Speaker 1: This is me eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely
Speaker 1: bug bitten and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You
Speaker 1: can't predict anything. So we're joined by a special guest, um,
Speaker 1: Brian Richards. That's right, right, you've got it with the
Speaker 1: U s g S, the United States Geologic Survey and
Speaker 1: at the National Wildlife Health Center at the National Wildlife
Speaker 1: Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. Now, just to just to
Speaker 1: start the most basic thing, because we're talking about wildlife disease,
Speaker 1: particularly chronic waste disease. But um, how how does the
Speaker 1: how how does the how does wildlife disease sort of
Speaker 1: fall under the under the bailiwick, you know? Or uh,
Speaker 1: how's the USGS tangled up in that? Because instead of
Speaker 1: because I would hear that when I was younger, and
Speaker 1: I would think that the USGS mapped mineral deposits and
Speaker 1: U s GS is formally known as the Science Wing
Speaker 1: or the Science Bureau in the Department of the Interior. Okay,
Speaker 1: But the National Wildlife Health Center originated back in Fishing
Speaker 1: Wildlife Service, and we were removed from Fishing Wildlife Service
Speaker 1: and moved over eventually into into U s g S
Speaker 1: as part of that larger conglomerate of science. So USGS
Speaker 1: does a lot of different things, earthquake monitoring, volcanoes, natural hazards. UM.
Speaker 1: There's a water science center virtually in every state that
Speaker 1: that deals with water issues. But we also do UH
Speaker 1: issues in in UM environmental health biology. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of interesting with the National Wildlife Health Center is we
Speaker 1: are a very a national center, so we deal with
Speaker 1: wildlife health issues across the country and internationally as well.
Speaker 1: Our main campus being in Madison, Wisconsin. We have a
Speaker 1: satellite UM in Honolulu, Hawaii. You know, I've been trying
Speaker 1: for the last twelve years to get relocated out there,
Speaker 1: but you know, so far, so far it hasn't worked. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you grew up here. You grew up here in Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: I did. I grew up just uh, just maybe an
Speaker 1: hour hour and a half northwest of where we are now,
Speaker 1: on a dairy farm, and and so really spent the
Speaker 1: better part of my life living you know, outdoors and
Speaker 1: enjoying hunting and fishing, you know, just like you know,
Speaker 1: very similar to the property we're on here today. Just
Speaker 1: a fantastic place to grow up, and then spent some
Speaker 1: time in Texas. I did. Um, after I got done
Speaker 1: with grad school. Uh, you know, you're you're poor, you
Speaker 1: need a job, and uh you start centering out applications
Speaker 1: in and Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. You know, for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, decided to entertain me down there for about
Speaker 1: eleven years. Uh. So I worked at the headquarters for
Speaker 1: Parks and Wildlife in in big game management. UH learned
Speaker 1: a lot. Texas is a very fascinating place. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: from an ecological perspective, I think there's ten distinct ecological
Speaker 1: regions in the state of Texas. There's something very neat
Speaker 1: about virtually every one of them. Uh, Texas being so large, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know when I was there, you know, we figured
Speaker 1: it was about fourteen hours from east to west, you know,
Speaker 1: from Houston Dale Passo and probably about fourteen hours drive
Speaker 1: from Brownsville up to Amarilla. So, you know, just a
Speaker 1: tremendous space. But game management there is a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Uh there you're dealing with you know, white tailed deer
Speaker 1: the premier. But you get out in West Texas, you've
Speaker 1: got mule deer, You've got pronghorn antelope, you've got elk
Speaker 1: and a few places. So a lot of diversity, and
Speaker 1: you have you know, desert big horn sheep that the
Speaker 1: state has spent a lot of time and effort restoring sheep,
Speaker 1: putting them back on mountains in in parts of Texas
Speaker 1: and fantastic place. That's the way off subject. But how's
Speaker 1: that project going? Do you still follow that? I keep
Speaker 1: track of of bighorn sheep in general from a disease perspective,
Speaker 1: and uh, and disease is a very prominent issue in
Speaker 1: a in a limiting issue for sheep management across North America.
Speaker 1: It's always pneumonia. It's a pneumonia complex and when you
Speaker 1: when you look at the causative factors, it links back
Speaker 1: to domestic sheep virtually every time. And the states realize that.
Speaker 1: And you know, if you want to boil it down,
Speaker 1: if you put desert sheep in the same space or time,
Speaker 1: you know with domestic sheep, the wild sheep are gonna die.
Speaker 1: You're gonna lose them. It's pretty It's that simple. So there,
Speaker 1: you know, sheep management is like a lot of other species.
Speaker 1: Management obviously need habitat, you know, you need you need
Speaker 1: spaces or them. You might need to engage in some
Speaker 1: sort of predator control early on to get them established.
Speaker 1: But disease is the limiting factor when it comes to
Speaker 1: sheep pretty much across their range. Uh, there's a few
Speaker 1: places where, um, where state management agencies, game management agencies
Speaker 1: identify that there is contact, physical contact or close contact
Speaker 1: between domestic sheep and the wild sheep, they'll go out
Speaker 1: and they'll take a herd off a mountain just because
Speaker 1: they realize the disease. If it gets engaged, you know,
Speaker 1: embedded in that herd on one mountain, it will spread
Speaker 1: from there. So, you know, pretty dramatic, sounds pretty draconian,
Speaker 1: but in order to keep sheep out out there, you know,
Speaker 1: we have to do some pretty pretty harsh things. Now
Speaker 1: with the big horn thing, with the desert big horns
Speaker 1: in Texas, how many are there in Texas? It's a
Speaker 1: great question, do you all? You know, I have like
Speaker 1: this very like like this hunter centric way I look
Speaker 1: at it. I know, I think they give out a
Speaker 1: tag right there, a big orange tag. It's pretty limited. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's probably a few hundred desert sheep. Um. Some
Speaker 1: of those are gonna be on public land and some
Speaker 1: of them are going to be on private land. So
Speaker 1: the state manages you know, pretty tight, you know, hunting access,
Speaker 1: trying to afford you know, the the great opportunity, and
Speaker 1: so I think, you know, I don't keep traffic because
Speaker 1: I haven't been in Texas for you know, twelve thirteen
Speaker 1: years so since I've been down there and engaged in management.
Speaker 1: But at that point in time, it seems like we
Speaker 1: were harvesting, giving way or allocating opportunities to harvest two
Speaker 1: or three rams per year, and they were great opportunities. Uh,
Speaker 1: the neat thing, and I'm not sure if they're still
Speaker 1: doing it. They called it, I think it was called
Speaker 1: the Big Time Texas Hunts and people could enter into
Speaker 1: a drawing and the winner got a whitetail hunt, a
Speaker 1: mule deer hunt, a prong horn hunt, and a desert
Speaker 1: big horn ram hunt. And they were all quality. They
Speaker 1: weren't guaranteed hunts. They were quality hunts. You had all
Speaker 1: that hit all at once, you had you had to work, yeah,
Speaker 1: but the people that won that that was like, you know,
Speaker 1: from a from a big game hunting standpoint, and how
Speaker 1: could you do any better than that? You know, you
Speaker 1: mentioned predator control ahead of some of the reintroductions they've
Speaker 1: done with those. I remember man A long time ago
Speaker 1: when I was uh, I used to do a bit
Speaker 1: of fur trapping, and I was reading an article and
Speaker 1: Trapper and Predator Color magazine, and it was the article
Speaker 1: something like the five hundred thousand dollar Lion, and it
Speaker 1: was about they did a reintroduction, you know, and moved
Speaker 1: in a bunch of sheep into this area, and then
Speaker 1: a single lion systematically like eliminated the whole reintroduction. And
Speaker 1: so he got he picked up the name of what
Speaker 1: that whole project cost. Well, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're putting sheep on the mountain side
Speaker 1: that they're not familiar with, and that cat is familiar
Speaker 1: with every nook and cranny, every water opportunity, every ambush spot,
Speaker 1: you know, on that mountain side. So who's got the advantage. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just thinks a bunch of weirdos moved into town
Speaker 1: who are like very easy to kill. Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: can you know, I could really see there's a place
Speaker 1: for predator management early on, you know, to help those herds.
Speaker 1: If you're going to go to the effort of trying
Speaker 1: to re establish those sheep on that mountain side, it
Speaker 1: does it kind of makes sense. To try and give
Speaker 1: them the best opportunity they can. But once they're once
Speaker 1: they're established, once those sheep know what's going on. I mean,
Speaker 1: they evolved with predators, so we don't we don't have to,
Speaker 1: you know, eliminate predators in order to have you know,
Speaker 1: sheep on the mountain side. But maybe adding a little
Speaker 1: bit of balance early on seems pretty reasonable. So from
Speaker 1: Texas you moved up here to Wisconsin. I did. I
Speaker 1: moved back home. Yeah, it was the How long is
Speaker 1: the tell me get I'm sorry? The wildlife disease was
Speaker 1: was the National Wildlife Health Center? The National Wildlife Health Center?
Speaker 1: How long has that been in Madison? Uh? Since its
Speaker 1: inception back in the back in the nineties seventies when
Speaker 1: it us put together and so we just hit uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's over forty years the center has been.
Speaker 1: It started out on the u W Madison campus and
Speaker 1: then we moved out into our facilities on the southwest
Speaker 1: side of Madison. Now we've been there quite a while.
Speaker 1: How many this might be hard to This might be
Speaker 1: hard to answer, but if you have to take a
Speaker 1: ball apart, how many um wildlife diseases are are being
Speaker 1: looked at or are of interest to you and your colleagues.
Speaker 1: I mean, is it is it like over a dozen
Speaker 1: or yeah, I mean if you had the ballpark it. Well,
Speaker 1: we're interested in anything that results in mortality events in wildlife.
Speaker 1: So we don't really look at the single cardinal that's
Speaker 1: land outside the plate glass window because probably pretty obvious
Speaker 1: what happened there. But people are our partners, and our
Speaker 1: partners being states, other federal agencies, tribal partners report mortality
Speaker 1: and morbidity UM sick or dead events to us, and
Speaker 1: that's when we get engaged and we try and help
Speaker 1: understand what the causative agent was, what caused that mortality event.
Speaker 1: We've been doing that for a long time, but when
Speaker 1: it in so that's a very important part of our
Speaker 1: work because our partners rely on us to be able
Speaker 1: to tell them what's going on and maybe parlay that
Speaker 1: into some management information. But then the deeper we go,
Speaker 1: we try and learn and conduct scientific activities research to
Speaker 1: learn more about the ecological conditions that lead to disease, okay,
Speaker 1: and then beyond that start working into, where possible, into
Speaker 1: mechanisms that might be able to help prevent or mitigate
Speaker 1: the effects of disease. UM. You know you mentioned kind
Speaker 1: of a number. I guess over the course of time
Speaker 1: there have been maybe twenty big you know, disease issues
Speaker 1: that we have seen that we have worked on, you know,
Speaker 1: some of the recent ones. Uh, you know, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about chronic wasting disease today. UM. Not too long after
Speaker 1: c w D we got involved with it, what is
Speaker 1: now called white nose syndrome and bats. Uh. Pretty interesting disease,
Speaker 1: a fungal disease that it's one of the rare diseases
Speaker 1: in wildlife that truly can in part population level impacts. Okay, Um,
Speaker 1: if you look at caves or hybernacular where white nose
Speaker 1: syndrome has become established, we see regularly ninety population declines
Speaker 1: in those hybernacular and that disease is moved quite clearly
Speaker 1: from east to west. And I believe it's been picked
Speaker 1: up now in about twenty six states. So, um and
Speaker 1: having pretty significant impacts. Is it lethal to a lot
Speaker 1: of species of bats. Um, it's pretty much isolated to
Speaker 1: those species of bats which hibernate in caves. Okay, you
Speaker 1: need appropriate conditions for the fungus. It's a cold loving fungus.
Speaker 1: So it prospers in these hibernacular be they um traditional
Speaker 1: caves where bats are are hibernating, and sometimes in artificial
Speaker 1: where minds things like that hibernacular is a cave that
Speaker 1: that they hibernate in, you bet, and this is there's
Speaker 1: something to do with that one where UM they feel
Speaker 1: that some of that spread is coming from humans going
Speaker 1: into caves. That's a you hear about that. That's a
Speaker 1: consistent feature with disease in general. Certainly, we we expect
Speaker 1: that bat to bat movement of disease occurs with white
Speaker 1: nose syndrome. But there's also a possibility that cavers spelunkers
Speaker 1: UM with their equipment, could be moving that fungus, that
Speaker 1: infectious material from cave to cave. So part of the
Speaker 1: management's UM scenario being enacted by states and federal agencies
Speaker 1: is limiting access to caves and also encouraging UM spelunkers
Speaker 1: cavers to thoroughly decontaminate all their equipment. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: if you're crawling, you know, in through a cave, I
Speaker 1: mean you're in muck, and you know you look like
Speaker 1: you've been crawling in a cave. And so certainly if
Speaker 1: the if the fungus responsible for white noses in one cave,
Speaker 1: you come out of that, there's a high likelihood that
Speaker 1: you've got contamination on your ropes, on your gear, on you.
Speaker 1: And so if the next day you go, you know,
Speaker 1: three or four miles to another cave, go in there
Speaker 1: with the same equipment, it's easy to understand and how
Speaker 1: you might be moving infectious material. And it certainly looks
Speaker 1: like most of the movement of white nose syndrome is
Speaker 1: associated with that bat to bat to. That movement is
Speaker 1: a gradual movement, yep. But now a year ago white
Speaker 1: nose popped up in the state of Washington. It's a
Speaker 1: long ways from you know, the most you know, the
Speaker 1: other closest closest places. So you've got to ask a
Speaker 1: question how did it get there? And you could go
Speaker 1: back to the original question, how did you know the
Speaker 1: fungus get to North America? Turns out that this fungus
Speaker 1: has been in Europe for probably for a long time,
Speaker 1: and uh, the hybernacular there the caves where the bats
Speaker 1: are there seemed to be in general maybe lower densities
Speaker 1: of bats, and so a balance has created over time
Speaker 1: where the disease doesn't manifest in in large mortality in
Speaker 1: the European bats. Uh. Now, somehow that fungus got brought
Speaker 1: over to this side of the large pond and got
Speaker 1: into hybernacular cave systems where we have these incredible densities
Speaker 1: of you know, tens of thousands of bats, you know,
Speaker 1: congregated in the wintertime. Put a little bit of fungus
Speaker 1: in there. The bats are hanging in there for literally
Speaker 1: hanging in there, I guess, over the over the course
Speaker 1: of the winter, and it provides an opportunity for that
Speaker 1: fungus to move back to back to bat to bat
Speaker 1: in that colony. Then in summertime those bats may commingle
Speaker 1: with bats, or they are coming from other hybernacular or
Speaker 1: than they may in fact themselves spend the next winter
Speaker 1: in the next hybernacular. And so you can see how
Speaker 1: that fungus has an opportunity to move. But it's long
Speaker 1: as the fungus take to be fatal, probably most of
Speaker 1: in this is not my area of expertise, but I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say probably most of the winner. Um. So, if
Speaker 1: the fungus is in a cave, it's going to get
Speaker 1: on a bat soon after, you know, they move in
Speaker 1: for you know, for hibernation season, and then you know,
Speaker 1: I think we see most of the mortality kind of
Speaker 1: in the debt of winter the bats. The bats will
Speaker 1: sometimes die in the cave. Some of them will die
Speaker 1: in the cave. Um. Another thing that one of the
Speaker 1: things that people observe is um. You know, bats flying
Speaker 1: around in the debt of winter. Okay, when those bats
Speaker 1: are are all reliant on insects as their food, and
Speaker 1: if it's zero degrees outside, that bad is there's no
Speaker 1: food available. So something has aroused or woken that bad up.
Speaker 1: And it could be you know, the discomfort associated with
Speaker 1: you know, having a fungus all across your body. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're using energy resources. You know, they're
Speaker 1: in a very delicate balance when they go into hibernation,
Speaker 1: so they don't have a ton of energy left over
Speaker 1: to spare. So maybe that that fungus is causing some irritation,
Speaker 1: you know, some physical irritation, some problems with thermal regulation
Speaker 1: as as the fungus is might be causing holes in
Speaker 1: the potadium on the bat's wing. So they're they're running
Speaker 1: out of energy and with there, if they're completely out
Speaker 1: of energy, they're gonna have to go outside and try
Speaker 1: and hunt, and hunting in January in northern latitudes it's
Speaker 1: not going to be successful. There are no there are
Speaker 1: no insects available. So I take that that contributes to
Speaker 1: the diseases that you know, they're they're short on energy
Speaker 1: come middle of winter and they just can't make it through.
Speaker 1: So jumping on from there into c w D and
Speaker 1: the reason like kind of the reason that our audience,
Speaker 1: well I know the reason are on it is interested
Speaker 1: in c w D because we have a lot of
Speaker 1: people we hang out with and who listen, who eat
Speaker 1: a lot of venison, okay, avid deer hunters, And the
Speaker 1: question we get all the time is like, what do
Speaker 1: you think about c w D? What's gonna happen with
Speaker 1: c w D? And is my dear safety, would you
Speaker 1: eat a deer if it has w D? And um,
Speaker 1: I'm always like, I'm always uh brimming over with opinions
Speaker 1: about everything, but I'm always really hesitant to talk about
Speaker 1: something that has so many question marks. And I think
Speaker 1: we'll probably in talking to you about this, will probably
Speaker 1: butt up against a lot of those question marks, maybe
Speaker 1: to a point where you don't even I feel like
Speaker 1: you know where you you feel like you've moved beyond
Speaker 1: the known the known science, and you're just going into
Speaker 1: pure speculations. So I realized that's gonna happen. If and
Speaker 1: if you do get up to a thing where I'm
Speaker 1: asking you an opinion and you don't want to give it,
Speaker 1: that's great. But I think the safe way to begin
Speaker 1: and talk about this. Can you explain the relationship between
Speaker 1: when we hear about mad cow disease, we hear about
Speaker 1: chronic waste and disease, and then we hear about jacob. Okay,
Speaker 1: they're all kind of cousins, right, I mean, can you
Speaker 1: break down that fan the tree? Sure? I can t.
Speaker 1: Scrape scrape is another one. Transmissible mink and cephalopathy is
Speaker 1: another one. So all right, all of the diseases you
Speaker 1: mentioned c w D and deer scrape in sheep, BSc
Speaker 1: or mad cow disease in in in cattle, and that's
Speaker 1: spongeforn spongeyform and cephalopathy kreuz failed yacops disease in humans.
Speaker 1: There's another one in humans that we don't see anymore.
Speaker 1: It's called cubu. Okay, all of these diseases are members
Speaker 1: of a family of diseases called transmissible spongeyform and cephalopathy
Speaker 1: or T S S. Great big long words and you
Speaker 1: look it up in the dictionary and it boils down
Speaker 1: pretty simple. And cephalopathy is a disease of the brain. Okay.
Speaker 1: Spongeyform means spongy or holes, and transmissible means very bit
Speaker 1: simply that a disease can be transmitted from animal A
Speaker 1: to animal B. It's amissible spongy brain, yeah, something like that,
Speaker 1: something like that, and so, but it's important to understand
Speaker 1: that the source of that spongy nous or the holes
Speaker 1: in the brain as well. These diseases are the causative
Speaker 1: agent is a protein, okay, being very different than virtually
Speaker 1: any other disease we know of. You think of viruses,
Speaker 1: we think of you know, bacteria, we think of you know,
Speaker 1: in the case of white nose syndrome, you know, an
Speaker 1: invasive fungus. Okay, all of those are in essence living entities.
Speaker 1: They have nucleic material they so we can see how
Speaker 1: they can reproduce, we can see how they can evolve
Speaker 1: over time. So you come back to the cause of agent.
Speaker 1: For T. S S, a protein that's referred to as
Speaker 1: a preon and so you get into it's kind of
Speaker 1: challenging to to put this in the same sense as
Speaker 1: you know viruses and bacteria because they don't have genetic material.
Speaker 1: So these, right, well not really a protein is not
Speaker 1: necessarily a living entity. We don't. But but I mean,
Speaker 1: but it causes I'll try, I'll try. So all mammals
Speaker 1: produce a normal cellular preon protein. Okay. It's a chain
Speaker 1: of amino acids. It's about two fifty long, so it's
Speaker 1: a relatively small protein. And so if you go back
Speaker 1: to what you learned in in biology class about proteins,
Speaker 1: it's a chain of amino acids that then folds up
Speaker 1: into a three dimensional shape. Okay, So all mammals produce
Speaker 1: normal prion proteins. We're not certain exactly what they do,
Speaker 1: but they they're very efficient, okay, in the body and
Speaker 1: produced by all mammals. And it seemed like produced a
Speaker 1: lot of normal cellular prem pro tein in the central
Speaker 1: nervous system as well. When a preon protein is produced,
Speaker 1: it's produced in an in an extra cellular environment, or
Speaker 1: or coded for it does whatever it does. It might
Speaker 1: be involved in intracellular communication. But then that normal cellular
Speaker 1: preon protein is broken down, it's recycled by the body,
Speaker 1: has a half life of maybe between four and six hours.
Speaker 1: So it's produced, it does what it does. It's broken
Speaker 1: down by the body and then recycled into its normal parts. Okay,
Speaker 1: then there is this disease associated preon protein. It's the
Speaker 1: exact same sequence of amino acids. It's folded up into
Speaker 1: a different three dimensional form. So if you think of
Speaker 1: if you took a piece of of a really old
Speaker 1: rubber band, you know that's been sitting in a drawer
Speaker 1: for several years. It's wound up into a three dimensional shape.
Speaker 1: So if you think of that as the normal form,
Speaker 1: and then you stretch it out and you let it
Speaker 1: go and it and it snaps back into a different form,
Speaker 1: that's in essence what we're looking at. Okay, a different
Speaker 1: three dimensional form of the same protein. And this different form,
Speaker 1: the disease associated preon, has radically different properties. Um I
Speaker 1: mentioned a normal cellular preon protein breaks down on its
Speaker 1: own in about four to six hours, or has a
Speaker 1: half life of four to six hours. The disease associated
Speaker 1: form is persistent. Um if it's can persist in the
Speaker 1: environment for years, potentially up to decades. Okay. It also
Speaker 1: cannot be broken down by ultra violet light. Um, it's
Speaker 1: very insensitive to change is in temperature. So if you
Speaker 1: want to destroy UH disease associated preon protein, you'd have
Speaker 1: to get it up to maybe six D plus degrees centigrade.
Speaker 1: So you're not going to cook it out of out
Speaker 1: of a stake, per se. So erradically different protein. It's
Speaker 1: the same protein with radically different form and radically different characteristics.
Speaker 1: It looks like um, this is a more or less
Speaker 1: like a template where a single disease associated prion protein
Speaker 1: enters into a healthy, susceptible animal. That disease associated protein
Speaker 1: makes physical contact with the normal cellular protein, causing it
Speaker 1: to unfold and refold into its own form and then
Speaker 1: moving on, so creating kind of a cascading interaction where
Speaker 1: the disease associated form takes over the system. Okay, And
Speaker 1: the disease associated prion protein in the body is associated
Speaker 1: with neuronal death, and so when we talk about that
Speaker 1: that spongy appearance of the brain, those are holes where
Speaker 1: neurons used to be and as and as the disease
Speaker 1: associated prion proteins come in contact. We don't know the
Speaker 1: exact mechanism of how they kill neurons. What they do.
Speaker 1: They result in neuronal death, leaving those microscopic holes in
Speaker 1: the brain. So that's the physical mechanism of how we
Speaker 1: get to you know, that trend, that sponge a form
Speaker 1: and cephalopathy. So without equipment, because you are the naked eye,
Speaker 1: look at like a grossly infected brain until now you
Speaker 1: want the holes aren't quite that large, So the neurons
Speaker 1: aren't that large. Saying even so, even so it would
Speaker 1: appear even if even if it was, this brain was
Speaker 1: racked with the stuff, they would never like shape change
Speaker 1: the form of the brain. You look at and look
Speaker 1: like a normal brain unless you look at it under
Speaker 1: a microscope and some special standing, then you would be
Speaker 1: able to see it that the hallmark of of all
Speaker 1: ts c s is progressive neurological degeneration. Okay, you slow
Speaker 1: lee are losing the capability to be a functional being.
Speaker 1: And if you if you look at kreuzfeldiakops disease, one
Speaker 1: of the human the human t s S. It affects
Speaker 1: um We see new cases about one in a million
Speaker 1: to one and a half per million. New cases per
Speaker 1: year in humans the typical clinical figures, and it is
Speaker 1: a person in their late fifties to early sixties, say
Speaker 1: one on one in one million, one in a million
Speaker 1: in new cases per year. And is that is that
Speaker 1: globally or nationally? That's globally, But is it true? Is
Speaker 1: it true in an international sense? I say to say
Speaker 1: that three hundred Americans a year get this? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: probably pretty close. If we've got three hundred million, we're
Speaker 1: probably looking at three cases per year in humans in
Speaker 1: the United States. And yeah, that's a ballpark figure. Um
Speaker 1: horrific way to go. Progressive neurological degeneration followed by death.
Speaker 1: And we think about, you know, as these disease associated
Speaker 1: prion proteins accumulate in the in the brain and in
Speaker 1: the central nervous system, resulting in neurnal death, it's easy
Speaker 1: to see how you know, once that reaches a critical mass,
Speaker 1: you know, inside of the central nervous system, um neurological
Speaker 1: degeneration proceeds fairly quickly and is followed by death. So
Speaker 1: that's the hallmark of each one of the t s S.
Speaker 1: Was the same thing in BSc or mad cow disease,
Speaker 1: where you know, You probably remember seeing videos of cows
Speaker 1: that are just you know, they're nobody's home right now.
Speaker 1: That's they it's reached that phase. Um another hallmark of
Speaker 1: of the t s s as tremendously long incubation period.
Speaker 1: So in Kreutzfeld Jakob's disease, we you know, it's hard
Speaker 1: to say how long that disease has been progressing in individuals,
Speaker 1: but it seems to manifest in that clinical phase of
Speaker 1: disease at the same time for him, that late fifties
Speaker 1: into early sixties. But you don't know what like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't spontaneously generate. It has to be the that the
Speaker 1: person in the case of the of the human form,
Speaker 1: it has to be the that the person somehow took
Speaker 1: in the infectious agent, and that's uncertain with m with
Speaker 1: c j D chrust failed THEOS disease, It's thought that
Speaker 1: most of the normal cases are sporadic or spontaneous in
Speaker 1: those individuals, that something just happened. Okay, they're during you know,
Speaker 1: the course of the lifetime that started that cascading interaction
Speaker 1: with one or multiple pre on normal cellular preons tipping
Speaker 1: over into that disease associated form and starting that cascading interaction,
Speaker 1: So it's not necessarily that they rubbed noses with with
Speaker 1: another infected person. Correct in in the majority of case
Speaker 1: is in that classical c j D profile. Either that
Speaker 1: or we have been unable to identify the moment the causation,
Speaker 1: you know, the causative event. We can contrast that a
Speaker 1: little bit with another disease, really remarkable disease called kuru.
Speaker 1: Okay Couru was first described, uh back in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties nineteen thirties someplace in there in Papua New Guinea
Speaker 1: in a tribe called the Farai tribe Fo r E,
Speaker 1: and the Faray had a rather what we guess we
Speaker 1: would consider an unusual trait, and they practiced ritualized cannibalism.
Speaker 1: So when one of their tribal members died, to honor
Speaker 1: that tribal member, they consumed the body okay, and somehow
Speaker 1: a t SC got into that population. And so when
Speaker 1: the ritualist cannibalism occurred, it created an opportunity for transmission
Speaker 1: of you know, the disease associated agent for the disease
Speaker 1: associated prion protein, and so kuru developed over the course
Speaker 1: of a few decades into an epidemic situation. It started
Speaker 1: very small, so when one person died of curu uh,
Speaker 1: their body was consumed maybe leading to other cases. They
Speaker 1: infected multiple individuals. Then after a fairly protracted incubation period,
Speaker 1: some of those individuals died very horrific death, you know,
Speaker 1: after you know, severe neuronal degeneration. They were consumed and
Speaker 1: so you can see how that cascading interaction. So they're
Speaker 1: very clearly there was a consumption you know, some sort
Speaker 1: of of a foraging habit which lead to disease that
Speaker 1: coincidentally is identical or virtually identical to what happened with
Speaker 1: bovine sponge form and cephalopathy or you know BSc mad
Speaker 1: cow disease, where it seems like we were trying to
Speaker 1: create maximum efficiency in in a livestock production system. So
Speaker 1: there's a lot of waste when you butcher a cow,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of waste. There's you know, the the awful,
Speaker 1: the hide bones, things like that, and so we all
Speaker 1: realized that you know, cows produced better with on a
Speaker 1: higher protein diet. So it made sense, it made logical
Speaker 1: sense from a production standpoint to take the awful from
Speaker 1: you know, when you're slaughtering cattle to render it, cook it,
Speaker 1: and then mix it up into a high protein food source,
Speaker 1: mix it with other with other forage material, and feed
Speaker 1: it back to cows. So in essence, what we were
Speaker 1: doing was we were creating cannibalistic cows, right, you know,
Speaker 1: we're feeding cow back to cow. It's not a normal
Speaker 1: it's an adherent foraging behavior. So somehow we got the
Speaker 1: first case of BSc in a cow. That cow either
Speaker 1: died from b SC or was you know processed normally
Speaker 1: at you know, for for beef production, whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be. The infectious material being concentrated in the spinal
Speaker 1: cord and the brain of that first cow was rendered
Speaker 1: not quite effectively enough to to uh, to deactivate the
Speaker 1: infectious It didn't get it didn't get quite warm enough,
Speaker 1: and so uh, that cow, in essence was fed back
Speaker 1: to thousands those some of those animals developed bs and
Speaker 1: so you're trying to maximize the use of the carcasses,
Speaker 1: so you grind that up and feed it back to
Speaker 1: more and so the numbers look like, you know, they
Speaker 1: were probably potentially millions of cows at one point that
Speaker 1: we're infected with with b SC. And as soon as epidemiologists,
Speaker 1: you know, disease specialists figured out, you know, it seemed like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this has got to be a food born thing, and
Speaker 1: they were able to figure out what it was band
Speaker 1: feeding bovine protein back to other cows, and the cycle stopped,
Speaker 1: in essence stopped, And so we had an epidemic curve
Speaker 1: that went ran like it looked like it was going
Speaker 1: straight up a mountain side. And as soon as you
Speaker 1: figure out what was going on and you stop that practice,
Speaker 1: the epidemic curve comes down the other side. Now there's
Speaker 1: still a few cases out there periodically today, but not
Speaker 1: the volume that there were, Like the US has only
Speaker 1: had one, right, some coward of Yakima, Washington, right, Well
Speaker 1: that was the first one. We've had a few more
Speaker 1: than that. UM. Yeah, it's kind of interesting in that
Speaker 1: UM we can talk about how c w D moved around,
Speaker 1: but it looks almost certainly like the United States gave
Speaker 1: Canada c w D um through movement of captive ELK
Speaker 1: back in the night or potentially early nine before the UM.
Speaker 1: It was we'd identified what was going on, our scientists
Speaker 1: had had identified what was going on, But it's certainly
Speaker 1: we was prior to knowledge of how movement of of
Speaker 1: animals could really contribute to movement of disease. But it
Speaker 1: looks like almost certainly that we gave CWD to Canada
Speaker 1: and so maybe it was only fitting that they sent
Speaker 1: B A C back to us in return. So let
Speaker 1: me back you up a little bit here. I want
Speaker 1: to get to that, But let me back up. Have
Speaker 1: are there known cases I should know this, but don't
Speaker 1: Are there known cases where they could track the mad
Speaker 1: cow form having passed into a human, like do they
Speaker 1: are they able to able to trail that? Yes? Yes,
Speaker 1: pretty clearly. Yeah. We mentioned kreutzfeldi ocups diseases being kind
Speaker 1: of that classic disease the clinical profile as a person
Speaker 1: late fifties, early sixties. There's another form, it's called variant
Speaker 1: Kreutzfeld jacops disease. And the first cases were detected in
Speaker 1: largely in Great Britain in the same time frame. A
Speaker 1: little bit later after the BSc crisis began in in
Speaker 1: Great Britain as well. These humans were exhibiting very you know,
Speaker 1: similar characteristics and when they died it was very apparent
Speaker 1: from uh, from their autopsy, from looking at the spinal
Speaker 1: and the brain material that they had a sponge a
Speaker 1: form and cephalopathy, and they were able to tie that
Speaker 1: statistically back to consumption of beef from you know, from
Speaker 1: the from the mad cow ord the b SC situation.
Speaker 1: So here's an instance in BSc is A is A
Speaker 1: is A isn't very interesting disease that it was able
Speaker 1: to jump across that species bar arier. So it it
Speaker 1: was not just a disease of cattle. When we fed
Speaker 1: BSc positive material to multiple other species, including humans, it
Speaker 1: lead to disease. And so that variant c j D Verian,
Speaker 1: kreuz Felt, Jakobs disease profile seemed to be humans that
Speaker 1: were a lot younger, you know, typically in twenties and thirties,
Speaker 1: things like that. So it looked like c j D
Speaker 1: what it, but it acted different and so that was
Speaker 1: kind of the first tie. Was there a possibility that
Speaker 1: BSc crossed over And now it's it's fairly certain um
Speaker 1: that BSc did cross over into humans, bridging that species
Speaker 1: barrier um. And you might come back and wonder whell
Speaker 1: where did b SC come from? Well that's an interesting question.
Speaker 1: But one of the possibilities is that you know it
Speaker 1: originated as as scrapy, you know, in sheep, and that's
Speaker 1: one of the t s s we haven't gotten to yet,
Speaker 1: but that's one has been known longer than any Uh
Speaker 1: scraping and sheep was first document mented in the literature
Speaker 1: in seventeen thirty four, so it's been around for a
Speaker 1: very long time, and they probably could only tell the
Speaker 1: behavior of the dying animal right at that point in time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, scrapy has been been a problem for you know,
Speaker 1: for you know, many years, decades to centuries. But it
Speaker 1: looks like scrapy may crossed over into b SC and
Speaker 1: certainly it's it's one plausible explanation for for where chronic
Speaker 1: wasting disease came from. You know, c w D first
Speaker 1: described back in nineteen sixty seven in a in a
Speaker 1: research facility out in the state of Colorado. Doesn't mean
Speaker 1: it's started there, but it was first described there. And
Speaker 1: when we say c w D, we're talking about not
Speaker 1: so we're talking about just members of the deer family.
Speaker 1: Kerry c w D. As far as we know, c
Speaker 1: w D is the T S C of members of
Speaker 1: the servant or the deer family. Name which which species
Speaker 1: it's been founded, Okay, it has been detected in free
Speaker 1: ranging and captive white tail mule deer elk, a handful
Speaker 1: of cases in moose and in reindeer as well, most
Speaker 1: recently picked up in reindeer. Three reindeer and a couple
Speaker 1: of moose in Norway. You know, the first cases UM
Speaker 1: outside of North America other than a game farm situation
Speaker 1: in South Korea. So we talk about distribution of c
Speaker 1: w D in those species, and it's been picked up
Speaker 1: in in twenty four states in free ranging and or
Speaker 1: captive situations in North America. UH. Two provinces Alberta and
Speaker 1: Saskatchewan in Canada also picked up and described in South
Speaker 1: Korea UM and in South and South Korea DIN they
Speaker 1: have some American deer. Okay, Actually, yeah, it's interesting k
Speaker 1: because the the original animals that died were elk that
Speaker 1: still had Canadian ear tags in them, and so it's
Speaker 1: highly unlikely that those elk UM you know, swam the
Speaker 1: big pond from North America over to South Korea. So
Speaker 1: I think we can we can pretty clearly identify how,
Speaker 1: you know, how those animals and how diseased moved UM.
Speaker 1: Now there's been additional outbreaks in South Korea so it
Speaker 1: looks like their efforts to you know, stamp out or
Speaker 1: keep the disease under control, I haven't have had some success,
Speaker 1: but they haven't been completely successful in that they They've
Speaker 1: had a few additional outbreaks in Norway. Norway's real interesting situation.
Speaker 1: And I don't I don't know that we'll ever truly
Speaker 1: know how, um how c w D got there. It
Speaker 1: was picked up um, you know, a year ago in um,
Speaker 1: initially in a reindeer, and then after they did they
Speaker 1: did some additional surveillance outbreaks a valance, and they found
Speaker 1: it in two more reindeer. They also found it in
Speaker 1: two moose. Okay uh. And it's kind of it's interesting
Speaker 1: if the moose live near the reindeer, they were not.
Speaker 1: The moose were quite a distance away. And as you're
Speaker 1: you're full aware, and you know, moose are relatively solitary animals.
Speaker 1: They don't hang out in big herds. And so the
Speaker 1: cases we've seen in moose and even in North America
Speaker 1: been you know, just one here, one there. I think
Speaker 1: it's you know, less than ten total cases in all
Speaker 1: of North America and free ranging moose, so they don't
Speaker 1: seem to be a real big player. They're certainly susceptible um,
Speaker 1: you know to c w D, but they don't seem
Speaker 1: to be a real big player in movement of disease. Uh.
Speaker 1: Now with the reindeer again, as you're aware reindeer are
Speaker 1: you know, they hang together in very large herds. So
Speaker 1: science was completed a few years ago that strongly suggested
Speaker 1: reindeer were susceptible to c w D. But we have
Speaker 1: not seen an outbreak in North America. So they instance
Speaker 1: in Norway, now pick it up in three reindeer is
Speaker 1: the first instance in free ranging herds. Well, the Norwegians
Speaker 1: are very very concerned about this, and uh, and so
Speaker 1: they are they're kind of taking the gloves off with
Speaker 1: regard to management, something that we have not really been
Speaker 1: effective at dealing with disease in free ranging populations in
Speaker 1: North America. They're going to take the gloves off over there.
Speaker 1: And so the reindeer maintain relatively static herd structures hanging
Speaker 1: together in a in a known geographic area. And so
Speaker 1: the plan is to um to eliminate, eradicate one whole
Speaker 1: herd unit of about two thousand reindeer over a fairly
Speaker 1: large geographic area now it will be a little bit
Speaker 1: easier than uh than trying to get rid of all
Speaker 1: the white tail in a region, because they are they
Speaker 1: you know, they hang together, and they're in more open countries,
Speaker 1: more open countries, So it will they will be able
Speaker 1: to pull it off. But hats off to the Norwegian
Speaker 1: government and their you know, their natural resources and agriculture folks.
Speaker 1: They look at this. It's a very serious issue. They
Speaker 1: have observed what has been going on in North America
Speaker 1: with cw D over the last few decades, and they concluded, hey,
Speaker 1: they don't want it be when you own when you
Speaker 1: so far, it seems like that disease, however it got there,
Speaker 1: is a fairly recent phenomena, and so with c w D,
Speaker 1: I would argue that you probably get one chance at
Speaker 1: effective management of c w D in a free ranching population.
Speaker 1: It has to be early. And so they fully they believe,
Speaker 1: based on the data they have that c w D
Speaker 1: has not been there long. They don't want it. So
Speaker 1: they're going to take the gloves off. They're going to
Speaker 1: eliminate this herd unit, and they're going to keep all
Speaker 1: other animals out of the geographic area where they heard
Speaker 1: where this herd, you know, has lived for a minimum
Speaker 1: of five years. We talked about that that UM characteristic
Speaker 1: of the disease associated pre on protein UM not being
Speaker 1: able to be degraded in the environment. It looks like
Speaker 1: it persists in the environment for years, potentially decades, and
Speaker 1: can remain viable and bioavailable. So healthy, naive, susceptible animals
Speaker 1: can pick up that disease associated preon protein from contaminated environment.
Speaker 1: If you catch disease early enough, early enough in the epidemic,
Speaker 1: there's probably not much of that contamination relative to you know,
Speaker 1: later on. So if you're going to be successful with
Speaker 1: managing this disease, you have to catch it early and
Speaker 1: you probably have to take the gloves off the way
Speaker 1: the Norwegians are doing now. You may recall back to
Speaker 1: Wisconsin back in two thousand and two, Well hit me
Speaker 1: with Colorado. So what happened in Colorado? All right? So
Speaker 1: that that was where they identified it in the US. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: CWD was first described in this research facility in Colorado
Speaker 1: back in n They were research animals, they were they
Speaker 1: were captive animals. They were research animals maintained by the
Speaker 1: by the state of Colorado. Now part of the history
Speaker 1: of CWD is that there may have been disease research
Speaker 1: going on with scrapey in that vicinity or the same area,
Speaker 1: or you know, maybe even the same facility. So one
Speaker 1: of the possible mechanisms for where cw D came from,
Speaker 1: and it's not the only one, is that what we're
Speaker 1: looking at is scrapy and deer. Cw D and scrapey
Speaker 1: have some really unique characteristics. All the rest of the
Speaker 1: t sc s be at um kreuz feldacops disease be
Speaker 1: a be se and cattle, they don't move on their own.
Speaker 1: We had to feed cow to cow in order to
Speaker 1: create an epidemic with b SC. With Guru, people had
Speaker 1: to consume people, okay, in order for disease to move.
Speaker 1: Scrape and c w D are unique amongst the t
Speaker 1: s c s and that they are contagious. They are
Speaker 1: freely laterally transmissible, so dear a or elk can give
Speaker 1: c w D to another animal on its own. There
Speaker 1: doesn't need to be any human intervention. Scrapey is the
Speaker 1: same way it moves sheep to sheep to sheep. These
Speaker 1: animals are shedding infectious agent through bodily fluids through saliva,
Speaker 1: through urine, through feces, and that creates a contagious mechanism.
Speaker 1: If that saliva is taken up by another animal, a healthy, naive,
Speaker 1: susceptible animal, it can lead to disease transmission. So we
Speaker 1: go back to the Colorado thing. One of the possibility
Speaker 1: might be that c w D originated and transit transferred
Speaker 1: across the species barrier from scrapy. You look at the timeline.
Speaker 1: I mentioned that that scrapey was first described in seventeen
Speaker 1: thirty four on the other side of the pond. The
Speaker 1: first time scrapy was described in North America was in
Speaker 1: ninety and it was traced back to a flock of
Speaker 1: sheep that had been moved across the pond, so human intervention.
Speaker 1: But over the course of the next twenty years, scrape
Speaker 1: had proliferated and been moved um, largely by humans moving
Speaker 1: sheep around. Scrape had moved um across across a lot
Speaker 1: of North America as well. So the time and the
Speaker 1: place if we think scrapey came to North America around
Speaker 1: and the first time c w D was described was
Speaker 1: about twenty years later out in Colorado, that's what we
Speaker 1: would we would refer to as as as a parsimonious
Speaker 1: solution for where CWD came from. We can't prove it,
Speaker 1: though there are other positives. Some people are kind of
Speaker 1: I don't fully understand why, but there's like, um, there's
Speaker 1: some resistance to that. I gather because if you start
Speaker 1: reading on the web, you'll find people making like very
Speaker 1: spirited arguments that that, uh, it's always been here. Do
Speaker 1: you even want to do you even care to speak
Speaker 1: to that? Well? Yeah, I would. I can take take
Speaker 1: a stab at that. Okay. So CWD in these places
Speaker 1: where it has been established the longest places in Colorado,
Speaker 1: place in Wyoming, in the South Converse Unit in UH
Speaker 1: in Converse County, Wyoming. I think we're not far behind
Speaker 1: in in Iowa County not far from here, Iowa County, Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Places where cw D has been established for a while decades,
Speaker 1: we've see two phenomenon. Number one, we see geographic spreads,
Speaker 1: so dear to deer to deer, you know it starts
Speaker 1: spreading from there. Number Two, we see increases in prevalence
Speaker 1: or the proportion of animals that are afflicted by c
Speaker 1: w D in some of these places. UM in UH, Wyoming,
Speaker 1: south Converse County, in a few areas in Colorado, U
Speaker 1: just south here in Iowa County, prevalence has reached up
Speaker 1: into the area in adult male so we're talking two
Speaker 1: and a half an older aged animals. Deer prevalence in
Speaker 1: the forty to fifty percent range. So you think about that.
Speaker 1: So you go out hunting and you're you're lucky enough
Speaker 1: to be able to tag, you know, in a three
Speaker 1: and a half year old buck, take a coin out
Speaker 1: of your pocket, flip it up in the air, and
Speaker 1: those are the odds that that deer has c w D.
Speaker 1: So when prevalence gets to that level, we start to
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, that's the science. The numbers suggest
Speaker 1: that we're going to start seeing population level impacts that
Speaker 1: a population cannot sustain that level of disease. So because
Speaker 1: it's I see this all the time, because it's always fatal,
Speaker 1: it is. It's a fatal disease. Now you'll get arguments
Speaker 1: and and somebody right now when they're listening to this
Speaker 1: is gonna say, always full of crap, it's not always fatal.
Speaker 1: And the argument that I typically here goes along something
Speaker 1: like this, that so a deer head c w D
Speaker 1: and a hunter shot that dear. That dear didn't die
Speaker 1: of c w D died of paracute lead poisoning. UM.
Speaker 1: But it isn't if If a disease is allowed to progress,
Speaker 1: it is fatal. You think about it and what I
Speaker 1: describe other thing happened airing, some other thing happening. Um,
Speaker 1: that disease is always going to be fatal. Once you
Speaker 1: start to see that that neurologic go degeneration in the brain.
Speaker 1: It's progressive. There's no way to stop that domino effect
Speaker 1: of the disease associated prions proliferating through the brain resulting
Speaker 1: in neronal death. There's no stopping that. There's no reversing
Speaker 1: the damage. And how long could it take? But I
Speaker 1: guess it's hard to answer because you don't know what
Speaker 1: the beginning is in UM. Like if you say, like
Speaker 1: I want to get back to I'm getting ideas stacked
Speaker 1: on top of each other here. But what is run
Speaker 1: with this for a minute. When you hear people say
Speaker 1: it's always fatal. So you know, a deer that gets
Speaker 1: to be like a buck, let's say that gets to
Speaker 1: be five years old, he's already super old anyways, Okay,
Speaker 1: So if it's always fatal, Like, how do you how
Speaker 1: do you measure that? Because you don't know when they
Speaker 1: got it in the first place. So I was gonna
Speaker 1: ask it how long it takes to kill a deer,
Speaker 1: but you probably can't say, like, today, this deer got
Speaker 1: c w D. Let's watch and see when he dies.
Speaker 1: We will never be able to truly identify the effect
Speaker 1: this moment, but we can track when mortality occurs, and
Speaker 1: we can look at at um sex and age ratios
Speaker 1: of animals that are harvested, and then we know how
Speaker 1: many of them those that are sampled, we know whether
Speaker 1: they were CWD positive CWD negative, so we can do
Speaker 1: a little back calculation. We do know from based on
Speaker 1: studies in in pen pen situations. If you take your
Speaker 1: garden variety, you know, dear uh, the incubation period for
Speaker 1: cw D is probably between eighteen and twenty four months,
Speaker 1: so you want to think it's maybe a two year disease.
Speaker 1: That animal looks perfectly healthy um all the way through
Speaker 1: that incubation period up until maybe six eight weeks before
Speaker 1: the end, and then they start really looking ragged and
Speaker 1: you think about the accumulation of that disease associated preonic
Speaker 1: protein in the brain. At first, it's probably having no
Speaker 1: effect on the animal at all. Then during the course
Speaker 1: of disease it looks like an exponential curve going up
Speaker 1: and towards the end, do you see that vast proliferation
Speaker 1: of of prion protein resulting in your ownal death? That
Speaker 1: animal cannot survive, So it's impossible. So in the average
Speaker 1: it's probably about a two year disease. But I want
Speaker 1: to go back if we can to. We talked about
Speaker 1: CWD hasn't always been there, Yeah, because I want to
Speaker 1: lay out people like why I'm asking about that is
Speaker 1: when and and Doug, you follow this a lot. You
Speaker 1: can speak up if this doesn't jibe, but so you're
Speaker 1: you're understanding of Hunter's understanding of this. When people when
Speaker 1: you get c w D in a hurt a dear
Speaker 1: herd out um, there's a lot of talk all of
Speaker 1: a sudden about trying to go in and radically coal
Speaker 1: the hurt, to lower numbers, or to do eradications in
Speaker 1: certain areas, to try to contain the disease, or to
Speaker 1: knock the numbers back so hard that it won't effectively
Speaker 1: pass some animal to animal. And this pisses a lot
Speaker 1: of guys off, because, as you know, anyone who likes
Speaker 1: to hunt knows you want as many animals around as possible.
Speaker 1: And so when people start hearing this chatter, they get
Speaker 1: uneasy feeling about it. They don't like where this is going.
Speaker 1: And I feel that it's a guy that feels that
Speaker 1: way who's likely to be the same guy who says
Speaker 1: it's always been here? Is that fair? Dog? I don't
Speaker 1: you've logged more hours thinking about this night. I don't
Speaker 1: know if more. I'm right up there with you. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: But I'm not trying to do the science. I'm just
Speaker 1: trying to do the psychology of like the kind of
Speaker 1: guy who's who likes the idea that it's always been here. Well,
Speaker 1: I think that they're they're more likely to say, well,
Speaker 1: we can't do anything about it anyway. Yeah, that ends
Speaker 1: up being the attitude that I get as much as anything. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's too late, we're not going to eradicated
Speaker 1: all the like when they had the eradication effort or
Speaker 1: that was, you know, we had the eradication zone, really
Speaker 1: upset people because well, how are we gonna be able
Speaker 1: to do that? We're gonna kill all the deer became
Speaker 1: a national news story. Yeah, UM, that was not supported socially,
Speaker 1: was not supported. And so the same thing happened in Alberta.
Speaker 1: UM when c w D it looked like was was
Speaker 1: starting to march from Saskatchewan towards Alberta. UM. Alberta wanted
Speaker 1: to I wanted to stop it. And they were doing
Speaker 1: everything they can could at that point in time. So
Speaker 1: they were calling large numbers of animals, UM trying to
Speaker 1: keep CWD you know, on the Saskatchewan side or drive
Speaker 1: it back to the Saskatchewan side. They even UM went
Speaker 1: to a point where they used kind of an unconventional
Speaker 1: method to kill deer. They were doing it from an
Speaker 1: aerial platform. And it wasn't a tree stand, it was
Speaker 1: a helicopter. And so if you want to be effective
Speaker 1: at dropping at knocking down deer numbers, same as you know,
Speaker 1: if you were trying to kill Farrell Hoggs or something
Speaker 1: like that, do it from a helicopter. You can you
Speaker 1: can really take down a lot of deer in the
Speaker 1: course of a day or a week. Well, that was
Speaker 1: it looked like they were being quite effective. They were
Speaker 1: being very effective at dropping deer numbers and it looked
Speaker 1: like they had a chance. Well that that technique was
Speaker 1: not supported. The outfitters and the hunters in that area
Speaker 1: were offended, um that the ministry in Alberta was taking
Speaker 1: that many deer for something that they didn't consider to
Speaker 1: be that big of a problem to start with. And
Speaker 1: so that social pressure led to political pressure, led to
Speaker 1: the program being basically defunded, and so Alberta stopped doing
Speaker 1: that aggressive management to c w D. And if you
Speaker 1: take a look at the at the at the map
Speaker 1: that you know I put together of the of the
Speaker 1: you know, known distribution of c w D, or you
Speaker 1: look at the Alberta ministry UM stuff, you'll see c
Speaker 1: to be the marching westward and it's now established and
Speaker 1: it's gonna be very challenging to to do anything with.
Speaker 1: There's another thing I've heard, uh from hunter's and that is,
Speaker 1: well they've had it out in Colorado this whole time
Speaker 1: and it's stabilized. No, I have no yeah, I stabilization
Speaker 1: of the population whatever were it's it's no big deal.
Speaker 1: In other words, it hasn't hurt the deer population. That's
Speaker 1: what I hear on a regular basis. UM and that
Speaker 1: comes back to that that situation, you know, trying to
Speaker 1: identify has it always been here in places where disease
Speaker 1: has been the longest. We have now documented population level
Speaker 1: impacts in localized geographic areas where CWD is clearly impacting
Speaker 1: numerically the deer herd. We've seen cases now documented peer
Speaker 1: viewed literature period science in mule deer in Colorado. We've
Speaker 1: seen um white tailed deer in uh in an area
Speaker 1: in the South Converse County in Wyoming, and documented in
Speaker 1: North American elk in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
Speaker 1: So if this disease had been here always, we know
Speaker 1: that c w D does two things really well. It
Speaker 1: spreads geographically and it grows in prevalence. When the prevalence
Speaker 1: gets high enough, there's every likelihood that it will impact populations.
Speaker 1: Is there any evidence anywhere that this has occurred historically?
Speaker 1: There's none. There is no evidence that a t SC
Speaker 1: has been out there and has caused local or regional
Speaker 1: population declines historically. And an interesting thing about c w D,
Speaker 1: but I mean, we'd only have if we're lucky. You
Speaker 1: know what, what we got a hundred years to draw on.
Speaker 1: I mean that stuff have been going on. You know,
Speaker 1: you have no idea, but over the last let's say,
Speaker 1: say like over the last hundred years, he might have
Speaker 1: been able to measure something like that or realize something
Speaker 1: that was occurring. Okay, but what will stop cw D.
Speaker 1: To date, we know of no biological feature which will
Speaker 1: stop it. So if it had been there two hundred,
Speaker 1: three hundred, five hundred years ago, there wouldn't be one
Speaker 1: little pocket. Yeah. Why, you know, we've seen, you know,
Speaker 1: we've seen small pockets of disease grow into larger pockets
Speaker 1: of disease, and none of those pockets has vanished. No,
Speaker 1: it's never like any area that's had it has never
Speaker 1: gotten rid of it. C w D, as far as
Speaker 1: I'm aware, has not gone away anywhere other than potentially
Speaker 1: in a captive facility where we depopulate that facility. So
Speaker 1: there's no you know, their populations don't seem to adapt um.
Speaker 1: There does not seem to be any strong genetic selection
Speaker 1: for resistance to disease. Now, there are genotypes in each
Speaker 1: of the three main species white tailed deer, mule deer,
Speaker 1: and elk that seemed to have some level of quote
Speaker 1: unquote resistance that resistance, they seem a little less likely
Speaker 1: to get c w D, but they can get c
Speaker 1: w D, and what it does is manifest through a
Speaker 1: longer incubation period. So when I said your garden variety, dear,
Speaker 1: it's about a two year disease in these in these
Speaker 1: resistant geno types, it seems like it's maybe a five
Speaker 1: year disease. So that gives them enough time to that
Speaker 1: gives many of them enough time to have the life
Speaker 1: they would have had to end, like they would have
Speaker 1: had reproduced and then die from the ship that kills
Speaker 1: year without them ever knowing that they had it. Like
Speaker 1: if you told me I had a disease it's going
Speaker 1: to be fatal in one years, I'd be like, yes,
Speaker 1: that's cool, get in line, right, there's the plenty of
Speaker 1: stars gonna kill me between now and then. Okay, But
Speaker 1: let's think about if that disease you have, if they
Speaker 1: over the course of that hun years eighty years of
Speaker 1: that you're able to actively give that disease to other people.
Speaker 1: And so that's kind of the difference. So that dear Dearing,
Speaker 1: the garden variety deer with c w D, where I
Speaker 1: said that clinical, you know, it's it's it's inapparent in
Speaker 1: the animal, at least to us for maybe twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two months, and then it's sick and it's and it dies.
Speaker 1: That animal is shedding infectious agents, so it's infectious. It's
Speaker 1: capable of transmitting disease, probably as early as three months
Speaker 1: after it gets disease. So for the majority of the
Speaker 1: time frame that animal has c w D, it's able
Speaker 1: to give that disease to others and to shed infectious
Speaker 1: agent out into the environment where it may persist for years,
Speaker 1: potentially up to decades. Now that that resistant genotype, he's
Speaker 1: got a five year version CWD instead of a two
Speaker 1: year so that deer might be shedding infectious agent for
Speaker 1: maybe four years or even longer before it gets sick
Speaker 1: and dies. So although it's good for him, it's bad
Speaker 1: for everybody else. It's good for him or her, and
Speaker 1: it might be good for their progeny if they you know,
Speaker 1: if that if that trait breeds, true, it might be
Speaker 1: good for their progeny, but it could be bad for
Speaker 1: everybody else. And we call that a typhoid Marry syndrome. Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not dying from it, but it's spread and sings
Speaker 1: that are probably gonna die from it quicker than he would.
Speaker 1: Right now, there's another interesting thing. These gena types that
Speaker 1: are supposedly resistant to c w D are incredibly rare
Speaker 1: out in a wild population. They might be five percent
Speaker 1: of the animals or even less. Okay, So if this
Speaker 1: was a desirable trait, geno typic trait, one would expect that,
Speaker 1: at a minimum, it be in a larger proportion. Always
Speaker 1: if yeah, if that, if that gene had had an
Speaker 1: opportunity to proliferate in response to disease, they ought to
Speaker 1: be the dominant genotypes out there. But they're not. They're very,
Speaker 1: very rare. So it's interesting because you know, some folks
Speaker 1: in the captive servit industry have proposed, Hey, why don't
Speaker 1: we start breeding these resistant genotypes and and infiltrate the
Speaker 1: populations with them. So we'll replace the susceptible animals with
Speaker 1: the resistant animals and everything will be just hunky dorry. Right. So,
Speaker 1: the observations of these animals well, Number one, if if,
Speaker 1: if that genotype is really rare, it suggests that that
Speaker 1: animal may not be fit, may not be a genetically
Speaker 1: fit animal. In other characteristics, that geno that CWD resistance
Speaker 1: may be tied to other characteristics that are that may
Speaker 1: be deleterious to animals. Okay, there's got to be an
Speaker 1: explanation for why that genotype is really rare. And researchers
Speaker 1: and Alorado were able to to actually breed up some
Speaker 1: of the mule deer with the resistant genotypes, and their
Speaker 1: conclusions were that while these deer uh looked like mule deer,
Speaker 1: acted largely like mule deer, they're highly technically, they weren't
Speaker 1: quite right. These animals just didn't behave the way that
Speaker 1: there their wild type brethren are. So now let's put
Speaker 1: that animal in a wild system where you've got things
Speaker 1: like you've got giant antlers. Where put put that animal
Speaker 1: who is just not quite right behaviorally into a system
Speaker 1: with predators over historical time, and maybe there you can
Speaker 1: see why that animal was selected against that that TSC
Speaker 1: resistance may be tied to other phenotypic characteristics which are
Speaker 1: less than desirable for an animal who has to be
Speaker 1: you know, has to be a hundred percent of ten
Speaker 1: percent of a deer in order to survive. So it all,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of boiled together that that resistance quote
Speaker 1: unquote resistance. Um, it might not be the panacea that
Speaker 1: we're that we're hoping for the cure of for well,
Speaker 1: there won't be a cure. We haven't found one yet.
Speaker 1: But what would it even look like. Well, researchers are
Speaker 1: working on vaccines. Okay, yeah, yeah, but I mean, but
Speaker 1: I are you gonna go vaccinate all the year and
Speaker 1: then keep doing it? Well, that's that's one thought. Now.
Speaker 1: Vaccine people have worked on vaccines, communic vaccines. Has there
Speaker 1: ever been a communicable vaccine a communical oh, where you
Speaker 1: would put it in put it in as the vaccination
Speaker 1: just by letting me sleep on its couch. That's an
Speaker 1: interesting theory. That's an interesting theory. I'm not aware of
Speaker 1: any that has been effective that way. Yeah, there you go.
Speaker 1: It might be on it. You might be on it. Um.
Speaker 1: There have been a number of vaccine candidates, uh for
Speaker 1: t sc s. In general, it would be great to
Speaker 1: be able to vaccinate cattle, sheep, humans for TSC we
Speaker 1: have not. Scientists has not been able to administer. If
Speaker 1: you had the miracle of the vaccine administering it to cattle,
Speaker 1: administering to sheep, administring to humans, it's plausible and and
Speaker 1: certainly it's not out of question that it could be
Speaker 1: done with free ranching animals as well. Some vaccines can
Speaker 1: be built into oral based formulations where we could put
Speaker 1: it into something that deer would eat, spread it, you know,
Speaker 1: probably from helicopters or or airplanes across the landscape and
Speaker 1: vaccinate animals to prevent them from getting CWD. But you'd
Speaker 1: have to do it over vast geographic carry, and you'd
Speaker 1: have to do it for a really long time decades
Speaker 1: vacine for vaccine. But there are instances where with other
Speaker 1: diseases where that's been effective. UM with rabies, with raccoon rabies,
Speaker 1: there's an oral bait um that has been created looks
Speaker 1: like little dog biscuits. UM. Raccoon rabies historically was isolated
Speaker 1: to the southeastern States, and it was moved up in
Speaker 1: a little bit further north along the eastern seaboard UM
Speaker 1: either by UM, by conservationists themselves, or by state agencies
Speaker 1: who were relocating raccoons to UM supplant you know, populations
Speaker 1: that have been reduced by over harvest inadvertently. That's something
Speaker 1: that's happened absolutely. People have had people have had to
Speaker 1: do raccoon reintroductions. Yeah, historically, I mean, game agencies have
Speaker 1: have restored darn near everything over time. Yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: raccoons were an exception there, just because they've enjoyed a
Speaker 1: general like in the time that we've been keeping track
Speaker 1: of such things, they've enjoyed a general northward and westward spread.
Speaker 1: Humans have helped a little bit, yea. They were like,
Speaker 1: why are there fox squirrels in Missool, Monta And and
Speaker 1: so inadvertently raccoon and rabies was moved from the farther
Speaker 1: in the southeast up into up into the Virginia's And so,
Speaker 1: as a good pathogen does, it will try and take
Speaker 1: advantage of a naive, susceptible host population, and raccoon rabies
Speaker 1: has moved straight up the eastern seaboard where now you
Speaker 1: know it's it's not uncommon to find cases in places
Speaker 1: like Central Park in New York, Okay. And and the
Speaker 1: fear with that is it's a it's a zooonosis, where
Speaker 1: that a disease that transmits between animals and humans and
Speaker 1: sometimes back. By definition, that's what a zoonosis is, and
Speaker 1: it's a face in rabies is a fatal disease in
Speaker 1: human to the raccoon, to other all mammalian hosts. So
Speaker 1: now raccoon rabies seems to it wants to move westward
Speaker 1: as well. And so there is a very massive program
Speaker 1: that's been ongoing for quite some time where every year,
Speaker 1: these vaccine laden baits are dropped from aircraft across a
Speaker 1: swath all the way from I believe it's a long
Speaker 1: lake erie down along the Appalachians down to the Southern
Speaker 1: States right now. It goes on every year, and so
Speaker 1: these these baits are dropped across. It's it's neat stuff,
Speaker 1: but it works. So you're trying to create a vaccinated
Speaker 1: path where the raccoons and other animals have been vaccinated
Speaker 1: against rabies, so even if they are exposed to the
Speaker 1: rabies virus, they are not no longer susceptible to it.
Speaker 1: A serious that's fascinating, absolutely, and it's and it's one
Speaker 1: of those instances said like you come back and say,
Speaker 1: is it possible that c w D could be managed
Speaker 1: sometime in the future, by you're making me feel like
Speaker 1: it's even the vaccine doesn't exist and it might be
Speaker 1: possible there decades or whatever. I'm feeling it. I'm feeling
Speaker 1: it on the idea that you could in fact maybe
Speaker 1: so then it would be expensive. So then as a
Speaker 1: hunter in an area whereas we were talking earlier that
Speaker 1: it's moving up through, I'm feeling and a landowner and feeling, uh,
Speaker 1: I feel like an obligation to do what I can
Speaker 1: and and if I can spread the word of let's
Speaker 1: at least we're not gonna we're not gonna get rid
Speaker 1: of it. How the hunter says, oh, we're not gonna
Speaker 1: get rid of it. If they've had it, its stabilizes
Speaker 1: all that. I mean, I feel like it's our obligation
Speaker 1: to slow it down. So to give that to buy
Speaker 1: that time, that's that's a great point in that. Okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: let me give you another quick example of vaccine that works.
Speaker 1: This one is is pretty interesting. This is one that's
Speaker 1: been developed at the National Wildlife Health Center. So it
Speaker 1: was thought, um that black footed ferrets were um extinct.
Speaker 1: They popped up in a guy's dog carried one up
Speaker 1: to the door. Yeh. Basically turns out they're not extinct.
Speaker 1: They're not extinct. So they brought that population into captivity
Speaker 1: and bred it up. Okay, and then they put these
Speaker 1: animals back out on the landscape. And now, if you
Speaker 1: are a black footed ferret, you pretty much eat one thing,
Speaker 1: prairie dogs. That's what you eat, all right. And so
Speaker 1: if we put black footed ferrets back out on the
Speaker 1: landscape and and on fishing, wild Life Service in the
Speaker 1: state natural resource agencies have done just that along some
Speaker 1: of the tribes as well. Now, what happens if plague
Speaker 1: comes into that population and wipes out of the prairie
Speaker 1: dog colony where you live. Well, either A you're gonna
Speaker 1: starve to death or be you're gonna die of plague yourself, right, Okay.
Speaker 1: So this is a limiting factor when we talk about
Speaker 1: the reintroducing the most endangered mammal in North America, putting
Speaker 1: it back on the landscape. If your food source dies
Speaker 1: of plague, you die too, Okay. So, researchers at National
Speaker 1: Wildlife Health Center, in conjunction with lots of other places,
Speaker 1: over the course of about a decade, developed a vaccine
Speaker 1: which works. It works in both prairie dogs and it
Speaker 1: works in blackfooted ferrets. I know a lot of ranchers
Speaker 1: who are gonna be disappointed to hear about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they could be. But if we're talking about endangered species
Speaker 1: reintroductions more making a joke about a certain mentality. There
Speaker 1: is that mentality. So anyway, now the researchers they were
Speaker 1: able to give an intramuscular injection of the vaccine into
Speaker 1: into the ferrets and protect them. But now, how do
Speaker 1: you go out and you capture all the prairie dogs
Speaker 1: and give them each a shot. It's analogous to what
Speaker 1: you're saying with deer with c w D. It just
Speaker 1: can't be done logistically. So the researchers were able to
Speaker 1: create an oral bait, and actually they tried different flavors
Speaker 1: to find out which the prairie dogs preferred. It turns out,
Speaker 1: guess what they like, peanut butter. So they created little
Speaker 1: bits vaccine latent baits, maybe a centimeter on on on edge,
Speaker 1: cubic little bits. And so it turns out we can
Speaker 1: put these out on the land escape in prairie dog towns.
Speaker 1: The prey dogs consume them, and they vaccinate themselves thereby,
Speaker 1: you know, at the population level, making them uh now
Speaker 1: no longer susceptible to play. And those efforts are probably
Speaker 1: focused in areas where you're trying to recover, you're trying
Speaker 1: to receive restore the black footed ferrets. You know, a
Speaker 1: little tidbet for people listeners. Um the most, I would
Speaker 1: the most universal attractant. It doesn't matter what you're trying
Speaker 1: to catch. Peanut butter molasses mixed together. Catch me on
Speaker 1: that stuff. I think, I really think it's the most.
Speaker 1: I think beaver castor is regarded as like a seemly
Speaker 1: almost universal attractant to anything that likes to eat meat.
Speaker 1: And two carnivores beaver castor and two herbivores, peanut butter
Speaker 1: molasses mixed together is like a universal attracting. Absolutely. I
Speaker 1: did a lot a small mammal trapping, you know, many
Speaker 1: many years ago, and you put peanut butter inside of
Speaker 1: a little you know, sherman live trap, and you end
Speaker 1: up with a mouse or a ole in there that
Speaker 1: they roll around in the peanut butter, and then you've
Speaker 1: got to deal with this grease covered animal. You mix
Speaker 1: the peanut butter with rolled oats, so that's the that's
Speaker 1: the component that you didn't have classes and and and oatmeal.
Speaker 1: Peanut's got stay in power and the rolled holts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it probably gives them something to actually they can carry
Speaker 1: it off to you know, yeah, well, and and it
Speaker 1: absorbs some of the grease in the in the peanut
Speaker 1: butter Bailey come back to that, that prairie dog, in
Speaker 1: blackfooted ferrets. So there are very few success stories when
Speaker 1: dealing with wildlife disease in general. You know, if wildlife
Speaker 1: disease becomes established in a free ranging population, it's very
Speaker 1: pretty tough. Success stories are limited. But it's really interesting
Speaker 1: through the advent and the development of this vaccine and
Speaker 1: this oral vaccinated you know, bait being able to put
Speaker 1: that out there on the landscape, it's likely that we
Speaker 1: will be able to remove or largely remove plague as
Speaker 1: an issue with reintroduction and restoration of the most endangered
Speaker 1: mano in North America. So it's a success story, and
Speaker 1: it's one it's rare, it's when right. So I heard
Speaker 1: two different things. One was long sorry uh no. One
Speaker 1: was that with the raccoons, essentially there was a band
Speaker 1: that was established to stop the disease from going further.
Speaker 1: And I think how that could apply to c w
Speaker 1: d IF and when a vaccine is developed, so you
Speaker 1: can do that band a containment band. And then this
Speaker 1: with the blackfooted ferret is stopping it in a particular
Speaker 1: or yeah, stopping in in a particular area. So those
Speaker 1: are really two success stories, but there are two very
Speaker 1: different ones that are very very different. And it comes
Speaker 1: back to your point, does it make sense to try
Speaker 1: and minimize the impact and the geographic stretch where c
Speaker 1: w D is And I think you you hit the
Speaker 1: name one last thing before that. I want to go
Speaker 1: into that and end with that. No, I want to.
Speaker 1: I want to go into that full on, total move
Speaker 1: into it. But first this is it's gonna be impossible
Speaker 1: to answer. Um. No, you can answer the first part.
Speaker 1: I'll give you an easy to answer one. Do we
Speaker 1: know of a case where a dude has caught c
Speaker 1: w D from eating deer? Okay, So you wanna talk
Speaker 1: about human risk? I think it's appropriate. It's a it's
Speaker 1: a topic that everybody's interested in. I think most people
Speaker 1: that's kind of where they end up when they're thinking
Speaker 1: about that. I'm happy to discuss this, So todate there
Speaker 1: is no recognized instance where a human has contracted a
Speaker 1: t SC associated with consumption of of c w D
Speaker 1: afflicted deer. Okay, So from an epidemiological standpoint, it does
Speaker 1: not look like it has happened. Okay. Now, a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of scientific research has been done, many different studies,
Speaker 1: many different ways, and the bottom line, if I had
Speaker 1: to boil down all of that research suggests that the
Speaker 1: chances of transmission of their CWD crossing the species barrier
Speaker 1: into humans is small. It's remote, but it is not zero.
Speaker 1: It was very remote in the case of BSc crossing
Speaker 1: over into humans, and to date we now know of
Speaker 1: over two hundred fatal cases of variant kreutz feldiacos disease
Speaker 1: in humans associated with consumption of BSc contaminated beef. Now,
Speaker 1: they entered, they put a lot of beef in that systems,
Speaker 1: Probably about at least three quarters of a million animals
Speaker 1: entered into the human food chain, resulting in approximately two
Speaker 1: cases known to date. So the conversion rate was very
Speaker 1: very small. Now, in for if we want to kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, generalize, if we said, in in experiments in
Speaker 1: test tube type environments, we can see c w D
Speaker 1: causing a conversion of human normal prion protein to the
Speaker 1: disease associated form at about the same rate as BSc does.
Speaker 1: It's reasonable to anticipate that it's not unreasonable to think
Speaker 1: that it could happen, said, the risk is very low.
Speaker 1: We can't quantify that risk exactly precisely. The risk is low,
Speaker 1: but it's not zero. Same thing can he said, with
Speaker 1: the chances for transmission into livestock. Okay, deer are out
Speaker 1: there commingling with cattle today, and if deer f c
Speaker 1: w D, that's happening not far from here, not not,
Speaker 1: it's not unfeasible. So there's interaction. Plus that the deer
Speaker 1: are shedding infectious agent into the environment and the cattle
Speaker 1: are are exposed to that, just like when humans are
Speaker 1: consuming venicine. If it's a CWD positive deer, those humans
Speaker 1: are exposed to the infectious agent. Exposure is not the
Speaker 1: same as transmission. I said, the chances are low, they
Speaker 1: are not zero. But now let's add to that equation
Speaker 1: just a little bit. In a state of Wisconsin alone,
Speaker 1: last year, there were four hundred, about four hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty positives detected. Probably the majority of them were consumed
Speaker 1: by the hunter that killed them. Okay, it seems that
Speaker 1: you know at least at least some of them that's
Speaker 1: positives detective, positives detective. So did you guys follow up
Speaker 1: with those hunters because I heard from a guy today
Speaker 1: who his family killed five four were positive and he
Speaker 1: was sketching out for me. Um, he's eating his His
Speaker 1: girlfriend's pissed at him. She won't eat it. They had
Speaker 1: a friend that wanted a deer. He want up declining
Speaker 1: the deer. This is right here in southwest Wisconsin. Do
Speaker 1: you guys follow up to be like, so, what happened
Speaker 1: to the deer? The DNR, Wisconsin Department and Natural Resources
Speaker 1: does follow up, and with every positive test, they provide
Speaker 1: information back to the hunter and provide them an option.
Speaker 1: They give them information and an option on what they
Speaker 1: want to do, and they obviously allow him to opt
Speaker 1: out of the Wanton waste laws. Right, Certainly, certainly they
Speaker 1: would they would come pick it up, or at least
Speaker 1: at one point they would actually come CWD positive material.
Speaker 1: Nobody's gonna go after you for that, but I would
Speaker 1: offer up that at least, you know, probably the majority
Speaker 1: of individuals now and I'm not I don't have their data,
Speaker 1: but I think the majority of individuals now would say, okay, thanks,
Speaker 1: but we've we've opted to consume it now, which but
Speaker 1: now let's think about it. The amount of surveillance that
Speaker 1: we do is much less than it used to be.
Speaker 1: First first few years in the southern part of the
Speaker 1: of Wisconsin. You know, the DNR was testing twenty thousand deer.
Speaker 1: This last year tested you know, around seven thousands. Uh.
Speaker 1: I really don't have the funding to do the to
Speaker 1: do the surveillance. Yeah, So it's not that hard to
Speaker 1: do some back of the envelope calculations. If we know
Speaker 1: what prevalence generally looks like. If we know what what
Speaker 1: prevalence generally looks like in a county, we know what
Speaker 1: harvest looks like in a county, So we can kind
Speaker 1: of figure out crude back of the envelope and identify
Speaker 1: maybe how many CBD positive deer were killed by hunters.
Speaker 1: I can come up pretty easily with you know, a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand CWD positive animals killed in the state
Speaker 1: of Wisconsin every year. Now, if only four hundred of
Speaker 1: them were tested positive, that means that for every test
Speaker 1: positive animal, there were probably three or ish three ish
Speaker 1: that we're not tested at all. So all of those
Speaker 1: you would think are going home being consumed by the
Speaker 1: hunters and their families. So when I talked about the risk,
Speaker 1: so the the amount of exposure doesn't change the risk
Speaker 1: to any one of those people. But if we think
Speaker 1: about if you had a scientific experiment, or maybe even
Speaker 1: not a scientific experiment, maybe buy lottery tickets things like that,
Speaker 1: the odds that any one of us buying you know
Speaker 1: that winning or in this case, that losing lottery ticket
Speaker 1: is extremely remote, But if you keep running that experiment
Speaker 1: enough times, you might expect an alternate outcome. At the
Speaker 1: end of the day, somebody wins the lottery. In the
Speaker 1: case of BSc, at least two hundred people got the
Speaker 1: bad lottery ticket where they developed disease from consuming BSc
Speaker 1: positive positive animals. So we keep challenging this system. You know,
Speaker 1: the odds are low from any for anyone individual, incredibly low.
Speaker 1: There's lots of things we do on a day to
Speaker 1: day basis which are much more risky than probably than
Speaker 1: consuming CWD positive venison, but were going along under the
Speaker 1: assumption that it cannot happen would be incorrect from a
Speaker 1: scientific set. That's what I find myself explaining when people
Speaker 1: ask me about it, is I'm like, no known, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: So take whatever solace you like you want from that.
Speaker 1: But it's just a lot of unknown man. So there's
Speaker 1: a few things we can look to. What is a
Speaker 1: place called the World Health Organization w h O. Their
Speaker 1: recommendations are pretty firm that animal material known to be
Speaker 1: positive for a c w or for any t SC
Speaker 1: should not be consumed by any other man animal, including humans.
Speaker 1: World Health Organization says keep it out of the food.
Speaker 1: What does the Centers for Disease Control say? The Centers
Speaker 1: for Disease Control is very, very similar. They have a
Speaker 1: presence on their website, you know, dealing with chronic wasting disease.
Speaker 1: Their recommendations are things like, you know, if you hunt
Speaker 1: in an area where c w D is known to exist,
Speaker 1: you should consider getting your dear tested. And if you
Speaker 1: follow that, if you get your dear tested and it
Speaker 1: comes back positive, the recommendation is that you not consume
Speaker 1: that material. So here you have, you know, both the
Speaker 1: World Health Organization and our national Centers for Disease Control
Speaker 1: making pretty solid recommendations saying, yeah, you probably shouldn't need
Speaker 1: that stuff. So that's from that's from health professionals. Um.
Speaker 1: The Wisconsin Department of Health has a little corner in
Speaker 1: the UH in the rules digest. Every state has their
Speaker 1: hunting rules digest or you know hunting regulations digest. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's a little presence from the from the Department of
Speaker 1: Health in there, and they recommend that you should have
Speaker 1: your dear tested and if it comes back positive, that
Speaker 1: you're not consuming. Yeah, but man, I mean the implications
Speaker 1: of it, though, is as you get into these areas
Speaker 1: like this guy heard from the on their family property,
Speaker 1: four or five. As I said earlier, four of the
Speaker 1: five deer they killed on their property had it. If
Speaker 1: you're going to follow his recommendations at a point soon
Speaker 1: in a lot of areas around the country, it won't
Speaker 1: warrant the chase. There will be no there would be
Speaker 1: no reason to hunt. Hear, you're gonna shoot five deer
Speaker 1: to get one that you can consume if you're doing
Speaker 1: the test, if you're following the guidelines. Now I've told
Speaker 1: this story before, but I had mine tested from here.
Speaker 1: From here, Yeah, we had them all tested and took
Speaker 1: him home. Now, Initially I was like, I'm not even
Speaker 1: get a tested because I don't want to write. I'd
Speaker 1: rather just live in peace. The landowner insisted, Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: rather know. Come on, I'd rather live. I'd rather live
Speaker 1: in ignorance. Right, just the peace, peaceful ignorance. But then
Speaker 1: I got to think of to myself, if my wife
Speaker 1: gets wind of the fact that there's a test one
Speaker 1: could get for free on a deer and did do
Speaker 1: it and opted to instead take said dear home and
Speaker 1: feed them to thy children, And then later you had
Speaker 1: to say like, oh, yeah, I could have had a
Speaker 1: test done but didn't instead just fed it to the kids.
Speaker 1: You know, you can picture all that's going. So what
Speaker 1: I did that was just like took the deer home,
Speaker 1: keptain my freezer, awaiting my results, got my results proceeded either,
Speaker 1: which were very quick by the way here in yeah,
Speaker 1: so that absolutely I don't want to go so far
Speaker 1: as to say you're stupid to not do that. Now,
Speaker 1: the rub is if it had come back positive, would
Speaker 1: I really have gone and taken those two deer and
Speaker 1: thrown them in the garbage? That is painful, and that
Speaker 1: is a you know, a very personal decision. It's based
Speaker 1: on what you know and your individual tolerance for risk.
Speaker 1: And that's what that's what I like to that's what
Speaker 1: I like to talk to people about. Is the chances
Speaker 1: are low, they're not zero. Is this a risk that
Speaker 1: you're willing to endure for yourself, for your family, for
Speaker 1: your children. Are you comfortable saying what you would do personally?
Speaker 1: I don't think it's really your main because I think
Speaker 1: my role is to information that I've studied this stuff
Speaker 1: for a long time, um, you know, to date, and
Speaker 1: I get my dear tested too because I want more
Speaker 1: c w D is it's not as thick, it's not
Speaker 1: as prevalent where I hunt yet as it is here
Speaker 1: or just to hair south of here, and I haven't
Speaker 1: hit a positive yet, let's put it that way. But
Speaker 1: you but you do, you do think obviously testing is
Speaker 1: a good idea if nothing else. I mean, it provide
Speaker 1: it provides data to people, provides data back to per science,
Speaker 1: just to try and track what's going on with this disease.
Speaker 1: You know, you're kind of boiling in now you're boiling
Speaker 1: into that kind of that big question, and it's why
Speaker 1: should people care about c w D? Okay, why care?
Speaker 1: Because it's been around a long time. Even where prevalence
Speaker 1: is high, there's still dear, maybe not as many, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe in these localized areas we see population level effects,
Speaker 1: but you know that's what I typically here. It's been
Speaker 1: here a long time. Cows don't get it, people don't
Speaker 1: get it, and there's plenty of dere to hunt. Why
Speaker 1: should I care about c w D Because it's a corruption.
Speaker 1: It's a potential corruption of a pristine food source. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not a it's not a normal part of the system.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I think we can boil this down and
Speaker 1: and and a paper came out a year ago written
Speaker 1: by a couple of people that I highly respect, John
Speaker 1: Fisher from the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study in in Athens, Georgia,
Speaker 1: and Mike Miller from the from the state of Colorado.
Speaker 1: And Mike has been publishing about c w D for
Speaker 1: you know, ever since I think the late seventies or
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties. He knows as much about this disease
Speaker 1: as any other person does. Anyway, these guys wrote a
Speaker 1: paper and they give they've given some presentations to you know,
Speaker 1: to state audiences over the course of the last year,
Speaker 1: and they articulate why we why we should probably care
Speaker 1: about CWD and boil it down to some very simple things.
Speaker 1: One is that chance that CWD could cross over the
Speaker 1: species barrier and become a human disease. Issue. So that's
Speaker 1: a reason. One reason why we should be concerned about CWD,
Speaker 1: the chance that it could become a human health issue.
Speaker 1: Number two is that you know, we have, as I mentioned,
Speaker 1: we've now documented in a localized area population impacts coming
Speaker 1: from c w D, and at this point in time,
Speaker 1: we don't know. Time will tell whether those population impacts
Speaker 1: will become more regional, whether they'll bread from the localized
Speaker 1: area to the regional. So there's that chance that c
Speaker 1: w D could become a population impacting, population limiting factor.
Speaker 1: That's another reason we should care. Those are the two
Speaker 1: big ones that they that they point out in their paper.
Speaker 1: But now there's a third one that when these guys
Speaker 1: are out talking to audiences, and this is one that's
Speaker 1: come up as well. It's a highly technical term we
Speaker 1: call we referred to as the ick factor. You were
Speaker 1: talking about it before the early Human dimensions research where
Speaker 1: they sent surveys out to hunters and their families. They
Speaker 1: did a lot of that in the state of Wisconsin
Speaker 1: back in two thousand to two thousand three, two thousand four,
Speaker 1: and they reached you know, they asked hunters, at what
Speaker 1: point would you have had enough and decide not to
Speaker 1: go hunting there, And it seems like when you get
Speaker 1: up in that forty to fifty percent prevalence range where
Speaker 1: not too south to here, too far south here where
Speaker 1: you kill that three year old buck and flip a coin,
Speaker 1: we're in at range that at that point, when prevalence
Speaker 1: gets to that point, that ick factor might change your
Speaker 1: behavior and either you will decide not to hunt there,
Speaker 1: or perhaps your spouse will decide for you that you're
Speaker 1: not going to hunt there. So now put yourself in
Speaker 1: the in the shoes of a landowner who's trying to
Speaker 1: manage deer, keep deer numbers down so he might have
Speaker 1: some oaks regenerate someday. How do you manage dear without
Speaker 1: deer hunters? So, even when we get CWD prevalence up
Speaker 1: in that fifty percent range in adult males, it's probably
Speaker 1: going to be some time before disease starts limiting deer
Speaker 1: numbers themselves. So we're gonna have that intervening timeframe where
Speaker 1: deer numbers are gonna skyrock. But I'll add to that, like,
Speaker 1: how do you manage deer without deer hunters? How do
Speaker 1: you manage a host of fish and wildlife species without
Speaker 1: deer without revenue generator from license sales, from license sales,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's a it becomes a like no
Speaker 1: hunt like when you have a radical decline and hunter participation,
Speaker 1: it does not bolde well for any kind of wildlife
Speaker 1: that's managed about to state right, A lot of problems
Speaker 1: for access research the very Yeah, the very information were
Speaker 1: the acquisition of the very information we're talking about right now. Yea.
Speaker 1: So so people ask me why should I care? And
Speaker 1: those are the things that I've been keying on for probably,
Speaker 1: you know, close to ten years. Quick recap would be
Speaker 1: the potential impact on dear populations themselves. When prevalence gets
Speaker 1: high enough kills deer and you start seeing localized or
Speaker 1: regional population declines due to c w D due to disease.
Speaker 1: Nobody wants to see that. Number two, the possibility that
Speaker 1: c w D could cross over the species barrier and
Speaker 1: become a human health or maybe even a livestock health issue, okay.
Speaker 1: And number three is that ick factor that when prevalence
Speaker 1: gets high enough, hunters will change their behavior, quit hunting
Speaker 1: or go hunting someplace else, and all the rep cuestions
Speaker 1: that that has on our ability to manage gear and
Speaker 1: as you so, I definitely pointed out our ability to
Speaker 1: manage other things. Is deer hunting licenses pay for it all. Now,
Speaker 1: I know you've been itching, You've been scratching to get
Speaker 1: fascinated by the whole because you've been wanted, Because I
Speaker 1: know that you want you you're concerned about controlling the spread,
Speaker 1: No one, because I I think of that as the like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you probably haven't noticed, but I I feel like I've
Speaker 1: tried to take us from the past into the present,
Speaker 1: and now we're moving into the future. I did notice that.
Speaker 1: That's very good. Yeah. Um, and and Brian's actually answered
Speaker 1: a lot of what I was the questions that I
Speaker 1: had that I wanted to start spurting out right at
Speaker 1: the beginning. Um, can I speak for you for a minute? Always?
Speaker 1: Is that that that that that bother you? No, not
Speaker 1: at all. You worry a doug during worries a lot
Speaker 1: about c w D because you're on sort of the
Speaker 1: you're on like the threshold. Yeah, we're right there. As
Speaker 1: as Brian said, it's just to the south of us.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that we have dear in our immediate area
Speaker 1: that have the disease. Um into DAT and none off
Speaker 1: this farm to DAT None office farm. And we've tested
Speaker 1: every year for the last two or three years. And
Speaker 1: where I hunt in Crawford County, Um, we saw it
Speaker 1: coming Crawford being just west of Richland County where we are,
Speaker 1: UM from the tree stand I sit in. Two years ago,
Speaker 1: the first positive in Crawford County was killed in a
Speaker 1: I think it was a four year old buck about
Speaker 1: three miles to the northeast of where I'm sitting in
Speaker 1: a tree. Last year another one was picked up in
Speaker 1: the section just to the southwest of where I'm sitting
Speaker 1: in that in that in that tree stands, So I'm
Speaker 1: watching it as well. First you know, you see it coming,
Speaker 1: and then it's just off to this side. Now it's
Speaker 1: on the other corner as well, and it doesn't end
Speaker 1: into you start looking at a mature deer a little differently.
Speaker 1: You can go onto the Wisconsin d in our website
Speaker 1: and UH in the c w D section, and of course,
Speaker 1: as you're saying, the statistics are a little bit different
Speaker 1: now because testing isn't as widespread. But you can take
Speaker 1: a year to year over the last several years, the
Speaker 1: photographs or these or the results of southwest Wisconsin and
Speaker 1: it shows every section and it started in the what
Speaker 1: they called the hot zone. And if you you kind
Speaker 1: of flipped through those very quickly, you just see that boop.
Speaker 1: It just keeps widening. And it starts out there, Oh,
Speaker 1: there's a little pink squares here, and then there gets
Speaker 1: to be more of them, and then numbers keep getting bigger,
Speaker 1: and it just keeps, you know, spreading in that way. Um.
Speaker 1: I was freaked out about enough earlier. But now that
Speaker 1: I've talked with you about it, the part that I
Speaker 1: didn't that it wasn't registering with me was Stephen, I've
Speaker 1: talked a lot about, you know, management and why why
Speaker 1: I'm concerned about it. I like hunting deer, like having
Speaker 1: enough uh deer hunt. I like eating venison. Um, it's
Speaker 1: there's the economic impact in the area and all these
Speaker 1: wonderful things that are a part of it. And and
Speaker 1: I guess I told you before we started the podcasts
Speaker 1: that one of our management objectives here is to regenerate
Speaker 1: red oak up in a chunk of woods that we're
Speaker 1: cutting my great grandfather's trees, hunting twenty five year old trees.
Speaker 1: And uh, We've put a lot of effort into a
Speaker 1: shelter would harvest up there, and now you know there's
Speaker 1: been a decline in hunters already certainly hadn't been a
Speaker 1: decline in hunters on this place, but some in the area.
Speaker 1: But the then mall factor in that ick factor where
Speaker 1: people fewer people are are are hunting, and well you're
Speaker 1: gonna start dying off, but not until a chew down
Speaker 1: every yoak I've got up there, and that would I mean,
Speaker 1: there's just there's a whole another uh concern that I
Speaker 1: have to Um. I mean, I was, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: if it kills all the do you have more oaks
Speaker 1: you know what to do with? Yeah, but it's not
Speaker 1: gonna as Brian was saying, it's not gonna Well, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna kill all the would be a nice problem
Speaker 1: to have. Yeah, well yeah, sure, it would be too
Speaker 1: many oak trees to be a nice problem they have.
Speaker 1: But um, and so I was feeling like, as I said,
Speaker 1: I'm on the County Deer Advisory Committee, and one of
Speaker 1: the statements that I made during our meetings was, I
Speaker 1: feel like we have an obligation in Richeal County, especially uh,
Speaker 1: you know here a little further north, And I talked
Speaker 1: with folks around here about this that you know, we're
Speaker 1: on the edge of it now, on the edge of
Speaker 1: the spread. We have an obligation to I feel we
Speaker 1: have an obligation at least to do what we can
Speaker 1: to slow the spread of it down. And how do
Speaker 1: you do that? Well, there have been these conflicting and
Speaker 1: it was actually something I wanted to ask you about.
Speaker 1: One is population control, but then the other one's demographic control,
Speaker 1: because the uh, the younger bucks are the ones who
Speaker 1: are more apt to spread it. Um, at least that's
Speaker 1: what I'm reading like in Samuel's research. Um, So, I
Speaker 1: guess I don't have any I don't have. I'm not
Speaker 1: leading up to a question so much as I'm just
Speaker 1: making is there a reason to believe that lowering a
Speaker 1: deer population by some factor whatever slow as the spread?
Speaker 1: Is that just an assumption? We're making some assumptions there. Um,
Speaker 1: I can try and address that a little bit. So
Speaker 1: if we have a population that has prevalence, and we
Speaker 1: may wave a magic want and we make half a
Speaker 1: those deer disappear today, what's the prevalence in the remaining population? Right?
Speaker 1: Because we're not selectively taking. That's why one of the
Speaker 1: reasons it's so challenging to try and manage c w D.
Speaker 1: We don't have good vaccines, we don't have any therapeutics
Speaker 1: that you could, you know, give a dearer dose of penicillin,
Speaker 1: it would make CWD go away. And they don't stand
Speaker 1: out when you look at a deer standing in the
Speaker 1: pasture or in the woods unless it's at that very
Speaker 1: late state of disease where it's obviously positive. We have
Speaker 1: no idea whether it's whether it's CWD positive or negative.
Speaker 1: So when you shoot a deer, you don't know. So
Speaker 1: that's why this disease is. One of the reasons it's
Speaker 1: so challenging is because we don't have affective management tools. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you would say say there, well, then why lower
Speaker 1: deer population? Right, doesn't make any sense because we're not
Speaker 1: impacting prev bents or the proportion of animals positive. But
Speaker 1: I think it's very important to lower to keep those
Speaker 1: dear populations low. Number one is for oaks. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure number one is oaks, but oaks are in
Speaker 1: the equation. Oaks are definitely like equation um, you know,
Speaker 1: agricultural crop depredation is another. Uh, the number of deer
Speaker 1: vehicle collisions is another, and disease is another as well.
Speaker 1: So let's take that population that we waived our magic
Speaker 1: wand and we made half of them go away, we
Speaker 1: still have ten percent prevalence. But the key to me
Speaker 1: is we only have half as many positives as we
Speaker 1: had before we waived our magic wand with half of
Speaker 1: those positives, we have less animals actively shedding infectious agents
Speaker 1: out into the environment where it's going to persist for
Speaker 1: years to decades. We have fewer animals which are able
Speaker 1: to actively transmit disease to other deer. And the thing
Speaker 1: you keep on before was that spursal. Okay, if we
Speaker 1: have fewer CWD positive deer out there on the landscape,
Speaker 1: we have fewer animals that might decide to pick up
Speaker 1: and move their home ten or twenty miles down the road,
Speaker 1: moving disease with them. So that to me is the
Speaker 1: argument while lower dear populations, lowering dear populations is good
Speaker 1: if theoretically, if we took dear populations down to some
Speaker 1: very very astoundingly low level, we may be able to
Speaker 1: break or interrupt the disease transmission cycle. And then we
Speaker 1: would actually reduce prevalence. But that's taking deer down to
Speaker 1: you know, scarce, you know, five deer per square mile
Speaker 1: not probably not going to do it. We'd have to
Speaker 1: take deer down to where interaction. We'd have to take
Speaker 1: it down to areas where deer would be rare in
Speaker 1: order to interrupt the transmission cycle. But like I said,
Speaker 1: those very positive benefits of taking dear populations low. Lowering
Speaker 1: the absolute number of CW positive deer on the landscape
Speaker 1: has very definite benefits. Um when in this part of
Speaker 1: the world we assume we know as dear biologists and
Speaker 1: landowners who have dear um hunters who spend a lot
Speaker 1: of time with deer, we know quite a bit about
Speaker 1: dear behavior. So who is the most likely candidate to
Speaker 1: disperse to take a ten or twenty mile or even
Speaker 1: up to a hundred mile hike. Young males when at
Speaker 1: what time? How old are they one year old, twelve months?
Speaker 1: When mama gives them the boot, you know they've hung
Speaker 1: around with mom pretty much their first year of life.
Speaker 1: When that dough gives them a boot, before you know,
Speaker 1: she has her next set of fawns, um she'll she'll
Speaker 1: give those um those year links twelve months of old
Speaker 1: animals of boot we'll start kicking out literally and a
Speaker 1: and a female fawn or female yearling will likely set
Speaker 1: up her home range adjacent to where mom is. Okay,
Speaker 1: more often than not, you'll find her place pretty close
Speaker 1: to mom, keeping that family group together. The young male,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, he needs to go out and
Speaker 1: find a place and so that might be close by,
Speaker 1: it might be quite a ways away. Like any of
Speaker 1: these stories you hear, were some animal turns up three
Speaker 1: states over right, it's a it's a it's a young guy.
Speaker 1: It's a young man, a Latin line that comes from
Speaker 1: South Dakota and shows up in Wisconsin. Yeah, with a
Speaker 1: radio color or like elk it turns up Missouri. Or
Speaker 1: wolf out of the up that gets shot outside of
Speaker 1: guy's chicken Cooper, Missouri. Now those can do it too.
Speaker 1: But when you think of the predominant animal that disperses
Speaker 1: as that twelve month old male. So if that twelve
Speaker 1: month old male has c w D and decides to
Speaker 1: go ten or twenty miles or thirty miles before it
Speaker 1: finds its new home, that could be you know, the
Speaker 1: animal that moves disease. So yeah, I don't think we were.
Speaker 1: We didn't quite get into it. But we think about
Speaker 1: how disease moves, how CWD moves, and we have that
Speaker 1: clearly at that dear to dear slow diffusion, diffusive type
Speaker 1: movement with an odd deer that picks up and goes
Speaker 1: a long way. Case in pointed in the state of Wyoming,
Speaker 1: they had a mule deer I think it was a
Speaker 1: dough that was CWD positive, had a radio collar. She
Speaker 1: went over a little over a hundred miles as the
Speaker 1: crow flies. Yeah, they lost her and then found her
Speaker 1: again with the UM with UM with a fixed wing
Speaker 1: aircraft with a with an antenna on it. And she
Speaker 1: had moved c w D herself and c w D
Speaker 1: infectious agent over a hundred miles as the crow flies.
Speaker 1: Now how far did she actually go? Okay, so we
Speaker 1: think of that slow to do they have like what
Speaker 1: just that was her personality type? She's no explanation for it. No,
Speaker 1: no explanation I'm aware with of you know why she
Speaker 1: did that, but she did and periodically Yale, you'll have
Speaker 1: animals in they had a dough here um in the
Speaker 1: early years of c w D when they were doing
Speaker 1: a collar and follower study, capturing the animals, putting telemetry
Speaker 1: collars on them and following. Had one that went from
Speaker 1: outside of Mount Horror just outside of Rockford and then
Speaker 1: she turned her on and came back. Apparently she didn't
Speaker 1: like Rockford, so but h so, anyway, that's the that
Speaker 1: first mechanism is that dear to dear to deer. Then
Speaker 1: the other one, the big one that we had can
Speaker 1: have something to do with. We might not be able
Speaker 1: to do a lot about dear to deer other than
Speaker 1: lowering populations trying to kill c w D positive deer.
Speaker 1: But the other broad category is human assisted movement. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's a big that we haven't really touched on, and
Speaker 1: there's multiple possibilities there. One is gonna be the deer farms, okay,
Speaker 1: the captive servid industry. That industry is built on movement
Speaker 1: of animals, moving them from place A to place B.
Speaker 1: In the United States, there've been over eighty game farms
Speaker 1: that have been detected CWD positive. Okay. In Canada there's
Speaker 1: been just under a hundred elk farms now that where
Speaker 1: CWD has been detected. So is this a risk factor? Absolutely? Oh,
Speaker 1: there are some there are some mainstream wildlife groups who
Speaker 1: have proposed a band and I'm not talking like like
Speaker 1: radical and virals, but i mean like hunter based wildlife
Speaker 1: groups that proposed the idea that we should ban interstate
Speaker 1: deer traffic or interstate deer traffic right. And some states,
Speaker 1: some states have actually uh, some states have never had
Speaker 1: a captive serving industry lawful. Uh. There's been a few
Speaker 1: states that have through citizen initiatives lad to legislative action
Speaker 1: to get rid of the industry. There is oversight um
Speaker 1: to a degree, there's over site on interstate movement of animals.
Speaker 1: But this is one risk factor now and we bring
Speaker 1: it home to Wisconsin. Here, we've got um, We've got
Speaker 1: three game farm shooter facilities or you know, whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call them, whatever you want to call them,
Speaker 1: fenced operation. There's a lot of them in Wisconsin anyway.
Speaker 1: There's three of them in the in the northern part
Speaker 1: of the state of Wisconsin where cw D has been detected.
Speaker 1: And the typical, the historical, the the response from management community,
Speaker 1: the agriculture or natural resources is to depopulate that facility
Speaker 1: to stamp out disease kill all the animals in it, right,
Speaker 1: So we now have three in the northern part of
Speaker 1: the state where they have not been depopulated. There are
Speaker 1: you know, these facilities are allowed to stay in business
Speaker 1: um restock animals, so multiple CWD positives. These facilities are
Speaker 1: in deer country, so we have wild deer on the
Speaker 1: other side of the fence. So some dude can pretend,
Speaker 1: can pay to pretend to go hunting. That's it. So
Speaker 1: he like some guy that can't stomach the idea that
Speaker 1: you'd have to go out and try and maybe cope
Speaker 1: with failure. Would be like, I could just pay some
Speaker 1: money and be guaranteed success because what I'm interested in, hey,
Speaker 1: by the inch, is getting what I paid for, getting
Speaker 1: what I came for. SAE. That's probably true. I probably
Speaker 1: shouldn't comment on that, but these are the These very
Speaker 1: definitely pose a transmission risk and epidemiological risk to free
Speaker 1: ranging deer on the other side of the fence. And
Speaker 1: so these are when I talk to people in the
Speaker 1: northern part of the state, they said, well, what are
Speaker 1: the risks. Well, the risks are you know, things we
Speaker 1: talked about dear to deer to deer movement and then
Speaker 1: anthropogenic are human assisted movement. One of those is the
Speaker 1: captive deer industry and the existence of these positive facilities
Speaker 1: where if a fence goes down or there's nose to
Speaker 1: nose contact through the fence, that disease could leak out
Speaker 1: of that facility. But another one we haven't talked about,
Speaker 1: movement of movement, movement of carcasses. Oh well, then there's
Speaker 1: the third that I wanted to ask about, because there's
Speaker 1: some of these facilities and you can go out and
Speaker 1: watch the YouTube videos at these facilities and they're put
Speaker 1: on by the captive captive servant industry about how here's
Speaker 1: how we do our deer. And they run them through
Speaker 1: just like a run cattle through a shoot, and they're
Speaker 1: taking urine, and they're taking uh, you know, any kind
Speaker 1: of glace for for deer attractive. And now they're selling
Speaker 1: that stuff in a bottle. And I mean, you go
Speaker 1: into any sporting goods store and you see this stuff,
Speaker 1: are there any restricts? Well, I guess you would know
Speaker 1: that necessarily or or may don't want to comment, But
Speaker 1: I started thinking about that. So now I'd go into
Speaker 1: the you know, Bob sporting goods store or whatever, and
Speaker 1: by a bottle of do urine in astrius and take
Speaker 1: that out and you know, spray it around and possibly
Speaker 1: spread am I that's not risk. Isn't a risk? Yes,
Speaker 1: it's a risk. Is it a numerically large risk? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to say. It's probably the facility. Sure, let's
Speaker 1: go back to I'd like to come back to that.
Speaker 1: Let me roll up the carcass manager, push you, because
Speaker 1: I think that's a significant one. So you know, come back.
Speaker 1: We've got you know that slow, dear to dear animal
Speaker 1: movement that it's it's hard to change that one. But
Speaker 1: then we have human facilitated disease movement. We talked about
Speaker 1: it originally with raccoon rabies. We moved raccoons with rabies
Speaker 1: or round. So we move deer with c w D around.
Speaker 1: We moved elk with CWD to South Korea, very clear.
Speaker 1: So the industry has a role. But carcasses are another one.
Speaker 1: So let's say you go out hunting in Wyoming in
Speaker 1: Converse County and you killed the mule deer buck of
Speaker 1: a lifetime. Yeah, and you know, five year old deer
Speaker 1: and like I said, it's coin flip. Say he's got
Speaker 1: c w D. So you bring that carcass, you know,
Speaker 1: back to your domicile, and you butcher yourself because that's
Speaker 1: what you've always done. Or you've got a few hundred
Speaker 1: acres here, you know there's there's parts left over when
Speaker 1: you're done butchering. You've got the spinal column, you've got
Speaker 1: the skull, unless it's all the parts where where infectious
Speaker 1: agent is concentrated. What do you do with that waste material?
Speaker 1: Do you dump it out on the back forty? If
Speaker 1: you do that, does that constitute a very real risk
Speaker 1: of introducing infectious agent to a naive, susceptible host population.
Speaker 1: The answer is yes. So many states and many of
Speaker 1: your localities have introduced bands on carcass movement. Minnesota's done it, um,
Speaker 1: you know, Michigan's working on one. We've had some some
Speaker 1: carcass movement regulations. Processed meat and a clean skull cap,
Speaker 1: but but leave the rest behind type thing. And so
Speaker 1: that's a very real risk that has been dealt with
Speaker 1: by regulatory means. But regulations don't cure everything. We need
Speaker 1: education to go along with it. Because if you went
Speaker 1: to Colorado and or Wyoming and killed that big deer
Speaker 1: and brought at home, you might have not know that
Speaker 1: you were violating the law. So we have to have
Speaker 1: education to go along with it. And and and the
Speaker 1: answer is to that, if you know, if you're going
Speaker 1: to do that, make sure that those carcass parts don't
Speaker 1: end up out on the back forty, that they go
Speaker 1: to a landfill or end up underground where any infectious
Speaker 1: agent is not available to be picked up, ingested, or
Speaker 1: inhaled by another deer. So that one's easy if we
Speaker 1: know what we're doing and we pay attention to it.
Speaker 1: So the carcass movement bands um have have a place.
Speaker 1: But when we when we boil it down, is there
Speaker 1: a way to appropriately manage carcasses? The answer is yes,
Speaker 1: make sure it ends up underground. You know what's interesting
Speaker 1: about those bands is that it's never like Colorado saying
Speaker 1: don't export. Yeah, nobody hasn't. When you guys leave, leave
Speaker 1: all the bones and the skulls here. Don't bring from
Speaker 1: Colorado here, right, It's an important people have it like
Speaker 1: at that shot out of here. Well, I can remember
Speaker 1: my dad going out west hunting and they would bring
Speaker 1: the whole the mule, deer, the elk, whatever, you know.
Speaker 1: They packed them with ice and brought him back I remember,
Speaker 1: you know, butchering him at the facility here. Where did
Speaker 1: those bones end up in it? I used to be
Speaker 1: a little bit of a conspiracy theorist in this whole thing. Oh,
Speaker 1: there had to be some guys down there who brought
Speaker 1: in among those big monster bucks from someplace to improve
Speaker 1: their genetics. Well that sounds crazy, doesn't it. So they
Speaker 1: let it out down there and in the Mount Horribor area,
Speaker 1: and so it's yeah, well they don't shoot the deer
Speaker 1: with the tag and it's here, you know that kind
Speaker 1: of thing um or or it was a facility, there
Speaker 1: was something like that, And then it could have been innoculous,
Speaker 1: just just some old boy like my dad who you know,
Speaker 1: bringing is is and and that's what they did, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just what we did. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people that would like to pin it on your dad.
Speaker 1: Well it's it's unlikely but that anyone individual. But if
Speaker 1: we're looking for theories about how disease got to a
Speaker 1: place like Wisconsin, nine hundred miles from the nearest infected
Speaker 1: area in the state of Colorado, we have those possible explanations.
Speaker 1: Was it dear to deer to deer it's not very
Speaker 1: likely that the deer from Colorado got up and walked
Speaker 1: across the Mississippi and came to Mount horrib to settle down.
Speaker 1: So then we start looking at the other possibilities. Could
Speaker 1: it have been human assisted movement, either of live deer
Speaker 1: to release out in that area. Yeah, it's possibility, pretty
Speaker 1: hard to prove at this point in time. Could it.
Speaker 1: Could it have been a hunter who inadvertently brought a
Speaker 1: positive back and you know, and carcass parts ended up
Speaker 1: out on the back. Forty Absolutely, that's possible. Could it
Speaker 1: have been other materials? Um, it's real interesting that that
Speaker 1: prions themselves, It turns out bind to some soil particles.
Speaker 1: They bind the clay particles much better than they do
Speaker 1: to sand particles. And and that's when we think about
Speaker 1: that deer who's shedding infectious agent out into the environment. Well,
Speaker 1: when it rains, it all out of wash away in
Speaker 1: to the into the river and will end up in
Speaker 1: the Mississippi. And it ought to be a problem down
Speaker 1: in the in the Gulf Delta, right, But it turns
Speaker 1: out the preons themselves can bind very tightly. They form
Speaker 1: a chemical bond with some soil particles. Which helps explain
Speaker 1: why they don't wash away and why they remain in
Speaker 1: the environment because they can be bound to soil particles
Speaker 1: the road like sand. Now from a from a disease standpoint,
Speaker 1: there's another part of that that it turns out when
Speaker 1: preon protein molecules are bound to clay particles, they are
Speaker 1: more infectious than they were on their own. It turns
Speaker 1: out that their infectivity is increased nearly seven hundred fold
Speaker 1: in that bound state. Okay, and we've seen where you know,
Speaker 1: a cow's stomach is a pretty harsh place, and you
Speaker 1: would think that if you put preons into a cow's
Speaker 1: stomach that's four chambered stomach, that it would degrade. And
Speaker 1: actually it does degrade. Preon is quite a bit. It
Speaker 1: lowers the tighter. But if these preons are bound to
Speaker 1: soil particles, it increases their infectivity. So maybe these soil
Speaker 1: particles help act as chaperones through the system to get
Speaker 1: in so they're bound tightly and they're more infectious. Now
Speaker 1: you've talked about the possibility of a bottle of urine. Okay.
Speaker 1: So urine is collected at captive deer facilities okay um
Speaker 1: or captive elk facilities where they have greats under the
Speaker 1: floor and the deer you know, urinate and so the
Speaker 1: it's it's collected up in theory, you know, process purified
Speaker 1: to some degree um and aggregated together, and then sooner
Speaker 1: or later it ends up on a sporting good shop
Speaker 1: or you can buy it online. Things like that. For
Speaker 1: a lure, you know, doan estrius. So there's currently a
Speaker 1: great debate going on and some states have taken proactive
Speaker 1: action and they've said, hey, don't use urine based lures
Speaker 1: in our states. Several states have done that because they
Speaker 1: identify that there is a risk, a small risk, but
Speaker 1: there is a risk. And if we've learned anything in Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: if you don't have c w D, now you want
Speaker 1: to keep it that way. And so other states have
Speaker 1: paid attention. They're putting in strong protective measures. Don't bring
Speaker 1: carcasses into my state, don't bring live deer into my state,
Speaker 1: and don't use urine based lures in my state. And
Speaker 1: that's a decision that a state makes on their own. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, so a state, even if you just look
Speaker 1: at the state's function as like protecting you know, even
Speaker 1: from the most conservative thing, facilitating business you're protecting the
Speaker 1: deer hunting industry, protecting the bigger industry than the piss industry,
Speaker 1: and it's a much bigger industry than the captive deer industry.
Speaker 1: Wisconsin makes way more money selling deer license and having
Speaker 1: people hunt wild deer than they do being a than
Speaker 1: they do being a service for the captive deering. So
Speaker 1: science has shown pretty clearly that you know, a deer
Speaker 1: with c w D is shedding infectious agent in their urine,
Speaker 1: but it's pretty dilute, okay. So the argument is that
Speaker 1: if you have a bottle, you know, a one once
Speaker 1: bottle of deer urine, it's not enough. Even if it
Speaker 1: did have CWD preons in it, it's likely not enough
Speaker 1: to transmit disease. That okay opinion from the industry or
Speaker 1: from science. By it it's promoted by it's promoted. That's
Speaker 1: that's promoted by the industry right now. Um, that the
Speaker 1: bottle of urine has it's it's negligible risk, okay. But
Speaker 1: one of the things, So we just talked about what
Speaker 1: happens to a preon protein when it binds to soil particles,
Speaker 1: and that really hasn't been entered into the equation. So
Speaker 1: how do people use dealer? I mean, some of them
Speaker 1: are gonna squirt it into cotton balls in the top
Speaker 1: of an old thirty five millimiter film cam canister case,
Speaker 1: hang it from a branch of a of a tree.
Speaker 1: Others are gonna spray it all over, either a mock
Speaker 1: or a real scrape, which is kind of a deer magnet,
Speaker 1: so lots of animals come there. So now, let's just
Speaker 1: suppose that a bottle of urine did have preons in it,
Speaker 1: which wasn't enough if we squirted into deer's mouth, it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be enough to give that dear c w D.
Speaker 1: But now we're squirting it on the ground where those
Speaker 1: prens might bind to soil particles, and a deer might
Speaker 1: lick that soil and ingest that preon protein that's now
Speaker 1: bound to clay particles. The the infectivities. I think the
Speaker 1: paper says SI I was rounding to seven hundred, So
Speaker 1: that hasn't been entered into into the equation yet. Is
Speaker 1: that enough? I don't know. I can't honestly, I can't
Speaker 1: answer that question. Is that enough of an increase in
Speaker 1: concentration where that bottle of urine constitutes a risk. I
Speaker 1: can't answer that question, but a question I can answer
Speaker 1: that if you are a state agency whose responsibility is
Speaker 1: to look out for the welfare of that dear resource
Speaker 1: for current and future generations of people in your state,
Speaker 1: if you've seen the impacts of c w D and
Speaker 1: you believe you don't have it, and you want to
Speaker 1: do everything you can to keep c w D out
Speaker 1: of your state, is it a reasonable thing for that
Speaker 1: state to promulgate rules to say, hey, we'd prefer if
Speaker 1: you didn't use urine based lures in your in our state.
Speaker 1: I think it's very reasonable that a state making that decision,
Speaker 1: they've looked at the information, they're making a calculated decision
Speaker 1: on the level of risk they're willing to incur on
Speaker 1: behalf of the people of their state. How can you
Speaker 1: argue with that? And if and if an overwhelming body
Speaker 1: of evidence were to emerge that contradicts that they could
Speaker 1: walk back lift the band? Aren't there a synthetic based
Speaker 1: lures that that people use? And I don't know. I don't.
Speaker 1: I gave up on that stuff. I figure if I
Speaker 1: can't sitting in a tree stand, if I can't have
Speaker 1: a deer walk up close to me. You know, probably
Speaker 1: having lures isn't the way I want to go. Well,
Speaker 1: folks will try all a man or stuff. All you
Speaker 1: have to do concluding thoughts, I are just smoking cigarettes
Speaker 1: something your stand brings him in. Well, I know that. Well,
Speaker 1: Doug Buckman during um there's special has special properties of
Speaker 1: his own urine, which is very enticing to dear yawn scrape. Yes, photo,
Speaker 1: he's a lot of photo documentary evidence that the dog
Speaker 1: buck Man urine is the most potent lure. But I
Speaker 1: don't know, I want I'd have to test your ear
Speaker 1: and make sure it's not positive. Yeah, yeah, he was
Speaker 1: actually been sending a urin around from the c w
Speaker 1: D area. You gotta concluding thought, I've I've got I've
Speaker 1: got a few. If you humor me, give me a
Speaker 1: couple of minutes here, because it's kind of boiled down.
Speaker 1: I get asked all the time, what can I do?
Speaker 1: What can people do about CWD? And people and individual
Speaker 1: hunters can't cure c w D. They're not gonna create
Speaker 1: the vaccine things like that, so but what can people do? Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things I think is really important is
Speaker 1: to be knowledgeable about really what CWD is. It's things
Speaker 1: that we've talked about today. Now, if you go to
Speaker 1: some sportsmen's clubs, or go to hunting camps, or go
Speaker 1: to a tavern and you get into a conversation about CWD,
Speaker 1: you'll hear some things about CWD. They'll make you scratch
Speaker 1: your head. Could really and and so alternative points of
Speaker 1: view are out there. There's places on the on the
Speaker 1: Worldwide Web that you know, if you tripped looked up
Speaker 1: facts about CWD or the truth about CWD, you might
Speaker 1: hear some things that are vastly different than what we've
Speaker 1: heard today. A good Google uh tip is never type
Speaker 1: in the truth about the truth about X. It's a
Speaker 1: good way to get the not truth. Ye. I think
Speaker 1: it's really important if people have a better understanding of
Speaker 1: what c w D is, what the risks are, what
Speaker 1: the potential outcomes down the road are. That they'll care
Speaker 1: about c w D, but they need to learn about it.
Speaker 1: They need to get accurate information. So if you're gonna Google,
Speaker 1: go to scholar dot Google dot com and enter in
Speaker 1: c w D and pre on disease, and there you'll
Speaker 1: get you'll get all your links will be peer reviewed
Speaker 1: scientific publications so learn about c w D and and
Speaker 1: us CWT kind of the way we're doing here today.
Speaker 1: I think that's really really important. Another thing is obviously
Speaker 1: going to be working with government. If you don't like
Speaker 1: what you see, if you don't like the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, captive servant operations with c w D are
Speaker 1: still out there on the landscape, haven't been depopulated, work
Speaker 1: with government. If you don't like the way your natural
Speaker 1: resource agency is responding to c w D, work with government.
Speaker 1: It's not gonna do much good to sit in hunting
Speaker 1: camp and, you know, gripe about the d n R.
Speaker 1: That's it's really not effective. It might be fun, it
Speaker 1: might be entertaining, but it's really not effective. So work
Speaker 1: with government at the appropriate levels and recognize and engage
Speaker 1: and recognize that the d NR is has you know,
Speaker 1: Natural Resource Agency and Agricultural Agency are working with a
Speaker 1: set of laws created by legislators, and so quite often
Speaker 1: the d n R is not the appropriate level. If
Speaker 1: you want to seek change, you're gonna have to talk
Speaker 1: to the just is. He's talks a lot about people
Speaker 1: who are blaming the d n R, blaming the State
Speaker 1: Fish and Game Agency for things that are coming from
Speaker 1: the legislature, right, the DNR has to work within the
Speaker 1: statutory guidelines provided by the legislation and those people are
Speaker 1: voted in and they are responsible to uh to their constituents.
Speaker 1: So working with government is a big one. Another way
Speaker 1: of working with government, though, is is promoting surveillance. You know,
Speaker 1: we've seen in in state after state there's fewer dollars
Speaker 1: available for surveillance. So the Wisconsin d n R has
Speaker 1: surveillance has gone down. Many other states surveillance has gone
Speaker 1: down because they don't have the money to do it.
Speaker 1: So the only way we learn more about distribution and
Speaker 1: prevalence is CWD is to do surveillance. So that's another
Speaker 1: way you can have an impact by talking to government.
Speaker 1: Another one's promoting research things, you know, epidemiological research, learning
Speaker 1: about how disease moves, learning about more about the risk
Speaker 1: to humans, learning about the risk to domestic livestock, learning
Speaker 1: about the possibilities of vaccines. We do that through research,
Speaker 1: and the amount of money available for for disease research
Speaker 1: has diminished greatly over time. So there's places where you
Speaker 1: can work with government. But now even more what can
Speaker 1: a hunter do well? We talked about it you can
Speaker 1: hunt deer. You know, they say, I believe that. You know,
Speaker 1: taking deer offul landscape, reducing densities is good from a
Speaker 1: whole host of reasons. In addition to disease management. If
Speaker 1: you feed and bait, those are probably not good things.
Speaker 1: Those could be considered risk factors. So the analogy they're
Speaker 1: a great one is if you have young kids and
Speaker 1: you put them in daycare. If all the kids in
Speaker 1: daycare were healthy, daycare would be healthy and your kid
Speaker 1: would never come home and give you some illness that
Speaker 1: you didn't want. But that's not the reality. So one
Speaker 1: little kid will go into take care with the cold
Speaker 1: or the flu, spread it around to everybody else, and
Speaker 1: then those children go home to their respective families. So
Speaker 1: now let's move that into the deer world, where if
Speaker 1: you're baiting out there on the landscape, you're putting corn
Speaker 1: or some other attractant out there. If all the deer
Speaker 1: are perfectly healthy, it's not a bad idea, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: there's no risk of disease transmission. But now let's put
Speaker 1: a little bovine tuberculosis in the system. Let's put a
Speaker 1: little bit of chronic wasting disease into the system. And
Speaker 1: now if we have one sick animal coming into that
Speaker 1: pile of bait or that attractant, there, they shed infectious
Speaker 1: agent into that bait, changing saliva and breath exactly. So
Speaker 1: multiple animals are coming in, so it elevates the risk
Speaker 1: of disease transmission. So feeding and baiting, anything that artificially
Speaker 1: congregates animals in association with disease enhances their risk. Carcass management,
Speaker 1: there's a big one we talked about. So if you're
Speaker 1: gonna go hunting in you know, if I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: hunting in in Iowa County, Wisconsin, and I live in
Speaker 1: northern Wisconsin, or I live in Michigan or Minnesota, if
Speaker 1: I can get it across the border, if I butcher
Speaker 1: that animal myself, make sure that the carcass parts end
Speaker 1: up not in reach of a deer, not on the
Speaker 1: back forty preferably at a landfill. That's a solid thing
Speaker 1: that hunters can do to help reduce the chance of
Speaker 1: of CWD loving bearing on your own how deep uh,
Speaker 1: probably deep enough where a raccoon is not going to
Speaker 1: dig it up and expose it back back to the
Speaker 1: deer um. Now, some people might might go, oh, you
Speaker 1: shouldn't have said that something like that, because there is
Speaker 1: obviously always a chance that effluent would percolate down get
Speaker 1: into groundwater. But that mantra back from the seventies dilution
Speaker 1: is the solution to pollution probably applies here. That getting
Speaker 1: those carcass materials out of where they are a bile
Speaker 1: available to healthy, naive, susceptible deer. That's what's key. Um,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to get technical, if you want to,
Speaker 1: if you really want to stop pre on movement, you
Speaker 1: go to a landfill that uses a clay liner system. Remember,
Speaker 1: clay binds pre on particles. What turns out, if you
Speaker 1: put a clay liner under a landfill, you will stop
Speaker 1: pre on movements so it won't go into the effluent
Speaker 1: that then gets discharged out onto the farmer's fields. Okay,
Speaker 1: so there's there's science behind that. I think the last
Speaker 1: thing that people can do to learn more about is if,
Speaker 1: especially if you hunt in an area where c w
Speaker 1: D is, get your carcasses tested. I mean, that's in
Speaker 1: line with recommendations coming from the World Health Organization in
Speaker 1: the Centers for Disease Control or the surrounding area YEP.
Speaker 1: If you're if you're close to disease, consider having your
Speaker 1: deer tested. Now, I'm not going to tell you not
Speaker 1: to eat it. That's your personal decision based on your
Speaker 1: own capacity to tolerate risk. But you've learned about c
Speaker 1: w D, you're doing your best not to contribute to
Speaker 1: movement of CEDA be a D. Getting that dear tested
Speaker 1: makes a makes a you know, kind of common sense.
Speaker 1: So so those are the kinds of things like I say,
Speaker 1: when I walk into an audience and people say, well,
Speaker 1: what can we do? That's what I always try and
Speaker 1: close with, here's the concrete things you can do. You
Speaker 1: can't fix it, but you can help. That's good stuff, man.
Speaker 1: And for most people to test it, it's their UM,
Speaker 1: local Game and Fish or Department Natural Resource. Talk to
Speaker 1: your natural resource the agency UM if they are not
Speaker 1: able to accommodate it, and I believe most can, but
Speaker 1: if they're not, you could talk to a veterinarian. You know,
Speaker 1: a local veterinarian who has the ability to collect this
Speaker 1: tissue samples for a hunter and then submit them to
Speaker 1: a state diagnostic laboratory. So it's it's doable any place
Speaker 1: here in the Cheese State. What do you guys call
Speaker 1: this state Wisconsin? Yeah? I mean you know, I was
Speaker 1: trying to be like a bad writer who uses like
Speaker 1: little synonyms here and there. So let's just this one
Speaker 1: year old crooner like that kind of line, uh Wisconsin. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But what is this? Help me out? Man? Here in
Speaker 1: America's dairy land. Uh, it's free. Yeah, And I would
Speaker 1: say this I know in our area. UM over at
Speaker 1: rock Bridge, at the rock Bridge Store, an old and
Speaker 1: dear friend of mine, Sharon Miller UH is one of
Speaker 1: the testing UH facilities, and her son has gone through
Speaker 1: the training and takes out the lymph notes and does
Speaker 1: all that work. It's real simple. You can just drop
Speaker 1: the head off obviously. I you've got a big old
Speaker 1: monster buck and stuff that you're gonna want to get
Speaker 1: mount takes. But they'll they'll work with you on that.
Speaker 1: And then, UM, so that's on this side of the county,
Speaker 1: or it's in just a few miles this way, but
Speaker 1: then a few miles the other way over in Sauk
Speaker 1: County in Bear Valley, which is one of the high
Speaker 1: prevalence areas. UH A live look taxidermy over there. Bill
Speaker 1: you can't think of Bill's last name right now, but
Speaker 1: he mounted the standard. Um he also uh is a
Speaker 1: testing for not a testing facility, but a drop off facility,
Speaker 1: and they too will take out the limp nodes and
Speaker 1: do that whole thing. Yeah, bring the whole damn head down,
Speaker 1: fill out a piece of paper, and then it's your
Speaker 1: Your results were sent uh sent to you. So I'll
Speaker 1: give my concluding thought. How's that hit it? Man? Uh?
Speaker 1: I feel better uh listening to you today, and I
Speaker 1: thank very thank you very much for that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I feel like I've I've been spending a lot of
Speaker 1: time learning about it, uh as much as I can.
Speaker 1: And then there is a lot of misinformation and uh,
Speaker 1: but most of what I have read you um explained
Speaker 1: today and some of the ways that I didn't quite
Speaker 1: get it and then boiling it down, which I think
Speaker 1: is so important. Uh. And so this has been a
Speaker 1: really important discussion for me. And like you're an Oak,
Speaker 1: that you're an Oak guy, if that makes a big
Speaker 1: difference too. So I saw Doug lose a big bet
Speaker 1: on Oaks one time. That was true, but I'm not
Speaker 1: sure about the person who decided. I'm still not happy
Speaker 1: with how we decided that. Um. Yes, it's ten years ago.
Speaker 1: I need to hear this. How many there's an oak
Speaker 1: tree drop, you know, it's one of those that was
Speaker 1: one of those. Uh so, and I think you gave
Speaker 1: you reinforced much of what I'm trying to promote. One
Speaker 1: of the things I did want to clarify though, it
Speaker 1: in the state of Wisconsin that the Department of Natural Resources, Yes,
Speaker 1: enacts with the legislature. Uh. In most cases, legislature tells
Speaker 1: them to UM. But deer farms are under the purview
Speaker 1: of the Department Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection.
Speaker 1: It's farming, not It's a common problem. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: those two things are very ins two agencies are seemed
Speaker 1: to be very different and in it it the relationship
Speaker 1: varies depending on what state you're in. In some states,
Speaker 1: the Agriculture and the Natural Resource Agency work very very
Speaker 1: closely together, and in others they don't work so closely together.
Speaker 1: And in other states they have diametrically opposed opinions about
Speaker 1: you know, how management should do. So Yeah, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: multiple um. Some states, Uh, management of the captive industry
Speaker 1: is under the Natural Resource Agency. Uh, there's it's under agriculture.
Speaker 1: It just depends on where you go. Man. Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: thank you very much. This is yeah, fabulous for you guys.
Speaker 1: Are welcome. This was enjoyable. Um my concluder, Brian, thank
Speaker 1: you for like, uh being a federal researcher. Man. Uh,
Speaker 1: there have been better times to be a federal scientist
Speaker 1: than to bring it back. We're gonna bring it back
Speaker 1: to where it's like where you guys get the credit
Speaker 1: you deserve. It's intriguing because you're able to look at stuff.
Speaker 1: You're able to look at stuff and look at problems
Speaker 1: that were gonna be facing down the road, and oftentimes
Speaker 1: private industry just isn't on their radar yet. And you
Speaker 1: need to have some people who are able to exercise
Speaker 1: a level of curiosity and look out at what might
Speaker 1: be coming down the road and have the funding necessary
Speaker 1: to do so, to to fill in some of the
Speaker 1: blanks for us and give it us a sense of
Speaker 1: what's coming. Because it's just we would still be nowhere
Speaker 1: on this if we were relying on private industry. Who
Speaker 1: the hell is gonna put money into this? Well, go
Speaker 1: back to the case of plague in prairie dogs and
Speaker 1: blackfooted ferrets. It took over a decade to develop a
Speaker 1: vaccine candidate and to be able to then create an
Speaker 1: oral formulation in order to solve an endangered species problem. Them.
Speaker 1: Where is the incentive outside of government research facilities to
Speaker 1: have the wherewithal and the capability to be able to
Speaker 1: do that and the patients to be able to do it.
Speaker 1: There is no place else. So there's value. I believe
Speaker 1: there's definitely value, UM, and success stories are not that common,
Speaker 1: but you have to work on these problems. UM. If
Speaker 1: we value our natural resources in our wildlife, we're posed
Speaker 1: today with more diseases than ever before. UM. Emerging infectious
Speaker 1: diseases are are rampant out there on the landscape, and
Speaker 1: if we don't learn about them more, we don't we
Speaker 1: will not learn about those diseases, we will not learn
Speaker 1: about what caused those diseases, and we will not maybe
Speaker 1: most importantly, learn how to effectively deal with, to mitigate
Speaker 1: or manage those diseases. So I appreciate the UH. I
Speaker 1: appreciate the compliment. Yeah, Well, UM, I feel you know,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm indebted to you and and for for the
Speaker 1: lifestyle I have in the natural resources I enjoy. UM.
Speaker 1: I feel indebted to people like you and generations past
Speaker 1: who committed themselves to a professional occupation of you know,
Speaker 1: working on natural resources. It's enjoyable. Thank you, Thanks for
Speaker 1: joining us. You're welcome. I appreciate the opportunity. And Dog,
Speaker 1: thanks for wholesness at your house, manure family, even if
Speaker 1: this might be the last time the family farmers, even
Speaker 1: though I just met a new person to day. Where
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start hanging out instead of Doug's place. It's
Speaker 1: just down the road door, so we're gonna stop body easier.
Speaker 1: I'll yell up. I told Dog come use the bathroom
Speaker 1: and get an internet connection out there, all right. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining