future. If you have fewer hunters and they are unwilling to shoot antlers deer, they create enough problems and enough incentive for others to change the system. Yeah. And we can either be part of informing the way that change happens or we can be subjected to it.

01:54:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:54:36
Speaker 3: And so I, that’s where my mind is on that conversation. And what, what’s it going to take for us as hunters to take some responsibility in this effort? And a state agency is trying to work with hunters to manage a deer population that is challenging.

01:54:52
Speaker 1: I have a deer friend and I, and I know I’ve known him a long time and I know him well.

01:54:58
Speaker 2: And he’s like, he’s uncorrupted. Okay.

01:55:01
Speaker 1: And where he’s landed is he’s landed just, he sort of landed at just a general sense of dismay and disappointment with the American deer hunter. And he’s like, stop talking to me about all this conservation bullshit and your Pittman Roberts and money and your all this and that. Managers ask you again and again and again to kill some does. And you can’t be bothered. You can’t be troubled that much. Like, you can’t be troubled as much as what it takes to gut a doe in the woods.

01:55:38
Speaker 3: I’m envious of the west a lot, right? Where, where you have way more demand and pressure for tags than, than there are animals to provide that opportunity.

01:55:50
Speaker 2: Right.

01:55:50
Speaker 3: In the east, you, you, you can’t give out enough tags or create an incentive and you can’t give them enough days to hunt, to create an incentive, to harvest what would be an appropriate number of deer.

01:56:02
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:56:02
Speaker 3: The other thing we face is small land ownership, private land owner, you know, decisions. that dictate what a local deer population looks like, right? There’s a non-migratory species that exists based on what the pressure locally does to that population. So rules and regulations can’t really help address this challenge. It really is about individuals taking some level of ownership of managing their deer herd together and with their neighbors, especially in states that have small land ownership. You got tens of thousands of acres in South Texas, right? Like you control the way everything happens. But in much of the East, you got small land parcels and you got to be working with your neighbors to figure out what deer population is going to look like. And folks just aren’t terribly willing to work with one another. But we can’t do it through regulatory. We just can’t. Regulations aren’t going to get us out of this problem. They haven’t got us into it and won’t get us out of it.

01:57:00
Speaker 2: I judge hunters by what they’re eating at dinner. Yeah. If I go to a big hunter’s house and I’m like, dude, what? You’re eating stuff from the store? Why are we eating chicken breast? Dude, you could be shooting does for eight bucks a piece. Right. Right. Right. Right. They’re begging you. It’s eight dollars. Right. To get a doe tag. Yeah. We’re not hungry, right? Like, we don’t rely on that. For what you paid for that steak, dude, you could have bought a whole deer. Yep. Yep. Yep. Not hungry. Not hungry. So, is there anything that I should have asked you about that I didn’t ask you?

01:57:34
Speaker 3: Gosh, we’ve covered the wide range of things.

01:57:42
Speaker 1: I thought of a thing I didn’t ask you about. We don’t need to spend time on it. Earlier I was saying my early perception of it was human health, which is shifting over time. How much does that linger around in your head?

01:57:58
Speaker 3: I think the mountain of data suggests that the risk to humans from consuming a CWD-infected deer is pretty low.

01:58:07
Speaker 2: Yeah. If there is one. Well, at this point, it’s zero. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t know. We don’t know. I should say zero risk. Yeah. Yeah.

01:58:15
Speaker 3: There’s no known evidence that it’s been transmitted to people. And so I think in a lot of ways that we need to remain diligent and understanding. It’s one of those, also the space where what’s possible and what’s probable happens.

01:58:30
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

01:58:30
Speaker 3: Is, is a really hard one to have that conversation.

01:58:33
Speaker 2: I used to be petrified by it. And now I’m not.

01:58:35
Speaker 1: And well, also now I know that I’ve like, I’m sure I have all along. Now I know for a fact that I’ve eaten positive meat. So I used to be petrified of it. Now I’ve just, now it just sort of lives in the back of my head.

01:58:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:58:48
Speaker 3: I mean, I think we have to communicate what the public health officials tell us they want communicated in terms of out of an abundance caution. We tell you not to eat any seed. regardless of what your state stands.

01:59:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

01:59:01
Speaker 1: I get why you have to do that, but I’m also, I don’t think the agency used to be saying that without simultaneously saying, but no one’s ever gotten it.

01:59:11
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:59:12
Speaker 3: And I think we try to do that too. And it’s your decision, right? Like we don’t tell you, you, you shouldn’t, we, here’s what is communicated. It’s recommended not to you choose to that. That’s your decision to make. I don’t even know what the asterisk is. Is it, should it be, No one’s ever contracted CWD. The asterisk being, but there’s a recommendation you don’t eat it. Or should it be, we recommend you don’t eat it. And the asterisk is no one’s ever gotten it.

01:59:40
Speaker 2: Right. What’s the headline? Right. Yeah. I don’t know.

01:59:43
Speaker 1: I used to think the headline was don’t eat it. And the asterisk was no one’s ever gotten it.

01:59:48
Speaker 2: In my head, it switched. The headline is no one’s gotten it. Yeah. Yeah. And the asterisk is maybe don’t eat it. I don’t know. Yeah.

01:59:55
Speaker 3: And so then those that drift down the, you know, the extremely cautious approach, you know, are somewhat fearful that as more folks consume more of them, our behavior of consuming deer, you know, when you, when you shoot a deer, the likelihood of you consuming the vast majority of it is much higher than, than for example, when they were dealing with BSE in England, when you were eating one meal of an infected cow, right? And so that’s some of the concerns those folks have. It’s the potential for repeated exposure. And then through time.

02:00:28
Speaker 2: You mean the whole damn deer? Yeah, right.

02:00:30
Speaker 3: And through time, there’s suggestions that the prions are changing, right? That the confirmation of the prion protein is looking a little different or there’s slight variations, which may interrupt some of that species-specific barriers. But again, we don’t have any evidence that that’s happened yet.

02:00:48
Speaker 2: Got it.

02:00:49
Speaker 3: Yeah.

02:00:51
Speaker 2: Anything else I should have asked you about?

02:00:54
Speaker 3: Not that I can think of. There was probably something.

02:00:58
Speaker 2: Thanks for coming on, man.

02:01:00
Speaker 1: You’ve been listening to Jason Sumner, the director of the Missouri Department of Conservation. And on all that, last note, on all that subject of whitetails, well, deer in general, it’s Whitetail Week at Meat Eater, September 28th to October 4th. We got a big giveaway today. We got the Ultimate Whitetail Giveaway, which is live at the Meat Eater Store. So check this out. We got the Headline Prize, where you can win a guided whitetail hunt with Mark Kenyon and our friend Jordan Budd as a guided whitetail hunt in Nebraska.

02:01:34
Speaker 2: I’ve been out there hunting the place is sweet.

02:01:35
Speaker 1: There’s a Matthew’s Bow, a Tethered Saddle, a Meat Brand Meat Grinder, a Grilla Smoker, Sig Binos. And dude, Sig Binos are the best binos. First Light Whisperdown, Crispy Boots, Onyx Membership. So keep an eye on MeatEater channels all week for everything whitetail. And head to the MeatEater store to sign up for the ultimate whitetail giveaway. If you get to hunt Jordan’s place, you’re going to be loving it. And once again, Jason Sumners, thanks for coming on, man.

02:02:04
Speaker 3: I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something I care about a lot, the whitetail deer. It’s an important topic, and it’s one we’re just going to have to continue to talk about.

02:02:14
Speaker 2: If you hate hearing about it, you people that listen, tough titty. We’re going to keep talking about this. Thanks everybody.