Hunters and CWD

[CycloneDaddy]

I would have to harvest a deer this year to worry about it. What a frustrating bow/gun season so far this year.

 

[ISUAgronomist]

Zero. I'm an avid hunter and deer meat is 80% of the meat eaten in our house. I have never and will never have them tested. And to be honest, it's kinda comical how some of it is handled. For example, if you take your deer to a locker (at least in southern IA) they'll ask you if your deer is from Missouri (MO has lots of "CWD Counties") Then they'll ask you if you've had it tested for CWD. If you are having it tested, they won't process it until the results come back negative. Whatever, fine. But they'll hop right to it if you haven't had it tested. ?

Personally I think it's being used to drum up fear and therefore more grants and funding. MO and WI both I believe have hired sharpshooters in the past to straight up exterminate deer. Essentially legalized wanton waste. To what end? These prions supposedly survive in soil for years if not forever. So kill all the deer so the prion doesn't get em first? Lol what?

These CWD programs are a wet dream for insurance companies - who you'll find lobbying at the Capitol for all the most aggressive and irresponsible policies that AREN'T favorable to the whitetail deer of Iowa.

Anyway... I'm ranting. I deeply care about the quality of whitetail hunting in our state and if the deer themselves were the priority, EHD would be what gets the funding. Not CWD.

Missouri has decided to pause/end CWD zones, special (slaughter) seasons, etc. I didn't read all the details but announcement was yesterday or end of last week if that information is of interest to anyone.

 

[cyclone101]

Missouri has decided to pause/end CWD zones, special (slaughter) seasons, etc. I didn't real all the details but announcement was yesterday or end of last week if that information is of interest to anyone.

Yes! Just saw this late last night. Those programs are absolutely senseless and make no sense at all.

 

[cyclone101]

Trying to manage CWD is not something anybody wants to deal with. It's a nightmare. It's not being exaggerated for funding purposes. The fact is these types of diseases have transmitted to humans before and if it happens it's fatal. If that happens who is everyone going to point at and blame for not doing a good enough job to manage the disease?

Agree to disagree I guess. As stated above, Missouri just ended their program that is essentially legalized poaching and wanton waste disguised as CWD "management" after less than 1% of deer tested positive. But thank heavens they exterminated most of the deer herd in these CWD counties to "manage" this crisis. All it managed to do was decimate a natural resource and make insurance companies happy. The prion is still in the soil. It's still being taken up by plants. Those plants are still being harvested and shipped all over the midwest. That load of alfalfa is still being rolled out in some pasture for the prion to go right back into the soil. And it will still spread. This program didn't manage ****.

Take samples and do lab tests all you want, fine. Maybe you find a cure, great. Let the lab people do their thing. I hope they do find a cure. But the senseless extermination of deer is ridiculous. It was a failure in Wisconsin, it was a failure in Missouri, and will fail again wherever they try it next.

 

[cycloneML]

Our family has hunting land in Richland county WI, about 20-30 min from Mt. Horeb area which was the ground zero outbreak in WI back in like 2002.

We will always have our deer tested and personally won’t get the meat processed if it comes back confirmed with CWD.

Some of our hunters, we host family and friends, and most of the locals will still process and eat the CWD meat. I’ve never heard of anything coming from eating it after cooking properly.

I will say the testing always left us with questions as usually it’s a single person cutting and grabbing all the samples to test. They never clean the knife or disinfect anything between deers or keep things very separated.

When talking with the DNR in WI it always comes to “we need more funding….to test more”.

When questioned further about what will come from additional testing, what the strategy would be with more funding, or why would additional testing change things, it will revert back to some form of “we need more funding so we can test more”.

That hasn’t helped their case and management efforts get buy in from the locals.

I hunt on my nephew's property in Ridgeway WI (Iowa County) and there is word that "blue tongue" is reducing numbers.

 

[nhclone]

I hunt on my nephew's property in Ridgeway WI (Iowa County) and there is word that "blue tongue" is reducing numbers.

Blue tongue and EHD are pretty similar and both are some of the nastiest diseases you could think up. The terrible part of that one is the head and neck area swell, including the tongue, so they can lose the ability to drink. Then it’s a race to see if they die of thirst or if the hemorrhagic disease kills them first. Probably 10 years ago, I talked to a landowner near the Iowa/Wisconsin border that found 22 deer laid out around his pond all dead from blue tongue. Nasty stuff.

 

[flycy]

Know someone who was living in England during the initial Mad Cow outbreak who later developed and died from it 20 years later. A friend of his I know visited him in the hospital shortly before his death and he couldn't even speak. I know CWD and Mad cow aren't identical, but they are similar and act very much the same. Just pointing out that no one getting sick doesn't mean they won't eventually. Be cautious.

 

[flycy]

Agree to disagree I guess. As stated above, Missouri just ended their program that is essentially legalized poaching and wanton waste disguised as CWD "management" after less than 1% of deer tested positive. But thank heavens they exterminated most of the deer herd in these CWD counties to "manage" this crisis. All it managed to do was decimate a natural resource and make insurance companies happy. The prion is still in the soil. It's still being taken up by plants. Those plants are still being harvested and shipped all over the midwest. That load of alfalfa is still being rolled out in some pasture for the prion to go right back into the soil. And it will still spread. This program didn't manage ****.

Take samples and do lab tests all you want, fine. Maybe you find a cure, great. Let the lab people do their thing. I hope they do find a cure. But the senseless extermination of deer is ridiculous. It was a failure in Wisconsin, it was a failure in Missouri, and will fail again wherever they try it next.

Maybe they should have made the deer wear paper masks and stand 6 feet apart.

 

[NorthCyd]

Know someone who was living in England during the initial Mad Cow outbreak who later developed and died from it 20 years later. A friend of his I know visited him in the hospital shortly before his death and he couldn't even speak. I know CWD and Mad cow aren't identical, but they are similar and act very much the same. Just pointing out that no one getting sick doesn't mean they won't eventually. Be cautious.

This is the problem with managing public health issues, especially potentially fatal ones. It is meant to be preventative which requires a very conservative approach. This leads to a lot of opinions that they are overprotective, but if people start dying because they weren't protective enough then they failed at their job. They have to err on the side of caution and when they are certain they can relax standards they do it prudently. It angers a lot of people, but those same people would want heads to roll if people start dying.