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

An episode of [The MeatEater Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/960902903), 22 Sep 2025, 2 h 30 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/63aba8bc-2dc8-4f89-807a-ae280065a7cd/991857a5-ef58-4ccd-98e0-b35b01341969/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=3892b9a1-a960-4f9e-bee7-ae280065a7db

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

## Transcript

[0:08] Speaker 1: This is the meater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
[0:13] Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
[0:15] Speaker 2: Listening past, you can't predict.
[0:19] Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
[0:23] Speaker 1: I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise,
[0:27] Speaker 1: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
[0:31] Speaker 1: just gear that works. Check it out at first light
[0:35] Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
[0:38] Speaker 1: T E dot com. All right, real quick, right up
[0:44] Speaker 1: right up top for anything that happens. You know, it's
[0:46] Speaker 1: hunting season. When Phil starts prepping for a theater production.
[0:50] Speaker 3: That's how I mark the seasons too.
[0:52] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Phil, Phil stepped away from theater. I never
[0:56] Speaker 1: really stepped away. It's just tough.
[0:58] Speaker 3: It's tough on the family for me to do shows
[1:00] Speaker 3: because I missed bedtime for months, and it's just a
[1:03] Speaker 3: lot of commuting.
[1:04] Speaker 4: You know, I live out of town.
[1:05] Speaker 1: So and that one year he was kissing the other
[1:07] Speaker 1: lady besides his wife, a whole bunch. I was in
[1:09] Speaker 1: the play. He had to kiss a lady.
[1:12] Speaker 3: It was scandalous to know one besides Steve.
[1:14] Speaker 1: But yeah, rehearse that for all fall.
[1:18] Speaker 2: Well I did.
[1:19] Speaker 5: I did one, as long as you keep it to
[1:20] Speaker 5: the regularly scheduled rehearsal.
[1:24] Speaker 3: That's correct. I did a play in January, Steve, you
[1:26] Speaker 3: just weren't there.
[1:27] Speaker 4: You didn't see it. I think the only person at
[1:28] Speaker 4: the company saw it was Randall.
[1:30] Speaker 1: So you're prepping up now to do I'm.
[1:31] Speaker 3: Doing Christmas Carol again straight? Yeah, I think we're doing
[1:35] Speaker 3: it straight. We're no no steampunk icing on it, which
[1:38] Speaker 3: I think you were referring to.
[1:40] Speaker 1: That's why I wanted to talk touch on this very quickly. Okay,
[1:42] Speaker 1: there's one modification. Yeah, when they're always talking about buying
[1:47] Speaker 1: that goose.
[1:48] Speaker 5: You know, sure, yeah, the big Christmas goose.
[1:51] Speaker 1: Farthing a shilling for a farthing, like is that an
[1:58] Speaker 1: expensive goose or not? You know what I mean?
[2:00] Speaker 3: I think it's just supposed to be an expensive get.
[2:03] Speaker 1: If they would, if you would just try this this year, okay,
[2:08] Speaker 1: switch it to US currency and just for inflation.
[2:12] Speaker 3: Okay, So I'm the kids like three dollars for a goose,
[2:19] Speaker 3: or maybe they.
[2:20] Speaker 1: Would probably be like, oh, ship, that's a very expensive goose.
[2:24] Speaker 3: Sure, or they they could say, you know, a shilling
[2:26] Speaker 3: and a farthing and then just turn to the audience
[2:28] Speaker 3: break character and just kind of whisper.
[2:31] Speaker 1: It's like three hundred dollars today.
[2:33] Speaker 5: Isn't that nuts?
[2:34] Speaker 4: Can you? Okay?
[2:35] Speaker 5: Back to the program? Is it?
[2:37] Speaker 1: I would to enjoy that place so much more? Talk
[2:41] Speaker 1: about that?
[2:41] Speaker 5: Yeah, currency conversion live? Does he? Is it an actual liner?
[2:45] Speaker 5: Is it from Scrooge where he says the biggest goose
[2:47] Speaker 5: in all of London? Because then when that imply it's
[2:50] Speaker 5: going to be expensive?
[2:52] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, when he's I had a change of heart.
[2:54] Speaker 3: I think you know, bud go buy the biggest goose.
[2:57] Speaker 3: You can find something like that.
[3:00] Speaker 4: That's a great accent.
[3:01] Speaker 1: Oh I could do that whole damn play?
[3:03] Speaker 4: Yeah, I might.
[3:05] Speaker 2: You should.
[3:06] Speaker 5: Christmas Tours coming up?
[3:08] Speaker 1: All right, The Wild Turkey Doc is back. Now we're
[3:11] Speaker 1: actually starting the show. The Wild Turkey Doc is back.
[3:13] Speaker 1: Mike Chamberlain, very popular guest on the show. It came
[3:17] Speaker 1: in and then tells you everything you ever want to
[3:18] Speaker 1: know about turkeys. Today, we're not talking about turkeys though,
[3:21] Speaker 1: except we're gonna talk about turkeys a little bit, of course.
[3:23] Speaker 1: We're here to talk about chronic waste and disease and
[3:28] Speaker 1: interesting some interesting findings about that, which is gonna stir
[3:32] Speaker 1: the old pot, the hoax. The c w d's a hoax.
[3:37] Speaker 1: C w d's a scam pot. You know the pot.
[3:41] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, a lot of guys stirring that pie there.
[3:44] Speaker 1: It is a big pot with lots of spoons. Uh, Mike.
[3:49] Speaker 1: Doctor Chamberlain is from the Warnell School of Forestry and
[3:52] Speaker 1: Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. He's the National
[3:57] Speaker 1: Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor sir A or the the
[4:02] Speaker 1: the the is only one.
[4:04] Speaker 4: Only one. This is the first endowed position that's Turkey centric.
[4:08] Speaker 1: I might like to have that role.
[4:10] Speaker 4: Come on. I'm a few years from retirement.
[4:15] Speaker 1: And he leads the Wild Turkey Lab.
[4:18] Speaker 4: Uh.
[4:19] Speaker 1: Mark Ruter? Am I saying that right?
[4:20] Speaker 2: Correct?
[4:21] Speaker 1: Okay? Mark Ruter's here a colleague of doctor Chamberlain's. He's
[4:25] Speaker 1: from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia.
[4:33] Speaker 1: You got some accolades here that I don't understand. Southeastern
[4:37] Speaker 1: Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study. What's that mean?
[4:40] Speaker 2: So it's squiddest for short. You'll hear most in the
[4:44] Speaker 2: wildlife community call it squidis, even though it has nothing
[4:46] Speaker 2: to do with squids. So we're a cooperative. So Squidist
[4:51] Speaker 2: was founded in nineteen fifty seven by state wildlife agencies
[4:54] Speaker 2: in the southeastern United States, and it was really founded
[4:57] Speaker 2: at a time where we had no no capacity, no
[5:00] Speaker 2: expertise within state wildlife management agencies for disease and health topics.
[5:08] Speaker 2: And it was actually founded in the face of one
[5:12] Speaker 2: of the better known diseases of white tail deer, and
[5:15] Speaker 2: that's hemorrhagic disease HD and blue tongue. And so we
[5:19] Speaker 2: were founded at this time to sort of provide expertise,
[5:24] Speaker 2: diagnostic capacity, and understanding of diseases in white tail deer
[5:27] Speaker 2: at a time where restoration efforts were still kind of ongoing.
[5:32] Speaker 2: Because the fear was that this disease was going to
[5:34] Speaker 2: complicate the recovery of white tail deer, and so states
[5:37] Speaker 2: couldn't individually stand up capacity to have a person or
[5:42] Speaker 2: facility for just focused on disease. So they went the
[5:46] Speaker 2: cooperative model. And so that was a long time ago
[5:48] Speaker 2: and we're still still here. We have today we have
[5:52] Speaker 2: seventeen state wildlife agencies one territory in the Southeast, and
[5:56] Speaker 2: then have federal partners US fishali Life Service and US
[5:59] Speaker 2: Geological sort of provides our core sort of funding, and
[6:03] Speaker 2: we serve the States and.
[6:06] Speaker 1: You're the director, correct. Do you carry one of these
[6:09] Speaker 1: in your wallet? Someone gave me this.
[6:13] Speaker 5: Not that your insurance card.
[6:17] Speaker 1: It's this little card that if you start dying or something,
[6:21] Speaker 1: it tells people what you did at the hospital. Someone
[6:24] Speaker 1: gave that to me at Coronell. It tells people at
[6:26] Speaker 1: the hospital, Hey, man.
[6:28] Speaker 2: I do some weird stuff.
[6:29] Speaker 1: Yeah, I should give that card to you. I don't
[6:32] Speaker 1: have one of these cards, but I feel obligated to
[6:35] Speaker 1: give you that card because it apply more to your
[6:37] Speaker 1: line of work than my line of work.
[6:38] Speaker 5: Oh yeah, does somebody ever go have you ever come
[6:40] Speaker 5: in contact with.
[6:42] Speaker 1: Have you been in contact with any animals that seems sick?
[6:46] Speaker 2: And that's my job.
[6:49] Speaker 1: And then doctor Callahan's here.
[6:51] Speaker 5: Oh he's not a doctor, got an honorary doctor, straight.
[6:57] Speaker 1: Up, old cal doc Doc Doc Callahan's grandkid Callahan.
[7:03] Speaker 4: I like that.
[7:04] Speaker 1: Yeah, we're gonna talk about some interesting findings around chronic
[7:08] Speaker 1: wasting disease, and don't be worried. We will start out
[7:10] Speaker 1: by talking about what in the hell is chronic wasting
[7:13] Speaker 1: disease and why is it controversial? Not yet, because first
[7:21] Speaker 1: let everybody know, we got we got a new show
[7:22] Speaker 1: coming out called Meat Eater Sheds. It's drops Thursday, September
[7:26] Speaker 1: twenty five. We got episodes. We don't go into people's homes.
[7:30] Speaker 1: We go into their sheds, barns, whatever. We profile their properties.
[7:37] Speaker 1: We got one with Jeff Foxworthy's game room, Kevin Murphy's
[7:44] Speaker 1: exceptionally chaotic shed, Heather Duville's fur processing facilities, and more.
[7:51] Speaker 1: One episode every Thursday, kicking off on September twenty five.
[7:57] Speaker 1: All right, I've been thinking out for a couple of
[8:01] Speaker 1: minutes at a time. For days, I've been thinking about
[8:03] Speaker 1: how to start this conversation. I think I want to
[8:06] Speaker 1: start like this, one of you guys, and you can
[8:09] Speaker 1: pick you can you can thumb wrestler, So who gets
[8:12] Speaker 1: to do it? One of you guys has to very quickly,
[8:15] Speaker 1: just to get people up to speed, very quickly, explain
[8:22] Speaker 1: what is chronic wasting disease. Okay, the super quick explanation
[8:26] Speaker 1: of what is chronic wasting disease. Then I'm gonna explain
[8:29] Speaker 1: I'm gonna Devil's advocate a little bit. And now I'm
[8:32] Speaker 1: going to explain what guys on the street in the bars,
[8:37] Speaker 1: not so much on the street. Well, guys, in the
[8:39] Speaker 1: field and in the bars, say about it, okay, in
[8:45] Speaker 1: a way that will capture my own concerns and then
[8:51] Speaker 1: capture the other people's concerns, and then we'll dig in.
[8:55] Speaker 1: Is that fair?
[8:55] Speaker 4: Yeah?
[8:56] Speaker 1: Yeah, because I want to do a little bit about
[8:57] Speaker 1: like what are we talking about? And then and then
[9:00] Speaker 1: kind of why someone should be paying attention to this.
[9:03] Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, Yeah. So chronic wasting disease is, if you,
[9:08] Speaker 4: if you kind of think about it, thirty thousand foot
[9:11] Speaker 4: so proteins or if you go back to grade school,
[9:14] Speaker 4: proteins are comprised of amino acids, right, They're the building clocks,
[9:19] Speaker 4: I believe you. Okay, So these amino acids that build
[9:22] Speaker 4: these proteins are supposed to fold naturally, and though they
[9:27] Speaker 4: fold to support basic cell functions in the body. So
[9:31] Speaker 4: what happens with CWD is you have this particular type
[9:34] Speaker 4: of protein called a preon protein, and it misfolds. And
[9:39] Speaker 4: we don't know why that misfolding occurs, but when it misfolds,
[9:44] Speaker 4: the body can't shed the protein through enzymatic breakdowns like
[9:48] Speaker 4: it would normally shed proteins, and so the proteins accumulate
[9:53] Speaker 4: and they tend to accumulate in the brain, and what
[9:57] Speaker 4: that accumulation causes is neurological. If you look at the
[10:01] Speaker 4: brain through microscopically, it essentially looks like it has holes
[10:05] Speaker 4: in it.
[10:07] Speaker 1: Why does something accumulating create.
[10:08] Speaker 4: Holes because the body cannot shed the protein, and so
[10:14] Speaker 4: this is this is the dumb.
[10:15] Speaker 1: But I feel like that would make a ball, not
[10:17] Speaker 1: a hole. If it was shedding too many, it make
[10:21] Speaker 1: a hole. I mean, this is not coming from a
[10:24] Speaker 1: professional person.
[10:25] Speaker 4: Yeah, Mark, what happened like a tumor build up.
[10:30] Speaker 2: Once you have this, you know, the normal protein in
[10:32] Speaker 2: the body, which we all have right now, it goes
[10:36] Speaker 2: through a sort of a recycle process, right it's all
[10:39] Speaker 2: a lot of proteins in our body are built and
[10:41] Speaker 2: then after it's sort of lifespan, enzymes in the body
[10:45] Speaker 2: will kind of surgically kind of break it apart and
[10:47] Speaker 2: recycle those components and you start over with other proteins.
[10:51] Speaker 2: Once this prenom protein takes this different shape, then the
[10:58] Speaker 2: enzymes that the body has to snippet apart don't recognize
[11:02] Speaker 2: it anymore. They can't get to those sites. And so
[11:04] Speaker 2: rather than naturally degrade and recycle this protein over time,
[11:09] Speaker 2: it just persists, and then it's sticky and more sort
[11:14] Speaker 2: of kind of can can glob onto it, and so
[11:16] Speaker 2: you end up accumulating these proteins that your body can't
[11:20] Speaker 2: break down anymore, where the deer's body can't break down anymore.
[11:23] Speaker 2: And so it's that accumulation of material in a very
[11:26] Speaker 2: sensitive space neurons around neurons in the brain, that's your
[11:31] Speaker 2: information super highway controls everything in your body. And you
[11:35] Speaker 2: start to put stuff in there that's not supposed to
[11:37] Speaker 2: be in there, it's going to be less efficient.
[11:39] Speaker 1: Okay, have you ever tried to when you say a hole,
[11:42] Speaker 1: do you mean a whole?
[11:43] Speaker 2: So how that starts. What they're talking about is when
[11:47] Speaker 2: you're looking at a tissue microscopically. So if we were
[11:50] Speaker 2: to take a deer's brain out and cut it into
[11:54] Speaker 2: super thin chips, you know, we put that on a
[11:56] Speaker 2: microscope slide, we stain it, we look at it under
[11:58] Speaker 2: a microscope. Then you can see the individual cells and.
[12:03] Speaker 1: Oh, at that level, at that level.
[12:05] Speaker 2: So we're talking about in a neuron, which is right.
[12:08] Speaker 2: It's kind of the workhourse of your the central like
[12:11] Speaker 2: the brain and sending you know, information down to everywhere
[12:15] Speaker 2: in your body. Those neurons that are the cell you know,
[12:19] Speaker 2: you can get we call them vacuoles clear spaces. Basically
[12:23] Speaker 2: when you're looking at it in the neuron and around
[12:26] Speaker 2: the neuron, and when you do a special stain to
[12:29] Speaker 2: look at that, you'll see that's where this preon is accumulating.
[12:33] Speaker 2: So you can see a lot of these these preon
[12:36] Speaker 2: proteins and abnormal preons accumulating in a very sensitive spot
[12:39] Speaker 2: in the body.
[12:41] Speaker 4: I use the bed sheet analogy. If you ever tried
[12:43] Speaker 4: to fold a fitted bed sheet.
[12:45] Speaker 1: Oh, you know what, it's funny you mentioned that my
[12:47] Speaker 1: wife is yelling at me a whole bunch of sat
[12:49] Speaker 1: Night about that.
[12:51] Speaker 4: Yep, there's only if I was.
[12:53] Speaker 1: Almost gonna look it up.
[12:54] Speaker 4: There's only one.
[12:55] Speaker 1: I don't understand how she gets a legit fold right.
[12:59] Speaker 5: And and so I was in my early thirties when
[13:02] Speaker 5: we had a literal barroom discussion on what a duvet
[13:06] Speaker 5: cover is, and that's when I learned what it was.
[13:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, I hate them. We use them, and I hate them.
[13:14] Speaker 5: Yeah, how I thought that that was an option. Yeah,
[13:17] Speaker 5: it's not a mandatory piece of bedkit.
[13:19] Speaker 1: It's a blanket for your blanket.
[13:21] Speaker 5: Yeah.
[13:21] Speaker 4: Years ago when I when I started reading about CWD,
[13:25] Speaker 4: I was trying to think of an analogy that would
[13:27] Speaker 4: allow me to conceptualize it and dumb Mike speak and
[13:31] Speaker 4: I was like, okay, so these these proteins are they're
[13:34] Speaker 4: folding and it's misfolded. And then the fitted bed sheet
[13:38] Speaker 4: came to mind because I've never understood why I can't
[13:42] Speaker 4: fold it and my wife can't. But all I know
[13:46] Speaker 4: is the way she does it is perfect and it fits,
[13:49] Speaker 4: and the way I do it and Mark does it
[13:51] Speaker 4: and you do it is all wrong.
[13:52] Speaker 1: I mean to fold it up and put it on
[13:54] Speaker 1: like a shelf.
[13:54] Speaker 4: Yes, it never fits in the same space. And see
[13:58] Speaker 4: what she's got going on that her sheet fits. And
[14:00] Speaker 4: that's the way I kind of in my dumb mic brain,
[14:03] Speaker 4: that's how I kind of think about it. Is when
[14:05] Speaker 4: it's folded perfectly, it works every time. When it misfolds,
[14:09] Speaker 4: it never functions the same.
[14:11] Speaker 1: Well.
[14:11] Speaker 5: Plus, it's just another level of a household too, to
[14:13] Speaker 5: have more than one of those or more than one
[14:16] Speaker 5: per bed.
[14:18] Speaker 1: Now we got a lot of beds, a lot of
[14:20] Speaker 1: people living there. Okay, so keep going. So that's what
[14:26] Speaker 1: that is. That's a preon disease. Yes, and humans we
[14:30] Speaker 1: call there's is there only one preon disease in humans?
[14:34] Speaker 4: There's krutz Felt Jacob's disease.
[14:36] Speaker 1: Okay, that's it.
[14:37] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[14:38] Speaker 5: And I didn't understand that that we all carry these
[14:42] Speaker 5: these preons currently either whatever reason. I think that's the
[14:46] Speaker 5: first time I've heard that.
[14:47] Speaker 2: We all have normal in animals as well, normal prion proteins.
[14:51] Speaker 2: The functions aren't entirely known, but their their fate is
[14:57] Speaker 2: right there. Recycle and they have a lifespan, and they
[14:59] Speaker 2: move and when when they don't, And it's that accumulation
[15:04] Speaker 2: slowly over time that that leads to the actual disease.
[15:08] Speaker 1: And we they're in cattle, there's a prion disease called
[15:14] Speaker 1: mad cow disease, and sheep there's a prion disease called
[15:18] Speaker 1: scrapy humans yaka crutch felt.
[15:24] Speaker 2: What is it?
[15:24] Speaker 4: Utch felt?
[15:25] Speaker 1: Crush? I always screw up which one comes first. These
[15:30] Speaker 1: are all kind of the same thing. It's just manifests
[15:33] Speaker 1: a certain way in cattle, manifest a certain way in sheep.
[15:35] Speaker 1: Is that a fair way to think about it.
[15:37] Speaker 2: It's a family, it's it's basically a category of pathogen, right,
[15:41] Speaker 2: So we think, you know, normally more commonly about bacteria
[15:45] Speaker 2: or a virus or a fungus or a parasite. So
[15:48] Speaker 2: the prions are sort of in this umbrella category known
[15:51] Speaker 2: as transmissible sponge of form encephalopathy or t SE. Transmissible
[15:56] Speaker 2: meaning you know, moving from one animal to the other.
[16:00] Speaker 2: Bunge of form gets at what we just talked about
[16:03] Speaker 2: with those prions accumulating kind of greeding holes more or
[16:07] Speaker 2: less in the brain. In Cephalopathy just means the disease
[16:10] Speaker 2: of the brain, and so chattle b sc bovine sponge
[16:14] Speaker 2: of form, and cephalopathies, scrapies c j D, and humans UH.
[16:19] Speaker 2: One of the earlier described was kuru in Papua New Guinea,
[16:23] Speaker 2: some ritualistic cannibalism that led to in humans, you know,
[16:28] Speaker 2: a prion disease. There's transmissible mink uh encephalopathy. So there's
[16:32] Speaker 2: there's banks, so there's there's others. But they all kind
[16:37] Speaker 2: of share similar traits. The one that makes CWD so
[16:42] Speaker 2: wicked is that it it's shed and passes from animal
[16:49] Speaker 2: to animal efficiently, so scrapey does as well. Those two
[16:52] Speaker 2: kind of set apart. As far as uniqueness among some
[16:55] Speaker 2: of the t ses.
[16:57] Speaker 5: And and scrapy is is preventable through a a vaccine, right.
[17:08] Speaker 2: Not a vaccine, it's it's really through so one thing,
[17:12] Speaker 2: scraping and scraping and cwds share some similarities relative to
[17:18] Speaker 2: you know, like I just said that the prions actually
[17:20] Speaker 2: leave the animal's body and can transmit to one another.
[17:25] Speaker 2: There's environmental components, so animals can get infected from the environment,
[17:29] Speaker 2: or they can get infected from their buddies. But one
[17:33] Speaker 2: thing that that Scrapey had sort of that that led
[17:39] Speaker 2: to some effective management for the domestic livestock industry is
[17:43] Speaker 2: that genetically there are some some different genotypes of sheep
[17:48] Speaker 2: related to that that you know, the preon protein that
[17:51] Speaker 2: I mentioned, Well, that preon protein is encoded by a gene,
[17:54] Speaker 2: and so there's a there's a particular genotype in domestic
[17:59] Speaker 2: sheep that they're they're pretty resistant, very resistant to cw
[18:04] Speaker 2: or to scrapey. And so through intensive you know, breeding
[18:10] Speaker 2: management and domestic sheep and then culling of everybody else,
[18:16] Speaker 2: they've been able to get on top of it. And
[18:18] Speaker 2: so that's a tool that scrapeye has that we don't
[18:22] Speaker 2: we don't have access to.
[18:23] Speaker 5: God, dear God, I didn't I didn't realize that I know.
[18:26] Speaker 5: I do know that the culling part of that in
[18:29] Speaker 5: the domestic world is severe. There's no nobody gets left behind.
[18:35] Speaker 1: And when we talk about chronic waste disease, we're talking
[18:38] Speaker 1: about one of these prion diseases that afflicts members of
[18:45] Speaker 1: the deer family. Yeah, so servants, deer, white tailed deer, mule, deer, elk, moose, caribou, servants. Ye,
[18:57] Speaker 1: think of things that if you're sitting there at home,
[19:01] Speaker 1: think of things that have antlers and shed those antlers.
[19:06] Speaker 4: Yes, and it's it's a one hundred percent fatal disease.
[19:12] Speaker 1: This has been Now we're going to lay out I
[19:16] Speaker 1: want to I want to briefly lay out what what different,
[19:20] Speaker 1: what you hear different hunters say about this situation. It's
[19:23] Speaker 1: part of while Yeah, it was first identified in the
[19:27] Speaker 1: seventies in Colorado, nineteen sixty seven. I was a sixty
[19:31] Speaker 1: seven on a research facility.
[19:33] Speaker 4: That's right. I think it was formerly described an eighty
[19:35] Speaker 4: nineteen eighty, I believe.
[19:36] Speaker 1: Yeah, So we found out about it, not to say it,
[19:42] Speaker 1: you know, who knows the history of it. Who knows
[19:45] Speaker 1: did it? Did it emerge one day? Did it emerge
[19:48] Speaker 1: that year? And we found it. That's like an outstanding question.
[19:52] Speaker 1: But it was identified on a research facility in Colorado,
[19:57] Speaker 1: and as we've looked for it more, we find more
[20:02] Speaker 1: of it. Though it definitely seems to spread. It's not
[20:07] Speaker 1: just detection, right fair, Yes, we tend to find a
[20:14] Speaker 1: lot of CWD in places that have a lot of deer,
[20:20] Speaker 1: which leads people has historically led people to say, if
[20:25] Speaker 1: it's in a place that has a lot of deer,
[20:29] Speaker 1: then it must not be that much of a problem,
[20:32] Speaker 1: because how could it be that bad if the places
[20:34] Speaker 1: that have the most deer have CWD. I'm still shooting bucks.
[20:40] Speaker 1: I'm still shooting big bucks. We got some of the
[20:42] Speaker 1: highest deer densities in the country. Where's the problem? And
[20:47] Speaker 1: in fact, at times people have come in early on,
[20:51] Speaker 1: in the early on in the battle against c w D,
[20:54] Speaker 1: you'd have an outbreak in an area and wildlife managers
[20:58] Speaker 1: would propose, well, let's try to go in and eradicate
[21:01] Speaker 1: every deer in the area to stop the spread, which
[21:05] Speaker 1: struck people as like quite counterintuitive. Here we're talking about
[21:09] Speaker 1: a disease that could potentially kill the deer, but there's
[21:12] Speaker 1: a ton of them around, and the remedy is to
[21:17] Speaker 1: kill them, all right, that seems odd, right, So that
[21:21] Speaker 1: strikes people's odd. Another thing will come in and they'll say, hey,
[21:26] Speaker 1: we have this disease that's spreading from seems to be
[21:29] Speaker 1: spreading from animal to animal, and so we're gonna make
[21:33] Speaker 1: it that you're not supposed to bait out on the
[21:36] Speaker 1: ground because that'll make deer come together. And people might
[21:40] Speaker 1: point out, I don't use bait, but I see deer
[21:43] Speaker 1: together all the time, right, They have sex, they hang out,
[21:47] Speaker 1: they nurse from one each other, they socialize.
[21:51] Speaker 4: The same tree.
[21:53] Speaker 1: Yeah, they play grab ass whatever, like, they're always in contact.
[21:57] Speaker 1: I don't see how me not putting out and see
[22:00] Speaker 1: how me putting bait out is making deer socialized when
[22:03] Speaker 1: I've been watching deer my whole life in the socialize.
[22:06] Speaker 1: So what's the big deal. Another thing guys might come
[22:10] Speaker 1: and say, and again this is all stuff from like
[22:12] Speaker 1: well meaning people that love deer. Guys might come and
[22:15] Speaker 1: say they're they're advising me against eating deer. That that
[22:23] Speaker 1: you know I should no deer. No dear test negative.
[22:27] Speaker 1: A deer might test not detectable, right, meaning you get
[22:32] Speaker 1: either if you submit if you kill a deer and
[22:34] Speaker 1: you want to be like, hey, I want to find
[22:35] Speaker 1: out if it's got CWD. You don't get negative, you
[22:39] Speaker 1: get not found, you get not detected. So off of
[22:42] Speaker 1: guys will say it tested negative, and people will point out,
[22:45] Speaker 1: it didn't test negative, it tested not found. Okay, so
[22:49] Speaker 1: we have no case. We have no case ever in
[22:54] Speaker 1: the history of the United States of America, the world, whatever.
[22:58] Speaker 1: There's no case ever where it has been shown that
[23:02] Speaker 1: a human has contracted chronic wasting disease. So people will say,
[23:07] Speaker 1: why is my game agency, Why is centers for Disease Control?
[23:12] Speaker 1: Why are they saying don't eat positive meat because of
[23:17] Speaker 1: a health risk, but there's no demonstrative health risk. It
[23:24] Speaker 1: winds up smacking a little bit of to people, it
[23:27] Speaker 1: winds up smacking a little bit of COVID. Right, be
[23:30] Speaker 1: really afraid, be really afraid, but we don't really know
[23:33] Speaker 1: what you're supposed to. Just be afraid. And that is
[23:36] Speaker 1: the thing that strikes people's like, you keep telling me
[23:38] Speaker 1: not to do it, but no one's gotten it. Various
[23:44] Speaker 1: versions of this, the annoyances around baiting restrictions, the idea
[23:50] Speaker 1: that we're gonna coll or eradicate deer in certain areas,
[23:56] Speaker 1: The restriction like you're not supposed to bait, you can't
[23:59] Speaker 1: put bait down anymore, has, in my view, has turned
[24:04] Speaker 1: people a lot where they don't want to hear about
[24:07] Speaker 1: research anymore. They just want to say it's all bullshit, right, yep.
[24:12] Speaker 1: To bring COVID back, I'm about done setting this whole
[24:15] Speaker 1: thing up. But I'm just trying to tell you, like,
[24:17] Speaker 1: to bring COVID back would be there was a thing.
[24:21] Speaker 1: People were getting sick, people were dying of COVID nineteen.
[24:26] Speaker 1: At the same time, people are like, oh, if someone
[24:28] Speaker 1: brings a box your house, don't touch the box. Your
[24:30] Speaker 1: kids can't go to school, you can't fly in an airplane,
[24:33] Speaker 1: your business needs to go out of business.
[24:35] Speaker 4: You need to change your behavior.
[24:37] Speaker 1: Yeah, right, And then in the end people are like, man,
[24:40] Speaker 1: I'm not going to listen to anything anybody says. I'm
[24:45] Speaker 1: just fed up.
[24:46] Speaker 4: Yep, I'm done.
[24:47] Speaker 1: And then they're done.
[24:48] Speaker 4: Yep.
[24:50] Speaker 1: We've hit this is my view. In my view, we've
[24:54] Speaker 1: hit a dangerous spot around conversations around chronic waste and
[24:57] Speaker 1: disease because we've had a lot of guys are like
[25:01] Speaker 1: hit the done phase. They're done, and I don't think
[25:08] Speaker 1: we should be done right, Like we should be asking
[25:12] Speaker 1: questions and looking at what's going to happen. Because I
[25:14] Speaker 1: think that this conversation, the conversations about this could be
[25:19] Speaker 1: very different in twenty years.
[25:23] Speaker 5: I think it would be worthwhile to kind of dissect
[25:26] Speaker 5: the done.
[25:27] Speaker 1: Like what done looks like? Yeah, well, because.
[25:30] Speaker 5: There's, as with everything, there's people who get there through
[25:34] Speaker 5: for a bunch of different reasons, right.
[25:36] Speaker 1: Yeah, like self like selfish reasons.
[25:39] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[25:40] Speaker 5: There's like the the what we talk about in hunting
[25:45] Speaker 5: all the time, which is like the the heritage part.
[25:50] Speaker 5: It's like, well, Grandpa managed white tails this way. Grandpa
[25:54] Speaker 5: was awesome. How could anything he do be wrong? And
[25:58] Speaker 5: that offends me personally, can't change. There's the I don't
[26:03] Speaker 5: care what anybody says. I just want big bucks. This
[26:06] Speaker 5: is the way that we get big bucks. And then
[26:10] Speaker 5: there's the vein of folks who are like, well, what's
[26:13] Speaker 5: the bigger crime here? Eating CWD meat or throwing it away?
[26:21] Speaker 4: Right?
[26:21] Speaker 5: And there's people who are like, this is my time
[26:25] Speaker 5: in the deer woods and the meat is a huge
[26:27] Speaker 5: part of it. And they struggle And I run into
[26:30] Speaker 5: these people a lot. They really struggle with having to
[26:38] Speaker 5: face that decision. So instead of facing that decision, they
[26:42] Speaker 5: just go full ignorance. They're like, I will not get
[26:46] Speaker 5: this thing tested because I don't want to face that
[26:48] Speaker 5: decision right and notify me and if things change.
[26:53] Speaker 4: All of that that you just brought up as context
[26:56] Speaker 4: is what Mark and I have been talking about for
[26:58] Speaker 4: weeks and is largely why we're here sitting with you,
[27:06] Speaker 4: is to have that conversation because as researchers, we look
[27:12] Speaker 4: at CWD through a certain lens. As a deer hunter,
[27:15] Speaker 4: I look at CWD through an entirely different lens. I
[27:19] Speaker 4: understand the frustration that you just mentioned cal and then
[27:25] Speaker 4: I have to I have to step back and realize
[27:28] Speaker 4: that one thing we're seeing with CWD is that it
[27:32] Speaker 4: doesn't function the same across the landscape. It can affect
[27:35] Speaker 4: certain populations differently. We are also seeing that you it
[27:42] Speaker 4: takes this disease has a long incubation period, and it
[27:47] Speaker 4: takes decades to run its course, not months or years, decades,
[27:53] Speaker 4: And so within a population, within a population, so not
[27:56] Speaker 4: within an animal, but within within a population. Yeah, so
[27:59] Speaker 4: within at the end animal level, you're talking, you know,
[28:02] Speaker 4: eighteen to twenty four months for this disease to progress.
[28:06] Speaker 4: And at the population level, you're talking decades for the population.
[28:13] Speaker 4: So in essence, kind of think about it like this.
[28:15] Speaker 4: You have these two axes on the graph. On the
[28:19] Speaker 4: bottom you have time, you have years, and on the
[28:22] Speaker 4: vertical axis you have prevalence, right, And what you're seeing
[28:29] Speaker 4: is that in low prevalence, a population can literally trend
[28:34] Speaker 4: through time at one percent prevalence, almost undetectable for years,
[28:40] Speaker 4: and then it slowly starts to increase in prevalence. And
[28:44] Speaker 4: when I say slow, I'm talking a decade to go
[28:47] Speaker 4: from one to two percent, and then two to three percent,
[28:52] Speaker 4: and then to five percent and then to twenty percent.
[28:55] Speaker 4: And you start seeing this exponential increase in prevalence rates
[29:01] Speaker 4: and we don't know.
[29:04] Speaker 1: What. Give me like a place, give me a place
[29:07] Speaker 1: in the country where we could be talking about we're
[29:10] Speaker 1: like one percent for a decade.
[29:12] Speaker 5: So and then there but you said there is like
[29:15] Speaker 5: a takeoff point.
[29:17] Speaker 4: Yeah, so what So what Mark and I run into
[29:20] Speaker 4: is we do research like this Arkansas study we just finished,
[29:26] Speaker 4: and you don't know when you start to study where
[29:28] Speaker 4: you are on the curve. Oh yeah, and so you
[29:32] Speaker 4: have prevalence data, so in other words as we can
[29:35] Speaker 4: talk about. You know, an agency collects prevalence data and
[29:38] Speaker 4: they let's say they think they're at five percent prevalence. Well,
[29:42] Speaker 4: then they start expanding testing and they realize, yeah, we
[29:46] Speaker 4: are at five, or maybe we're at fifteen, or maybe
[29:48] Speaker 4: we're at twenty. And then you have other situations where
[29:52] Speaker 4: you have we think we're at twenty and we're at
[29:55] Speaker 4: thirty five or forty. And then you have other situations
[29:59] Speaker 4: where you have a single detection and then after lots
[30:03] Speaker 4: and lots of testing in that area, you have two
[30:07] Speaker 4: or three or five animals that are positive. So the
[30:12] Speaker 4: disease is functioning differently across the landscape, and so that
[30:17] Speaker 4: creates confusion and frustration and uncertainty because this disease, as
[30:22] Speaker 4: Mark can explain, didn't read the book on how to
[30:25] Speaker 4: be a disease. So that creates a lot of uncertainty.
[30:29] Speaker 4: And so when we go design these field studies trying
[30:33] Speaker 4: to get information to assist agencies with their decision making,
[30:37] Speaker 4: we don't really know where we are on that curve.
[30:40] Speaker 4: And once we think we figure out where we are, sometimes,
[30:45] Speaker 4: you know, some of the some of the work that's
[30:47] Speaker 4: coming out now Arkansas West Virginia, Wisconsin. They're seeing that
[30:52] Speaker 4: they they're at a different point along this curve than
[30:56] Speaker 4: they believe they were when the research project started, which
[30:59] Speaker 4: is what we saw in Arkansas. We thought we were
[31:03] Speaker 4: at a point and in reality we were much farther
[31:06] Speaker 4: up the curve to where prevalence was extremely high. And
[31:11] Speaker 4: that just speaks to the complexity of the disease.
[31:14] Speaker 2: Yeah, just to follow up on a couple of things,
[31:16] Speaker 2: I think at the root of so much confusion relative
[31:20] Speaker 2: to c TOWD is adjusting our time scale. Right, So
[31:26] Speaker 2: heemorrhagic disease, for instance, there's not a deer hunter who
[31:28] Speaker 2: doesn't fear haemorrhagic disease. You know, messing up a season, right,
[31:33] Speaker 2: and it's sweeping through and that's actively happening right now.
[31:36] Speaker 1: Yes, So like just just for people that know some terms,
[31:40] Speaker 1: you might hear EHD, you might hear blue tongue YEP,
[31:45] Speaker 1: which comes in and just wham.
[31:47] Speaker 2: Yes, it's it's it comes in. You know, it's a flood,
[31:51] Speaker 2: a quick one, right. You can go from zero to
[31:54] Speaker 2: sixty in the span of weeks, right, and you'll have
[31:58] Speaker 2: it's very visible, it's explosive of it's clustered, so you
[32:02] Speaker 2: can you see death, you smell death. It's everywhere, right,
[32:06] Speaker 2: it's very jarring, very alarming. And so you know, and
[32:10] Speaker 2: I've spent a long time studying that disease, and it's
[32:13] Speaker 2: you know, it's a it's it's got a lot of
[32:19] Speaker 2: sort of it'll grab your attention really quick. Right, it's
[32:23] Speaker 2: very concerning c w D and it's and it's all boom, right,
[32:27] Speaker 2: it's it's in. It's in a matter of weeks or
[32:30] Speaker 2: months exactly exactly.
[32:34] Speaker 1: They didn't know where.
[32:35] Speaker 2: Yeah, you're wondering about how do I deal with all
[32:37] Speaker 2: these carcases. They're starting to smell bad, right, Flip that
[32:41] Speaker 2: to CWD. It's it's completely opposite. There's there's multiple examples
[32:46] Speaker 2: in the country of hiding in plain sight, not for years,
[32:49] Speaker 2: but for decades. Right, it's cryptic on the landscape. You
[32:52] Speaker 2: don't see it until you until you see it. And
[32:56] Speaker 2: so when I think about CWD, I think about it
[32:59] Speaker 2: in individuals and I think about it in populations at
[33:01] Speaker 2: the individual level. You know, we're talking about we think
[33:04] Speaker 2: of it in terms of months and years, not days
[33:08] Speaker 2: and weeks like we would hemorrhagic disease. So months and
[33:11] Speaker 2: years for an individual, but like Mike said, for a population,
[33:15] Speaker 2: we think in terms of years and decades. And so
[33:18] Speaker 2: it's that slow, cryptic nature of the disease that just
[33:24] Speaker 2: I think at that is the root of so many
[33:26] Speaker 2: challenges for people to wrap their heads around in terms of,
[33:29] Speaker 2: you know, do we need to care about it? Why
[33:31] Speaker 2: do I need to care about it. I'm not seeing
[33:32] Speaker 2: anything on the landscape. Heemorrhagic disease just stacked up a
[33:36] Speaker 2: bunch of bodies in my property. I don't see anything.
[33:40] Speaker 1: Yeah, Meaning some guy turns in a deer for testing
[33:43] Speaker 1: first time in his county. There's a deer that's positive
[33:46] Speaker 1: in his county. Wildlife managers then like, good lord, let's
[33:51] Speaker 1: rewrite the rule book. And people at home, deer hunters
[33:56] Speaker 1: at home, are like, I just don't see the issue, right,
[34:00] Speaker 1: that that might be a thing that they come away
[34:02] Speaker 1: with because they're like, I don't get it. I saw
[34:06] Speaker 1: all kinds of deer, yeah, and I can't. I'm having
[34:09] Speaker 1: great hunting. Why is there a problem?
[34:10] Speaker 4: Right? I can't speak for a state agency, but Mark
[34:13] Speaker 4: and I can both. You know, state agencies take a
[34:17] Speaker 4: very Most state agencies take a fairly scripted approach to
[34:22] Speaker 4: dealing with CWD, and what they're trying to do is
[34:25] Speaker 4: they're trying to reduce transmission rates amongst individuals. They're trying
[34:31] Speaker 4: to prevent the transport of the disease outside of the
[34:35] Speaker 4: im mediatet local area. Because what we do know with
[34:38] Speaker 4: CWD is it starts out as a focal spot on
[34:42] Speaker 4: the landscape and then it slowly spreads outward from that spot.
[34:48] Speaker 4: And so what agencies are trying to do, you'll see
[34:51] Speaker 4: common responses be the creation of a CWD management zone, right,
[34:55] Speaker 4: So they'll delineate in an area, a geographic area, and
[34:59] Speaker 4: they'll create restrictions on import and export of carcasses or
[35:03] Speaker 4: parts of carcasses. They will ban sometimes you know ban
[35:08] Speaker 4: or alter how feed is applied to the landscape.
[35:12] Speaker 5: Yeah, beating bands, yep.
[35:13] Speaker 4: They'll often liberalize exactly and remove antler point restrictions and
[35:19] Speaker 4: things like that because what they're doing.
[35:21] Speaker 5: And here's like one of those major friction points is
[35:25] Speaker 5: like the state is actively working against the quality of
[35:29] Speaker 5: my personal deer hunting yep.
[35:31] Speaker 4: And what what's so what's at play there? And I
[35:33] Speaker 4: get it as a deer hunter, I totally get that,
[35:36] Speaker 4: but you have to look at it through their lens.
[35:39] Speaker 4: They are publicly, by law charged with managing for conservation
[35:43] Speaker 4: and sustainability of the species of wildlife in their state,
[35:47] Speaker 4: and so they're dealt this gut punch of being told
[35:51] Speaker 4: you have this disease on on your landscape. They they
[35:56] Speaker 4: have two approaches. They can They could be nihilistic and
[36:00] Speaker 4: just say I'm not doing anything, or they could take
[36:03] Speaker 4: this approach that we don't know where we are on
[36:06] Speaker 4: the curve, so we're going to create this zone. We're
[36:10] Speaker 4: going to expand our surveillance and testing, and meanwhile we're
[36:15] Speaker 4: going to try to reduce transmission. Right, we know that
[36:19] Speaker 4: deer are licking each other, and we know that they're
[36:22] Speaker 4: feeding under the same tree and all of that. But
[36:26] Speaker 4: for instance, what feeding is doing is putting animals at
[36:31] Speaker 4: the same spot on the landscape repeatedly and therefore changing
[36:38] Speaker 4: how the preon can get into the environment and then
[36:41] Speaker 4: remain in the environment. So an animal coming to a
[36:45] Speaker 4: feeder every day and eating at that feeder every day
[36:50] Speaker 4: is very different from a preon accumulation standpoint than if
[36:55] Speaker 4: he's walking around in a food plot or going under
[36:58] Speaker 4: an oak tree, and the ac warns are there, he's
[37:01] Speaker 4: around other deer for a couple of weeks, and then
[37:04] Speaker 4: he's gone. That's not the way a feed or functions.
[37:07] Speaker 4: So that's what the agencies I'm not I'm not trying
[37:09] Speaker 4: to justify their actions. I'm simply explaining that that's the
[37:13] Speaker 4: logic is that let's put this.
[37:15] Speaker 1: More dear from farther away and put them on the
[37:18] Speaker 1: same like literally the same square photograph.
[37:20] Speaker 2: I'm mixing social groups that normally wouldn't have those interactions.
[37:24] Speaker 4: That has been shown that you know, you will bring
[37:26] Speaker 4: multiple social groups, think about dose, for instance, matriarchal family groups.
[37:32] Speaker 4: You will bring multiple family groups to the same location
[37:34] Speaker 4: and otherwise would not be there at that time.
[37:38] Speaker 5: One of the issues is like just like how I
[37:42] Speaker 5: personally contextualize these things. And when we talked about like
[37:47] Speaker 5: preon's around the landscape forever, you can't get rid of them.
[37:52] Speaker 5: My visual my mental visual right is like that little
[37:56] Speaker 5: tiny sucker group of them is sitting there on the
[37:58] Speaker 5: tip of that forber grass forever. And then I saw
[38:07] Speaker 5: some body produced something that showed like how those preawns
[38:14] Speaker 5: eventually like work their their way down into the soil
[38:18] Speaker 5: to where they're they're just effectively not able to come
[38:22] Speaker 5: in contact with any sort of a grazer, right, which
[38:26] Speaker 5: makes like it rains, there's dew in the morning, it
[38:28] Speaker 5: starts like working its way down into the soil. And
[38:35] Speaker 5: that to me was one of those like really, like, boy,
[38:38] Speaker 5: you're kind of stupid for not having thought about this
[38:40] Speaker 5: yourself moments, right, but that is how you kind of
[38:44] Speaker 5: think about these things on first glance. Right, it's like, oh,
[38:48] Speaker 5: it's there forever, which she means then then was the
[38:51] Speaker 5: point in controlling this?
[38:52] Speaker 4: Yeah?
[38:52] Speaker 2: Right, I wanted to revisit one of the things you
[38:55] Speaker 2: said cal about sort of the disruption CWD has once
[39:01] Speaker 2: it's detected in an area to someone's here and now opportunity, right,
[39:06] Speaker 2: And I think a lot of those those you know,
[39:08] Speaker 2: common actions that an agency takes it does it seems restrictive.
[39:13] Speaker 2: It's how CWD has kind of become vilified in some ways,
[39:17] Speaker 2: but really those those actions target trying to lower the
[39:22] Speaker 2: risk of other deer getting CWD. So again, timescale, it's
[39:27] Speaker 2: we've got to adjust it. Those actions are they're further now,
[39:31] Speaker 2: but they're also for the future. To Mike's point about
[39:33] Speaker 2: stewardship and sustainability of the population, because we've got these
[39:37] Speaker 2: examples now of when we're at the end of that curve,
[39:40] Speaker 2: like when we're way towards decades down the road, we
[39:44] Speaker 2: we have glimpses into what that picture looks like, and
[39:47] Speaker 2: so so a lot of those actions are trying to
[39:49] Speaker 2: prevent or slow the movement in time along this this
[39:55] Speaker 2: sort of what phase of disease is the population at?
[40:00] Speaker 1: I desperately want to get into what you guys found
[40:02] Speaker 1: when you did your work in Arkansas, but I wanted
[40:05] Speaker 1: just a little more. We're very heavy on front loading here,
[40:09] Speaker 1: so apologies, But has it ever been demonstrated this is
[40:14] Speaker 1: a huge question, apologies, have any of these early detection restrictions.
[40:21] Speaker 1: Has any of them ever been demonstrated to be effective?
[40:27] Speaker 1: Is that yes they have? Or yes? You understand the
[40:30] Speaker 1: question I.
[40:30] Speaker 6: Do that I think that I do is to both
[40:33] Speaker 6: as well as the uh yeah, that's it's that's challenging, right,
[40:38] Speaker 6: because that that's a big.
[40:41] Speaker 2: Desire among many, right, is in the and we and
[40:44] Speaker 2: we often will sort of isolate one, right, will isolate
[40:48] Speaker 2: you know, carcass movement, or will isolate baiting restrictions or
[40:52] Speaker 2: feeding restrictions or faun rehabilitation or or removal of aprs
[40:56] Speaker 2: or whatever. You know, it's sort of the all la
[40:59] Speaker 2: carte you of options for these are the tools we
[41:02] Speaker 2: got in the toolbox. The challenge with evalue, like evaluating
[41:08] Speaker 2: one at a time, is that's not how they've really deployed.
[41:11] Speaker 1: When you apply it. Let's say I'm saying does applying
[41:14] Speaker 1: the whole toolbox? I don't mean to carve out what
[41:17] Speaker 1: restriction was effective. Have we ever had a situation where
[41:22] Speaker 1: there was a detection of the disease of a novel detection,
[41:26] Speaker 1: so a detection of the disease in a in a
[41:29] Speaker 1: place that had been previously unknown, The toolbox is applied,
[41:34] Speaker 1: and then lo and behold, we never get another detection
[41:37] Speaker 1: New York Or is it always it's just full blast ahead?
[41:43] Speaker 2: No, it's not always there. There are successes, right, so
[41:45] Speaker 2: there's you know, there's you also have to kind of
[41:48] Speaker 2: reframe the version of success too, Like the best example
[41:52] Speaker 2: of success would be New York right where they had
[41:54] Speaker 2: a detection there there was a captive facility involved, there
[42:00] Speaker 2: was depopulation of those facilities and aggressive removal of deer
[42:05] Speaker 2: in a in a tight radius around that area. That
[42:10] Speaker 2: was sustained for several years, and they did not have
[42:12] Speaker 2: another detection, despite having detections not only inside the fence
[42:15] Speaker 2: but also in wild deer outside the fence.
[42:17] Speaker 1: So that's that's reminding me. I'm familiar with that story.
[42:21] Speaker 4: So they caught it early. They caught it early enough
[42:23] Speaker 4: as that epicenter was growing that that focal area was
[42:25] Speaker 4: small enough around that captive facility that they could catch
[42:28] Speaker 4: it in time. And with that intensive culling around that facility,
[42:32] Speaker 4: they caught the spread before it had gotten too far,
[42:36] Speaker 4: which is what we're finding in a lot of our
[42:38] Speaker 4: wild populations. By the time an animals detect that is
[42:44] Speaker 4: being positive, the follow up surveillance is showing that it's
[42:47] Speaker 4: more widespread and more prevalent in some situations. In that situation,
[42:52] Speaker 4: to Mark's point, that is incredibly challenging to try to
[42:56] Speaker 4: manage that disease when you realize that you're there along
[43:00] Speaker 4: that curve than you thought you were.
[43:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, you get a county. I keep talking about
[43:05] Speaker 1: county level, but a county's a county, and I don't know,
[43:07] Speaker 1: pick a state. A county in Missouri gets its first
[43:10] Speaker 1: ever CWD hit from a hunter submitted deer that's the first.
[43:19] Speaker 1: But then you're saying, then they'll come in and be like, okay,
[43:21] Speaker 1: let's go test a thousand deer, and they test a
[43:24] Speaker 1: thousand deer and they're like, well, shit, there's fifty there's
[43:27] Speaker 1: fifty positives. So they didn't catch the first deer. It
[43:32] Speaker 1: had been there for some time, like yeah, we at
[43:34] Speaker 1: that point, you're like, is it the first, and they're like,
[43:36] Speaker 1: oh no, it's not the first. This has obviously been here.
[43:39] Speaker 1: We just never caught it. We were looking, and now
[43:40] Speaker 1: that we're looking, it's all over the damn place. Right.
[43:44] Speaker 1: It's too late to it's too late to isolate that
[43:46] Speaker 1: little square mile of ground.
[43:50] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[43:51] Speaker 2: Yeah, So it changes the options, right, and if you
[43:53] Speaker 2: because that's you know, if you have if you have
[43:55] Speaker 2: say robust surveillance in a state, and you really have
[43:58] Speaker 2: some confidence that like this might not be the first,
[44:02] Speaker 2: but maybe it's really early, right, that that could that
[44:06] Speaker 2: could sort of justify some pretty severe aggression to try
[44:09] Speaker 2: to like, okay, if we got a chance, let's try
[44:11] Speaker 2: to stamp this out and to that to that point,
[44:14] Speaker 2: to your your victory point earlier, you know, there are
[44:18] Speaker 2: examples Minnesota, like a you know, within a state. Sometimes
[44:22] Speaker 2: we get we get focused on the state, but but
[44:25] Speaker 2: there are victories within states too, right. So you might
[44:28] Speaker 2: have an endemic region in a state or an area
[44:30] Speaker 2: that has c to BED established and you get a
[44:33] Speaker 2: spark somewhere else and through you know it's early, through
[44:36] Speaker 2: aggressive action, they kind of stamp it out and there's
[44:39] Speaker 2: no new cases, right, and so that shouldn't be lost,
[44:42] Speaker 2: I think in terms of victory even within an unaffected
[44:47] Speaker 2: region of a state. States are big areas, and the
[44:49] Speaker 2: disease moves slowly. So as long as we can be
[44:53] Speaker 2: aggressive on those outliers, you know, that will save you
[44:57] Speaker 2: know it, it will reset the time scale of this
[45:00] Speaker 2: disease in those areas. Right, then we're not marching up
[45:03] Speaker 2: that path where we're kind of starting over again and
[45:05] Speaker 2: waiting until the next one. As far as other successes,
[45:11] Speaker 2: that's where it gets a little bit more challenging with
[45:14] Speaker 2: some of these regulations. In areas where c TOBD is established,
[45:18] Speaker 2: it's about living with CWD, right, and so our goals
[45:23] Speaker 2: might be different. You know, some agencies are are controlling
[45:26] Speaker 2: you'll you'll you'll hear you know the term managing for prevalence, right,
[45:31] Speaker 2: So basically these actions are just trying to keep that
[45:34] Speaker 2: prevalence down to the to that likes as Mike was
[45:39] Speaker 2: talking about earlier, like you know, one percent to five percent,
[45:42] Speaker 2: you know, trying to prevent it from increasing sort of
[45:45] Speaker 2: exponentially up that slope. The more you can keep it
[45:49] Speaker 2: suppressed down, the the more you suppress the very negative
[45:54] Speaker 2: consequences at the population level. Right, and so a lot
[45:57] Speaker 2: of agencies are doing that. That's a hard that's a
[45:59] Speaker 2: hard like happy pill to swallow sometimes. Right, It's like
[46:02] Speaker 2: we're sort of redefining what success means.
[46:04] Speaker 1: When we're talking success, we're no longer putting it back
[46:07] Speaker 1: in the bottle.
[46:08] Speaker 2: No, no, no, yeah, thats As a deer hunter, I
[46:11] Speaker 2: think about it like like like this, okay, so the
[46:14] Speaker 2: agency is telling me I have to behave differently, Well,
[46:17] Speaker 2: why are they doing that?
[46:18] Speaker 4: To Mark's point, they're trying if the prevalence is low,
[46:23] Speaker 4: they're trying to keep it low because a deer that
[46:28] Speaker 4: contracts CWD is going to die, and so that is
[46:32] Speaker 4: an animal that is not as we're going to talk about,
[46:35] Speaker 4: They're not going to have the same reproductive potential as
[46:39] Speaker 4: other deer. They're going to have lower survival they are
[46:43] Speaker 4: not going to contribute to the population in the same
[46:46] Speaker 4: way as a CWD negative animal, and therefore they're not
[46:51] Speaker 4: part of that surplus, that harvestable surplus moving forward, particularly
[46:56] Speaker 4: if they contract the disease when they're young. And so
[46:58] Speaker 4: what the agencies are trying to do is keep CWD
[47:02] Speaker 4: from not being a relevant form of mortality, if that
[47:06] Speaker 4: makes sense. They're trying to keep it to where it's
[47:08] Speaker 4: really not relevant at a population scale, and if they
[47:13] Speaker 4: if they can do that, then that is in many
[47:15] Speaker 4: ways a success. Like to see to your point, you're
[47:19] Speaker 4: not putting it back in the bottle, but what you're
[47:22] Speaker 4: doing is you're minimizing the impacts of the disease at
[47:25] Speaker 4: a population scale so that you don't go to where
[47:29] Speaker 4: some of these populations are going, which is there is
[47:32] Speaker 4: no more harvestable surplus. The disease has affected the population
[47:37] Speaker 4: in a way the prevalence has gotten so high that
[47:41] Speaker 4: there is no more surplus there.
[47:44] Speaker 5: Any hunter harvest is going to have a population level effect.
[47:49] Speaker 4: You start getting to a point where harvest is truly additive,
[47:53] Speaker 4: Like you have such a significant percentage of animals that
[47:57] Speaker 4: are dying solely from CWD that when you start tacking
[48:01] Speaker 4: on harvest and predation and these things that just affect
[48:04] Speaker 4: deer populations, you've chained, you've tipped the pendulum to the
[48:09] Speaker 4: point where the lens doesn't look at all like it
[48:13] Speaker 4: looked if the prevalence was two percent. When you get
[48:16] Speaker 4: to twenty percent or thirty percent or even higher as
[48:19] Speaker 4: we see in some populations, that's what the agencies are
[48:22] Speaker 4: trying to do is keep it low enough to where
[48:24] Speaker 4: it's not relevant.
[48:26] Speaker 2: And that's that's scary what Mike is outlining there. But
[48:29] Speaker 2: I think it's really important for listeners to understand that
[48:32] Speaker 2: that that can happen at the same time, even in
[48:37] Speaker 2: the same state, in different areas as record harvests. You know,
[48:42] Speaker 2: everything you would want as a deer hunter is available
[48:44] Speaker 2: to you in one area and then in another. That
[48:47] Speaker 2: it's this focal nature of these very severe impacts and
[48:51] Speaker 2: that slow sort of expansion over time. And that's where
[48:55] Speaker 2: it's like that that can happen, you know, in the
[48:58] Speaker 2: same state or in the same general area for a
[49:00] Speaker 2: long time, where you have great opportunity, great abundance sort
[49:04] Speaker 2: of juxtaposed with this other scenario. It's hard to I
[49:08] Speaker 2: think that that's challenging for people because unless you've been
[49:11] Speaker 2: on the ground and you see sort of some of
[49:14] Speaker 2: the stuff Mike's talking about. You're on the landscape and
[49:16] Speaker 2: you see some of these these population level impacts of CWD.
[49:20] Speaker 2: You just hear about them. It's different from seeing it,
[49:24] Speaker 2: you know, and experiencing it. And so I think that's
[49:28] Speaker 2: a challenge for people because you know, you harvest the
[49:30] Speaker 2: buck and it tests positive. It was you know, it
[49:33] Speaker 2: was a healthy that, you know, totally normal looking deer.
[49:37] Speaker 2: That's your experience as a hunter with CWD, the real experience.
[49:41] Speaker 2: You hear all this stuff, but then your real experience
[49:43] Speaker 2: was that was a great looking deer. And to cow
[49:46] Speaker 2: it is all this noise about.
[49:47] Speaker 4: CW and to Cal's point, now I have to I
[49:49] Speaker 4: have to discard that deer, right, Yeah, that's extremely frustrating
[49:52] Speaker 4: it and it causes confusion.
[49:54] Speaker 5: Yeah, I shout to know at Doug Duran's place that
[49:57] Speaker 5: you were just like, like people stopped and looked at
[49:59] Speaker 5: it and they're like, that is a damn good looking animal, right,
[50:03] Speaker 5: You're just like, she's mature and just big and healthy
[50:08] Speaker 5: and always and she tested positive right for CWD, And
[50:12] Speaker 5: that was just a gut punch, you know.
[50:13] Speaker 4: And what Doug is experienced, and I spoke with Doug
[50:17] Speaker 4: prior to coming here, and what he's experiencing is very
[50:20] Speaker 4: comparable to what's going on in northwest Arkansas, where you've
[50:24] Speaker 4: got parts of the landscape where to Mark's point, where
[50:28] Speaker 4: you're in these focal centers, and you flip a coin
[50:32] Speaker 4: and every other deer is testing positive or more particularly
[50:36] Speaker 4: for bucks. And then in the next county over they're
[50:41] Speaker 4: testing positive and the prevalence is lower, but the penulum
[50:45] Speaker 4: hasn't swung far enough to start seeing these population level consequences.
[50:50] Speaker 4: You still see deer, you still harvest deer. They're not
[50:53] Speaker 4: all positive. And so the chatter at the local feed
[50:56] Speaker 4: store is different from this county to this because it's
[51:01] Speaker 4: taken thirty years for this disease to get to where
[51:07] Speaker 4: the snapshot that we as human beings are seeing right
[51:10] Speaker 4: now today, and we can't. I suck at this. I
[51:14] Speaker 4: think about today and tomorrow. That's just the way I'm wired.
[51:18] Speaker 4: It's hard for me to think about twenty years from now.
[51:21] Speaker 4: What you know, what's my camp in Louisiana going to
[51:24] Speaker 4: look like twenty years from now versus today? What's a
[51:28] Speaker 4: client's property going to look like thirty years from now? Now,
[51:33] Speaker 4: the prevalence you know in that area that he manages
[51:36] Speaker 4: that property is one percent, Well, what's it going to
[51:40] Speaker 4: look like in thirty years if we just throw our
[51:43] Speaker 4: hands up and do nothing versus if we try to
[51:48] Speaker 4: minimize transmission potential and try to do these things that
[51:53] Speaker 4: that logically would impact pre on accumulation in the environment.
[52:00] Speaker 4: That's hard to conceptualize and wrap your head around thirty
[52:03] Speaker 4: years from now or fifty years from now.
[52:08] Speaker 1: Among people that are among guys such as myself, that
[52:12] Speaker 1: are concerned about CWD, that want more information about CWD,
[52:17] Speaker 1: that want us to pay attention to CWD, I think
[52:19] Speaker 1: there's like these kind of camps we're talking about. Doug Durn,
[52:22] Speaker 1: Like Doug Durn and I sit in sort of different camps.
[52:24] Speaker 1: He gets frustrated with my camp because I have always
[52:28] Speaker 1: looked at it. I've always looked at it as primarily
[52:33] Speaker 1: a food safety issue. How heartbreaking culturally devastating for American
[52:39] Speaker 1: hunters it would be if all of a sudden, a
[52:43] Speaker 1: deer wasn't like a good source of venison, wasn't something
[52:48] Speaker 1: people were excited to see on their property wasn't something
[52:52] Speaker 1: that we celebrated, right, But all of a sudden, they
[52:55] Speaker 1: were like the way you'd look at a rat, like, ah,
[52:59] Speaker 1: get that out of here, shoot like shoot the deer.
[53:02] Speaker 1: There's a deer in the yard right before we all
[53:05] Speaker 1: get sick. Like that, it would just what a deer
[53:07] Speaker 1: stands forward change from a human safety standpoint, that haunts
[53:11] Speaker 1: me and my own the diet that my family, which
[53:16] Speaker 1: is like me too, like the bulk of the protein
[53:20] Speaker 1: we take in is from servants. It'd be devastating, it'd
[53:23] Speaker 1: be heartbreaking. I've looked at it like that. Doug looks
[53:28] Speaker 1: at it one just animal welfare, meaning you know, he
[53:32] Speaker 1: grew up with a farm background. Sick animals equals no
[53:37] Speaker 1: good okay, So he just instinctively doesn't like the thought
[53:41] Speaker 1: of sick animals. Loves deer, doesn't like the thought of
[53:43] Speaker 1: sick deer, so that turns them on two. He's often said,
[53:48] Speaker 1: we will get to a point, and he reads more
[53:51] Speaker 1: and studies more than I do, we will get to
[53:53] Speaker 1: a point where this does impact deer hunting. He feels,
[53:58] Speaker 1: we'll get to a point where we don't see big
[54:00] Speaker 1: bucks anymore. And it used to be kind of like
[54:04] Speaker 1: I felt like it was like he was predicting or
[54:08] Speaker 1: or you know, prophesizing or trying to crystal ball it, right.
[54:12] Speaker 1: But that's like two different things, and I think there's
[54:15] Speaker 1: probably a lot of people to hold both those at
[54:17] Speaker 1: the same time, where they're like very concerned with food
[54:19] Speaker 1: safety and then very concerned down the road of are
[54:22] Speaker 1: we going to have big white tails? Yeah, we're still
[54:25] Speaker 1: gonna be able to grow seven year old bucks.
[54:27] Speaker 4: I also think part of Doug's frustration is what I
[54:30] Speaker 4: see with with private landowners all over the South, is
[54:34] Speaker 4: that they buy these recreational properties. They put so much
[54:39] Speaker 4: of themselves and their resources into creating this recreational opportunity
[54:44] Speaker 4: for them and their families. They want their kids and
[54:47] Speaker 4: their grandkids to come experience and to have this legacy
[54:50] Speaker 4: of all and they've got this grand plan. I'm envisioning
[54:55] Speaker 4: one of my clients at seventy two, he has this
[54:59] Speaker 4: like zat actually what he's wanted forever. He finally worked
[55:04] Speaker 4: his ass off enough to be able to afford this property,
[55:07] Speaker 4: to put the resources on it. He hires a biologist.
[55:10] Speaker 4: He does these things, and his dear herd is terrific
[55:15] Speaker 4: and the thought of that being undermined by this disease
[55:22] Speaker 4: is something that causes him incredible frustration and angst and
[55:27] Speaker 4: because and then having clients that own properties in CWDS owns,
[55:32] Speaker 4: that is what they tell me. They're like, I'm having
[55:36] Speaker 4: a hard time thinking through what the future is going
[55:40] Speaker 4: to look like because I'm sixty and I want my grandkids.
[55:46] Speaker 4: You know, I have two new grandsons, and this is theirs.
[55:51] Speaker 4: I've been working all these years to create this opportunity
[55:55] Speaker 4: for them so that I can facilitate the next generation
[55:59] Speaker 4: of hunters and land managers and conservationists. And now you're
[56:03] Speaker 4: telling me that there's a chance that could be undermined
[56:06] Speaker 4: by this disease, and that is incredibly frustrating and upsetting
[56:10] Speaker 4: for them. That's what I hear, Not so much the food,
[56:13] Speaker 4: although that is incredibly frustrating. Is the legacy, the property legacy,
[56:19] Speaker 4: the generational impact that this disease could have on land management,
[56:25] Speaker 4: on land value, on the deer hunting, you know, fraternity.
[56:29] Speaker 4: That's what I hear with the conversations that I have.
[56:35] Speaker 1: Okay, so is the guy that's worried, how warranted is
[56:39] Speaker 1: someone who's worried about the future big buck potential in
[56:43] Speaker 1: their area.
[56:44] Speaker 4: Well, there's no question like what we're seeing with these
[56:48] Speaker 4: with the research that is occurring in populations with high prevalence,
[56:55] Speaker 4: the age structure which Doug is seeing in his area
[56:58] Speaker 4: as well, the age structures progressively younger, meaning that you're
[57:03] Speaker 4: just not you're not carrying older males over into the
[57:08] Speaker 4: five and six year old age class. And so I
[57:11] Speaker 4: know we're going to talk about Arkansas, but so what
[57:15] Speaker 4: we found in Arkansas which we'll circle back to, but
[57:19] Speaker 4: you know, we found that fifty percent of all two
[57:21] Speaker 4: and a half year old males tested positive, more than
[57:24] Speaker 4: fifty percent of three and a half year old males.
[57:27] Speaker 4: And so if you look across the South, a lot
[57:30] Speaker 4: of the buck harvest is comprised of three and a
[57:33] Speaker 4: half year old males. So if you're in a you know,
[57:37] Speaker 4: you think about this population in Arkansas super high prevalence,
[57:40] Speaker 4: which we'll talk about, most of your bucks by the
[57:43] Speaker 4: time they're three have the disease. Well over sixty percent
[57:48] Speaker 4: have the disease when they're four, and if half of
[57:51] Speaker 4: them have it at two, they're not surviving past four.
[57:55] Speaker 4: And so you know, I'm thinking that.
[57:58] Speaker 5: That timeline is so crucial to these arguments as well.
[58:02] Speaker 1: Right, it's like, sure, because he's a jumbo at five
[58:04] Speaker 1: or six.
[58:05] Speaker 4: Well, I mean in my world working with landowners, you know,
[58:09] Speaker 4: we're not we're not harvesting at least southern white tails.
[58:13] Speaker 4: We're not. We're not harvesting many of our bucks until
[58:17] Speaker 4: they're at least four and most we're going to five.
[58:21] Speaker 4: And so in that vein, you know, under that scenario
[58:27] Speaker 4: I just described, which is on the ground in northwest Arkansas,
[58:31] Speaker 4: you're not going to have five and six year old bucks.
[58:34] Speaker 5: And well, I guess I bring up that timeline too,
[58:37] Speaker 5: because you do hear in certain areas of the country
[58:39] Speaker 5: they're like, well, who cares our beer don't live till
[58:41] Speaker 5: six anyway?
[58:42] Speaker 4: Right, right? Right?
[58:43] Speaker 5: And so if they're if they're showing signs of the
[58:46] Speaker 5: disease at six, what is it again to me? Like
[58:50] Speaker 5: why is this a backyard issue to me? And how
[58:53] Speaker 5: I hunt and managed here? Right? But you're saying that
[58:57] Speaker 5: in it progresses to where when by the time they're
[59:01] Speaker 5: showing signs of the disease, that that gets younger.
[59:06] Speaker 4: Yeah as well?
[59:07] Speaker 2: Right, Another thing is the farther we keep talking about
[59:12] Speaker 2: that time scale, right, and the farther down that path
[59:15] Speaker 2: you get and sort of the percentage of animals and
[59:18] Speaker 2: infected in the population is that increases. The age at
[59:23] Speaker 2: which those animals get infected tends to be earlier in life.
[59:28] Speaker 2: And I was just talking with Mike about this this morning.
[59:31] Speaker 2: There's a particular spot in the Arkansas study site where
[59:37] Speaker 2: the prevalence is very high. We suspect it's been on
[59:40] Speaker 2: the landscape for the longest and we've got you know,
[59:43] Speaker 2: all these collar deer. We you know that we investigated
[59:47] Speaker 2: the you know, the death site. You know, full field
[59:50] Speaker 2: nee cropsies, lots of photos, you know, sent back, lots
[59:53] Speaker 2: of laboratory analysis to sort of sort of understand why
[59:56] Speaker 2: these deer died. Individual causes of death. So there's a
[1:00:00] Speaker 2: there's a particular buck that was that was captured in
[1:00:04] Speaker 2: this area. He was about eight or nine months at
[1:00:07] Speaker 2: the time of capture, just this kind of a normal,
[1:00:09] Speaker 2: average looking body weight. Did a rectal biopsy he was
[1:00:16] Speaker 2: So this is a common diagnostic test that you could
[1:00:19] Speaker 2: use for CWD. You take a little snip of sounds
[1:00:22] Speaker 2: kind of weird, but like of the rectal like tissue,
[1:00:26] Speaker 2: it was positive, right, And so.
[1:00:29] Speaker 1: How did you get this deer in your hands, tranquilise it.
[1:00:33] Speaker 4: Yeah, so let you want.
[1:00:36] Speaker 2: Visit it later.
[1:00:36] Speaker 4: Let's cover this.
[1:00:37] Speaker 2: We'll come back to that.
[1:00:38] Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a big deal.
[1:00:39] Speaker 2: I'll come back to the end of his life.
[1:00:41] Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, yeah. So what we did in Arkansas is
[1:00:43] Speaker 4: so Arkansas Game Fish Commission first detected CWD in twenty
[1:00:49] Speaker 4: fifteen in an elk. They subsequently detected it in a
[1:00:52] Speaker 4: white tail in twenty sixteen far milk. No, this was
[1:00:56] Speaker 4: a wild wow though, and so they as an age
[1:01:00] Speaker 4: and decided to submit an RFP Request for Proposals a
[1:01:05] Speaker 4: few years later to solicit proposals from researchers to try
[1:01:11] Speaker 4: to understand as soon as they started testing. Once these
[1:01:16] Speaker 4: two positives occurred, they realized their prevalence was well over
[1:01:21] Speaker 4: twenty percent and so.
[1:01:23] Speaker 1: And that's from Hunter's submissions.
[1:01:24] Speaker 4: Yes, and so suddenly they went a while, we need
[1:01:29] Speaker 4: to understand where we're at, what's going on.
[1:01:31] Speaker 1: So they found one, started testing promptly, started taking a
[1:01:35] Speaker 1: lot of samples. Yep, people turn in their deer head
[1:01:39] Speaker 1: some of it.
[1:01:39] Speaker 2: Was agency collection too, and that initial response their goal
[1:01:43] Speaker 2: was to shoot they basically so they had that positive
[1:01:46] Speaker 2: elk and They also had a positive white tailed deer
[1:01:49] Speaker 2: that was clinically affected. So they kind of drew big
[1:01:52] Speaker 2: circles around these used them together, and their goal was, right,
[1:01:55] Speaker 2: We're going to go shoot three hundred deer within this
[1:01:57] Speaker 2: area because we need to understand what we're facing.
[1:02:00] Speaker 5: Where that area. Is that a lot?
[1:02:02] Speaker 2: It's a lot of deer. Yeah, it had been more
[1:02:05] Speaker 2: than they had sampled there previously. Yeah, but they didn't
[1:02:07] Speaker 2: even get to three hundred because by two sixty they
[1:02:10] Speaker 2: saw that they were facing this twenty percent plus prevalence. Yeah,
[1:02:13] Speaker 2: so they're like, okay, aout.
[1:02:14] Speaker 1: They wanted to go get an immediate snap shot. Yes,
[1:02:16] Speaker 1: and their immediate snapshot was like one in five deer, Yeah,
[1:02:21] Speaker 1: are positive for chronic waste and disease.
[1:02:22] Speaker 2: Yah. It was a gut punch.
[1:02:24] Speaker 4: Yeah, and Mark was living that. I was not involved
[1:02:27] Speaker 4: at that time. I was hearing about this peripherally. And
[1:02:31] Speaker 4: then I got this email with a request saying that
[1:02:35] Speaker 4: we would like you, among others. It was sent to
[1:02:38] Speaker 4: a number of researchers, We'd like you to consider putting
[1:02:41] Speaker 4: together a research project. Excuse me, they would answer these
[1:02:45] Speaker 4: relevant questions we have and so what I did, excuse me,
[1:02:50] Speaker 4: what I did was I reached out to Mark and
[1:02:54] Speaker 4: colleagues at the University of Georgia. We reached out collectively
[1:02:58] Speaker 4: to colleagues at Colorado State at the pre owned Research
[1:03:01] Speaker 4: Center there, and we put together this this very large
[1:03:05] Speaker 4: five year study to try to help the agency do
[1:03:09] Speaker 4: everything from understand abundance or deer density UH prevalence rates,
[1:03:15] Speaker 4: to look at behavior of CWD positive and negative deer,
[1:03:20] Speaker 4: to look at to survival and habitat use, and all
[1:03:25] Speaker 4: these things that you would get from just capturing and
[1:03:28] Speaker 4: collaring deer. And then we designed this study plan to
[1:03:33] Speaker 4: come back at the end and to also collect coll
[1:03:37] Speaker 4: animals that were radio marked at the end of the
[1:03:39] Speaker 4: study to try to figure out if their disease trying
[1:03:43] Speaker 4: if their disease you know, prevalent I'm sorry, if their
[1:03:47] Speaker 4: positive or negative would change at the end, you know,
[1:03:50] Speaker 4: by the time the end of the study occurred. So
[1:03:53] Speaker 4: what we did is we we captured and GPS collared
[1:03:58] Speaker 4: hundreds of deer. We ended up trap we would dart them,
[1:04:02] Speaker 4: rocketing at them and dropping at them. And what we
[1:04:06] Speaker 4: were trying to do is put GPS collars on adults
[1:04:10] Speaker 4: and we put vaginal implant transmitters in doors, which are
[1:04:13] Speaker 4: these as you know, these transmitters that when they give birth,
[1:04:17] Speaker 4: it kicks the transmitter out, alerts the researcher that there's
[1:04:20] Speaker 4: fawns on the ground. We would then go in and
[1:04:22] Speaker 4: collar the fawns at every capture. Of course, to Mark's point,
[1:04:27] Speaker 4: which he can explain, we would take a rectal biopsy
[1:04:30] Speaker 4: for CWD testing. We would then track these deer. We
[1:04:34] Speaker 4: programmed the callers to have battery life over several years.
[1:04:39] Speaker 4: Because we were interested in obviously studying the deer for
[1:04:42] Speaker 4: as long a term, you know, timeframe as we could,
[1:04:47] Speaker 4: we tried to recapture as many deer as we possibly
[1:04:50] Speaker 4: could from year to year so that we could repeatedly
[1:04:52] Speaker 4: test them. We set up camera arrays all over the
[1:04:57] Speaker 4: study site. And the way the initial old study site
[1:05:01] Speaker 4: came to fruition is through the testing that Arkansas game
[1:05:05] Speaker 4: Fish had already done. They had evidence to show that
[1:05:09] Speaker 4: there was a progression of prevalence from higher to lower
[1:05:13] Speaker 4: as you went from west to east. So we set
[1:05:16] Speaker 4: our study design up to where we captured that variation.
[1:05:20] Speaker 4: We had. We had sampling in the highest prep what
[1:05:23] Speaker 4: appeared to be the highest prevalence all the way to
[1:05:25] Speaker 4: the lowest prevalence, and we captured deer and put camera
[1:05:29] Speaker 4: arrays and did all of this work the same across
[1:05:33] Speaker 4: all kind of three study sites that that span from
[1:05:38] Speaker 4: high prevalence to lower prevalence certainly not low. And we
[1:05:42] Speaker 4: did this for for four years, and then we had
[1:05:45] Speaker 4: a fifth year where we went in and tried to
[1:05:47] Speaker 4: collect marked animals off of public lands at the same time,
[1:05:53] Speaker 4: which Mark can talk about because he saw this with
[1:05:56] Speaker 4: his own eyes. He you know, where deer dying while
[1:06:00] Speaker 4: this study is ongoing.
[1:06:02] Speaker 1: Deer with your collars on them, yes, are.
[1:06:05] Speaker 4: Dying and we're recovering those animals, and we are field
[1:06:08] Speaker 4: nee crop seeing and beyond we are testing them for CWD,
[1:06:13] Speaker 4: and we are seeing that this disease is becoming more
[1:06:17] Speaker 4: prevalent right before our eyes. And so we did this.
[1:06:22] Speaker 4: We recently provided the findings to the agency. The penultimate
[1:06:28] Speaker 4: piece of information from this study was a population model,
[1:06:31] Speaker 4: an integrated population model, where we took all of this
[1:06:34] Speaker 4: data and we used it to model to tell the
[1:06:37] Speaker 4: agency where are you at on that curve and more importantly,
[1:06:42] Speaker 4: where's the what's the future for you? Given where you
[1:06:45] Speaker 4: are on the curve? What does the next ten years
[1:06:47] Speaker 4: or twenty years look like for you as an agency
[1:06:50] Speaker 4: relative to this population. And what we realized pretty quickly
[1:06:56] Speaker 4: is we were we as a as a research group
[1:06:59] Speaker 4: and the agency were farther along on that curve than
[1:07:02] Speaker 4: we thought. And so as of twenty twenty five, the
[1:07:08] Speaker 4: prevalence rate is about fifty percent in that part of Arkansas,
[1:07:13] Speaker 4: about thirty five percent for doze in about sixty eight
[1:07:17] Speaker 4: percent for bucks, So most bucks have CWD in that area,
[1:07:23] Speaker 4: and so incredibly high prevalence, which is that's context. The
[1:07:27] Speaker 4: listener needs to understand that CWD had been on this
[1:07:31] Speaker 4: landscape for years before it was ever detected, and so
[1:07:35] Speaker 4: this population had gone quote unquote unmanaged, just normal harvest
[1:07:41] Speaker 4: regulations that the state would implement. There were antle point
[1:07:45] Speaker 4: restrictions in place, trying to improve aid structure and allow
[1:07:49] Speaker 4: animals to grow to be older. And so what was
[1:07:52] Speaker 4: occurring is for decades, prevalence was just slowly creeping up
[1:07:57] Speaker 4: and then suddenly and animals detec acted positive because they're clinical,
[1:08:02] Speaker 4: and the agency realizes, oh, wow, we're farther along.
[1:08:06] Speaker 5: Sorry, when you get to say clinical, are you saying
[1:08:08] Speaker 5: like it visually is showing signs of.
[1:08:10] Speaker 1: A sick deer shows up someone's yard.
[1:08:12] Speaker 4: Yes, sorry, yeah, And that's not something you know that market.
[1:08:17] Speaker 4: That's something Mark and I talk about a lot. Is
[1:08:19] Speaker 4: these clinical animals. You're not likely to see this unlike
[1:08:24] Speaker 4: a heemorrhagic disease outbreak where you've got animals laying everywhere.
[1:08:29] Speaker 4: As we saw with our with our movement data, these
[1:08:32] Speaker 4: animals as they're becoming positive as there as the disease
[1:08:37] Speaker 4: is progressing. So I'll give you a scenario. You catch
[1:08:40] Speaker 4: a two year old buck, you put a radio collar
[1:08:43] Speaker 4: on him, and he tests positive. He looks fine, everything,
[1:08:47] Speaker 4: he looks great, but he he tests positive. Now we're
[1:08:51] Speaker 4: tracking his movements over the next two years as the
[1:08:55] Speaker 4: disease progresses and he starts becoming comprom mist. And so
[1:09:01] Speaker 4: what we saw is they don't behave like uninfected deer.
[1:09:06] Speaker 4: They are less vigilant, they move differently. They will expand
[1:09:12] Speaker 4: their home range. They which is interesting if you think
[1:09:15] Speaker 4: about pre on transmission, that they're actually expanding their area
[1:09:19] Speaker 4: that puts them in contact with other animals that they
[1:09:21] Speaker 4: may know.
[1:09:22] Speaker 1: Why are they doing that? Don't know if they're sick, I.
[1:09:24] Speaker 5: Don't know the preon wanting to spread. It's like a
[1:09:26] Speaker 5: sci fi magazine.
[1:09:27] Speaker 4: It's hard to say. I mean, I would think that
[1:09:30] Speaker 4: they would honker down. Oh sure, man, But we didn't
[1:09:33] Speaker 4: see that. We saw the opposite, that they actually expanded
[1:09:36] Speaker 4: their home range.
[1:09:37] Speaker 1: And you should have not just like its function of
[1:09:39] Speaker 1: his age.
[1:09:42] Speaker 4: No, no, I mean, so we we control for.
[1:09:46] Speaker 1: Age, and our got all kinds of other ones that
[1:09:48] Speaker 1: aren't positive.
[1:09:51] Speaker 4: We also saw that, interestingly enough, they started interacting as
[1:09:55] Speaker 4: they became positive. They started interacting with other deer differently,
[1:10:00] Speaker 4: and they were much more likely to interact with another
[1:10:03] Speaker 4: positive deer. And so they start changing kind because.
[1:10:07] Speaker 5: Of the change in their behaviors and movements. Maybe maybe
[1:10:10] Speaker 5: they're they're less likely to run with uh.
[1:10:15] Speaker 4: They're more likely to be around another deer, which makes sense.
[1:10:19] Speaker 1: Why does that make sense? He's sick.
[1:10:22] Speaker 5: They're letting them do the thinking.
[1:10:24] Speaker 4: Maybe I don't yeah, I mean, I don't. I don't
[1:10:26] Speaker 4: know the I mean, could it be could it be
[1:10:28] Speaker 4: a combination of the change in vigilance behavior with Hey,
[1:10:32] Speaker 4: I don't, I'm not. Things just aren't clicking with me. So,
[1:10:37] Speaker 4: for instance, we had a you remember that polar vortex.
[1:10:41] Speaker 4: We had a severe weather outbreak? Was that the first
[1:10:45] Speaker 4: year or the second year we had a couple Yeah,
[1:10:51] Speaker 4: so we had positive deer that just laid down in
[1:10:56] Speaker 4: the woods and died like and they didn't seek refuge
[1:11:00] Speaker 4: at all, got it? And so there's something that that.
[1:11:02] Speaker 5: Where the term stiff as a pecker comes from.
[1:11:05] Speaker 1: I don't know, but you know this. You remember that
[1:11:06] Speaker 1: massive cold snap we went down to hunt squirrels and
[1:11:10] Speaker 1: out in the woods. I mean it was like national
[1:11:13] Speaker 1: news cold, yeah, freezing everything to death. But out in
[1:11:16] Speaker 1: the woods all over the place, it's just birds totally fine,
[1:11:21] Speaker 1: except dead underground, not a feather ruffle, freezing to death
[1:11:27] Speaker 1: in the trees, falling off the ground, I mean, we
[1:11:29] Speaker 1: like all day long. So there's Clay's whole bamboo patch.
[1:11:34] Speaker 4: And something that you know, their behavior is becoming compromised
[1:11:37] Speaker 4: in some way, which makes sense.
[1:11:39] Speaker 1: With yeah that like that clicks Yeah, like that click
[1:11:42] Speaker 1: did it? Did it did? It doesn't have the wherewithal
[1:11:44] Speaker 1: to do what it needs to stay alive. But just
[1:11:46] Speaker 1: like increase social unless that's somehow was attributed to its
[1:11:50] Speaker 1: lack of vigilance or it's paranoia.
[1:11:53] Speaker 4: Is some of that some of that we couldn't possibly
[1:11:56] Speaker 4: understand what this resolution of the data we have because
[1:11:59] Speaker 4: our vigil and data are coming from cameras from observing animals,
[1:12:03] Speaker 4: you know, head up, head down. The spatial and interaction
[1:12:06] Speaker 4: data are coming from GPS locations, and we know we
[1:12:09] Speaker 4: don't have all deer marked, right, so there's inherent bias there.
[1:12:13] Speaker 1: Well, I can tell you a sick kid is more
[1:12:15] Speaker 1: likely to end up in his mom and dad's bet.
[1:12:18] Speaker 4: Yeah.
[1:12:18] Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know why.
[1:12:20] Speaker 5: In a long time, uh, marketing communications folks for the
[1:12:26] Speaker 5: state agency saying like, are you sure you want to
[1:12:30] Speaker 5: capture sick deer and then let them go again?
[1:12:33] Speaker 4: Yeah? So Mark and I talked about this this is morning.
[1:12:36] Speaker 4: We wanted to understand how this disease looked without intervention, like,
[1:12:44] Speaker 4: so we wanted to see exactly what was going on
[1:12:47] Speaker 4: with these animals. So, yes, we were capturing animals and
[1:12:51] Speaker 4: we were allowing this to proceed as it would.
[1:12:55] Speaker 1: Like what would have happened if you weren't doing the study?
[1:12:58] Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And so we we do we collect
[1:13:02] Speaker 4: all this information we see. You know. For instance, one
[1:13:07] Speaker 4: of the more kind of concerning outcomes was the prevalence
[1:13:11] Speaker 4: is so high. Another outcome that was interesting. If you
[1:13:17] Speaker 4: look at dough survival, like annual survival of negative dose,
[1:13:24] Speaker 4: it was about eighty percent pretty high. It was sixty
[1:13:27] Speaker 4: percent for positive dose. God, if you looked at buck
[1:13:33] Speaker 4: survival an your survival, if it was a negative cohort,
[1:13:36] Speaker 4: it was about seventy percent pretty high. It was forty
[1:13:40] Speaker 4: percent positive.
[1:13:42] Speaker 1: And that is above and beyond normal. Well is that
[1:13:47] Speaker 1: above and beyond just the disease killing them? Because you know,
[1:13:51] Speaker 1: like like like if you think back to like HIV AIDS, right,
[1:13:57] Speaker 1: people that die are dying from pneumonia or they're dying
[1:14:01] Speaker 1: from complications from other things right there, they more likely
[1:14:05] Speaker 1: like die from the flu.
[1:14:07] Speaker 4: Yep.
[1:14:08] Speaker 1: So if if if it takes two years to kill
[1:14:12] Speaker 1: a deer, if the disease takes two years to kill
[1:14:16] Speaker 1: a deer, then of course from one year to the next,
[1:14:20] Speaker 1: fifty percent of the deer that have it should be
[1:14:21] Speaker 1: dead because it kills them. It's always fatal. So yes,
[1:14:26] Speaker 1: so like no shit, like like of course they're dead
[1:14:28] Speaker 1: because they have a disease that always kills them.
[1:14:31] Speaker 5: But are they but if they get hit by a car?
[1:14:33] Speaker 4: Yeah, So what we did is we categorized if they
[1:14:38] Speaker 4: even if they were CWD positive, but they died from
[1:14:41] Speaker 4: a car, a vehicle collision, or harvest or predation. We
[1:14:46] Speaker 4: considered that not CWD related.
[1:14:48] Speaker 1: Oh well, okay, wow.
[1:14:50] Speaker 4: We only categorized mortalities to CWD that had no other links.
[1:14:56] Speaker 1: And Mark was it lays down and dies.
[1:14:58] Speaker 5: Yes, that's fascinating, and.
[1:15:00] Speaker 1: So that's what I was. Yeah, that addresses what I
[1:15:03] Speaker 1: was getting. A meaning he's positive and gets smoked by
[1:15:05] Speaker 1: a car. That's maybe he's a little bit less vigilant.
[1:15:08] Speaker 1: But how do you fracture that in?
[1:15:10] Speaker 4: Right? So we were trying to be a conservative in
[1:15:13] Speaker 4: that vein to not link mortalities to CWD that had approximate,
[1:15:20] Speaker 4: you know, some other type of cause. And what we
[1:15:24] Speaker 4: found was about twenty percent, just under twenty percent of
[1:15:28] Speaker 4: all mortalities were linked directly to CWD. And so that's
[1:15:33] Speaker 4: that's in addition to predation and harvest and these other things.
[1:15:40] Speaker 1: Have you ever tested a live deer with the rectal
[1:15:44] Speaker 1: thing you're talking about, that's what we do. Yeah, but
[1:15:46] Speaker 1: have you ever tested a live deer and then had
[1:15:49] Speaker 1: it be that that deer was still alive twenty five
[1:15:54] Speaker 1: months later?
[1:15:58] Speaker 4: Are you asking if you if it tested positive at.
[1:16:01] Speaker 1: The rect Have you ever had a deer test positive
[1:16:04] Speaker 1: and then twenty five months later that deer is still
[1:16:07] Speaker 1: running around alive.
[1:16:11] Speaker 4: I have to look at the data.
[1:16:13] Speaker 2: I would think that would be the app you know,
[1:16:15] Speaker 2: that would be the exception, not the rule, but not impossible. Well,
[1:16:18] Speaker 2: this based on the incubation period.
[1:16:20] Speaker 5: I wanted to ask this too, because this test is
[1:16:23] Speaker 5: pretty darn new, right, I mean I feel like I
[1:16:26] Speaker 5: just was talking about this last week and I'm like,
[1:16:29] Speaker 5: there's not a test for CWD for live deer that so,
[1:16:35] Speaker 5: is there a And this was because that it takes
[1:16:41] Speaker 5: a while for the prions to build up to a
[1:16:43] Speaker 5: detectable stage unless you're taking biopsies from the brain, brain stem,
[1:16:50] Speaker 5: spinal column. Then lymph notes, So is the the rectal test?
[1:16:57] Speaker 5: Is that uh only giving you positives at a certain
[1:17:05] Speaker 5: progression point of the disease.
[1:17:08] Speaker 2: Yeah, there's there's a lot of nuance here with the testing.
[1:17:11] Speaker 2: But it also gets back to that time scale that
[1:17:13] Speaker 2: I was talking about with in an individual deer, We're
[1:17:16] Speaker 2: talking about you know, months and years, and so a
[1:17:19] Speaker 2: lot of that has to do with the progression of
[1:17:21] Speaker 2: the disease, the movement of the abnormal preon in the body.
[1:17:25] Speaker 2: So you know, if a deer gets exposed to, you know,
[1:17:29] Speaker 2: infected with CWD, the first place where we're typically going
[1:17:34] Speaker 2: to have a detectable amount in there is in the
[1:17:37] Speaker 2: lymph noodes, right, And everybody's probably familiar with the retroferringial lymphodes.
[1:17:43] Speaker 2: That's part of what people will call the lymphoid system.
[1:17:46] Speaker 2: So like you know, there's lymph nodes all around the body.
[1:17:49] Speaker 2: So that little piece of the rectum that we're taking
[1:17:51] Speaker 2: there happens to be like little tiny they're not lymph nodes.
[1:17:54] Speaker 2: They're a little almost like little islands of lymphoid tissue.
[1:17:58] Speaker 2: That's what we have those all throughout our all throughout
[1:18:00] Speaker 2: our intestinal tract, and so that's what we're grabbing there.
[1:18:04] Speaker 2: But that's typically a little bit later in disease. So
[1:18:08] Speaker 2: you could easily have if we were to just have
[1:18:10] Speaker 2: a deer that, you know, several months or you know,
[1:18:14] Speaker 2: three months, four months, five months after infection, we test
[1:18:18] Speaker 2: its lymph node and we test its rectal biopsy, there'd
[1:18:21] Speaker 2: be a decent chance that that lymph node sample is
[1:18:23] Speaker 2: positive and that rectal biopsy is not positive.
[1:18:26] Speaker 4: Got it, got it.
[1:18:27] Speaker 2: And a lot of that just has to do with
[1:18:29] Speaker 2: the timing. The last place that it goes is going
[1:18:31] Speaker 2: to be the brain, right, the brain stem. The obex
[1:18:35] Speaker 2: people will have that referred to the information super Highway
[1:18:38] Speaker 2: for us, right, And so that process takes a long time.
[1:18:44] Speaker 2: That's the months in years process. Right. So you can
[1:18:48] Speaker 2: have an animal it's you know, where that preon is
[1:18:52] Speaker 2: kind of just slowly accumulating in these tissues and it's
[1:18:57] Speaker 2: doing normal deer stuff and it looks totally healthy. That's
[1:19:01] Speaker 2: why you can harvest an animal that tests positive for CWD.
[1:19:05] Speaker 2: It's hard to say does that animal have CWD the disease, Well,
[1:19:09] Speaker 2: probably not exhibiting any signs of it yet, but he's
[1:19:11] Speaker 2: test positives on the path to disease, right, and so
[1:19:16] Speaker 2: you know by the time by the time you get
[1:19:19] Speaker 2: you know, a year, sometimes two years. Sometimes there's been
[1:19:24] Speaker 2: experimental studies where they don't really see disease out until
[1:19:27] Speaker 2: three four years, so the time is is pretty weird sometimes.
[1:19:31] Speaker 1: Okay, So why do people say that CWD is always
[1:19:35] Speaker 1: fatal because you start like like life, always like life.
[1:19:40] Speaker 2: As yeah, yeah, we're all gonna die, right, suthing's fatal
[1:19:43] Speaker 2: and so.
[1:19:44] Speaker 1: If he can have it for four years. Why do
[1:19:48] Speaker 1: people also often say that they're dead in two years.
[1:19:51] Speaker 2: I guess it's like you can predict. Okay, so if
[1:19:53] Speaker 2: something else you can start a clock. But here gets
[1:19:56] Speaker 2: CWD test positive for CWD. It's like, I don't know
[1:19:59] Speaker 2: when if you evade all other causes of mortality, this
[1:20:02] Speaker 2: is what you're going to die from. There's very few
[1:20:04] Speaker 2: of us that can say that.
[1:20:05] Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, but at what point? So I'm saying like
[1:20:10] Speaker 1: if he if.
[1:20:13] Speaker 5: Yeah, the point would have to be prior to the
[1:20:16] Speaker 5: naturally natural average mortality mark.
[1:20:20] Speaker 1: Right, So yeah, So when they say it's always fatal,
[1:20:23] Speaker 1: meaning if he doesn't get shot, doesn't get hit by
[1:20:25] Speaker 1: a car, doesn't get killed by kyo, whatever, that will
[1:20:29] Speaker 1: be his cause of death.
[1:20:31] Speaker 2: Correct.
[1:20:33] Speaker 1: But if it could be that he carries it for
[1:20:36] Speaker 1: four years, it almost kind of doesn't matter because most
[1:20:39] Speaker 1: like dear, don't live that long. Do you follow me?
[1:20:43] Speaker 1: Like if you could if you tested a deer, like
[1:20:45] Speaker 1: if you guys go out and put if you go
[1:20:47] Speaker 1: out and test deer and collar them and you're like, okay,
[1:20:49] Speaker 1: here's a positive deer. Uh, I would expect you to
[1:20:54] Speaker 1: say since that he's already had it, he's already somewhere
[1:20:58] Speaker 1: along the line. I would expect you to say that
[1:21:00] Speaker 1: mortality CWD mortality in and of itself is sixty percent
[1:21:06] Speaker 1: or seventy percent, or certainly more than fifty percent, because
[1:21:10] Speaker 1: it's always fatal and it kills them within a couple
[1:21:12] Speaker 1: of years. So any deer that's already positive, the clock
[1:21:16] Speaker 1: has already started ticking. He's already into his two years
[1:21:19] Speaker 1: of life. So why is it not that by two
[1:21:22] Speaker 1: years every one of them is dead?
[1:21:25] Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's part of the you know, Mike mentioned earlier,
[1:21:30] Speaker 2: like this disease is just atypical. It doesn't read read
[1:21:33] Speaker 2: the book. You know, there's not a you know, with
[1:21:36] Speaker 2: most infectious diseases, there's a highly predictable time course. It's
[1:21:41] Speaker 2: a little bit unpredictable once you get into sort of
[1:21:45] Speaker 2: that when is a deer going to start to show
[1:21:47] Speaker 2: clinical signs?
[1:21:48] Speaker 1: Right?
[1:21:50] Speaker 2: Usually once that happens, you know, whether it's sixteen months,
[1:21:54] Speaker 2: eighteen months, twenty months, once they start to you if
[1:21:58] Speaker 2: you were watching a deer and you're like that years off,
[1:22:00] Speaker 2: it's not doing not doing right, that course is going
[1:22:04] Speaker 2: to be pretty quick, probably within weeks or a couple months.
[1:22:08] Speaker 2: So once they hit that point, it's downhill, and those
[1:22:11] Speaker 2: those are the deer that you can you know, like
[1:22:15] Speaker 2: some of those subtle changes that Mike was talking about
[1:22:18] Speaker 2: relative to vigilance or home range size, all that stuff.
[1:22:21] Speaker 2: That's probably even something different than we can perceive visually.
[1:22:24] Speaker 2: Sometimes even you know, it's the classic deer everybody sees
[1:22:27] Speaker 2: in the pictures. It's a frame stance, head drooped, slobbering,
[1:22:31] Speaker 2: zombie kind of stare, just like looking into space. Nothing
[1:22:34] Speaker 2: like those deer are circling the drain. Those deer are
[1:22:37] Speaker 2: so far down this path, you know, they a lot
[1:22:40] Speaker 2: of them would have died earlier. You know, I look
[1:22:42] Speaker 2: at animals as like wild animals as akin to professional athletes, right.
[1:22:48] Speaker 2: They they have to be at their peak constantly to migrate,
[1:22:52] Speaker 2: spar evade predators, evade threats. If you're if you're just
[1:22:56] Speaker 2: like a little bit off. Think about how many professional
[1:22:58] Speaker 2: athletes sit on the bench and they're just I'm just
[1:23:01] Speaker 2: not a little bit right, you know. So that's where
[1:23:05] Speaker 2: it gets really hard. Those other mortalities, you know, killed
[1:23:08] Speaker 2: by a hunter, nabbed by a predator, hit by a car, whatever,
[1:23:12] Speaker 2: you know, what role did it have in sort of
[1:23:15] Speaker 2: sealing its fate into that like there is there is
[1:23:18] Speaker 2: something there. It's hard to quantify. There have been studies
[1:23:21] Speaker 2: that have shown, you know, more prone to predation, more
[1:23:23] Speaker 2: prone to harvest, more prone to vehicle strike. There seems
[1:23:27] Speaker 2: to be regional differences with that stuff, but certainly it
[1:23:30] Speaker 2: gives us the impression that like this stuff matters, right
[1:23:33] Speaker 2: that when you're when you're adjusting an animal's ability to
[1:23:37] Speaker 2: interact with its environment, perceived threats, move, all these things,
[1:23:42] Speaker 2: it's going to be more prone to an unthrifty life,
[1:23:44] Speaker 2: you know.
[1:23:44] Speaker 1: And and we one time saw a kylete that must have
[1:23:46] Speaker 1: got hit by a road going up the hill by
[1:23:48] Speaker 1: our house, got hit by a car, but eagles were
[1:23:51] Speaker 1: killing them. So did the eagles kill them?
[1:23:55] Speaker 4: Right?
[1:23:56] Speaker 2: This is tricky And your question is he's just.
[1:24:00] Speaker 1: Dragging himself along and you're just like taking advantage of
[1:24:03] Speaker 1: the situation. So yeah, it's hard to sort it out.
[1:24:06] Speaker 1: But I'm just trying to get to again, I'm trying
[1:24:07] Speaker 1: to get from the perspective of someone looking at someone
[1:24:10] Speaker 1: looking at it and saying like like if I took
[1:24:14] Speaker 1: a human like you take an American male, like okay,
[1:24:18] Speaker 1: if he doesn't die of you know, he doesn't die
[1:24:24] Speaker 1: of an opioid overdose, if he doesn't die in a
[1:24:27] Speaker 1: vehicular car accident, he doesn't die from lung cancer. He
[1:24:33] Speaker 1: will die from heart disease. Right, It's always fatal because like,
[1:24:38] Speaker 1: of course something will end up getting you, and if
[1:24:41] Speaker 1: you take all the other things that kills shit and
[1:24:43] Speaker 1: set it asides, like, of course it'll be heart disease.
[1:24:46] Speaker 4: But I think that I think the point that that
[1:24:48] Speaker 4: argument misses is that these animals on average are not
[1:24:52] Speaker 4: living as long as non diseased animals. Therefore their net
[1:24:57] Speaker 4: reproductive potential is less than negative animals, and therefore you
[1:25:03] Speaker 4: factor in that reduced lifespan. That's the answer to that
[1:25:08] Speaker 4: question from my perspective is these animals are not going
[1:25:11] Speaker 4: to live as long on average as a negative animal,
[1:25:15] Speaker 4: and therefore the consequences to the population are going to be.
[1:25:20] Speaker 5: Yeah, you get along that curve. You go from a
[1:25:23] Speaker 5: population that on average you can take like one of
[1:25:28] Speaker 5: those crazy Maryland deer. Remember learning about those, well the
[1:25:32] Speaker 5: white tails on like the all the weird government ground
[1:25:35] Speaker 5: in Maryland that you know they have like ancient white
[1:25:38] Speaker 5: tail doughs that lived to regularly like sixteen or whatever.
[1:25:42] Speaker 1: I don't know about this, yeah.
[1:25:44] Speaker 5: But like on average, the population starts as like they
[1:25:49] Speaker 5: lived to eight years old, and then a decade goes
[1:25:53] Speaker 5: by and it's like, well it's seven and a half,
[1:25:54] Speaker 5: and then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, on average,
[1:25:57] Speaker 5: everybody lives till five. On average, everybody lives till three
[1:26:01] Speaker 5: and a half. Right, And then you got serious problems
[1:26:05] Speaker 5: because and that's you're not producing deer.
[1:26:07] Speaker 4: That's why the agencies are trying to keep that prevalence
[1:26:10] Speaker 4: so low is because at a low prevalence, these this
[1:26:14] Speaker 4: discussion that we're having about you know, mortality causes, and
[1:26:19] Speaker 4: it becomes largely a relevant because only a tiny percentage
[1:26:23] Speaker 4: of animals have the disease to begin with, and therefore
[1:26:27] Speaker 4: an even smaller percentage of that are dying specifically just
[1:26:31] Speaker 4: from CWD.
[1:26:32] Speaker 5: You're killing big bucks, people are getting food ea.
[1:26:35] Speaker 4: But as you get up closer farther up that curve,
[1:26:38] Speaker 4: then this conversation becomes more relevant because now you're losing
[1:26:43] Speaker 4: a significant percentage of your population to just the disease.
[1:26:48] Speaker 4: And so if we looked at at of all the
[1:26:52] Speaker 4: positive deer that we put our hands on, a third
[1:26:55] Speaker 4: of them died just from CWD. So about twenty of
[1:27:00] Speaker 4: the total population was impacted, but a third of the
[1:27:05] Speaker 4: animals that were positive died solely from CWD. And so
[1:27:10] Speaker 4: again that's why.
[1:27:11] Speaker 1: Because prevalence rates are so high, you're losing twenty percent
[1:27:15] Speaker 1: of the population to the disease strictly to the disease, Yes,
[1:27:19] Speaker 1: and in harvest wouldn't even be that high hunter harvest's uh.
[1:27:24] Speaker 4: It was so the most impactful. You know, from a
[1:27:28] Speaker 4: from a population perspective, you had three competing mortality sources.
[1:27:33] Speaker 4: You had harvest, predation, and CWD, whereas in a normal
[1:27:39] Speaker 4: population you would have harvest and predation, right, and so
[1:27:43] Speaker 4: you're adding this mortality source that's becoming increasingly more relevant
[1:27:47] Speaker 4: as prevalence increases. And so not surprisingly, the final product
[1:27:52] Speaker 4: that we produced with this with this study was this
[1:27:55] Speaker 4: population model, and what we what we showed clearly is
[1:27:58] Speaker 4: this population's declining about thirteen to fourteen percent per year.
[1:28:03] Speaker 4: And so now you're looking at deer densities that are
[1:28:07] Speaker 4: in the one to five deer per square.
[1:28:09] Speaker 1: Mile range from a high of what well.
[1:28:12] Speaker 4: We came in at us we only have a snap shot, right,
[1:28:16] Speaker 4: We we came in and.
[1:28:17] Speaker 1: Well, because you don't trust other you can't trust other guesses.
[1:28:21] Speaker 4: Well, you don't know where I mean, we don't know
[1:28:24] Speaker 4: twenty years ago, what the I mean. We come in
[1:28:27] Speaker 4: as researchers and we get a snapshot of where we
[1:28:29] Speaker 4: are right now. And that's another problem with this, with
[1:28:33] Speaker 4: trying to understand this disease. It's kind of like the
[1:28:36] Speaker 4: other analogy I have. It's kind of like wild Turkey declines.
[1:28:39] Speaker 4: I mean, you're you're coming in and you're trying to
[1:28:41] Speaker 4: study something that's been occurring in the South over twenty
[1:28:44] Speaker 4: five years, and you come in and you get a
[1:28:47] Speaker 4: little snapshot of data from a population, and then now
[1:28:51] Speaker 4: you're trying to figure out from a snapshot what the
[1:28:53] Speaker 4: bigger picture is. And we're dealing, you know, you're talking
[1:28:56] Speaker 4: about a disease that takes decades to kind of operate.
[1:29:00] Speaker 4: Eight And we come in and a five year study
[1:29:03] Speaker 4: is a pretty long field study in my world, and
[1:29:06] Speaker 4: even in that's not near enough. I would have loved
[1:29:09] Speaker 4: to have had fifteen years of data before, and I'd
[1:29:12] Speaker 4: like to keep studying the population, but that's just not
[1:29:15] Speaker 4: that's just not realistic. But and so we we show
[1:29:19] Speaker 4: clearly that this population is declining and it's going to
[1:29:23] Speaker 4: continue to decline. And now you have prevalence that you
[1:29:27] Speaker 4: know is exceeding you know, is that fifty percent across
[1:29:30] Speaker 4: the population, which is incredibly high. And now you start
[1:29:35] Speaker 4: thinking through scenarios of what does the agency do right?
[1:29:40] Speaker 4: And so back to where kind of where we started.
[1:29:44] Speaker 4: When the agency detected this disease, they took a fairly
[1:29:47] Speaker 4: standard approach. Let's create his own let's an increase harvest
[1:29:52] Speaker 4: or opportunity. Let's liberalize bag limits, let's remove antler pointler restrictions,
[1:29:58] Speaker 4: let's ban feeding. And what they're trying to do is
[1:30:02] Speaker 4: controlled the spread of the disease. But they didn't know
[1:30:06] Speaker 4: where they were on the curve.
[1:30:07] Speaker 1: So now that they know it's too late to do
[1:30:11] Speaker 1: that and they know that the population is declining, at
[1:30:16] Speaker 1: what point do they reverse strategy?
[1:30:19] Speaker 4: I think that that speaks to the complexity of this disease. Is,
[1:30:22] Speaker 4: you know, in some situations, and this is certainly not
[1:30:25] Speaker 4: doom and gloom, but when you get to prevalence as
[1:30:29] Speaker 4: high as what you see in Northwest Arkansas, your your
[1:30:32] Speaker 4: management options have changed from where you are. If you're
[1:30:36] Speaker 4: at two percent prevalence at two or three or you know,
[1:30:40] Speaker 4: on the low end of the curve, you have these options. Mark,
[1:30:43] Speaker 4: and I've talked about when you get up to fifty percent,
[1:30:47] Speaker 4: now your options are limited because now your population is declining,
[1:30:51] Speaker 4: and now you're thinking about the future sustainability of the population.
[1:30:56] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what. Yeah, So if you go to a
[1:30:59] Speaker 1: place that has thirty for prevalency, you're not going to
[1:31:06] Speaker 1: shoot your way out of it.
[1:31:09] Speaker 2: No, no, because you're not going to get rid of
[1:31:11] Speaker 2: the disease. But that's the version of living with it.
[1:31:14] Speaker 4: Yeah, at that prevalence, it's there, and so.
[1:31:18] Speaker 1: So would you Is there an argument that you'd want
[1:31:21] Speaker 1: more deer on the landscape, to have a higher amount
[1:31:25] Speaker 1: of deer and test more that you'd have some sort
[1:31:30] Speaker 1: of natural selection play out. Do you have more deer,
[1:31:34] Speaker 1: more genetic diversity, and you'd start some new strategy of
[1:31:39] Speaker 1: seeing who's resistant?
[1:31:41] Speaker 4: Did one of the were you asked this at that here?
[1:31:44] Speaker 2: You know there's there's yeah, the deer there are. It's
[1:31:51] Speaker 2: basically trying to establish a new normal. Okay, Right, it's
[1:31:55] Speaker 2: trying to the theory with CWD is that you're eventually
[1:31:59] Speaker 2: going to hit some equilibrium right where you have your
[1:32:01] Speaker 2: prevalence is so high, that percentage of deer that are
[1:32:04] Speaker 2: positive is so high, and you have this continual you
[1:32:07] Speaker 2: know sort of you know, the clock ticks and deer die,
[1:32:11] Speaker 2: but you still have recruitment into the population, and so
[1:32:14] Speaker 2: you really can't. At some point you'll have that percentage
[1:32:18] Speaker 2: of positive deer is going to kind of like yeah.
[1:32:20] Speaker 5: Because if it's good, right, like, it's going to suck
[1:32:24] Speaker 5: in other deer who are like, oh, there's not deer here,
[1:32:26] Speaker 5: m h lots fo Yeah.
[1:32:28] Speaker 2: And and there is that there are studies ongoing and
[1:32:32] Speaker 2: this is like real world Mother Nature experiments right now,
[1:32:35] Speaker 2: like trying to look at these populations that are at
[1:32:38] Speaker 2: this state and start to understand genetics, like what is
[1:32:42] Speaker 2: that equilibrium, what's the new balance? Is there shifting of
[1:32:46] Speaker 2: you know, like we talked about that that preon gene,
[1:32:50] Speaker 2: the pr NP gene. That's kind of a metric that
[1:32:52] Speaker 2: some places will use to sort of monitor, you know,
[1:32:57] Speaker 2: how how a population is maybe shifting based on a
[1:33:01] Speaker 2: new selection pressure. Right like this is a relatively new
[1:33:04] Speaker 2: selection pressure for most most populations, and so all that
[1:33:10] Speaker 2: work is sort of you know ongoing. I think we're
[1:33:13] Speaker 2: a little bit down the road from understanding it, but
[1:33:16] Speaker 2: it's a very important area to sort of understand, is
[1:33:19] Speaker 2: what do we expect from these populations once they get
[1:33:22] Speaker 2: to that point. I do want to circle back to
[1:33:24] Speaker 2: one thing we were talking about dead deer, because that's
[1:33:26] Speaker 2: my jam. So yeah, you like, say a buck, you
[1:33:30] Speaker 2: can definitely have a scenario where Okay, he first tests,
[1:33:33] Speaker 2: you know, he gets infected at two and a half.
[1:33:37] Speaker 2: Yeah he'll lift to four and a half and you know,
[1:33:39] Speaker 2: honky dory, everything's great, you know. But I'll go back
[1:33:43] Speaker 2: to that original story I was talking about with one
[1:33:46] Speaker 2: of our collar deer in sort of the hot zone
[1:33:48] Speaker 2: where we are. And I do this not to like
[1:33:52] Speaker 2: I fear that sometimes this is the kind of stories
[1:33:55] Speaker 2: that you know, you get accused of fear mongering, but
[1:33:59] Speaker 2: very ill tell you it's really not, you know, because
[1:34:02] Speaker 2: like I just said, you can also have a scenario
[1:34:05] Speaker 2: where you harvest be four and a half year old
[1:34:06] Speaker 2: buck right gets to these ages that are desirable. The
[1:34:10] Speaker 2: opposite is also true, and we know that as prevalence
[1:34:13] Speaker 2: increases in a population, that percent increases you get to
[1:34:17] Speaker 2: this point where it the age at which you're infected
[1:34:22] Speaker 2: early in an infection cycle, you know, it's usually like
[1:34:25] Speaker 2: those the males are at greater risk of becoming infected.
[1:34:28] Speaker 2: Older males are more likely of being tested and positive.
[1:34:31] Speaker 2: But as it becomes a highly endemic area, so you've
[1:34:35] Speaker 2: had preons shed into the environment, into that habitat for
[1:34:40] Speaker 2: many years, lots of direct contact between animals, the age
[1:34:44] Speaker 2: of like the writ, there's accumulation of risk. Right, your
[1:34:47] Speaker 2: chances once you are born of encountering CWD are greatly increased. Right,
[1:34:52] Speaker 2: if you're born into that environment, chances are you're going
[1:34:55] Speaker 2: to see CBD sooner rather than later. And so that
[1:34:57] Speaker 2: to that point. You know, there was a buck that
[1:35:02] Speaker 2: was captured in twenty twenty two. He was about eight
[1:35:06] Speaker 2: or nine months old at the time of capture, relatively
[1:35:10] Speaker 2: normal body condition, wasn't thin, wasn't you know, super chunky,
[1:35:14] Speaker 2: just kind of kind of average. We got the recto biopsy,
[1:35:18] Speaker 2: and that's not an immediate test. Right, months go by
[1:35:20] Speaker 2: before we get that answer. Ended up testing positive. So
[1:35:24] Speaker 2: that was in March. Okay, we got a mortality signal
[1:35:29] Speaker 2: in September. He was dead along the Buffalo River, right
[1:35:34] Speaker 2: on the shoreline. And to say emaciated is kind of
[1:35:38] Speaker 2: an understatement. You know, this is a one point five
[1:35:41] Speaker 2: year old deer at this point died of chronic wasting disease.
[1:35:45] Speaker 2: He was completely wasted away. I can show you guys
[1:35:47] Speaker 2: picture later. No muscle mass, no subcontinuous fat, no visceral fat,
[1:35:54] Speaker 2: fat inside, you know. And he had aspiration pneumonia, which
[1:35:59] Speaker 2: is a common problem you see an end stage clinical CWD.
[1:36:04] Speaker 2: You know, as as you as this disease begins to
[1:36:07] Speaker 2: affect pretty much everything, right, because it's it's it's filling
[1:36:12] Speaker 2: up the space in that brain stem like your information
[1:36:15] Speaker 2: super highway for your body. They lose control of their
[1:36:19] Speaker 2: you know, reflexes, right, so they're swallowing. Reflex goes away,
[1:36:22] Speaker 2: so they aspirate feed and then that settles down into
[1:36:26] Speaker 2: the lung. So he had aspiration pneumonia. And he had
[1:36:29] Speaker 2: an old injury on his foot, which a crops you
[1:36:34] Speaker 2: a lot of deer and an old injury on a foot.
[1:36:36] Speaker 2: Deer do fine for a long time putting up with
[1:36:40] Speaker 2: little pesky problems like that, but by it was it
[1:36:43] Speaker 2: was kind of an eye opening, you know. And I'm
[1:36:46] Speaker 2: a disease nerd, you know, I like I like, I
[1:36:49] Speaker 2: like this stuff. But there's these certain moments where you
[1:36:51] Speaker 2: see and touch something and it kind of hits different.
[1:36:54] Speaker 2: And that was one of those moments, you know, like,
[1:36:56] Speaker 2: here's here's a year and a half old male you
[1:36:59] Speaker 2: know in this area that literally fell over dead in
[1:37:05] Speaker 2: a riparian corridor on the Buffalo River from CWD, you know,
[1:37:09] Speaker 2: And that's just a kind of a jarring moment. But again,
[1:37:11] Speaker 2: that can happen. But you can also harvest in the
[1:37:14] Speaker 2: same population a four and a half old male that
[1:37:17] Speaker 2: you know looks okay. But both things happen, and over time,
[1:37:20] Speaker 2: as you get more one of the hallmarks of as
[1:37:23] Speaker 2: it sets in that young those younger age classes start
[1:37:26] Speaker 2: to become a little more commonly infected, and then that
[1:37:29] Speaker 2: clock ticks earlier.
[1:37:34] Speaker 5: How much of the conversation, like legitimate conversation is there
[1:37:38] Speaker 5: around CWD resistant deer? Obviously, State of Oklahoma is going
[1:37:44] Speaker 5: great guns in a way that I think is concerning.
[1:37:49] Speaker 5: And I don't honestly know how it's legal to release
[1:37:53] Speaker 5: game farm animals that are quote unquote CWD resistant that
[1:37:58] Speaker 5: unless they know also know how to read state boundaries
[1:38:02] Speaker 5: and maps and things to stay in Oklahoma. How much
[1:38:09] Speaker 5: like is there a conversation there of identifying deer that
[1:38:16] Speaker 5: do have a resistance or long term carriers to the
[1:38:21] Speaker 5: point where it just never manifests, or like what is the.
[1:38:27] Speaker 2: So we know we know there with CWD, you know,
[1:38:31] Speaker 2: say in white tailed deer like that again, that that
[1:38:33] Speaker 2: preon protein gene. They'll refer to it as the pr
[1:38:36] Speaker 2: and P gene. We've known for a long time that
[1:38:40] Speaker 2: certain genotypes. So the basically the configuration of that gene,
[1:38:48] Speaker 2: certain genotypes are less susceptible doesn't mean resistant, It means
[1:38:55] Speaker 2: they don't they aren't as commonly infected. And when they
[1:38:58] Speaker 2: are infected typically what happens to your point, Steve, earlier,
[1:39:03] Speaker 2: that incubation period is longer, So those deer with certain
[1:39:06] Speaker 2: genotypes might rather than you know, head and downhill at
[1:39:12] Speaker 2: two years after maybe that pushes out to three years
[1:39:14] Speaker 2: after four years after, right, So that's been known. That's
[1:39:18] Speaker 2: that's a thing, right, But they ultimately will to our
[1:39:22] Speaker 2: conversation earlier, if they live through all, if they you know,
[1:39:25] Speaker 2: dance through all the other flaming hoops of dear mortality causes,
[1:39:28] Speaker 2: they'll ultimately bite it from chronic waste disease. So you know,
[1:39:33] Speaker 2: we can't manipulate that. But mother nature can if there's
[1:39:37] Speaker 2: adequate selection pressure, those more favorable like less susceptible genotypes
[1:39:42] Speaker 2: historically and most like free ranging populations are not well represented. Right,
[1:39:48] Speaker 2: it's the exception, those more like those less susceptible CWD
[1:39:53] Speaker 2: genotypes are the exception, not the rule. So kind of
[1:39:57] Speaker 2: in a simple sense, I'm not a geneticist, but it
[1:39:59] Speaker 2: tells you that that there's not adequate selection pressure on that. Right,
[1:40:03] Speaker 2: Fitness is greater in some of these other ones, so
[1:40:05] Speaker 2: there's concern there. But as CWD sets in and selection
[1:40:09] Speaker 2: pressure hits, you know, maybe I would anticipate that in
[1:40:13] Speaker 2: some of these populations we start to see that, and
[1:40:15] Speaker 2: they've they've they've started to do some of that work
[1:40:19] Speaker 2: in mule deer populations in Colorado, you know, where they've
[1:40:23] Speaker 2: seen a.
[1:40:24] Speaker 1: Little bit of a shift.
[1:40:26] Speaker 2: Maybe to some of these less susceptible you know, genotypes.
[1:40:30] Speaker 2: But again, this is this is it takes time, and
[1:40:34] Speaker 2: there's a lot of smart people working on that, but
[1:40:36] Speaker 2: I do think it's going to take time. To your
[1:40:38] Speaker 2: point though, relative to the issue in Oklahoma, so on
[1:40:42] Speaker 2: the farm servet industry, that's where that sort of desire originated. Right,
[1:40:50] Speaker 2: Let's let's try to selectively breed whitetail deer two that
[1:40:56] Speaker 2: are resistant to CWD, all right, and they're doing some approaches.
[1:41:00] Speaker 2: It's genome wide, so they're looking at the whole genome
[1:41:03] Speaker 2: and all the other you know, genes within the body
[1:41:06] Speaker 2: that might impact susceptibility. And so that has bled out
[1:41:13] Speaker 2: into you know, it's kind of been talked about as
[1:41:18] Speaker 2: the great hope in some degree, right, And I think
[1:41:22] Speaker 2: that's because this is a it sucks to talk about
[1:41:26] Speaker 2: this disease. It's just not it's not a great disease
[1:41:29] Speaker 2: to talk about. We don't have clear solutions, and so here,
[1:41:33] Speaker 2: let's let's try to march down this path of you know,
[1:41:36] Speaker 2: let's breed our way out of this.
[1:41:39] Speaker 5: You know that's because we can seem more proactive in
[1:41:43] Speaker 5: certain circles. Then well, there's this naturally occurring test that's
[1:41:49] Speaker 5: going on in Colorado mule deer, and in a few
[1:41:52] Speaker 5: decades or longer, we might have something that comes out.
[1:41:56] Speaker 4: And we want a silver bullet. That's the bottom line.
[1:41:58] Speaker 4: We want something that will fix this. And I think,
[1:42:02] Speaker 4: you know a few things that Mark said, I think
[1:42:05] Speaker 4: are important. There's a difference between resistant and less susceptible.
[1:42:10] Speaker 4: There's context there. The other thing to go back to
[1:42:15] Speaker 4: Steve's question is, you know, so if you have if
[1:42:18] Speaker 4: you have an animal that lives an extra two years
[1:42:21] Speaker 4: longer because he has a different genotype, he's still spreading
[1:42:26] Speaker 4: the preon in the environment for two additional years, right,
[1:42:30] Speaker 4: So that I get it from the standpoint of that
[1:42:36] Speaker 4: those deo are living longer, But if they have the disease,
[1:42:39] Speaker 4: they're still contributing to a transmission. There's still you know,
[1:42:43] Speaker 4: there's still preons that they're putting into the environment. And
[1:42:47] Speaker 4: you know, I think my perspective from the genetics standpoint is,
[1:42:53] Speaker 4: I think the scientific community recognizes that genetics may be
[1:42:58] Speaker 4: one tool that we have at our disposal, but we're
[1:43:03] Speaker 4: not there yet as a scientific community. And the idea
[1:43:07] Speaker 4: that you're going to I look at it like antlers
[1:43:11] Speaker 4: antler quality. That you're going to take deer of a
[1:43:15] Speaker 4: certain antler quality and release them into the environment and
[1:43:19] Speaker 4: expect them to elevate the antler quality for the entire herd.
[1:43:23] Speaker 4: Given that deer whitetails are promiscuous, is kind of crazy
[1:43:28] Speaker 4: to think that. And when I look at kind of
[1:43:32] Speaker 4: this scenario, I thought Okay, so that the idea that
[1:43:37] Speaker 4: you're going to release animals into the wild, regardless of
[1:43:41] Speaker 4: whether where they go from when they're released, and that's
[1:43:46] Speaker 4: going to immediately change how this population is functioning. I
[1:43:51] Speaker 4: think that logically to me doesn't make sense.
[1:43:55] Speaker 1: Do you think it might have that that might have
[1:43:59] Speaker 1: an application if the worst fears come true, we wind
[1:44:04] Speaker 1: up the areas that have CWD, whether it's twenty years
[1:44:08] Speaker 1: down the road, thirty years down the road, forty whatever,
[1:44:12] Speaker 1: that it's going to wind up being that you're going
[1:44:13] Speaker 1: to have, you know, seventy percent prevalency, and you're going
[1:44:18] Speaker 1: to have a d or two per square mile, right
[1:44:21] Speaker 1: like if it lands there at that point that might
[1:44:24] Speaker 1: become we might land in a place where that is
[1:44:28] Speaker 1: a conversation that warrants happening.
[1:44:30] Speaker 2: The thing that you know with I think within the fence,
[1:44:35] Speaker 2: inside the fence, you know they're going to go down
[1:44:39] Speaker 2: this path, right and if that leads to lowering risk
[1:44:44] Speaker 2: of things getting out of control inside the fence, yeah,
[1:44:48] Speaker 2: you know that that could be a favorable thing. I
[1:44:51] Speaker 2: would not prefer it to be happening in replacement of surveillance, biosecurity,
[1:44:57] Speaker 2: all of these these routine standard methods we do to
[1:45:01] Speaker 2: prevent and manage disease and animal populations. That stuff has
[1:45:04] Speaker 2: to invigorate and maintain in the face of this new
[1:45:09] Speaker 2: tool if it's potentially useful. The fact is, right now,
[1:45:16] Speaker 2: it's still in that investigation phase right. Science is going
[1:45:19] Speaker 2: to take time to understand if this is a tool
[1:45:22] Speaker 2: that can be leveraged within captive service populations, and so
[1:45:27] Speaker 2: that research should continue. But I think people are so
[1:45:31] Speaker 2: desperately wanting an answer and a solution, a silver bullet,
[1:45:34] Speaker 2: whatever the case may be, that we elevate it before
[1:45:37] Speaker 2: it should be elevated as a tool. It's not a
[1:45:39] Speaker 2: tool in the toolbox right now.
[1:45:41] Speaker 5: Because one point in time, if there was CWD, it
[1:45:45] Speaker 5: was almost certainly associated with a captive servant facility. Now
[1:45:51] Speaker 5: we're much further down the road, and the state of
[1:45:55] Speaker 5: Oklahoma is very serious about allowing the captive service industry
[1:46:01] Speaker 5: in that state to grow and sell h a deer
[1:46:09] Speaker 5: that those breeders have determined to be uh tolerant or
[1:46:15] Speaker 5: resistant to CWD by their own standards, meaning that they
[1:46:20] Speaker 5: they're just going to live a little a little bit
[1:46:21] Speaker 5: longer and then sell those outside of the fence for
[1:46:28] Speaker 5: six hundred bucks a pop to people in the state
[1:46:30] Speaker 5: of Oklahoma.
[1:46:31] Speaker 2: Mm hmm. Yeah. And it's it's that.
[1:46:34] Speaker 1: That feels a little crazy. Like if you're trying to
[1:46:36] Speaker 1: control the typhoid outreak and you had you're like, well, listen, man,
[1:46:40] Speaker 1: normal people get typhoid and they die in six months. Uh,
[1:46:45] Speaker 1: this guy, he'll he'll die in a year, but he's
[1:46:48] Speaker 1: got typhoid the whole time. We'll send them over to
[1:46:51] Speaker 1: your area for for decades. It does seem like someone
[1:46:54] Speaker 1: would be like, wow.
[1:46:56] Speaker 2: Yeah, for decades. To your point, the whole focus of
[1:47:01] Speaker 2: you know, the from from USDA state agriculture agencies and
[1:47:05] Speaker 2: state wildlife agencies has been separation of captive serviands and
[1:47:09] Speaker 2: wild servants. Right, we need separation of these two populations
[1:47:14] Speaker 2: for disease purposes. So to start suddenly talking about the
[1:47:18] Speaker 2: idea of opening the fence and releasing captive bread animals
[1:47:23] Speaker 2: that are selectively bred for the traits that humans think
[1:47:27] Speaker 2: are favorable, not for what mother nature thinks is favorable.
[1:47:31] Speaker 2: Is you know, there's no place for that in my
[1:47:34] Speaker 2: opinion right now, it's just there's we live in a
[1:47:38] Speaker 2: world with wildlife disease of unintended consequences. There's always unintended
[1:47:43] Speaker 2: consequences that are hard to predict, and it's it'd be
[1:47:46] Speaker 2: super challenging to to.
[1:47:49] Speaker 1: Have a.
[1:47:51] Speaker 2: Have enough assurances that that that those animals are, you know,
[1:47:57] Speaker 2: not going to put the populations.
[1:47:59] Speaker 4: Is a plausible that you're releasing something else into the environment?
[1:48:03] Speaker 5: Oh yeah, I mean listen to that.
[1:48:06] Speaker 1: You hear that Kell's Wildlife Disease Book.
[1:48:08] Speaker 5: That's that's a whole book of wildlife diseases just found
[1:48:12] Speaker 5: in the southeast. We're only talking about one.
[1:48:15] Speaker 1: All right, let's go. Let let's take northwest is it?
[1:48:19] Speaker 1: Northwest Arkansas? Okay? Northwest Arkansas, southwest Wisconsin. Here you got prevalency.
[1:48:28] Speaker 1: You know, hunters, they're the forty percent of the deer
[1:48:31] Speaker 1: they kill fifty percent of the deer they kill. Have
[1:48:33] Speaker 1: some CWD deer populations had a new form of mortality.
[1:48:40] Speaker 1: Used to be hunting and predation. Now it's hunting predation
[1:48:44] Speaker 1: c w D. CWD is killing twenty percent of the
[1:48:47] Speaker 1: deer herd. The deer herd is going down, down, down,
[1:48:50] Speaker 1: down down. What is the recommendation? I mean, like, like,
[1:48:55] Speaker 1: what do you wind up doing with that information? I mean,
[1:48:58] Speaker 1: do you say no more hunt, uh, because we're going
[1:49:02] Speaker 1: to run out of deer. Do you say, hey, kill
[1:49:04] Speaker 1: more deer because somehow that'll fix the problem. Like, what
[1:49:09] Speaker 1: do you tell people?
[1:49:10] Speaker 4: Well, as a scientist, what we told the agency is
[1:49:14] Speaker 4: we don't design regulations or.
[1:49:16] Speaker 1: To I know, but I'm asking you outside of that.
[1:49:19] Speaker 4: Yeah, but what what we did is we told the
[1:49:22] Speaker 4: agency this is where you are, you know, this is
[1:49:25] Speaker 4: where you're headed, and this is how many deer per
[1:49:29] Speaker 4: square mile you have, we think, and this is what
[1:49:32] Speaker 4: the future looks like.
[1:49:33] Speaker 1: You know how many you figured had? How many per
[1:49:34] Speaker 1: square mile? About one to five depending on unbelievable. And
[1:49:38] Speaker 1: then you think they're headed where It.
[1:49:41] Speaker 4: Really depends on you know, various factors.
[1:49:45] Speaker 1: But I think essentially lower than that.
[1:49:48] Speaker 4: Well, I mean right now in in the one the
[1:49:52] Speaker 4: highest prevalence area of Mark and I talked about this
[1:49:54] Speaker 4: over coffee this morning. From spending time there, you can't
[1:49:58] Speaker 4: you can't find deer. They're like, you can drive around
[1:50:02] Speaker 4: at night, you don't see deer. You can drive around
[1:50:04] Speaker 4: looking for deer and you you don't see deer. And
[1:50:08] Speaker 4: so you know what Mark alluded to this earlier. I mean,
[1:50:12] Speaker 4: you're going to get to some point where the population
[1:50:15] Speaker 4: is going to stabilize and it's going to increase, but
[1:50:19] Speaker 4: it's not going back to where it was, and so
[1:50:23] Speaker 4: where it goes and how quickly it gets there could
[1:50:28] Speaker 4: be influenced by regulations. So to your question, you know,
[1:50:33] Speaker 4: should the agency I'm not going to tell the agency,
[1:50:36] Speaker 4: but could the agency consider basically taking the foot off
[1:50:41] Speaker 4: harvest and instead of liberalizing harvests like many agencies do
[1:50:47] Speaker 4: thinking they're low on the curve, now when they're up
[1:50:49] Speaker 4: high on the curve, do we take our foot off
[1:50:51] Speaker 4: the gas? Do we reduce dough harvest? Do we you know,
[1:50:55] Speaker 4: do we change our behavior because now we're in a
[1:50:58] Speaker 4: new normal. And I think the answers yes that because
[1:51:03] Speaker 4: you're going to try at that point, the agency's goal,
[1:51:08] Speaker 4: I would think logically would be recovery. Now, what's this
[1:51:13] Speaker 4: going to look like in the next few decades, And
[1:51:17] Speaker 4: we know we're not going back to where we were
[1:51:19] Speaker 4: forty years ago, but we have to get this population sustainable.
[1:51:24] Speaker 4: And from the standpoint of you know, I'm thinking about
[1:51:27] Speaker 4: this as a deer hunter. I grew up in an
[1:51:29] Speaker 4: area of Virginia when at the time, if you saw
[1:51:32] Speaker 4: a deer you had that was a great hunt. If
[1:51:34] Speaker 4: you killed a deer. I was telling Mark, we would
[1:51:37] Speaker 4: take polaroids brown deer. We shot brown deer. We would
[1:51:41] Speaker 4: take a polaroid and go to school on Monday and
[1:51:44] Speaker 4: show it. And it was like you you had struck
[1:51:48] Speaker 4: the lottery, you know. And then I fast forward to
[1:51:52] Speaker 4: where I am now and trying to raise kids and
[1:51:56] Speaker 4: mentor young people through becoming deer hunters. They have to
[1:52:00] Speaker 4: be successful, They have to see animals. They have to
[1:52:03] Speaker 4: be able to grasp the fraternity of what you're doing
[1:52:06] Speaker 4: and the success, and you build off of that, and
[1:52:09] Speaker 4: then they want to learn about the process of managing
[1:52:12] Speaker 4: for deer and all this that goes away if you
[1:52:16] Speaker 4: can't see animals and you can't harvest animals. So as
[1:52:19] Speaker 4: a deer hunter, I would look at the agency and say,
[1:52:24] Speaker 4: I need you as an agency to think about how
[1:52:27] Speaker 4: to get what does the future need to look like
[1:52:30] Speaker 4: to recover this population to the point where I can
[1:52:33] Speaker 4: I can see animals, I can harvest animals, and we
[1:52:37] Speaker 4: know that prevalence is not going to stay at that
[1:52:40] Speaker 4: super super high level. It's going to it's going to
[1:52:44] Speaker 4: reduce through time. So yes, and we hope to get it.
[1:52:49] Speaker 4: You know, it's some something where you're you're not dealing
[1:52:54] Speaker 4: with what you're dealing with now, which is you know,
[1:52:56] Speaker 4: every every other animal in most bucks are to positive.
[1:53:01] Speaker 1: You think it will go You think it has the
[1:53:03] Speaker 1: capacity to then go the other direction, to climb, climb,
[1:53:06] Speaker 1: climb to fifty sixty seventy percent, and then it hit
[1:53:10] Speaker 1: some point when prevalency goes down.
[1:53:13] Speaker 2: I don't think it would go back down to it
[1:53:16] Speaker 2: will still it'll be chronically high. You know, it might
[1:53:19] Speaker 2: come up and then just kind of level out and
[1:53:21] Speaker 2: then wobble back and forth as you get recruitment and whatnot.
[1:53:24] Speaker 2: And that would happen.
[1:53:25] Speaker 5: But the effect there, Michael, to your point is like
[1:53:31] Speaker 5: people aren't gonna want to hunt in that area, and
[1:53:33] Speaker 5: so like the hunting participation in that zone and the
[1:53:37] Speaker 5: culture around hunting is going to suffer alongside the low population.
[1:53:44] Speaker 2: And this is this is the challenge with CWD as
[1:53:46] Speaker 2: you hit that that chronic, steady state of this is
[1:53:50] Speaker 2: the new normal. Right. We hear a lot about EHD, right,
[1:53:53] Speaker 2: and so we've had multiple large scale EHD outbreaks where
[1:53:57] Speaker 2: like even in a given county thousands of deer like
[1:54:00] Speaker 2: that right, in one transmission season, you might kill thousands
[1:54:03] Speaker 2: of deer indiscriminately right the sky's falling, people back off
[1:54:10] Speaker 2: a hunting that year. We've got multiple examples though through
[1:54:13] Speaker 2: time of within a few years that population is right
[1:54:17] Speaker 2: back to where it was, or even beyond where it was.
[1:54:21] Speaker 1: Yeah, I'd like personally, yeah, I'm old enough where I
[1:54:24] Speaker 1: personally lived through the cycle, right.
[1:54:27] Speaker 2: And that's where this is so different, right, And this
[1:54:29] Speaker 2: is why this matters. Is like with EHD, you can
[1:54:32] Speaker 2: get on the other side of it and get back
[1:54:33] Speaker 2: to the normal state. With CWD, you don't. You just
[1:54:37] Speaker 2: go to this new state of normal. And that's what
[1:54:40] Speaker 2: we're trying to define of what that is. And that's where,
[1:54:42] Speaker 2: like you know, in Wisconsin, parts of Wisconsin, parts of Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming,
[1:54:47] Speaker 2: part of West Virginia, like trying to figure out what
[1:54:49] Speaker 2: that new normal state looks like. And I do think
[1:54:52] Speaker 2: it's important too to mention, like you mentioned backing off
[1:54:55] Speaker 2: a doze for instance, I think it's a confusing point
[1:54:59] Speaker 2: to hunters that that don't have the misfortune or pleasure,
[1:55:05] Speaker 2: whatever the case may be, of of of seeing the
[1:55:08] Speaker 2: bad spots and the not so bad spots if because
[1:55:12] Speaker 2: you might be in an area and your interaction with
[1:55:14] Speaker 2: C TOBD is very early in that scale, Right, there's
[1:55:17] Speaker 2: just a couple of detections in the state or in
[1:55:19] Speaker 2: a county, and what do they do. They liberalize most
[1:55:23] Speaker 2: take right, And so they're they're doing the opposite. And
[1:55:25] Speaker 2: I think I think many folks that's a little bit
[1:55:29] Speaker 2: confusing based on you know, what phase of the disease
[1:55:34] Speaker 2: you are in the management agency seemingly from like on
[1:55:37] Speaker 2: the surface level doing completely different things. They're telling me
[1:55:40] Speaker 2: not to shoot those, they're telling me to shoot those.
[1:55:43] Speaker 2: It can be a little bit confusing, but it's all
[1:55:44] Speaker 2: relative to that long protracted time scale, and in the
[1:55:47] Speaker 2: early phase you're trying to prevent from getting to that
[1:55:50] Speaker 2: bad phase. And that's what all those actions are doing.
[1:55:52] Speaker 1: And actually, like if this place in Arkansas it's got
[1:55:55] Speaker 1: one to five per square mile, I just can't picture
[1:55:59] Speaker 1: that they'd still be in the mind frame of we're
[1:56:01] Speaker 1: going to do earn a buck. We're going to do
[1:56:05] Speaker 1: you can hunt deer through February, right, right, like, because
[1:56:08] Speaker 1: you're playing with fire at that point.
[1:56:10] Speaker 4: Right, and we don't know, I mean, we tried to
[1:56:13] Speaker 4: simulate what prevalence would look like, you know, through time.
[1:56:18] Speaker 4: But again, we we capture a five year snapshot of
[1:56:22] Speaker 4: this population in Arkansas, and it was extremely well done.
[1:56:27] Speaker 4: Science is rigorous, but it's five years of data and
[1:56:29] Speaker 4: we're trying to predict out, you know, to Mark's point,
[1:56:35] Speaker 4: prevalence gets to some level it's fifty percent right here,
[1:56:40] Speaker 4: and then in the next county over it's thirty percent
[1:56:42] Speaker 4: or whatever. You know, So you've already got some complexity there.
[1:56:46] Speaker 4: So we're trying to inform the agency on where are
[1:56:49] Speaker 4: you going to be. It's not going to disappear, but
[1:56:52] Speaker 4: where are you going to be? Its prevalence going to
[1:56:55] Speaker 4: remain high in parts of the landscape, It's probably going
[1:57:00] Speaker 4: to remain high in other parts of the landscape. When
[1:57:03] Speaker 4: it kind of starts oscillating to Mark's point and going
[1:57:06] Speaker 4: up and down slightly, it very likely will remain at
[1:57:10] Speaker 4: a prevalence that is at least palatable. Moving forward. You're
[1:57:16] Speaker 4: still going to have situations where you're going to have
[1:57:19] Speaker 4: a deer that you harvest a test positive, but it's
[1:57:21] Speaker 4: not going to be at the scale at which it
[1:57:24] Speaker 4: is now, which is most are prevalent.
[1:57:28] Speaker 1: Do you think there's a way that you could have
[1:57:31] Speaker 1: Do you think there's a way you could have a
[1:57:33] Speaker 1: county Texas, Illinois? Where ever? To help, we'll say there's
[1:57:36] Speaker 1: a county in Texas that has one percent prevalency today, Okay,
[1:57:44] Speaker 1: is there a way that in forty years that county
[1:57:50] Speaker 1: will have the same deer density and one percent prevalency.
[1:57:57] Speaker 4: Let's see, that's part of why we're having this conversation.
[1:58:00] Speaker 4: Those questions are incredibly difficult, almost impossible to answer because
[1:58:05] Speaker 4: there's so many factors that influence the transmission and accumulation.
[1:58:11] Speaker 4: I mean, we know vegetative communities, soil types, deer density,
[1:58:16] Speaker 4: social behaviors, there's so many factors that influence how this
[1:58:23] Speaker 4: disease is operating on the landscape that there could literally
[1:58:28] Speaker 4: be a thousand different scenarios. And that's part of why
[1:58:32] Speaker 4: it's so difficult to have these conversations with hunters. To
[1:58:35] Speaker 4: march point is like, well, I see that this is
[1:58:37] Speaker 4: occurring over here, and I see that this is occurring
[1:58:40] Speaker 4: over here, and that doesn't make any sense to me.
[1:58:43] Speaker 4: They should be doing the same thing. And so to
[1:58:47] Speaker 4: Mark's point, you know northwest Arkansas, that the context needs
[1:58:52] Speaker 4: to be that this population is so far along on
[1:58:55] Speaker 4: this curve, and the disease has progressed the way it
[1:58:58] Speaker 4: has here, but it's not going to operate like that everywhere.
[1:59:02] Speaker 4: There's going to be situations where it's going to operate
[1:59:05] Speaker 4: very differently. And then so that context is lost on
[1:59:08] Speaker 4: us as hunters. I see the frustration as a hunter,
[1:59:12] Speaker 4: and you see.
[1:59:13] Speaker 1: If you getting frustrated over here.
[1:59:16] Speaker 4: As a scientist. As a scientist, damn it. I want
[1:59:19] Speaker 4: to solve I want this to be solved, and as
[1:59:22] Speaker 4: a deer hunter, I don't want to deal with this.
[1:59:24] Speaker 4: I don't want to deal with this. I don't want
[1:59:27] Speaker 4: you to tell me that I have to behave differently.
[1:59:29] Speaker 4: I don't want you to tell me that this thing
[1:59:32] Speaker 4: that I've worked let's say fifty years to groom this
[1:59:35] Speaker 4: piece of property suddenly is is all undermined by the yeah.
[1:59:41] Speaker 4: And I don't want I don't want there to be
[1:59:44] Speaker 4: conversations where there are people that are telling the public
[1:59:49] Speaker 4: that the science is a lie. Don't I don't want
[1:59:52] Speaker 4: to be in that discussion either. But that's where we
[1:59:55] Speaker 4: are with this disease, and all of this creates confusion,
[1:59:59] Speaker 4: and the confus usion creates nihilistic kind of attitudes. Nothing's worked.
[2:00:04] Speaker 4: The hell with it, let's just quit. And I just
[2:00:08] Speaker 4: I don't see that looking through the two lenses I'm
[2:00:11] Speaker 4: looking through as an option.
[2:00:13] Speaker 2: And to your one percent question, my wheels had to
[2:00:16] Speaker 2: turn for a minute on that. I'm a thinker. No,
[2:00:20] Speaker 2: it's not going to stay the same. You know, if
[2:00:22] Speaker 2: you mother nature has done that experiment for us, right,
[2:00:25] Speaker 2: you know if because it's operated you know, cryptically underneath
[2:00:31] Speaker 2: hiding in plain sight, right in front of us. Right,
[2:00:33] Speaker 2: no interventions, status quo, Right, what did it do? It climbs?
[2:00:40] Speaker 2: I mean, you know, there's just nothing, you know, without
[2:00:43] Speaker 2: without intervention, CWD has proven to us over time that
[2:00:48] Speaker 2: it will do two things. It will the percentage of
[2:00:51] Speaker 2: deer in that population that are infected with CWD it's
[2:00:54] Speaker 2: going to increase. And then the geographic footprint of where
[2:00:58] Speaker 2: it is on the landscape that's also and I increase. Like,
[2:01:01] Speaker 2: those are the two things that we know with absolute
[2:01:04] Speaker 2: certainty are going to happen, and that expansion.
[2:01:07] Speaker 4: Is going to take time.
[2:01:11] Speaker 1: So in your professional opinions, if you're in a like
[2:01:14] Speaker 1: an area that has very low prevalence here they just
[2:01:17] Speaker 1: found their first case, and your professional opinions is if
[2:01:20] Speaker 1: your option, if you choose the option of ignore it
[2:01:24] Speaker 1: and do nothing in your professional opinion, decades down the road,
[2:01:30] Speaker 1: you will be living under a new normal and it
[2:01:33] Speaker 1: won't just be that you wished it away.
[2:01:37] Speaker 2: Correct, Yes, I mean yeah, I don't see. I don't
[2:01:40] Speaker 2: see a scenario where, you know, if it's just one
[2:01:45] Speaker 2: deer on the landscape right and it it dies, it's
[2:01:48] Speaker 2: not consumed, and you know, somebody covers it up with
[2:01:51] Speaker 2: a driveway. Okay, maybe it's sealed in there, it's not
[2:01:53] Speaker 2: coming anywhere, but like, but other than that, you know,
[2:01:56] Speaker 2: these will will fester, It will smolder till it's visible,
[2:02:01] Speaker 2: you know, years down the road.
[2:02:02] Speaker 1: Can you guys? Is it what blocks someone what prevents
[2:02:08] Speaker 1: the researcher from getting some white tailed deer in captivity
[2:02:15] Speaker 1: and experimenting with different transmission things, Meaning it's only you
[2:02:22] Speaker 1: take a deer and it never comes in contact with
[2:02:24] Speaker 1: another deer. You allow an affected deer to graze a
[2:02:32] Speaker 1: one acre pasture for a week, pull that deer away
[2:02:36] Speaker 1: and kill it. Then you take a known, clean deer
[2:02:43] Speaker 1: that doesn't have interaction in there deer and you let
[2:02:45] Speaker 1: it go graze on that pasture. And then you see
[2:02:49] Speaker 1: does it get CWD from grazing on the pasture? Like,
[2:02:52] Speaker 1: did it happen that way?
[2:02:54] Speaker 2: That's been done, that that kind of work gets done?
[2:02:58] Speaker 1: And is it? Because do you remember a few years
[2:03:01] Speaker 1: ago all this hysteria came out, like if you took
[2:03:04] Speaker 1: stainless steel and you like cut a deer up on
[2:03:07] Speaker 1: stainless steel and then scrubbed it and bleached it, it
[2:03:10] Speaker 1: could still I'm like a bullshit, do you know what
[2:03:13] Speaker 1: I mean? Like theoretically sure, but like people aren't getting
[2:03:15] Speaker 1: it that way or like deer aren't getting it yeah
[2:03:20] Speaker 1: off stainless steel, right, like like how are they getting it?
[2:03:24] Speaker 2: I mean that's a it's a you know, for as
[2:03:26] Speaker 2: much as we know about chronic waste and disease, there's
[2:03:29] Speaker 2: a lot we don't know about.
[2:03:31] Speaker 1: Does the does the deer get it? Who only goes
[2:03:33] Speaker 1: and grazes on the pasture?
[2:03:36] Speaker 2: Well, well that's one possibility and it's been shown so
[2:03:40] Speaker 2: so Colorado Parks and Wildlife they did a study where
[2:03:44] Speaker 2: they had, you know, a decomposed carcass from a clinical
[2:03:48] Speaker 2: CWD animal, Like by decomposed, I mean bleach, white bones
[2:03:52] Speaker 2: gone yours put deer in there and they get infected.
[2:03:55] Speaker 4: They do.
[2:03:56] Speaker 2: They do, just not other deer in there. Just go
[2:03:59] Speaker 2: into that clean deer in clean deer in dirty deer
[2:04:01] Speaker 2: come out.
[2:04:02] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what That's what I'm saying. So this has
[2:04:04] Speaker 1: been demonstrating, that has been done.
[2:04:05] Speaker 2: But the exact mechanisms, right, is it eating soil, is
[2:04:09] Speaker 2: it chewing on a bone? Is it getting in a plant?
[2:04:12] Speaker 2: The exactly how it gets in there they don't understand yet,
[2:04:15] Speaker 2: but most of the evidence suggests that it's like oor nasal.
[2:04:19] Speaker 1: So, but the highest chance is oral.
[2:04:21] Speaker 2: Nay, through the nose, through the mouth is the highest chance.
[2:04:24] Speaker 2: But there's multiple modes of transmission, you know, potentially and
[2:04:29] Speaker 2: so you know, so deer can get it through their
[2:04:32] Speaker 2: social direct contacts with one another, which obvious. You know,
[2:04:35] Speaker 2: a lot of transmissible diseases are like that. The thing
[2:04:38] Speaker 2: the curve, one of the curveballs is that CWD has
[2:04:41] Speaker 2: is exactly what we just talked about. The environment, the habitat, right,
[2:04:45] Speaker 2: and that's where you know, if if you can become
[2:04:49] Speaker 2: sick or infected just from the habitat, which almost acts
[2:04:55] Speaker 2: like a host. When I look at through my lenses,
[2:04:58] Speaker 2: I look at the landscape, I look at the habitat
[2:05:02] Speaker 2: as a host, just like I look at a deer
[2:05:03] Speaker 2: as a host, and the importance of that host based
[2:05:07] Speaker 2: on you know, what we've seen so far in some
[2:05:10] Speaker 2: literature is that the importance of that habitat as a
[2:05:14] Speaker 2: as a source of infection for deer becomes greater the
[2:05:19] Speaker 2: farther up that curve and the time scale you get.
[2:05:22] Speaker 2: The more deer die, the more deer p and poop
[2:05:24] Speaker 2: and just you know, live on the landscape, the more
[2:05:27] Speaker 2: of those CBD prions are going to be put into
[2:05:29] Speaker 2: that environment. And so as you get those prevalentce you know,
[2:05:33] Speaker 2: of of the deer, that's a lot of it's a
[2:05:38] Speaker 2: lot of p that's a lot of poop, that's a
[2:05:39] Speaker 2: lot of saliva, that's a lot of flesh that goes
[2:05:42] Speaker 2: onto the landscape, and those preons just stick around. And
[2:05:44] Speaker 2: so trying to control prevalence, right, trying to keep lower
[2:05:48] Speaker 2: down that scale will will in theory hopefully help minimize
[2:05:52] Speaker 2: that environmental contamination.
[2:05:54] Speaker 4: Right.
[2:05:54] Speaker 2: And so, like Mike mentioned earlier, feeding and baiting, right,
[2:05:59] Speaker 2: those a focal spot on the landscape put a lot
[2:06:03] Speaker 2: of deer which also pee and poop and other things.
[2:06:07] Speaker 2: So you're potentially depositing like sort of a hyper focused
[2:06:11] Speaker 2: area of prions on the landscape that would put a
[2:06:15] Speaker 2: deer at greater risk of infection if it forages there.
[2:06:19] Speaker 2: That's what all those regulations try to sort of get at,
[2:06:22] Speaker 2: is like, Okay, let's try to lower that risk. And
[2:06:24] Speaker 2: that's why baiting and feeding are a common, you know,
[2:06:27] Speaker 2: a common point of intervention for the state, because you know,
[2:06:31] Speaker 2: you're just trying to break the chain of infection, right, Like,
[2:06:34] Speaker 2: what can we do that will try to lower risk
[2:06:38] Speaker 2: on the landscape for deer encountering CWD, whether it's from
[2:06:41] Speaker 2: another deer or from its habitat.
[2:06:44] Speaker 1: So much would make a handy chart. The chart would
[2:06:47] Speaker 1: be zero to five, here's what you do. Try this
[2:06:51] Speaker 1: five to ten or like zero to three, try this right,
[2:06:55] Speaker 1: and when you get to thirty or forty, guess that's
[2:07:00] Speaker 1: where I'm like, I find my confusion. Is that thirty
[2:07:02] Speaker 1: or forty Is it just say like, try to enjoy
[2:07:06] Speaker 1: your last bit of great deer hunting well?
[2:07:09] Speaker 2: And I think that i'd say more to come soon.
[2:07:13] Speaker 1: The suggestions kind of run.
[2:07:14] Speaker 4: Out well, and I think that's I mean, that's part
[2:07:18] Speaker 4: of why we wanted to have this conversation is that
[2:07:21] Speaker 4: there is no blanket prescription for this, and that just
[2:07:26] Speaker 4: creates complexity and confusion. And so that's part of why
[2:07:31] Speaker 4: we wanted to have this conversation is where you're at
[2:07:34] Speaker 4: on the curve matters. And some of these prescriptions that
[2:07:39] Speaker 4: agencies are taking, like the banning feeding and liberalizing harvest,
[2:07:43] Speaker 4: those are applicable at the bottom of the curve. But
[2:07:46] Speaker 4: when you get up to the top of the curve,
[2:07:49] Speaker 4: as we now see that because we the data are
[2:07:53] Speaker 4: emerging from these populations that are high up the curve,
[2:07:56] Speaker 4: now it's taken some time to get those fields down.
[2:07:59] Speaker 5: That's an unfortunate take away from some of our nas
[2:08:01] Speaker 5: air crowd. Yeah, right, like, well, you better be testing
[2:08:05] Speaker 5: and turning in your deer because that's your best shot
[2:08:07] Speaker 5: at being able debate again, well as if the prevalence,
[2:08:11] Speaker 5: if you show the.
[2:08:12] Speaker 4: Prevalence is and the bottom line is, you know, there
[2:08:14] Speaker 4: was a recent summary National Academy of Science has put
[2:08:18] Speaker 4: this kind of state of the state of where we
[2:08:21] Speaker 4: are with CWD, and then in the preface it says,
[2:08:25] Speaker 4: basically to paraphrase, albeit not perfect, efforts to manage the disease,
[2:08:32] Speaker 4: the progression and spread of this disease are our option
[2:08:37] Speaker 4: right now. So you have this group of scientists that
[2:08:41] Speaker 4: come from all these different perspectives that collectively agree that
[2:08:45] Speaker 4: it's not perfect. The management strategies that agencies are implementing,
[2:08:49] Speaker 4: they're not perfect, but they are where we need to
[2:08:53] Speaker 4: be right now, given how much we don't know about
[2:08:57] Speaker 4: this disease, and there's just so much we don't know
[2:09:00] Speaker 4: so much time.
[2:09:01] Speaker 5: Yeah, because I mean, the blue Sky scenario really could
[2:09:04] Speaker 5: be to be able to manipulate the new normal, right,
[2:09:11] Speaker 5: So like right now you're like, yeah, we probably if
[2:09:13] Speaker 5: it if the new normal levels out at forty percent prevalence,
[2:09:18] Speaker 5: we're probably not going to get lower than that. But
[2:09:20] Speaker 5: maybe that is the the ultimate goal is to be
[2:09:24] Speaker 5: able to reduce those new normals or be able to
[2:09:27] Speaker 5: manipulate them to some degree. Ideally, right if you, through
[2:09:34] Speaker 5: people turning, in voluntary testing and good communication, you establish
[2:09:40] Speaker 5: that new normal at five to ten percent prevalence.
[2:09:45] Speaker 4: Is that yeah?
[2:09:46] Speaker 5: Realistic sounding?
[2:09:48] Speaker 2: I mean it all, It all sort of depends on
[2:09:50] Speaker 2: where you're at in the in the scale. I think
[2:09:52] Speaker 2: some of those sort of real world experiments you know,
[2:09:55] Speaker 2: can can be happening, especially sort of in you know,
[2:09:59] Speaker 2: in parts of the web with some of the oldier
[2:10:00] Speaker 2: populations where you have okay, you're at this high prevalence.
[2:10:04] Speaker 2: Now what you know, what management actions or harvest you know,
[2:10:09] Speaker 2: sort of quotas, could we could we get to try
[2:10:11] Speaker 2: to drop this back down? A lot of like where
[2:10:14] Speaker 2: that intervention happens a little bit that the goal would
[2:10:17] Speaker 2: be happened earlier, right before you get to this sort
[2:10:20] Speaker 2: of thirty forty, like you're up at the five, eight, ten, twelve,
[2:10:24] Speaker 2: Like okay, let's let's you know, be aggressive and try
[2:10:27] Speaker 2: to knock this see if we can through harvest, through
[2:10:30] Speaker 2: our hunters, you know, decrease prevalence and stabilize prevalence, right
[2:10:35] Speaker 2: and and so that's where a lot of the effort
[2:10:37] Speaker 2: comes in is again trying to trying to prevent the
[2:10:40] Speaker 2: climb up, you know, and I think now there'll be
[2:10:44] Speaker 2: like once we get to that mountaintop, I guess, and
[2:10:46] Speaker 2: trying to understand the new norm. Then it's like what
[2:10:49] Speaker 2: triggers are there? What levers can be pulled to manipulate that?
[2:10:53] Speaker 2: Are there some you know, can we bring it back down?
[2:10:56] Speaker 1: I got two yes, no questions for you guys, But
[2:10:57] Speaker 1: you can only do. Yes, No, No, we don't. That's
[2:11:01] Speaker 1: tough for our scientists. It always depends because it's guessing.
[2:11:04] Speaker 1: It's just guessing. No one's going to hold you to this.
[2:11:06] Speaker 1: It's just crystal ball. Guests.
[2:11:08] Speaker 4: We both know that that is fundamentally a lie.
[2:11:11] Speaker 1: In twenty five years. In twenty five years, will there
[2:11:17] Speaker 1: be counties in the eastern half of the United States
[2:11:22] Speaker 1: where CWD has not been detected?
[2:11:24] Speaker 4: Yes, I agree, that was fast.
[2:11:28] Speaker 1: If I made you a hamburger, I keep wanting to
[2:11:31] Speaker 1: do this. I'm gonna I have five CWD positive deer,
[2:11:38] Speaker 1: now handle them just like normal. I bone them ount
[2:11:41] Speaker 1: I make burger.
[2:11:44] Speaker 5: Which is a mix between the five.
[2:11:45] Speaker 1: I got five CWD positives, me a burger. This is
[2:11:48] Speaker 1: my this is my thing for whiles like. The only
[2:11:51] Speaker 1: CWD deniers I'm interested in talking to are the ones
[2:11:56] Speaker 1: that eat this burger. I take five CWD, I grind
[2:12:00] Speaker 1: it all up and make a normal old burger. I
[2:12:03] Speaker 1: grill that burger to medium. I know it doesn't matter
[2:12:08] Speaker 1: by a girl to medium, And I'm like, would you
[2:12:11] Speaker 1: like a bite of that burger? The ones that eat
[2:12:15] Speaker 1: the burger, I'm like, I'd like to hear what you
[2:12:17] Speaker 1: think about c w D. The ones that don't eat
[2:12:21] Speaker 1: the burger, I understand how you feel, right, But the
[2:12:26] Speaker 1: ones that are like, it's no big deal, I'm like,
[2:12:27] Speaker 1: you eat that burger and tell me it's no big deal. Okay.
[2:12:31] Speaker 1: If I made said burger, would you take a bite?
[2:12:36] Speaker 2: No?
[2:12:37] Speaker 1: No, you wouldn't me neither, so kills me. Would you
[2:12:43] Speaker 1: eat it? Phil?
[2:12:44] Speaker 4: Oh no, I don't think so.
[2:12:46] Speaker 7: Cat they eat the biggest burger London five quid. It's
[2:12:52] Speaker 7: so funny though, because c w D burger in London.
[2:12:57] Speaker 5: Meat saying a thing like the it's in a direct
[2:13:02] Speaker 5: attack on my ability to make stock, which is horrible.
[2:13:06] Speaker 1: Right, you do all the ship you're not supposed to do.
[2:13:08] Speaker 1: You like got the backbone and air and everything. Oh yeah,
[2:13:11] Speaker 1: spine turns all why.
[2:13:12] Speaker 5: And for the longest time, like all everything I did
[2:13:18] Speaker 5: came out of the woods on my back, typically a
[2:13:21] Speaker 5: long way, so some of this you'd be like, oh yeah,
[2:13:23] Speaker 5: no bones, no problem. But then like you get that
[2:13:27] Speaker 5: big bull elk and a CWD management zone right on
[2:13:30] Speaker 5: the side of the road. Magically you're like, oh my god.
[2:13:33] Speaker 1: I'm making like t bones and ship, you know, and
[2:13:36] Speaker 1: then you get all scared about it. That's what continues
[2:13:41] Speaker 1: to kill me.
[2:13:41] Speaker 4: Yeeah, I totally understand that it.
[2:13:43] Speaker 1: Continues to kill me. And I know that's not what
[2:13:45] Speaker 1: you guys are here to talk about. But like I
[2:13:47] Speaker 1: worry about, like I've proposed the two bunch of people,
[2:13:52] Speaker 1: I don't know if if there's a good way to
[2:13:54] Speaker 1: do it, it'd be like I wish someone would have
[2:13:56] Speaker 1: started a long time ago. Go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin, Okay,
[2:14:01] Speaker 1: used to be like for a while that was like
[2:14:02] Speaker 1: big Bucks. You know what, big Buck Central moves around
[2:14:05] Speaker 1: the country, Like big Buck Central was Alberta, big Buck
[2:14:08] Speaker 1: Central was whatever, Illinois, big Buck Central Kansas. You know,
[2:14:12] Speaker 1: just it hops around. There's multiple big Buck Centrals at
[2:14:15] Speaker 1: any given time, but they move the places people are
[2:14:18] Speaker 1: excited about move. Buffalo County had like a for a
[2:14:22] Speaker 1: while they were big Buck Central, Like go into areas.
[2:14:26] Speaker 1: I wish he'd done it ten years ago and start
[2:14:28] Speaker 1: being like, man, let's track like Boone and Crockett Entries
[2:14:35] Speaker 1: and overlay Boone and Crockett Entries county wide, statewide whatever
[2:14:40] Speaker 1: with CWD prevalency and be like or some way like
[2:14:45] Speaker 1: is if you just like to hunt big Bucks and
[2:14:47] Speaker 1: you're an antler guy, and I'm like fifty percent antler guy.
[2:14:49] Speaker 1: I'm fifty percent a burger guy. But like, are we
[2:14:54] Speaker 1: seeing that, like antlers are going away from CWD. If
[2:14:59] Speaker 1: someone imustrated that, it would change a lot of the
[2:15:01] Speaker 1: conversation people were having. But it would need to be
[2:15:04] Speaker 1: like not need to be that would that would impact
[2:15:12] Speaker 1: people's behaviors, It would impact people's perspectives to see where
[2:15:19] Speaker 1: it's headed. But just the uncertainty, it's just like it
[2:15:22] Speaker 1: just kills me. But you know, it's been killing me
[2:15:24] Speaker 1: now for how many years? Has been killing me? It's
[2:15:26] Speaker 1: been killing me for my entire adult life.
[2:15:28] Speaker 4: The uncertainty exactly, and the fact that this disease is
[2:15:36] Speaker 4: so complex. We want answers. We don't like working under
[2:15:42] Speaker 4: uncertain conditions. We don't like being told, well, you can't
[2:15:48] Speaker 4: do this the way you've been doing it. Well, why, well,
[2:15:53] Speaker 4: we can't give you an answer, a precise answer for
[2:15:56] Speaker 4: this question that you're asking, because we don't know. And
[2:15:59] Speaker 4: when some body, particularly a scientist, says we don't know.
[2:16:03] Speaker 4: I've said I don't know several times today. It's because
[2:16:06] Speaker 4: we don't know. And if you, I mean, all we
[2:16:10] Speaker 4: can do is acknowledge what we know and what we
[2:16:12] Speaker 4: can demonstrate with with rigorous data. And if we don't
[2:16:15] Speaker 4: have the data, we just have to say, don't we
[2:16:18] Speaker 4: don't know the answer to that. That doesn't sit well
[2:16:21] Speaker 4: with us as society.
[2:16:23] Speaker 1: No, That's why the one certainty I have is whatever
[2:16:30] Speaker 1: we're spending on research, I'd be like, let's quadruple it.
[2:16:35] Speaker 1: I'll find the money somewhere. I'll find something dumb that
[2:16:37] Speaker 1: we spend money out to make that go away, so
[2:16:39] Speaker 1: we can spend four times as much money on research.
[2:16:42] Speaker 1: So they're like, I don't know me and my kids
[2:16:44] Speaker 1: don't have to be paranoid about this ship for their
[2:16:45] Speaker 1: entire adult life.
[2:16:46] Speaker 4: Yeah. And one thing that doesn't help with CWD at
[2:16:49] Speaker 4: all counterproductive is you have narratives, You have myths, you
[2:16:54] Speaker 4: have nonsense that that gets that can Mark and I
[2:16:59] Speaker 4: were talking about this on the drive over here. That
[2:17:01] Speaker 4: just consumes state agency personnel and resources and time. They
[2:17:06] Speaker 4: spend more time dealing with bullshit than they do trying
[2:17:11] Speaker 4: to actually do their job and try to understand what's
[2:17:15] Speaker 4: going on. And you put all that you know in
[2:17:18] Speaker 4: a hat, and you have something that's so complex that
[2:17:22] Speaker 4: is cryptic to Mark's point that you don't see it
[2:17:26] Speaker 4: that it takes generations to to kind of manifest itself
[2:17:30] Speaker 4: and really get going. And you and I think in
[2:17:33] Speaker 4: year to year, month to month terms, and now you're talking.
[2:17:37] Speaker 4: You know, now you have COVID and the skepticism of
[2:17:40] Speaker 4: science in general, and you put all of that together
[2:17:43] Speaker 4: and you've got a soup of crap that surrounds this disease.
[2:17:48] Speaker 4: And then that's what we work in. We work in
[2:17:50] Speaker 4: that soup. We're trying to provide data to inform decisions
[2:17:55] Speaker 4: and have conversations that are difficult to have. Nobody wants.
[2:17:59] Speaker 4: I don't want to think about this in the future,
[2:18:01] Speaker 4: but it's an unfortunate reality on the landscapes that I
[2:18:04] Speaker 4: hunt and I that I do science on. And so
[2:18:09] Speaker 4: you put all that together and it's it's it's it
[2:18:12] Speaker 4: burns your energy. And that's what you see when you
[2:18:15] Speaker 4: talk to state agency personnel in these states that have
[2:18:19] Speaker 4: these high prevalence rates, it is a gut punch to them.
[2:18:22] Speaker 4: I mean, the morale is down. They just are like,
[2:18:26] Speaker 4: what do we do, Like, there's no answer that's going
[2:18:31] Speaker 4: to work today, and the skeptical public wants an answer yesterday,
[2:18:36] Speaker 4: and that's just not the way that this works. And
[2:18:39] Speaker 4: that is a colleague to these agency biologists. That's frustrating
[2:18:44] Speaker 4: to me because I see what they're going through, and
[2:18:47] Speaker 4: I see that there are people in the public saying
[2:18:51] Speaker 4: that the agencies, you know, this is a positive because
[2:18:55] Speaker 4: they can get federal money. For God's sake. Oh give
[2:18:59] Speaker 4: me a break. I don't know.
[2:19:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, that that idea, Like, I know plenty of people
[2:19:03] Speaker 1: that are in wildlife management. The fact that like that,
[2:19:06] Speaker 1: there's this idea that someone that some biologists, some deer
[2:19:10] Speaker 1: biologists sitting there and they get a positive in his region.
[2:19:15] Speaker 1: He's like, oh goodie, Yeah, now I'll be able to
[2:19:17] Speaker 1: buy that new car. It's like, are you kidding me? Shoulders,
[2:19:20] Speaker 1: It's so it's it's like so cynical and grotesque.
[2:19:24] Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, it's like they just found out that think
[2:19:28] Speaker 4: about it like this, You're the director of a state
[2:19:31] Speaker 4: agency that just discovered CWD in your state for the
[2:19:34] Speaker 4: first time. Everything just changed everything. And he's like, oh good,
[2:19:38] Speaker 4: everything just changed for that that man worship And and
[2:19:43] Speaker 4: if you're.
[2:19:43] Speaker 5: A director of a state agency, you're already well aware
[2:19:46] Speaker 5: that the subtlest changes in your state regulations for anything. Yeah,
[2:19:51] Speaker 5: because quite the public uproar.
[2:19:56] Speaker 2: Dollars.
[2:19:56] Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, Now they're doing what with snapping turtles? I
[2:19:59] Speaker 5: don't I don't care, but I got an opinion on it.
[2:20:02] Speaker 4: Now everything changes for these biologists and and it trickles
[2:20:07] Speaker 4: down from the director all the way to the field staff.
[2:20:10] Speaker 4: Everything changes about the way they do their jobs, The
[2:20:13] Speaker 4: resource flow within the states change, everything changes, and the
[2:20:17] Speaker 4: idea that that is a positive. The amount of federal
[2:20:21] Speaker 4: money that's allocated to deal with CWD is literally pennies
[2:20:25] Speaker 4: to what it costs state agencies to deal with the
[2:20:29] Speaker 4: consequences of this disease. So this this this myth that
[2:20:33] Speaker 4: it's a money grab. It's ludicrous. It's absolutely ludicrous. It's
[2:20:37] Speaker 4: it's it's the exact opposite of that. It is a
[2:20:39] Speaker 4: money loss. It's a morale killer. It causes these state
[2:20:44] Speaker 4: agency biologists to put their hands up because particularly in
[2:20:49] Speaker 4: states like you see in Arkansas, where you know you
[2:20:53] Speaker 4: can you can feel it, like in the room, you
[2:20:56] Speaker 4: can feel it, you can feel the conversations about how
[2:21:00] Speaker 4: exasperated they are. It's like, my gosh, this is where
[2:21:05] Speaker 4: we're at, and this is where we're headed. And it's
[2:21:07] Speaker 4: just you can feel it sucked the air out of
[2:21:09] Speaker 4: the room.
[2:21:10] Speaker 5: Well, I mean, you're not uncontrollable timelines, right, And it's
[2:21:14] Speaker 5: like the old gentleman that you talked about, like made
[2:21:17] Speaker 5: his dream become a reality. He's been planning and scheming
[2:21:21] Speaker 5: on this legacy white tail property or just family ranch. Right,
[2:21:26] Speaker 5: It's like how much of the planning has been done
[2:21:30] Speaker 5: in the absence of real nature and real conditions.
[2:21:33] Speaker 4: Right.
[2:21:34] Speaker 5: But it's like, yeah, this is the way it's going
[2:21:35] Speaker 5: to be, and this is the way it's going to be,
[2:21:37] Speaker 5: and it just takes time. It's not going to happen
[2:21:41] Speaker 5: on our timeline, no matter what.
[2:21:42] Speaker 4: I think about the other side. Because I have friends
[2:21:46] Speaker 4: that are on the other side. Well then what do
[2:21:47] Speaker 4: we do? Nothing's working fail with it. Let's just and
[2:21:52] Speaker 4: the science shows that if you can keep prevalence to
[2:21:56] Speaker 4: where CWD is not a relevant source of mortality, if
[2:22:00] Speaker 4: you can keep prevalence low, then the future is not
[2:22:04] Speaker 4: going to look like it's going to look if you
[2:22:07] Speaker 4: put your hands up in the air and turn around
[2:22:09] Speaker 4: and walk off. That's just the reality.
[2:22:11] Speaker 1: Yeah, that's clear. And I guess what people are going
[2:22:13] Speaker 1: to be waiting on is if you don't do that
[2:22:18] Speaker 1: and things go to hell what you try, and maybe
[2:22:24] Speaker 1: they're sometime down the road there'll be some clarity about that. Yeah,
[2:22:29] Speaker 1: But I think if you're in the low area, I'd
[2:22:31] Speaker 1: aim for low.
[2:22:33] Speaker 5: Right, if you like the way things are right now, yeah,
[2:22:35] Speaker 5: and your best chance of getting somewhere close.
[2:22:38] Speaker 2: To that is yeah. And that's where, like, you know,
[2:22:42] Speaker 2: across the landscape, you know, in these areas where you know,
[2:22:46] Speaker 2: we don't think CWD exists, even if it's part of
[2:22:49] Speaker 2: a state that has CWD, you know, all of the
[2:22:53] Speaker 2: effort and energy should be at prevention still, you know,
[2:22:56] Speaker 2: I think I think there's this other narrative out there.
[2:23:00] Speaker 2: You know, we look at the states. What are we
[2:23:02] Speaker 2: up to? Thirty five? I don't even remember because it's changes.
[2:23:05] Speaker 2: But then it's like, okay, well.
[2:23:07] Speaker 1: That's thirty five states where it's detect right.
[2:23:10] Speaker 4: I guess.
[2:23:10] Speaker 1: So it's like okay, yeah, it's been hard to follow
[2:23:13] Speaker 1: because we keep almost getting new states.
[2:23:15] Speaker 2: Right, right, right, right, But you know, like it's almost
[2:23:20] Speaker 2: like you know, some some people are like, oh, that
[2:23:21] Speaker 2: state's positive now whatever, it's done.
[2:23:24] Speaker 1: Yeah, you one, it's a bad way of thinking.
[2:23:26] Speaker 2: It's a bad way of thinking about it because to
[2:23:28] Speaker 2: your question earlier, Steve, about in twenty five years is
[2:23:30] Speaker 2: going to be a county that's not detected in the
[2:23:33] Speaker 2: state or in the in the southeast right those places
[2:23:36] Speaker 2: where we know it not exists, you know, the whole
[2:23:41] Speaker 2: effort of people in that area should be to prevent
[2:23:45] Speaker 2: it from coming. So we often throw prevention to the
[2:23:48] Speaker 2: side because it's a pain in the ass and it's
[2:23:51] Speaker 2: you know it, it interferes with our way of doing
[2:23:54] Speaker 2: things and what we want to do and how we've
[2:23:56] Speaker 2: done it in the past. But the alternative is not great.
[2:24:00] Speaker 2: I would much rather live in a in a shroud
[2:24:02] Speaker 2: of prevention than one of reaction and frustration and control.
[2:24:07] Speaker 1: Meaning the fight shouldn't start when you find your first case.
[2:24:09] Speaker 1: The fight should start before you find your first kiss.
[2:24:11] Speaker 4: An excellent point, very good point.
[2:24:14] Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, guys, we got to wrap up. Man.
[2:24:17] Speaker 1: I appreciate you coming on, thank you for having me,
[2:24:19] Speaker 1: and I appreciate just like the you're talking about wildlife
[2:24:25] Speaker 1: managers being frustrated, you know, like, I appreciate you guys
[2:24:30] Speaker 1: entertaining a conversation that just like is it's hard, It
[2:24:34] Speaker 1: is like it is frustrating because like you're coming on,
[2:24:37] Speaker 1: you know, you're coming on with with having done research
[2:24:41] Speaker 1: and expert opinion, and you're just in a situation where
[2:24:44] Speaker 1: you got to have a lot of like I don't know,
[2:24:46] Speaker 1: I don't know, it's got to be feel a lot
[2:24:48] Speaker 1: better when you come on and be like here's the deal, Yeah,
[2:24:52] Speaker 1: do X do why we're gonna do Z.
[2:24:54] Speaker 4: We're gonna fix this.
[2:24:55] Speaker 5: But but what is like the at home takeaway right
[2:24:59] Speaker 5: now for folks going into their deer season.
[2:25:02] Speaker 2: I always say, I mean, and I appreciate you for
[2:25:07] Speaker 2: entertaining this topic. Yeah, with you know, your audience, because
[2:25:11] Speaker 2: I think I think as much as individuals can just
[2:25:15] Speaker 2: be engaged care you know, and and understand sort of
[2:25:20] Speaker 2: the the you know, it's not you know, some of
[2:25:23] Speaker 2: these restrictions and quirky regulations and confusion around that. It's
[2:25:28] Speaker 2: it's all from a place of trying to prevent a
[2:25:31] Speaker 2: really big problem in the future and so trying to
[2:25:34] Speaker 2: just you know, embrace that and you know, be an
[2:25:37] Speaker 2: active participant in what the wildlife agencies need. That's one
[2:25:42] Speaker 2: of the things I always lean into.
[2:25:44] Speaker 4: And be willing to. I mean, from my perspective, I
[2:25:47] Speaker 4: talk to hunters all the time that that have various
[2:25:51] Speaker 4: narratives that we've talked about today, their minds, you know,
[2:25:54] Speaker 4: their mindset is different than mine. I don't expect you
[2:25:59] Speaker 4: to listen to this podcast, ask and change everything you
[2:26:02] Speaker 4: think about CWD. But if you will just sit back
[2:26:05] Speaker 4: and just think carefully about the issues we've talked about
[2:26:10] Speaker 4: and recognize that there's no there's no answer, there's no
[2:26:13] Speaker 4: clear answer right now. This is going to take time.
[2:26:16] Speaker 4: There's always context involved, But if you're willing to at
[2:26:20] Speaker 4: least entertain that there is work going on that's showing
[2:26:24] Speaker 4: these things that we've talked about that this is a
[2:26:26] Speaker 4: this is a problem that is not going to just
[2:26:29] Speaker 4: go away. To Mark's point, you not getting it is
[2:26:34] Speaker 4: in your area is important and so I kind of
[2:26:38] Speaker 4: look at it from you know, the deer season framework
[2:26:41] Speaker 4: is one I don't want CWD where I'm trying to hunt,
[2:26:45] Speaker 4: and if I have it there, then I'm going to
[2:26:48] Speaker 4: have to behave differently because the agency is going to
[2:26:51] Speaker 4: implement changes to try to keep prevalence low, and that
[2:26:55] Speaker 4: is key. Not getting it and keeping prevalence low if
[2:26:59] Speaker 4: you have it, That's that's kind of where I see it.
[2:27:04] Speaker 1: All right, man. Thanks again, guys, thank you well, thank
[2:27:06] Speaker 1: you for the book Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases in
[2:27:09] Speaker 1: the Southeastern United States, which my first response upon seeing
[2:27:14] Speaker 1: it is it shouldn't be that thick.
[2:27:17] Speaker 2: Unfortunately it is.
[2:27:19] Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'm gonna read this to my kids at night.
[2:27:22] Speaker 4: I wouldn't recommend that. Yeah, oh, thanks man.
[2:27:26] Speaker 1: Yeah, if you want a real uh real eyeburner, I
[2:27:30] Speaker 1: don't know what you call this.
[2:27:32] Speaker 5: Well, it's a professional level book based off the intensity
[2:27:35] Speaker 5: of the pictures.
[2:27:36] Speaker 1: Right, it's a professional book. When I'm taking a non
[2:27:39] Speaker 1: professional gander through here, and it's an alarming collection of
[2:27:43] Speaker 1: photo my kids would like.
[2:27:45] Speaker 4: Yeah, we're song okay. I was actually gonna ask Marca,
[2:27:49] Speaker 4: there's a there's a disease. There's something that causes wild
[2:27:53] Speaker 4: turkey feathers to be like soaking wet with like an
[2:27:56] Speaker 4: oil all over them.
[2:27:58] Speaker 2: Whoa that I haven't seen that.
[2:28:00] Speaker 1: It's not in this book.
[2:28:01] Speaker 4: It's not in that book. And I'm certain this book
[2:28:03] Speaker 4: isn't complete. You haven't said you haven't sent this one, mate. No,
[2:28:06] Speaker 4: we caught we caught a hen in Louisiana in two
[2:28:08] Speaker 4: thousand and eight, and she was soaking wet like not wet.
[2:28:13] Speaker 4: She had this oil all over her to the point
[2:28:17] Speaker 4: where she looked terrible, and I put her in a
[2:28:21] Speaker 4: capture box and it was greasy on the inside of
[2:28:24] Speaker 4: the box. She was part of a brouge. She had
[2:28:26] Speaker 4: polts with her and I've searched for that, and I
[2:28:30] Speaker 4: meant to ask you the other day about that.
[2:28:32] Speaker 2: And is that your only encounter?
[2:28:33] Speaker 4: Only encounter ever?
[2:28:35] Speaker 2: Weird things happen. I mean, is there any chance she
[2:28:38] Speaker 2: got into.
[2:28:38] Speaker 4: A been a ben of oil whales? She was country,
[2:28:44] Speaker 4: so she could have encountered anything, right, right, Yeah, she
[2:28:47] Speaker 4: ran through.
[2:28:48] Speaker 5: The defat Friar before she got right, yeah, yeah, anyway,
[2:28:51] Speaker 5: good lord.
[2:28:52] Speaker 2: This book, now we we make that for that's intended
[2:28:55] Speaker 2: for field biologists, so those you know, most of our
[2:28:58] Speaker 2: agency personnel in this southeast kind of refer to that.
[2:29:02] Speaker 2: So it's written for biologists, but any hunter would enjoy it.
[2:29:05] Speaker 5: I think put this in the camp or un take
[2:29:08] Speaker 5: my buddies read kid hunting with us this year and
[2:29:13] Speaker 5: be like, well, you just got to flip through that
[2:29:14] Speaker 5: first before we But there's also.
[2:29:18] Speaker 2: There's also some normal stuff in there, because disease is
[2:29:21] Speaker 2: a part of life with wildlife, so you can have
[2:29:24] Speaker 2: a healthy deer that also has a disease, and so
[2:29:26] Speaker 2: there's lots of you know, parasites we've commonly seen in
[2:29:28] Speaker 2: wildlife and other things that would be of interest for
[2:29:31] Speaker 2: hunters when they're dressing an animal.
[2:29:33] Speaker 1: I'm quite enjoying this book, man. All right, guys, thanks good,
[2:29:36] Speaker 1: thank you, thank you, y'all.

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