Doug Duren & Bryan Richards

00:01five four three two one yeehaw and we're live my good friend Doug durin hello Douglas hello joe rogan good to see you man Bryan Richards your friend wildlife biologist and well we're gonna talk about a bunch of things but one of the things that I wanted to talk about is this scary disease that uh well when Ted Nugent was on the podcast he downplayed the consequences and effects of something called CWD or chronic wasting disease which has made it onto your farm and you live in Wisconsin and you have this beautiful place that we visited when we did the meat-eater television show and this is a new thing that this chronic wasting disease was just just it decimates the deers health and kills them and the suspicion is that some of this at least comes from these high fence operations where people grow deer and treat them like instead of like a wild animal they treat them like a

01:06domesticated animal and have them all feeding off of the same pile of food and they share this disease is this all correct Mac your it Brian well you just started out about an hour's worth of coverage so yeah just a little bit I'm a wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Health Center US Geological Survey up at Madison Wisconsin and so one of the things that I spend a lot of time on is chronic wasting disease I wouldn't say that makes me necessarily an expert but I've gotten to know a lot of people that I would call experts over the years so I've gained a little bit of knowledge so I don't I mean your statements and we could start at number different yes this disease it essentially just we'll just describe what it does to these animals and why it's such a major concern it hasn't jumped to humans yet that we're aware that we're aware of but it is a

02:01possibility a very real possibility we can't rule it out at this point in time science is unable to rule it so okay that's a great place to start why would we care about this thing called chronic wasting disease and I would argue in some other scientists of argue there's two major reasons number one is the impacts of this disease on members of dear family themselves and the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWD could become a human health issue at some point down the road okay so you kind of nailed those two with regard to deer or members of the deer family white-tailed deer mule deer elk moose and most recent leaves picked up in in reindeer in Norway of all places we could articulate some reasons some rationale why you know this disease might be thought of as being important first we look at is would be geographic spread so you know

02:57CWD twenty years ago was thought to be this really novel thing in a very restricted Geographic range in southeastern Wyoming adjacent north eastern Colorado and maybe a little spillover into Nebraska wildlife biologist wildlife disease specialist looked at this disease it was interesting we didn't know much about it at that point in time but it seemed to be very isolated there what does it do to the deer what kills deer right but how does it kill alright so this is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs so big long words transmissible means it can go from animal a tube animal be spongiform means looks like a sponge and encephalopathy means disease of the brain so you put it together and so this disease results in holes in the brain resulting in progressive neurological degeneration followed by death okay it's a it's a

03:56death sentence and there's no cure for it it's all you can capture the deer and give them some sort of medication no cure for these diseases the suite of diseases come you know there's there's members of the TSE group of diseases and humans most familiar is is one called creutzfeldt-jakob disease so it's very similar to mad cow disease they're in the same family ion's well I take sometimes you just read it that's an interesting you know there's a goes back and forth on whether it's prion or prion stand poisoner to receive a Nobel laureate for his work on these diseases coined the term prion mmm-hmm and in his first publication describing these diseases he did a phonetic spelling and it's prion so other researchers it's especially you know some from across the pond say it's got to be prion and the main reason that you know some of them I talk to about that

04:55is that an irk stand poisoner when he hears it called prime oh so we'll say prion yes I'll say prion from now on now this disease which people know as mad cow disease obviously is transmissible to humans and that's one of the reasons why people are very scared that this could potentially jump from deer into humans and correct me if I'm wrong but it also is making its way into the actual plants that these animals eat you're correct on both accounts show with BSE mad cow disease that was an interesting disease where it resulted from in essence turning cows into cannibals we were which I like this in New Guinea right with kicks with crits fell with that's Krugman which is a human disease tse likely started when one individual developed creutzfeldt-jakob disease that individual died and as is the practice was the practice in the fur a tribe in Papua New Guinea they practiced

05:57ritualized cannibalism to honor the debt and to help release the spirits from you know deceased family members so they would feed upon the upon the corpse important you know the bodies of their deceased so when one individual died of probably some variant of creutzfeldt-jakob disease then the causative agent the prion protein which is concentrated in the central nervous system and lymphatic systems of you know of disease patients this was fed back to other members of the family and the extended family and so when they got sick and died and fed it again so we saw that with kuru in in the nineteen we was in 1960 or around there it was realized that this cannibalistic behavior was likely the result you know or the right day the cause of disease transmission cannibalism was outlawed and at that point in time he broke completely the disease transmission cycle so no more

06:57new cases of kuru but they had lingering cases with an extended incubation period up to forty years later before kuru finally burned out of that population whoa so now with with BSE or mad cow disease we were doing exactly in essence the same thing not exactly the same thing but in essence so in an effort to maximize production and reduce the amount of waste when a butchered cattle we would take all awful offa al you know the hide the bones the parts that are inedible and we would render them cook them at high temperature and typically you know high pressure as well and it turns into a slurry a high protein slurry you skim the fat off the top of that and then dehydrate the rest of it and you have you know kind of a meat and bone meal a high protein supplement realizing that cattle grow faster and produce better when they're went on a high higher protein diet it seemed

07:57reasonable to use waste material from cows to feed back to cows so at some point turning traffic did better turning clouds into candles yeah so at some point in time a cow developed a TSE apprentices whether it came from scrapey the TSE of sheep or arose on its own is unknown but that cow died it was rendered into meat and bone meal and this high protein feed was then fed out to hundreds to thousands and correct me if I'm wrong for these prions they could survive up to more than a thousand degree temperature yes surviving is kind of a strange term Joe in the they're not alive start with it's a protein they can persist they cannot be inactivated so yeah it's you that's a goodness entirely these prions are not necessarily a living thing like a disease or a virus or a bacteria well they're disease-causing agent but they are incredibly unique they're an ideological

08:57like a virus of bacteria or you know a parasite could be causing disease but all these other things have genetic material they're alive which allows them to change rapidly to evolve over time so the whole concept that you have a protein a protein that all mammals produce in a normal form can be converted after production into a disease associated form that has these radically different characteristics one that you mentioned was you know resistance to heat treatment a normal prion protein and we have billions of them circulating in our bodies right now have a specific purpose as cellular purpose we don't know exactly what it is but it's likely involved in some sort of intracellular communication it's a string of around 250 amino acids so a relatively short protein it does whatever it's does and then the body recycles breaks that chain of amino acids down into its component parts and

09:59recycles it turns out that normal cellular prion protein likely has a half-life of maybe four to six hours okay so you're producing them relatively constantly then there's the disease associated form and all disease associated prions start as the normal cellular pria so they're converted from one three-dimensional form to a different form okay and this different form has these radically different characteristics one is heat resistance now there is UV light resistance I mentioned that the normal cellular prion protein has a half-life of maybe four to six hours the disease associated ones can persist in the environment for years and potentially up to decades okay when you say persist in the environment you mean in like on the ground on leaves like how how would they persist yeah all thanks Jeff so if a deer sheds infectious agent this prion protein and so from the time of deer is infected

11:02it's probably around two years before it develops clinical signs a disease goes downhill loses its fear of humans with dramatic weight loss all of those things that incubation period you know it's probably shedding infectious agent for the vast majority of that time period so it looks healthy but it's able of transmitting disease we'd call that a Oh a typhoid mary syndrome the two deer that we that were positive on our farm two bucks two and a half-year-old bucks were we had them tested as you know we're for the last several years we've been getting initially we got our only bucks tested and then the last three or four years we've gotten all the deer tested they were two and a half-year-old bucks perfectly it looked perfectly healthy and these are the first ones that you tested that tested positive when we tested in excess of thirty five deer over the last 50 during the incubation

11:59period would they still test positive at some point they will at some point so they could be spreading infectious agents without testing positive yes oh so it's a it's probably between three and six months out when we can test an animal test positive but it's likely shedding infectious agent and we set lower quantities prior to that point in time and so then so it's shedding infectious agent it's capable of transmitting disease okay belong before it looks clinically ill that's one of the real challenges with this disease from a management standpoint they look perfectly healthy they act perfectly healthy but they're starting to have that progressive neurological degeneration that we can only see very near the end of disease so correct me if I'm wrong but this seems like we could potentially be facing a ticking time bomb of many many many deer that are wandering around out there right now

12:59that looked totally normal that are spreading this stuff all over the place and they're acting they look perfectly healthy and then obviously with this multi-year incubation period this could just cascade and I think we've seen evidence of that now started out you know we talked about being isolated disease it was picked up in Wisconsin at the end of 2001 as of today CWD has been up and picked up in 25 states in captive and/or free-ranging populations in whitetail deer mule deer elk or moose two Canadian provinces in addition it was picked up in South Korea and that was a real interesting it was in captive elk and those elk still had Canadian ear tags enema so we pretty much know how CWD you know let's do those helped and swim across the pacific pond most recently it was picked up two years ago in free-ranging reindeer in Norway and subsequent to that it was

13:59picked up in a small handful like three or four moose and a Red Deer in Norway and a single moose in Finland the real concern over in Norway with reindeer okay so reindeer are very gregarious you know white-tailed deer or caribou so you know caribou reindeer so not unusual to see meant herds of hundreds of animals so very very different than what we see with white-tailed deer mule deer elk or moose we don't see those huge hurt but with elk you can in the wintertime but anyway it's thought that this gregarious behavior might really facilitate transmission in reindeer alright so when it was picked up in reindeer Norway said you know we maybe we should do something it's an interesting story and you know Norway's got experience with scraping and sheep and so they have a long history what a scrimping scrapey is the same as well it's the same family diseases in sheep it's actually the

15:01first one that was described scrapey we've known about since the early 1700s disease a domestic sheep and it's called scrapey because of the behavior of these animals once they entered a clinical phase of disease and they they seem like they itch bad and so they'll go up the fence posts and other objects and they'll literally rub their hide off of their body so that's the name scraping and it's the same progressive neurological disorder followed by death you think about it so as this disease creates vacuoles in the brain it's killing off neurons and so without those neurons firing you fall into that progressive degeneration and yet at some point your body can no longer survive that's what's really spooky about how this thing kills so anyway you go back to Norway when they detect it CWI you try to keep this a little bit closer to yours okay you're very soft-spoken

15:56oh I can hear myself playing I know is that the problem is the recording I'm sorry okay no worries so when they picked up CWD and reindeer in Norway the researchers over there had witnessed what we are lack of success on this side of the pond over the course of the last 20 years they took it very very seriously so they took kind of some harsh medicine they announced their plans that they were going to eliminate a herd unit they were gonna kill every reindeer in an entire herd unit in Norway the idea is to eliminate the host population it's called stamping out and it works in a pen this is the first time it'd been done realistically in a free-ranging population all ideas we don't have effective tools for management of disease they were very fearful of what would happen if this spread throughout that reindeer population and throughout other reindeer herds and like Alaska

16:52they have multiple herds like last year I hunted caribou was Steve up in the 40 my liver area and but there were you know and so they're very well localized as probably none but at least they have a range that they move through so and in in Norway they have two or three different herds many more than that so I don't know exactly how many you can isolate the herds so the idea is before this gets be any worse before it gets any farther let's take it out so they had a hunting season they allowed hunters to take as many as they could with was a little over a thousand reindeer then they came in with government agents but it's our concern that the hunters could eat something with CWD and then catch it well that's always a concern but we can talk about him yeah let me finish this it was with Norway in it so they took literally took the bull by the horns they decided to do what was very

17:50unpopular what we have not been able to do in North America they and so after the hunting season government agent sharpshooters took an additional 1400 reindeer they killed every reindeer in this herd unit and they're gonna keep it foul allow no reindeer in there for a minimum of five years so it says every bit of promise of being the first large-scale success with dealing with this disease in a free ranging herd pretty different than what we've been able to accomplish over here five years is that uh I mean with it being in the soil and dirt and from what I was reading wood and everything else is that so at some point there becomes the the prions diminishing population or they die out or whatever the proper word I mean they're not living so they don't die but finally becomes viable anymore yeah five years is probably a pretty good it's a guesstimate okay as well as

18:45with regard to how long these prions remain viable in in the environment and in this substrate so it's a it's a good first guess and what what they'll do then is slowly allow reindeer to repopulate and as they do they'll be harvested periodically and every one of those will be tested so I mean it'll be a long-term experiment into you know successful management and it will also learn quite a bit about whether how far along the environment was contaminated so another things they caught this disease very early so after killing off you know 2,400 reindeer I think they had around twenty positives so very low prevalence suggesting the disease was very very new in this system if you're gonna be successful with a disease where animals are shedding infectious agent out into the environment it persists for years to decades do it early you know if you're gonna get on it get it detect it

19:38early get on it fast get on it far why the decision to let human beings consume them well at this point in time that we really don't have any evidence that's that humans can get CWD could that potentially though be an incubation period issue just like it is with deer maybe extend it with humans because you were talking about how do you it was the correct pronunciation I was pronouncing it wrong kuru no no or you Jakob Christ Chris field occupied cells young herbs disease so the that has a long incubation period in human beings correct likely yeah in mad cow same thing extended incubation period kuru could you know some of the cases it looks like we're up maybe even to 40 maybe even 50 year incubation I want to talk about kuru for a minute because every time I talk to this guy I mean I've learned a lot from him about all kinds of things in diseases but

20:31yesterday we were talking about kuru and one of the things that was interesting to me about it is that these tribes the women and children contracted it yeah isn't it interesting yeah and the reason why was the man ate the meat and the women and children ate the internal organs internal organs and as well as concentrated as kuru took off you know it was one of the features as the researchers in the you know in 50s and 1950s we're looking at the population very few adult males had kuru and it was more focused in the females and and the children and so it came back to that ritualistic eel cannibalism and he hit it right on the head the women and children got the internal organs including the brain that have the highest concentration of the prion protein the man if they consumed anything consumed the the finer cuts of meat which have a lower concentration

21:33but not now that's just one of those social things it just kind of stuck with me you know it is kind of it's pretty pretty interesting so Larry well a bunch of people reached out and some some were very angry after Ted Nugent was on the podcast and I don't know how CWD got brought up I don't with the the context was I don't remember but I remember him saying that winter kills more animals than CWD does and many people were very angry that this was a gross simplification of what could be a ticking time well I guess I would yeah I'd have to agree with that another disease out there called epizootic hemorrhagic disease EHD and periodically you'll have significant outbreaks of this disease and in in northern latitudes where you know the disease has not been present as often you can see dramatic mortality 8090 percent of a herd can be killed in a single you know to event okay but a very

22:35you know you distinction between these diseases you know EHD is spread by midges little black noseeums okay bug bug actually transmits transmits the disease the virus from an away to animal beer from the environment to animal either one so while you have these pretty dramatic die offs as soon as the weather changes after the first frost the first hard frost kills off the midges and within about two weeks the disease cycle is broken completely so it has significant impacts on a localized level periodically but the disease cycle there's a definite end to the disease cycle and then it's no longer present well there for that period of time work for a period of time anyway yeah the virus may persist in the environment but once the transmission cycle is broken the mortality stopped and isn't there some genetically engineered food plots that they're putting together now or

23:34different different types of seed that inhibits midge growth and inhibits EHD I'm not aware that but I wouldn't doubt it and I think there's also some stuff they're doing that bolsters the animals immune system they're they're supplementing some of the the food with I don't know what they're using but it bolsters the animals immune system makes them less susceptible to it and populations that have been his foes just exposed to EHD and over time definitely develop a herd immunity to it and as EHD transferable to humans no we don't not that we've ever seen there's no evidence that it is this is a disease of deer and you know it's it also can get into livestock so even if people get bitten by these midges there's still no concern that we could potentially get not EHD no no so contrast that this disease EHD with a very definite end to the transmission cycle first frost kills off the midges

24:30with CWD there's no known ecological factor which signals the end of the transmission cycle so that's why we see prevalence or the proportion of animals that are positive in individual you know locations and individual herds it just keeps going up up up in captive facilities the hall farm in Wisconsin where CWD was first detected in 2002 the place was depopulated in 2006 prevalence was nearly 80 percent so four out of five deer in that captive servant facility had it Wow more recently we had a farm a deer farm in Iowa we're in a disease had gone undetected for some period of time and when the herd was depopulated again about 80 percent prevalence but this was a big hurt so there were over 200 positives in this single high fenced enclosure and so winners not going to change that it grows so no stop there's no known feature which stops the transmission cycle and so when you say

25:34that something like EHD kills a lot of deer yes it does but the disease transmission cycle stops with CWD we don't know anything that stops it its ph.d is more like the flu oh you had it on your farm PhD never no no let me rephrase that I not that I'm aware of and so when I learned about EHD and there and you know comparative diseases in chronic wasting diseases like none other it as it develops within the herd as it develops within the animal it just continues to grow so it'll start out as a very small problem there's some maps of how it developed or how its spread in the southwest Wisconsin and we're on the front edge of it now and it's all correct me if I'm wrong Brian but it's like it's almost like the way it develops within the deer taking that period of time before it becomes clinical and the deer dies it's almost as if that's reflective of how it

26:44moves through the landscape it moves very slowly but once it's there it's there now I have read about hunters eating meat from some sort of disease deer and getting sick and dying what would that be miss reporting would possibly I mean I shouldn't I shouldn't say that I mean I don't know there have been instances where people that hunted deer later died of a prion disease likely developed across film the Ockham's disease okay and so was it the deer that gave it to them well there's no epidemiological evidence that this occurs at this point in time and we've hinted about some of the human health issues so so a few things we can look at in areas where CWD is known to exist do we see higher mortality rates from creutzfeldt-jakob disease the disabled prion disease of humans than we do elsewhere the answer is no okay so from an epidemiological standpoint

27:48there's no evidence that CWD has crossed over that species barrier into humans now we can take a look at a number of science experiments that have been conducted and at least in in some of these studies in experimental models we have evidence that the CWD prion protein can cause human normal prions to convert to a disease associated form okay but now these are models okay they're not it's not quite the same as pumping CWD into the brain of a human patient and seeing what's what developed okay so the science suggests that there is a small nonzero chance the CWT could become a human health issue there's also some of the more recent science that's been conducted suggest that this barrier we call it the species barrier and it really is a very robust barrier one would think that keeps CWD CWD from crossing into human hosts that barrier may not be as tough as we think

28:56it is and that barrier may be changing over time is that because one of the things we've talked about before is that they've discovered different strains of CWD yeah it sure gets worse it's fascinating it's fascinating stuff you gotta get to that point it's fascinating point it's definitely fascinating but it's scaring the out of me already so yeah the idea strange is really interesting with scrapy I mentioned that diseases sheep we recognized some 30 different strains and it's still all that same identical strand of amino acids and it's shaped that tertiary form must be slightly different and it manifests slightly differently in sheep so now with CWD there's at least two recognized strains that have been published in you know peer-reviewed literature there's probably more strains out there in fact it's kind of interesting there was a there was a paper done a couple years

29:57ago which looked at the actual the architecture of this disease associated prion protein and there's a there's a portion of it that's referred to as a loop structure and it's just kind of you know if you take a rubber band and or a piece of yarn or something and ball it up into a three-dimensional shape there's a little loop hanging off the side of this disease associated prion protein and in deer in CWD that loop is very very rigid okay it's very inflexible shall we say in humans it is more of a flexible loop as opposed to the rigid loop and it's thought that this difference in that architecture is part is partially you know controls that species barrier okay so I was telling Doug paper yesterday it's it's pretty good it's pretty neat stuff guys relaxes alright Zobrist so now it turns out mice experimental laboratory mice their prion protein has the same structure as the

31:01human prion does okay so you cannot give CWD to a normal laboratory Mouse they just don't get it and it's likely this different some of this difference in their prion structure this one cannot convert that one to a different form so some researchers in Alberta identified a strain of CWD which came from wild deer so it's not something they engineered in the laboratory they have a strain from wild deer that does give mice CWD no so most of the strains out there mice can't get but they discovered one that mice do get so researchers from a few years ago and and lately I've seen it in the in the popular media that hey this difference in this loop structure is going to keep people from getting CWD well the all the assumptions that people can't get CWD are based that on this idea that CWD is CWD and it will always be exactly the same thing but our experience with scrapey strongly

32:06suggests that even though there's no there's no DNA in these things that they do change over time they morph over time into slightly different disease characteristics and etiologic agents now in the hind community as their skepticism about this is ted nugent's ideas are these unique or is this a common thought that or is it a convenient thought for them because they don't want it to be real it's it's a challenge um of education yeah it's obviously just enough whatever period of time that we talked here it's you know it's really complicated in it right and and to get to the you almost want to stick your head in the sand and just forget about it hey you know besides of the sort of things that you know your friend that we were talking about before like I was doing on the farm of you know managing gear in a particular way for a particular kind of deer which might be contrary to the to

33:05the spread of the disease letís nobody wants to hear that I can't do what I want to do man and we're talking about management why's that we were talking about my friend John Dudley's farm in Iowa is that he only shoots the big mature males and he lets all the other deal grow to a very large size so he has a really healthy population of big deer on his farm mm-hmm now what are you doing in your place I understand you're just on a mass call well I feel like I'm on the front edge oh well I don't feel like it I am on the front edge of the spread of this disease and there's some in Wisconsin in Wisconsin and Southwest Wisconsin so 15 years ago when or 16 years ago when CWD was discovered there were a lot of changes in hunting structure and there was an effort by the Department of Natural Resources to eradicate the disease in in the the core area of south of the Wisconsin River

34:02about 70 miles from us in 15 years the disease has moved 70 miles north that effort that the DNR started was became political you know and quite honestly that many years ago I would have likely been a little skeptical well I know I would have been skeptical you want me to do what they wanted to kill all the deer in a particular area you know that many years ago had they come to my farm and said we're gonna kill all the deer here and all the neighboring deer I would have had some real hard questions I have no idea how I would reacted to it I continued to do like buck management and you know you were there when we were still doing that and and there's we can talk about you know how how bucks contribute to the spread of the disease and and that sort of thing uniquely versus doe we see different prevalence or curves depending on the demographic faction of deer adult males

35:10the ones with the big antlers but yours on the wall over there tend to have higher prevalence sometimes maybe two three four times as high as other segments of the population so highest prevalence and adult males followed by adult females and then by juvenile animals so so it's likely behavioral reasons why we see that in adult males so adult male deer during the rut or breeding season they greatly expand their home range they contact multiple you know female or family groups of females earlier in the fall especially with the white-tailed deer adult males tend to gather in these bachelor groups so there's a lot of social contact grooming things like that so because of their behavior they contact more animals at different times of the year and this number of contacts it's believed it's likely responsible for them becoming infected at a higher rate than other members out in the herd

36:10so now if you are an adult male then you're in the in this group you also have a higher likelihood of being able to transmit disease to other animals because you're out there during breeding season is there any evidence that any of these deer have transferred this to livestock or that it's God into agriculture the food sources corn and what-have-you that could be consumed by people even that are vegetarians okay interesting questions so with regard to transmission into cattle it's basically the same situation as with humans no evidence that it has but in an experimental sense we can push it over that species bear here okay now interesting you bring up plants because we have shown research that we've done at the national wildlife health center I've shown that if you grow some plant types in a slurry a concentrate of prion protein that those prions can be up

37:10taken through the roots and deposited into stems and leaves okay and so that's one possible mechanism a second is that Cyprian stem cells disease associated yawns tend to perform very tight chemical bonds with various surfaces and I showed him a paper on the way out here yesterday were they binded just about anything they bind to plants as well so that deer that's out there with CWD positive shedding infectious agent out into the environment through its urine through its saliva through its feces so if a deer urinates lets deer with CWD urinates on plants the prions have a tendency to bind to those plants form a chemical bond it's not just dry non it forms a chemical bond to the plants and literally become part of the plan it's but yeah okay so a deer could eat those plants and that could be one of the possible transmission mechanisms so that's the second one the third one has you know

38:13speculated about and some folks have looked at and and it has potential impacts for agricultural commodities so when CWD was you know 20 30 years ago was really really rare he's probably couldn't happen but now it's in 25 states vast geographic areas we have just south of where he lives in adult males nearly 50 percent prevalence so when you kill that big buck take a coin out of your pocket flip it in the air and that's the odds at that deer s CWD and when he says just south just 15 miles okay so now let's go out west or something yes so let's go out when to to overall in the county ass let's go up into the the big agricultural areas in Saskatchewan or out west okay so you got a mule deer herd out there with CWD let's say maybe 20% over all of that hurt is CWD positive you've been out in some of those big wheat fields and hay fields how many mule deer are standing

39:15out there before sunset shitload yeah okay so take that amount times 20% or that amount whatever percent to have CWD figure out how many times it's a deer defecate or urinate on a daily basis and that's a bunch and now think about the possibility that when you harvest those agricultural food stuff and roll it up into big bales that you might have fecal material rolled up into those big bales not just might right I mean most likely we'd need a graduate student that we could have you know pick apart large bales of hay to really prove that but I mean it's almost certainly so now we're now we're putting those on semi trailers and moving across borders yeah and are those could is there a possibility that these agricultural commodities then deer could come up to them and be infected by contact I think we don't know Orton to say that Brian's a scientist these other folks studying

40:19that are scientists and they don't you know it's it's evidence and it suggests and they get attacked for that mm-hmm by people who don't want it to be true well and you know that's how science is attacked yeah right because it's hard to speaking in absolutes is a real hard thing to do you know and so it's you'll hear him say the evidence suggests yes the information is this I just think that's a real important distinction to draw you're having those kind of discussions you know they're people want absolute proof proof is hard in a biological world because there's so many factors out there we can't control for them all but there's certain tactics that have been used quite successfully it goes all the way back to smoking you know when you know tobacco companies were attacking science and the whole idea is to sow the seeds of doubt there's a scene actually merchants of

41:15doubt' we've seen that we see the same thing going on with CWD so you mentioned it earlier hey um you know CWD it's not so bad what about winter kill what about EHD so instead of focusing on that saying don't look here look at this one this one is worse why aren't you doing something about this one so it's a simple diversion another tactic which is and that mean there's slot there's a body it's not a scientific approach this because these are unrelated issues like EHD does kill animals winter kill most certainly kills animals but we're not talking about the same sort right to divert the conversation right another thing that's very easy to do is you know it's cherry-picking the literature that that's out there we saw a real great example of this about a year ago where there's a lot of letters to the editor being sent into newspapers in areas where CWD is and I think it's it's an

42:11attempt to change the conversation so they were very careful to use citations from peer-reviewed literature and one of the ones they used was they found that in researchers in Wisconsin found that CWD was not having a significant effect on mortality rates when they studied the disease so this is a true statement taken directly from peer-reviewed science what they didn't identify was that that when they studied that disease was between 2003 and 2007 10 12 you know 11 years ago the names on the next sentence in the paper was our study can use as a baseline for comparison at a later point in time should disease change over time so you mentioned that exponential growth curve and how early on back in 2003 to 2007 this area disease prevalence was probably lower than 5% now it's shot up in that curve and it's probably in that you know 25 30 30 plus percentage range so you're

43:19cherry-picking literature to make your argument so even scientists say this is not having a big effect when they studied it they're just not saying when they studied it hmm so as a non-scientist what I'm looking at here is everyone's always terrified of the next pandemic disease and this is one of the reasons why I felt was so important to discuss this because you know people would say they look at it casually good don't eat animals don't eat deer this is this is not that this is something that has a potential to reach large-scale agriculture this is I mean if you one of the things about your farm and we talked about this when we're there it's like these animals are farm animals almost because they're they're absolutely free range they're absolutely wild when you talk about the deer on your place you don't you don't have them controlled in any way but they're feeding off of your corn

44:07they're eating all this stuff that people eat they're eating I mean that's what they eat they that's one of the reasons why the deer populations are so enormous in farmlands is because it's a massive super perfect environment yeah and it's also one of the reasons why they're so delicious yeah well fed you know there's so you know nutritionally balanced diets but the the real what what terrifies me is this potential for a pandemic disease also comes with an incubation period and that we are looking potentially at like if you just objectively look with no hysteria and no hyperbole you look at the history of diseases diseases mutate and and many of them come from animals this is why swine flu and avian flu and all these different things have actually come from either farm animals or wild animals that have somehow another manager transmitted disease is that if

45:03morphed and mutated and become dangerous and deadly to human beings this to me seems like a ticking time bomb it has a potentially one switch one way or the other like you've observed or they've observed rather with mice and this could potentially infect human beings and spread across I mean the entire country like wildfire well we're seeing that spread right now in deer you know so in deer we're seeing you know clear geographic spread we're seeing clear increases in prevalence and in areas where the disease has been present the longest we are seeing population level impacts there's a locations in Wyoming where we've demonstrated where we've proven that CWD is driving population decline in deer so that's a that can encapsulate why we should be concerned about deer and is this in mule deer that's in mule deer and in white-tailed deer and the mule deer have an extended

45:58range in terms of like their migration that's one of the things that we've realized I believe over the last decade right is that mule deer travel far more far longer and far longer distances engage on and we just ate four even whitetails can there's an interesting research tidbit the state of Minnesota yeah they've got appears to be a fairly recent CWD outbreak in the southeastern part of the state so their researchers are really trying to get ahead of this and figure out what could move this around so they went in and captured deer in an adjacent area but radio telemetry collars on these to see well just how far do they go this was in an article just about a week ago popular media articles so it's not published yet but they had a doe single doe collared that went 80 miles pretty long distance now 80 miles circular or 80 miles be miles as the crow flies from in Christ

46:55so in that 80 miles could potentially be spreading CWD if it was an infected sure throughout crops throughout I mean and this is and then there's that exponential growth so it's yeah it's there sure it takes a long time for it to become a you know a large problem and we're seeing that in we're seeing that in Richland County it crossed the river testing is you know surveillance testing has been going on it crossed the river and it just keeps moving and it could be in again all these different plants all these different berries people could be eating these berries eating these plants fruits vegetables all these different things and they could be potentially consuming these prions now they're being I think it's very clear that there's exposure and I talked with Doug quite a bit about the difference between exposure and disease transmission okay so it is certain that lots of humans are

47:57exposed to disease associated prion protein from CWD and likely from plant materials as well whether that will result in transmission a disease across that species barrier is an open question we absolutely cannot say it will we absolutely cannot say it will not it's an open question and one thing we can identify very clearly is that the rate of exposure is increasing actually as disease has a larger geographic footprint and prevalence goes up more and more hunters are just by simple math being exposed to that positive material so we're rolling the dice and when you do biological experiments I mean there's a certain likelihood that you'll see outcome a or a outcome B so if you keep rolling the dice enough times you might see an alternative outcome we cannot rule that out wouldn't when we talked about this when you were on with with with Rinella and I at the farm mediator podcast number 70

49:05you Brian you put it as the chances are very small at this point that it can and this is what the CDC and the World Health Organization says as well the chances are very small minuscule even but they're not zero and I'm assuming that we continue to that continues to be the you know the concern and I know you're talking a lot of joe about about and I get it because after all humans but I've actually begun to focus more on the effect on the on the resource on the on the on the deer I mean I tested positive animals we properly disposed of the meat which is a whole other you know line of discussion I'm still eating venison but I'm not are you testing the animals to eat every one of them we test every deer killed on the farm now how long when you raise a cow how long before you kill it like how long do well I do grass-fed beef and Brian it's actually kind of interesting you were

50:15talking about the deer the white-tailed deer on our place eating corn and beans and GMO corn GMO beans alfalfa whatever they want to eat I control what my grass-fed beef eat I mean right you're not something like oh yes the one since a little by the way oh anyway but it's very controlled so even though my dear could unaffected your cow well and that they're they're not organic right my cattle are right because it is controlled how ironic oh yeah yeah I mean you have farm animals in captivity that are organic purely eating grass this nature intended and you got deer eating Monsanto corn yeah and you know and before anybody out there gets the idea that my cattle are confined in a little barnyard area no it's a big big large area a big pasture they're you know they are you know free ranging within that pasture you know a pasture raised so short answer with grass-fed beef I just sent four in

51:28unfortunately none of it was ready I was going to bring you some good they just went in on Monday nice to see him go through the security checkpoint carrying you know bags of beef with him but 26 so they were two years old and two years old in two months or three months now what the incubation period that you were discussing earlier you're talking about a two year incubation period with deer before they potentially show any effects so these animals would fall into that line between birth and slaughter that that would be inside that incubation window for deer it could be potentially larger for cow was that correct BSC I think the incubation period is between three and five years and so that's why one of the precautionary measures for BSC in the United States is we don't allow those older aged the cattle into the human food chain what does BSE stand for bovine

52:21spongiform encephalopathy aka mad cow disease so so that's one of the precautionary measures is not allowing cause to get old Oh for mad cow disease well and from my standpoint they're prime at 26 27 months right and so when they are in an incubation period they're still capable of distributing the disease though correct well that's what CWD and with scraping and sheep as well with BSC and I'm clarify if CWD went into a cow in a in a natural world we don't know exactly what it would look like we know what it looks like when we inject it into the brain of a cow but we don't know what it would really look like but BSE is quite different in that similarly with with the human prion diseases an individual with kuru could not give kuru to another human being they had to consume it so that was that artificial process involved same thing with BSE cow a cow would be

53:26as he can't give BSE to another because they're not shedding that infectious agent out into the environment so when they stopped it when they stopped feeding the aquadolls CWD is a different animal CWD into 3rds times then on steroids well they're contagious kind of freaking me out the freaking patient because these animals are shedding okay then infectious agent cows with BSE are not shedding infectious agent CWD positive deer and scrape be positive sheep are these two diseases are unique in the world of TSEs tses the prion diseases are unique amongst themselves but scrapy and CWD are in a different world of their own so okay what if anything can be done well I try to break this stuff down to like the most basic level so a guy like me can understand it by time pay for science that's sort of one of the things slow the spread it's slow of the spread of the disease there's a lot of work

54:41being done all kinds of studies being done different organizations and the government unfortunately in Wisconsin not as much as we should be doing we're you know we're a hotbed of it I think that in Wisconsin quite honestly that we've become an example of how not to handle the disease and a lot of the other states have begun to you know take that idea that if you don't have it you don't want it so let's do what we can to stop it from coming here that's why you're seeing things like let's not transfer carcasses that you know there's bans on being able to transfer carcasses in Wisconsin in some cases you can't take it to another County you can take the finished meat so you have to bone your meat in the area and then you can take it home which you know was a bit of a problem for you know for some folks we're beginning to stop the movement of captive deer from one farm to the other

55:43but that's just recent and and there have been hearings on that lately so we also people resist that right if your if your economic vitality depends on selling and moving live deer you're going to be opposed to restrictions on your economic activity that is one of the primary infections sources it's one of the infectious sources yeah so they'll always correct you when we prime it's a world I live in yeah we think of there's there's two mechanisms primary mechanisms if we lump them together for how CWD moves one is dear - dear - dear - dear that's slow diffusive process you know moving out on the landscape that's really hard to deal with the other one is this anthropogenic or human assisted movement where humans are moving infectious material and that might be how it got from Colorado to Wisconsin in the first place so highly unlikely that a mule deer a white-tailed deer got up

56:47woke up one morning in Colorado and decided to you know go 900 miles cross the Mississippi River and settle in you know Western Dane County and back in the day my dad and a bunch of his buddies used to go out to Colorado and they are Wyoming's actually where they went and they hunted elk and mule deer and it bring the whole damn thing back I mean just what you did right you put it on the back of the truck and off you went and then process time you can remember doing it in the garage in Cazenovia as a kid you know working there with knives this is a great thing well what do you do with the bones and the you know the non meat stuff when you're done well back in the day we stood and it still happens we take it out and put it in a wood called bone pile coyote pile there's something like it's dumped on the back 40 yeah wear it wear that still could have been effectivity if it was a

57:40positive animal so off to Wisconsin is who knows but anyway these are so he's absolutely correct the 25 states that don't have CWD don't want to get it they want to do everything okay so these like what is it eastern states or southeastern states and some of the far western states haven't picked it up Omid yeah if you go to our website you'll see a map there that shows the current known distribution of where the disease is so the other states really don't want it they don't want it bad so it makes sense you know to look at these anthropogenic factors human assisted identify the possible mechanisms how humans could bring CWD to them to you and stop them either with regulatory frameworks or with education teaching hunters that it's a risk to move carcasses around it's likely much more effective than just putting a rule in place that says you can't do it and

58:34there are unscrupulous people who purchase deer from these high fence operations and release them in the wild because they want big racks and animals that like people don't know there are these high fence operations shouldn't call them high fence operations because some of them wild animals that are contained in a fence these are farms their farms that grow deer and they grow deer with special protein feed so they have enormous racks so you have these really perverse species perverse examples of a deer and people look at that in it like to to someone who enjoys wild animals you see those you like it's like a stripper with triple F ticks it's like what the did you just do like these they don't look real they look like they have like 80 points yeah instead of like an eight point buck which is you know very typical or 10-point buck you're like wow look at that monster that's a

59:32natural animal that lives in the wild they they have these things that they don't even look like deer they look like some some cartoon that's triple F tits there are dudes who go I'm digging that yeah but it's obvious to all who are in the know like you go over a guy's house and he has one of those over his wall you like did you just walk right after that thing and put a pistol in its head like did deer hunter yeah you know like what what is that you know that's not even a wild animal that's some weird science project well in genetics play a role in trial correct me when I start to yeah they're off the science thing here but but genetics play a role in in in in bigger deer yes and your friend John Dudley it's a the number of he's doing it the number one way to get big antler deer is it's not let them fight let him get old let him get old and give them

60:30plenty of food yep yeah but ethics have a role in it too yeah there's three three factors in production of antlers it's genetics age and nutrition are really the key three there but now you know a lot of places will identify these as genetically superior well that's kind of a misnomer when you get back to the definition of fitness genetic fitness there's only one measure of genetic fitness and that's how well represented you are in the next generation okay so let's take an example where we took one of these you know eighty point whatever and let's release it out into the wild and during breeding season it comes across a prime three and a half or four and a half year old eight pointer you know this physical specimen that you've witnessed them they're unbelievable so now if you put those up against each other in a mortal battle I know who I'm putting mine my money on

61:29yeah the wild animal absolutely yeah every time answer so so these animals while they're bred very much like livestock for very specific characteristics big antlers these don't necessarily translate into something that would be more fit out in the wild well let's also point out that what the reason why you're bringing this up is these animals actually do fight to the death and it happens all the time they kill each other and in combat that's the reason why they have those antlers in the first place they don't have them to protect themselves against wolves like caribou do they they literally have them to fight with you know female caribou have antlers as well and they have these antlers so they could try to fend off animals that are trying to eat them there's a big difference between that and elk and deer they have them for combat that's why once the breeding season is

62:15over they shed them and then they start all over again yeah there's an interesting example if you look to to history it's an animal called the Irish elk they're extinct now okay they were they were twice three times the size of our normal elk and their antlers were measured in feet instead of inches okay and so during their evolutionary time period when they were on the face of the earth that was when you know animals were larger predators were larger these things got gargantuan okay then they disappeared from the landscape and at least you know they offered author Stephen Jay Gould there you go Steve and Jay Gould has offered up that likely what occurred was a change in the habitat that climate changed over time and that forests grew up if you're in the plains and you have antlers that are seven eight feet wide you can walk around but now when trees start to grow

63:13up how can you survive when the world around you changed and you'd have to literally walk with your head turned sideways and I Rochelle Clinic stinks so there's a very real example of how you know a phenotypic characteristics these mega antlers really in the long term we're not in the best interest of the species Jamie pull up a photograph of these farm deer antlers just right just type in Google ridiculous farm deer antlers and you get a sense what we're talking about for the people that are watching us on YouTube because until you see it you don't really you don't understand how gross it's gotten yeah I think one was called Goliath that I remember well there's some perfect example that is a perfect example what in the is that because that's not a deer I thought that thing is that's crazy what they've done to that deer it's a product of selective breeding your specific characteristics

64:11that some people will pay a lot of money for yeah and there's certain high fence operations that you can go online and they they you know this is what like look go back to that photo you just had that guy standing there drawing oh it's a drawing yeah duh you went to so quick I thought it was real look at that thing I mean that is just insane look at the one behind it though yeah very normal looking deer yeah yeah it's probably a one-year-old yeah yeah these are this is there's these places that have these animals and some people will take these animals and then they import them they purchase them and port them and then release them into the air quotes wild and then they'll hunt them and then they'll pretend that that's a wild animal if they shot and this is this is a source of CWD they are potentially well ok so a deer has to have seed immunity in order to be a risk

65:07right so it's been shown I mean in the lower 48 we're just I think we're at a hundred captive deer and elk facilities that have been shown to be CWD positive so we can definitively identify that the captive serving industry has been a part of moving CWD across the landscape we know that you know see to be positive deer have been moved by the industry even across you International and state lines okay the ones in the Korea great example right even we had a recent one where CWD positive farm in in Wisconsin that can do trace backs where this animal came from it turned out it came from Pennsylvania a game farm in Pennsylvania and then doing testing in that source heard they found additional positives there so definitively so now while that's me they'll say that very clearly the CW the captive industry is a portion of the equation they're not the whole equation no they're not the whole

66:02equation so where did it where did originate he said they were the first testing of the positive testing of this stuff was it was first described in 1967 in a research facility in the state of Colorado okay that's not to say that was the first instance of CWD it was the first time it was described and so this is Jeffery deer farms I think deer farms have been around for a long time there's a few Google you know tame deer you'll find some from them you know the late 1800s when photographs became possible of deer following people around so we've domesticated animals for a long long time but as an industry probably really came into vogue in there you know maybe the 60s and 70s and more recently now it's grown you know that industry has grown exponentially yeah I used to work for for Texas Parks and Wildlife before I worked for USGS and one of the things I did was I administered the the deer

67:01breeding program for the state so when I started this I didn't start the program but when I came into that that role you ministered well deer breeders in the state of Texas like many states need a permit from a state agency to conduct those activities okay and so I was administrating that program I think there were around a hundred and twenty licensed breeding facilities whitetail deer breeding facilities in the state at that point in time you know ten years later when I left Parks and Wildlife in Texas there are around six or seven hundred so it just grew exponentially and now I believe they're they're around a thousand captive deer facilities in the state of Texas Jesus Pennsylvania there's around a thousand of them Ohio's got several hundred Wisconsin's got a couple hundred so so except they're part of the equation but I don't want to you know I don't want to

67:59place all the blame for CWD moving it around because there's other possibilities for how this disease moves around Doug hit on a one of them and that's the the idea of carcass movement it hasn't been proven that this occurs but it's certainly when you look at it from us from a scientific standpoint it's very easy to identify so if you know I butcher my own deer so if I kill a deer it happens to have CWD a butcher my own deer I've got to do something with this stuff okay um you know the meat component in a deer is probably around thirty thirty five percent something like that so I've got a lot of other stuff landfills it turns out are very loath to accept this material you know it's almost taboo know who it might have CWD so we don't want it at our landfill because the effluent might be pumped out onto a farmer's field and they could come back and you

68:50know they see it as a liability so I've got my deer bones and an awful the rest of the material and I drive to the dump which is you know 25 miles away they say no we're not taking that well now what am I gonna do with this stuff so I could double bag it you know a little bit at a time put it out in the trash you know or maybe on the way home I'm driving past a state on a state park or a State Natural Area or a wildlife management here and I see a trail go down there and I drive down that trail and hey there's a pile of deer bones and deer heads here whoops and I knocked that over sorry about that Joe so it's easy to see how inadvertently just hold your thought when you're not on a microphone just uh just that's and it is one of the one of the concerns is how are we you know how what kind of do we have with the carcasses is something that we're talking about a lot

69:54more in Wisconsin now and it and it's become an issue and one of the interestingly I'm the county deer Advisory Committee for Richland County and we it's a citizen group and we have some say in season structure and then how many antlerless permits there are there's a lot of things we don't have any say in which is you know fine I'd rather leave it to the biologists but because there are hunters involved I'm happy to be one of them one of the things that happen in our in our spring hearings is that we had folks come in and say you know we're concerned about chronic wasting disease and we don't to spread it on the landscape but when we put the bones out on the curb they aren't taking it on the Wisconsin DNR CWD website there's a list of haulers who will take it so there are some that will take it there are some who don't my problem is were they taking it well

70:47they're taking it to clay lined land landfills and how it's being handled there's you know there's some question but it can be isolated so the effluent isn't being taken out and pumped on the fields it's something that you can do something about so there's there's clear science so you know and we noted how prions behind the various surfaces they bind to clay particles very very tightly and so one of the researchers at UW Madison's name's Joel Patterson you know tom was looking at this issue you know 10 years ago to try and figure out is can it be safely done it turns out if you put about 1/8 inch clay liner underneath you know one portion of your landfill you can put all the deer and all the prions there that you want to and while the prions will then migrate down you know over time through the soil when they come in contact with the play clay particles they bind and they don't

71:41go anywhere so it can be completely safely done so there's there's a way to dispose of these materials very very safely but the the thought of it the risk associated with it the liability some some landfill owners are just like yeah we'd rather not and interestingly because we were challenged about this what are we supposed to do and can incinerate it right because they'll well it ends up being a budget issue in Wisconsin everything's a budget issue and the DNR is having you know issues of that and is something I'd like to talk about a little bit but and they weren't when when this all first happened seventeen years ago they were incinerating during became a you know problem but there are landfills that are taking it and there are haulers who will take it they have dumpsters that they use specifically for it they're lined with you know heavy mill plastic they it's

72:42they're very specific to deer bones but some haulers aren't doing it so I I contacted the head of a solid waste for the state of Wisconsin and asked well how is this I go on your website and I see some taken some don't and her response was we have no legislative authority to require them to take this so some are doing it voluntarily and actually one solid waste hauler said to me jeez were putting a hell of a lot worse stuff in the landfills then you know some deer bones but it's you know it's simple hygiene so one of the efforts that we're working on in in southwest Wisconsin right now is to and it's a funding issue is to put place dumpsters in areas where you know like I'm volunteering to have one on my farm it's a question of who's gonna pay for it and if it comes down to it I'm gonna pay for the damn dumpster or about 500 bucks for a 20-yard dumpster but so

73:42that then you know people come by throw their put their bones in that dumpster and then they'll be properly disposed of because we have a hauler near us who's said we're willing to bring them there you know to bring the dumpster there and then dispose of the bones properly like they do with one of the lockers that one of the butcher shops that you know process is deer they have the set up which is actually when I saw it I was like well why aren't we doing that in you know countywide in various places so that people aren't chucking them in the ditch I mean otherwise you're holding on to the damn bones until you find out whether the things if you're if you're being completely careful about the hygiene which we I've been trying to do I'm something you got a pile of bones in the old milk house down there until you find out whether it's positive or not and I'm literally keeping it the deer

74:33bones separate so that when I find out that deer a was non positive well okay I can put those out or something like that so that's one of the things there's a difference between what we can we can there's natural spreading of the disease and then there's human-like putting them on trucks and and moving around or taking the bones from this carcass thing is it really a low-hanging fruit the idea that we can't fix this one I mean that's that's ridiculous and it's it's it's it's easy it seems easy to me I mean it's just a matter of will and money and then an education obviously that we're providing opportunity for this um I've been working with the DNR a little bit on and this weren't some discussions about two things one is self-service kiosks so to make getting getting your deer tested easier where you essentially cut the head off the deer and leave it in a kiosk with some

75:33information about where it was and you know they're fairly simple they've been doing this for a couple of years on an experimental basis but again it becomes a budget issue so we're hoping that we're going to be able to do is start something called adopt a kiosk essentially that hunters and and people are sportsmen groups will gather those heads and then take them into the testing facility and therefore you know keep the budget money targeted at doing the actual testing right next to that that uh self-service kiosks really should be a dumpster that you can throw your deer bones into whether you know whether it's positive or not otherwise you are holding it the other thing that the DNR suggests that we do is if you kill the deer on your farm leave the bones on your farm makes sense to me that way if it is positive disease is already there and so you're not taking as great a

76:29chance of moving in that's not an optimal solution to leave that stuff on on the ground surface an optimal solution is dig a hole but you know it's pretty hard to dig sometimes in December in Wisconsin well if I if the dumpsters thing doesn't end up working out with me there will be a hole I mean last year we I just kept the bone separate and the and the ones that we actually took the from the one deer it was they went into the dumpster at the locker this all seems to me sorry to interrupt but this all seems to me like band-aids on massive gunshot wounds it is but go back to the what I was saying before let's buy time right because this shit's spreading man yeah let's buy time and pay for science not there's nothing we can do about it or the other one that it's always been here which I think the guitar player talked about is there any consideration whatsoever that there

77:22could potentially be a cure absolutely absolutely so we hit on a couple of things I think it's important to talk just very briefly about some very generic disease management practices number one and this would be wildlife disease human disease livestock disease prevention number one if you don't have it don't get it do everything you can that's why we get vaccinated okay for various diseases if you do get disease do everything you can to keep from moving it artificially so that's why we don't want to move the carcasses around that's why you know we don't want to move captive deer around that's why we when we had in a bowl of outbreak in 2015 in Liberia and Ivory Coast we stopped commercial airline flights we didn't want people inadvertently moving it up so prevent don't move it around conduct surveillance around areas where it is to see what's going on and in states are

78:17doing that very well largely the next one is a tough one do something about disease manage disease to try and knock down prevalence incidents and get rid of the disease so that's challenging but two other things number one is support research because if we don't have a cure today we won't have one tomorrow either how is resource funded right now either by states or by the federal government and there's not a ton of money the last one is being transparent with your stakeholders being open and communicative with them so is with many diseases we have good therapeutics ok we can treat some diseases CWD and other prion diseases we have no therapeutics we have no treatments right now but people are certainly working towards them not so likely it's going to be very challenging to create a therapeutic something that treats a prion disease because treatment would then mean you

79:13would have to get past the blood-brain barrier and once you start this cascading interaction of normal prions to disease associated prions in the central nervous system it's going to be really really challenging to stop that I mean it's a it's a roller coaster gone or I by the time it gets up into the brain so then you're looking at preventive measures the idea of vaccines is number one and number two is looking at animals that through their genetic profile are resistant to disease and there's some advances on each front so we can talk about vaccines for a moment so people of individual scientists research outfits have been trying to develop vaccines for TSEs for prion diseases for a long time okay none have been successful there's no there's no human prion disease vaccines there's nothing for BSE there's nothing for scrapey but there's research ongoing and

80:09there have been some advances there was a Canadian research group that had a vaccine candidate for CWD they thought it looked very promising so I went to a field production stage and I actually tried deploying this vaccine in a captive facility in Wyoming a research facility it turned out that this vaccine was not ready for primetime and actually after after giving this vaccine to some elk giving a placebo placebo to other elk and then leaving him in a consider be decontaminated facility actually the vaccinated animals got CWD faster and at higher rate than the nine vaccinated animals so it turned out to be almost an anti vaccine okay so it didn't work so I said of being in earth there was some sort of active CWD in the vaccines that no it just for whatever reason it dispose it predisposed the animals so it was a massive failure but even from failures you learn okay so

81:08they're working now and based you know they learned a lot in that experiment there's another research group centered out of the University in New York who published a paper I think it 2015 was their most recent work and they've got a vaccine candidate that provides some degree of protection quote-unquote protection from disease now all but one of the animals that they gave this vaccine to and then challenged with CWD got CWD okay so that's not good news but the average incubation time was extended on something like 300 days okay so they're on the right track they have a mechanism that is somehow interfering with the conversion from normal host prion protein to the disease associated form it's a very valuable now will they get there we don't know so but think about even if we do create a vaccine that works that prevents CWD and prevent as opposed to slowing there's a very big

82:10distinction so if you have a vaccine that makes the average course of disease three years instead of two years or four years instead of two years they still have CWD are there deer farms that have a hundred percent negative CWD deer in them like none of them test positive that the vast majority of deer firms have never had CWD the vast majority and so there is a potential that you could isolate these populations of completely CWD free deer and if there's some sort of a mass die-off you could reintroduce these deer into the wild well okay so you're again you're looking at the difference agile so you're looking at the difference there between a herd that is CWD free which means hasn't been exposed to CWT versus animals that are CWD resistant through genetics okay so today we have we have not seen any deer that are genetically completely resistant there are different

83:17genotypes of the prion protein gene out there that do impact the length of disease and also seem to have some impact on how often the frequency that these animals get disease but even the genetically resistant deer do get CWD okay and they get it they get it at a lower rate they likely transmit it they're likely shedding infectious agent so instead of that that kind of garden-variety two-year incubation period it might be closer to a five-year incubation period so now from the one hand you're going great most deer died before they're five years old anyway so this would be a good thing but on the downside you're talking about a population of animals that have CWD with all these other side effects they're shedding infectious agent out into the environment this set and the other and you know cause a you know a potential risk to human another other health

84:17impacts on the landscape so I'm not so certain that this is a success story just like a vaccine that results in a longer course of disease where your deer can get CWD but they died from something else a population of resistant animals that have high prevalence of CWD I guess I don't see that it's a desirable endpoint because of the other consequences and potential repercussions it's almost be more desirable for kill them instantly a shorter incubation period would be preferable yeah because then you have the I mean it's almost like engineering deer to survive longer gives them more potential to spread it absolutely so now recently so there's claims that and there's research going on in some of the servant farms that deer farms that they've identified genetic markers ones that are not published in the literature yet that are affording a higher degree of protection from

85:15disease but until it's published in the peer-reviewed literature and really tested it's it's a speaking point until that point in time so we don't know if they'll get there we got to put a fence around Wisconsin dug giant 130 feet are well it's you know there's 30 feet at Northern Illinois northeast whoa all the places that have it 25 but so we're half and half Alaska doesn't does Alaska have it not that we know no Hawaii no no okay so lower 48 25 it's more than 50% then more than 50% of states have it Wow 25:48 yep here so this is something that it just can't be dismissed this is not this is not something that's a hoax this is not so the reason why people were upset and would Ted said on the podcast there's a very good reason well look if I want to yeah I play guitar and if I want to learn some kickass Detroit guitar riffs I'm gonna listen to Ted Nugent if I want to learn about CWD I'm

86:18gonna listen Richards and guys like yeah the thing is Ted does know a lot about hunting a lot of wildlife you know it's a lot about conservation but it appears that he's very misinformed or under informed let me let me let me try and put this in perspective okay so you have a disease which is contagious so always fatal upon closed clinical presentation they don't under percent fatal yeah deer don't survive if humans don't survive prion diseases when it enters the central nervous system it's a death sentence okay so it's contagious its fatal neurodegenerative disorder it's got to be a horrible way to die okay so that's a pretty significant set of clinical signs or symptoms in an individual animal right okay now let's look at the geographic spread rampant geographic spread so it has a ever-expanding geographic footprint in areas where it has been known the

87:14longest we now have prevalence in a cohort of animals adult males of around 50% and in adult females around 30% can you name any other disease of humans domestic livestock dogs wildlife anything else that has that set of characteristics and that degree of penetrance into the population and you go yeah that's no big deal I'm not aware there isn't one now this is obviously very very significant which is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you guys off I wanted to ask Jamie to pull up some photos of clinical CWD deer or elk I think you had photos of the ones that are there sick that so again 24 month plus or minus incubation period in the last six to eight weeks our clinical I you know I got to tell you man I killed this deer and he tested positive oh yeah tested positive and that one's not CWD that's not the one before that one what is that some of that was called

88:27that's cutaneous fibromas there tumors that grow on the surface of the skin pretty grotesque looking because of that um it's a virus it's if well if you get those warts and those fibromas on your eyes and they block your vision it would be but otherwise it's about it's a stressor on animals and you can actually eat them they're fine but I don't think I would that Jamie's got up there the larger image scroll down that what is that that's likely CWD yes absolutely pick the one that's on the row underneath the second one from the left that one that the buck there the rib that's yeah that's a photograph no you know so that was taken by a game warden Michael hopper is his name within the state of Kansas and he's you know this diseases has a pretty decent footprint in Kansas that's game warden he gets calls about deer acting funny and so he's taken a number of good

89:34pictures if you can zoom in on that photo I don't know if you can look at what's coming out of that dears mouth see that stream of saliva yeah yeah that's all filled with infectious material so that's one of the clinical signs is this hyper solid that's a wild deer that's a wild deer so it's almost like the this disease is trying to spread itself it's um pretty efficient yeah yeah but but by doing that by forcing these animals to have all the saliva excretion this is a very effective means of transmitting this disease throughout the the set of characteristics of this whole disease where the protracted incubation period shedding infectious agent through bodily fluids for the majority of that incubation period the the infectious agent persists in the environment for years out to decades I mean if you wanted to stack the deck for a disease you couldn't come up with a better set

90:30of characteristics plus they look perfectly healthy so we have no idea you know that they're there their disease until later on in in in the disease progression now is there a prevalence in or is there a higher prevalence in deer versus moose versus elk or anything else we tend to see higher prevalence in the deer species white-tailed deer mule deer in isolated areas than we do in either elk moose there's only been you know worldwide there may only been 10 positive moose okay to date and it's likely and it doesn't seem that they're less susceptible it's just that they're likely haven't been exposed because they're not in the same systems and there are there moose tend to be solitary solitarius concen thank you you know periodically a single a yearling will will wander down from northeastern part of Minnesota but very very rare what about wolves have wolves contracted it yet

91:33wolves are an interesting story so to date there's no evidence that any canid any member of the dog family has ever developed any Tse they never got BSE as far as we know no evidence that any canid has gotten CWD now that could be a real observing it could also be that we haven't done enough science on it okay but there's certainly exposure as opposed to cats in the BSE situation both great cats and domestic cats got a TS equally it was referred to as feline spongiform encephalopathy and it was from consuming BSE contaminated meat okay very similar to how she yeah great cats which is most certainly consumed deer yeah now in in with CWD in North America we again we have no evidence that any mountain lion or any great cat or small cat has contracted CWD and thanks it's very interesting in a research study in Wyoming that I was a part of it turned out that the highest

92:37source of mortality for CWD positive deer was mountain lion predation and so somebody's going ha ha CWD doesn't always kill deer well but it predisposes them so think about that progressive neurological degeneration and think about how mountain lions hunt their ambush hunters so if you're a deer and you're not quite right you know I mean this disease is developing in your brain you're progressing progressive dementia it's not at the point where we are humanized which really are very very poor we can't see disease yet but disease is progressing and an ambush predator can leverage that and take advantage of that in that weakness in the prey see the same thing in Colorado studies have identified that CWD positive deer tend to get hit by cars more often than CWD negative deer it's very logical you know so now let's extend that to two wolves and ask the question could wolves be a

93:39management tool for CWD okay wolves are present in northern Wisconsin you know a lot of other lot of other locations and at some point wolves and CWD will meet so there's been mathematical models developed which are there's a lot of assumptions built in those models but it leaves it as an open question could a large coursing predator whose vision and senses are much more acute than ours could they take advantage of this disease in earlier stages and so when disease meets geographically wolves could wolves slow or maybe stop the progression of disease because they're because they're taking the weak and the the sick and the old right but they still still wouldn't stop the excretion and they still wouldn't stop all the bodily fluids could they could they slow the spread or stop the spread maybe could they reverse disease you could likely take all the Predators you could

94:42find wolves and mountain lions and dump them you know into Iowa County just south of where Doug lives and they likely would not be able to eliminate disease but at that what as disease spreads geographically at the interface could predators be an effective tool to slow or stop disease from spreading it's an interesting question especially when states are contemplating more aggressive control measures opening up hunting and trapping seasons to reduce population densities or wolves so we don't have good tools and I'll leave it an open question do we want to take that potential tool and take it out of the toolbox what about what about okay so a wolf okay well coyote by us you know they're eatin deer die in our woods you know from we found a dead one last time Steve was there and I was very suspicious of it being a CWD because it was a two and a half year old buck it

95:40was playing there and turns out it was probably hit by a car but it was fairly well consumed by coyotes by then and I cut the head off of it and sent it in and it came back non positive what happens when that coyote which is going to travel now they aren't traveling huge distances but say he's eaten a CWD positive deer on the Durand farm and he's running over to Bunker Hill seven or eight miles away because they do that and he yeah we've done that science has been done and so it turns out if you take CWD CWD positive material you put it in the front of a coyote it comes out the back end of a coyote and it's still capable it's still infectious there's still in fact if 'ti and it is capable of transmitting disease you said mice don't get it rats eat Taiyo poop correct yeah yeah so they they don't get it though not that we're aware of there's a potentially

96:38spread in their urine because they would be carrying it so that that coyote you have to ask you so you could eat CWD positive materials you could poop it out so X number of hours later and he might be a mile or two away okay so that's a fairly local geographic phenomenon that could be spreading infectious material now you have to ask your clutch self in you know more questions when they they defecate on the landscape is it deer likely to encounter and consume that material well maybe not now but it might be fertilizer two years down the road for plants that the deer could eat so but I think that's quite restricted it's a localized geographic phenomenon okay and not something that we can do a hell of a lot about it's hard to same thing with with crows you can put CWD in the front end of the crow or probably other scavengers and CWD comes out the back end about four hours

97:33later so you could ask yourself the question how far does a crow fly in four hours and is a deer likely to consume crow poop so these have been shown to be possible in a laboratory environment but how much they really apply out in the field is of course of question so we go back we know that dear - dear - dear - dear we see that slow diffusive process on the landscape that's the biggie that's going on just south of him and now is past him then we have that anthropogenic movement you know humans moving at long distances and the potential for agricultural commodities to be involved I mean there's likely other things like crows and coyotes a proof of concept in the laboratory but whether they're really happening in the field isn't is an entirely open question and if they are how big are they as compared to these other features so why not do the you know and and and some of the

98:35detractors will also say well you can't stop deer from doing deer activities right licking branches licking each other you those those those normal deer activities but if we're concentrating them in an area let's say a mineral lick where every deer in the area comes through there and then licks that and there or a feeder or a feeder and you know a bait pile and and you we've seen bait I mean I've seen bait piles where there's a pile of corn there's a pile a apples well they're all eating off the same pile you got all these deer coming into that that's something we can do something about there are all these natural movements that we can't do anything about but if we can slow the spread by stopping these unnatural gatherings of during these unnatural you know spreading the disease why wouldn't we do that yeah there's a few things you know you keep honing in on you know

99:35there's these anthropogenic factors and then what can we do where disease is truly is here the things you're talking about the baiting and feeding artificial congregations of animals okay in where TB is in in Michigan you can't bait and feed and in Wisconsin some of the other states where CWD is you can't bait and feed deer the idea is you're artificially congregating them so remember that single deer we saw them up there on the screen as shedding you know copious amounts of saliva so if that deer goes up to a pile of corn on the ground he's sharing spreading infectious agent into that corn it can persist on that corn for a long long time decades healthy naive susceptible animal comes up it eats that corn or licks that mineral lick and it's likely that that animal is ingesting viable infectious agent can transmit disease the the the the analogy there is is daycare okay if

100:34you want to get your kids sick your three-year-old kids sick what's the best place to do it thank you okay daycare Indiana is the analogy there is that pile of corn on the ground so if every child that ever goes to daycare is perfectly healthy they're not little disease factories but we know that's not the case so there's a great place in schools are a great place to spread disease and then those kids come home and share it with you and then you can share it with others right same thing there so these artificial congregations if all the deer are healthy well then they can't be a place to transmit disease but we know that's not the case so it's an iguana those risk factors we can control but now you hit Doug you know we get back to this area where disease is established is there anything we can do and there's certainly things we can try all right let me haven't we haven't exhausted the

101:28toolkit yet Mike Samuel at UW's I don't now retired he looked at this from a mathematical perspective and he's trying to leverage the idea that adult males have higher prevalence right so there they are sinks for disease they're gathering disease and then they're shedders of disease as well so what if in our harvest regime in hunting season we focused on adult males okay we hammer the bucks because they're the ones most likely to have disease so we would lower prevalence in that we're reducing the proportion of the population with the highest prevalence of disease the idea is if you knock that segment down enough that you would interrupt disease transmission cycles and you could actually lower herd prevalence over time now you still have the persistence in the environment but I'm from a modeling basis it works all right so now think about the deer hunter out there

102:32listening to me today listening this show today oh now they want us to go out and kill all the Bucks so it's not going to be a very desirable from a hunters perspective tool so all the tools we have we consider these like medicine for for a disease they're very bitter it is a bitter pill I you know you were there when we were still doing wearing the sombrero if you you know shot a smaller buck or whatever and and then we had a management idea that we wanted to grow some bigger bucks but at the same time we were pretty lenient about it we we're not doing that anymore the deer I shot last year were deer that seven eight years ago I wouldn't even take another look at em first bucket I shot the first book I had an ethical shot at now are they giving you more tags or give house no there's resistance in resistance in the hunting community to that that's unfortunate

103:33it is unfortunate I'm not one of those those people we are in I'm part of the county deer Advisory Committee again we're giving more doe tags or antlerless tags because the other part of it sure we have a population the Bucks that because their sinks as he said and they're spreading the disease and and they're traveling more you know a doe and her family tend to kind of stay in one area a little bit more where the Bucks have a bigger range but the other thing is in is population so one of the things that for a couple of different reasons I mean you saw the number of deer that we have in our place in Richland County we have in excess of 75 deer per square mile of habitat and I know there's places in the country that are higher than that but um you know it's it's sort of a it's a big population and I'm I'm I have issue with it for a few different reasons one of

104:23them's disease the other one is that when I have too many deer my little oak trees are getting because they love those little oak trees and they're getting chewed off and I'm trying to do multiple things I'm not just trying to raise deer on our farm and in our Woodlands so you know that that's one of the issues so there's this demographic issue that that Mike samulet had been working on but then there's the population issue as well we're given for when I when I was a kid when you bought up buck license you and four other dudes would get together and then fill out this form and send it in and like August to get a what was called a party tag and you could shoot one dole between four people we had they were trying to manage the hurt to have more deer because again when I was a kid seeing here was a big deal it's exactly opposite now so now you buy it you get a buck tag and you

105:20get four antlerless tags with every tag that you buy in our County what changed from when you were a kid where the population exploded well management was a big part of it and the management exploded is I mean I'm gonna be 60 years old joke you look great well thank you very much as do you thanks oh and Brian you look pretty good too that's a pretty long period of time and when you when you're controlling because you don't have any deer and you're managing to increase the deer herd and you have a mentality out there that well I'm not going to shoot it doe because you know rather and they're having two fawns and this year at least in my area we're seeing a lot of those having three fawns that's you can see how that growth of the herd would be pretty dramatic yeah if you want to herd to grow stop shooting doze if you don't want to take a herd down you know shoot dose remember

106:31back in grad school in Illinois they gave away these little pins that hunters collected when you brought a doe into the registration station you got a pin that said I shot a doe so the herd won't grow you know people collected these little mementos that's arrested during you know that time for him like I said I grew up you know a couple counties to the north and west of where Doug was and in the you know in the 1960s I mean there weren't a lot of deer around there and watched you know as I grew up yeah we we didn't shoot many does the regulations in the state didn't allow you to shoot those by 1980 on opening day I remember I counted a hundred and sixty deer on opening day 15 years before that probably saw three something like that so exponential growth in the deer population over that point in time the deer management program worked really well oh yeah we know how to count day I met

107:23along with all of that that that we've already talked about the agriculture and the and the agriculture expanded well but you know so it had the potential for all of those you know for this explosion so there's a interesting here I talked with folks in in the state of Michigan and they've got a issue you know relatively recent likely issue is CWD and you know there's user groups out there that are trying to advise the state on how to manage CWD one of the groups is is talking about it's called antler point restrictions okay the idea is a you know a yearling buck eighteen months old has fairly small hours and then when as they get older they typically get successively larger handlers so a group is out there right now as an active proponent of implementing antler point restrictions and promoting enormous harvest at the same time okay as a disease management

108:27tool so as we noted you know lowering the population where it is that already CBD is beneficial in that if we have if we have a herd of five hundred animals with ten percent prevalence that's fifty positives versus our herd of 20 animals with five percent which would be one and that's a dramatic you know difference the prevalence is the same but we have fewer positives out there right so lowering populations overall does make sense with regard to disease okay but now the other part of antler point restrictions is allowing males to get older and they argue that that will keep hunters engaged and if hunters are engaged they'll shoot more dose and keep the population down and that'll be a good thing but you know we've already discussed how adult males have to tend to have the highest prevalence of CWD okay and so now you're talking about promoting pushing more

109:28into these older age groups in an area where CWD is already known to exist and so from from a biological perspective from a numerical modeling perspective of disease I fail to see how this can work so will it keep it hunters engaged that's a sociological question that I can't really address but from a purely biological disease driven process promoting more older aged men animals older age deer in a population with CWD I cannot figure out how that could be beneficial that seems the opposite hoping that through this podcast this information becomes more digestible because I think that in order to get what you just laid out over two hours in order for someone to get that by reading it's like they're not going to do it most hunters are just not going to do it sorry I have a feeling that like what Ted Nugent had said that this is a his perspective is possibly way more

110:35prevalent than should be and because this information is not that digestible I think that there's you know the I know you talked about it on meat-eater episode seventy seventy and then now today this is gonna reach a lot more people and it's in a very digestible form where they get to sit down and listen to it and hopefully we can get the word out on this in a way that it's not getting out now so people understand the consequences of this this is a real issue and if this is not simply like hey we don't want to do this because this could negatively impact our hunting opportunities you might not have any hunting opportunities in ten years or twenty years like this this literally could devastate the entire population of deer this is not it's not a simple thing this is an incredibly complex thing with a terrible disease that is 100% fatal and is absolutely spreading no question

111:29some of the you know take-home points I always think and I get regularly asked by hunters well what can I do okay well what a hunters do they sit at deer camp and they shoot the crap around yeah whatever libations or whatever so and they're gonna talk about things like CWD and good so let those conversations be driven by fact and science as opposed to rumor and innuendo right okay that's what we're doing here today and that's why I think this public information is is so important there's other things that can do we talked a you know Doug hit on a bunch of them you know hunting is part of a promoting a healthy deer herd hunting keep populations low test your deer and manage those carcasses don't leave them out on the landscape there's another category though of things that can be done you know in deer camp what's the easiest thing to do let's blame the DNR for everything the

112:24Department of Natural Resources okay it's it's almost a sport to kick around at night and see who can insult the DNR the worst right so with regard to disease though is that really an effective use of your time it might be fun but it's likely not effective because think of these state management agencies that deal with deer might be the Agriculture Department or the Natural Resources Department they're very very restricted in what they can do they're within a legislate within a legislative framework okay so if you really want to impact change in how a government agency goes about its business should you talk to the local biologist or should you talk to the elected leader who establishes the legislative framework that that agency works underneath it's important to put pressure on on our elected representatives and and we've seen change in that in well Wisconsin being a

113:17great example our management used to be science-based wildlife biologists making decisions about deer management it's politically based now politicians are are deciding what the you'll you'll often hear that in Iowa County Wisconsin where this this first effort started well see it didn't work up there DNR is you know they had this idea and it didn't work to stop the disease it didn't get a chance to work because a social and political pressures from political stars forced the DNR to vacate their plans and their aggressive measures anymore recently there's a court case of the state of Missouri the Missouri Department of Conservation tried to implement some restrictions on the captive servant industry to stop importation of live deer seeing them as a risk factor the deer breeders sued the state went through you know the court system and it was decided by the Supreme

114:15Court in the state of Missouri about three weeks ago that in fact all deer are you know represent wild deer and that the Department of Conservation was well within their constitutional and legislative authority to implement measures designed to protect the integrity and viability of that deer herd for future generations so the Supreme Court said yes Department of Conservation you do have the right to restrict import of animals into captive Servet facilities to protect the integrity of the herd and it's the the legislative part of it is really important and I can't put too fine a point on it laws can be changed and there's pressure to do that under a lot of you know a lot of different reasons I've been a part of changing some legislation it had to do with forestry and I know how it's done and you know one of my favorite quotes from Aldo Leopold is ethical behaviors doing the

115:18right thing even when no one's watching and the wrong thing is legal so just because it's legal doesn't mean it's the right thing to do and it doesn't mean it's the ethical thing to do is there any potential to changing the the limits tag limits or making them more widespread if they understand the issue with this and they understand that one of the main tools of handling this in a more effective manner and slowing the populate or slowing the spread of this disease to the population of deer is reducing the population itself I mean even though these hunters would resist this because it would limit hunting opportunities this could potentially be a large tool in the toolbox of conservation and stopping the spread sure answer on that is yes as I said I'm on the coming to your Advisory Committee we have the opportunity to give out as many tags as antlerless tags as we want

116:13what about antler tags because that's the issue one that's it one permanent is legislatively controlled but even with this disease which that might be the number one tool to slow down the spread we used to have a policy in Wisconsin called Ernie Boch and it was not particularly popular with a lot of hunters because you know I want to shoot my book and I don't want to have to shoot it and earn a buck yeah issues don't unless deer turn the buck tag and it wasn't particularly popular that's really a mild way to put it mm-hmm well it was violently opposed the only opposed by a very noisy group of hunters just like and again with my experience with working with the legislature a small group of people making a hell of a lot of noise with a certain amount of money can change things it wasn't popular it was popular with me as well again you hunted on my farm we shoot way

117:20more antlerless deer than we shoot bucks when when Ernie buck was in place we'd have a stack of buck tags because we were shooting so many dos that was because it was politically and socially became a political issue it was rescinded and so now what we found in Richland County is we can give we could drop antlerless tags from a helicopter shoot as many as you want and we're still going to kill about the same number about the same number of Doceri there's a little bit there's been a little bit of an uptick but when we had earned a buck we killed a shitload of them you know three times as many and it becomes a Menai and especially like casual hunters like you know gun hunters good example and bow hunters are you know different example because they're not as casual but they're more interested in and you know killing a big big buck a generally it gone hunters

118:24yeah you go out there for two or three days him you were there we'd froze our asses off it's like well how long I could stay out here yeah we have a really short season we initially had much longer season when when the CWD management first started we had much longer season I loved it I invited I got a hunt with folks that I you know that that maybe had their own place to hunt or I invited folks from the community to come in and hunt you know friends from different places came down and hunted but again a small noisy group and I don't know if small it's the yeah I don't know what the numbers are on that but made that go away so now we're back down to the nine-day season that doesn't make any sense to me like who gave in to that the politicians do understand and they're doing it from an ignorance from point of ignorance there's no pressure no pressure I got a hope that something

119:18like this podcast gets to them I sure hope so man I mean sure why we this is a terrifying couple so the Wisconsin experience was really important and the data shows that the first couple years of this aggressive management with earn a buck was actually forcing the population down but it was very unpopular and so political pressure was applied and that tool was taken out of the tool box thrown on the ground immediately when you stop doing earn a buck and you stop having longer seasons the population trends reversed and started going back up so it was easy to label hey the DNR failed their effort to eliminate disease by by having aggressive seasons failed like Doug said we don't know that because we stopped we pulled the plug on the tool Alberta when when CWD started really blossoming in Saskatchewan Alberta was like we don't want it and they found their first

120:21handful of cases right on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan they took they they raised the odds a little bit they started harvesting deer from an aerial platform called a helicopter okay that helicopter with government agents sharpshooting deer to try and basically eliminate deer in a buffer zone between Saskatchewan and Alberta knocked the diseased deer out and create a buffer zone where disease wasn't well that was not very popular over like a fart in church and landowners and Outfitters went to the ministry and said we can't possibly have this and that program had every chance of being successful and the rug was pulled out from underneath them okay now here we have time here we are you know years later and the western states you know Montana Colorado Wyoming where disease has been a long time there wildlife health professionals I have put together a set of uniform management

121:24recommendations for the western states okay and they're promoting the things that we've been talking about reducing those artificial congregations of animals implementing a harvest structure to focus on males okay the male focused that most of the the social group with the highest prevalence and also kind of what I guess I would refer to as hot spot shooting when you see a new spark of disease out there on the landscape get on it don't allow it to become established your only chance to be successful to eliminate disease it's very very soon before it gets established and start you know spreading so now we're seeing in Wyoming and Colorado in Montana they're actively talking they're talking to the media they're talking to their Commission's and they're talking about implementing these regulatory structures at least on an experimental basis recognizing that

122:19doing nothing is no longer an option and that's one of the things that was learned from the Wisconsin experiment for lack of a better that are our failure I mean it you know the analogy that I often use is you know we had this we had this car and it was you know pretty decent car that's pretty decent model of how we were going to control the disease but you know they can let the oil go out of the car and they ran and ran it in the ditch and bang it around and then brought it up and say damn this Ford doesn't run worth a and if you you can't actively try to defeat something and then say it doesn't work you really have to let it you know this is course and and in the sky it what I hope that what's happening and what I can see is you know in the 15 years that I've learned about CWD is that not only is there a lot being learned about the disease but there's

123:11been a lot and about how to manage it both on a scientific level but on a social level as well and I can tell you man if you don't have it you don't want it um you know 15 years ago I felt oh and there's so much more knowing now than there was 15 years ago you know I feel like we it's not too late in Wisconsin I'm a we can keep slowing it down and we can protect the rest of the state but we got a lot of work to do and it takes a while the medicine is very bitter information too because I don't think people are really aware of the extent of this disease or the danger of it or all the ramifications of it I agree I agree I'm surprised in my area intelligent people that I know that are casual hunters yeah so it's getting to be deer hunting time you know I'll talk to what I'm like ah they don't really you know they don't know that they don't know yeah that yeah yeah and that really

124:09is one of the things so you know I appreciate so much the opportunity to come out here and talk about it and and Brian and and Mike Samuel are going to come to Richland Center in September which is you know the capital or county seat I'm sorry of Richland County and we're going to do another presentation on chronic wasting disease and we're advertising it while you know widely and and more of that information has to get education as a big part of it Joe you're exactly right I just don't think there's enough digestible education and I think this sort of form is one of the most digestible all you do is you put it on your car you drive around you listen to it you put it in your headphones you're at the gym you'll get this information you'll get in and I'm in a way that you're probably not going to sit down and go through these studies I appreciate it as well I mean I'm

125:02pretty not very savvy on social media and things like that I wasn't even sure what a podcast was when you know Stephen rinoa you know asked me to come on and do meat-eater and so we did that and I understand now it's been downloaded like 650 thousand times okay which for a scientist you know I've been an author on a lot of peer-reviewed papers and I can guarantee you they haven't been read you take a couple zeros off of there and that's probably the readership on those thing so from an impact being able to get a message out to people this type forum really really is helpful and getting it down like you say down to a level that you know hunters can understand and digestible I think is very very important because I we talked about how misinformation active misinformation to try and you know it's not so bad or look over here don't look at this look over there you know these

125:57diversionary tactics are very very successful they were very successful with tobacco they're successful with other scientific invent endeavors yeah today and also the simplistic perspective that hey look how many deer get killed by winter you know it's way more than CWD stop stop crying wolf yeah it's a diversionary tactic you know just the other thing that I'd like to bring up about that um I've killed some big deer and I get it guys want it people want it hunters want to do that sure I want to kill it's what they look forward to they look forward to hunting season it's only one time a year yeah and you get to do that as we're not just hunters we're conservationists what we do is going to affect the future and we have an obligation to do what's best for the resource and what's best for the future and I'll tell you this last year I shot a two and a half year old buck opening day

126:50and this is a nice little eight pointer and I celebrated that dear I enjoyed that dear I remember that moment just as much as the 200-inch buck that I killed it's it's different but it concerns me that at times we get so wrapped up and I was one of them man I feel like a recovered alcoholic sometimes about the whole healer thing you know like I am Doug and I used to be an 12-step process well and there you know there is a part of that yeah but that remember what the joy of hunting is and the the the reason for it and how important it is to make sure that that continues into the future there have been some folks who really you know sounded huge alarms about this and you know you talked about a little bit that twenty years from now what you could you know can be well it might take a generation or two but it really could become that I want to be able to eat the

127:53meat and I want to know that in future generations you know 100 years from now and that farm is still there and it's still in the durin name it's been in my family for 115 years I want to know that a hundred years from now that my descendants and their friends and their family are going to be able to come there and still enjoy that and in order for that to happen just like when I'm managing my oak trees so that 100 years now there's gonna be those big oak trees there again a hundred years from now we have to do what we need to do now in order for this opportunity be there for the future our hunting heritage is huge not to mention the economics of deer hunting in a place like Wisconsin there's over six hundred and fifty thousand people that hunt deer they pump in excess of 1 billion dollars every year into the economy and the state of Wisconsin surrounded by hunting if we

128:46put that on a national basis there's millions of hunters and more billions of dollars spent so it's not a small thing when you think about you know the economics of hunting but the heritage of hunting is very very important I mean I've been hunting my whole life yeah now I hunt primarily one County West to him and you know CWD is coming I'd say I'm sitting in my tree stand three years ago and CWD is in the next county over two years ago the first CWD positive deer in Crawford County Wisconsin was detected less than two miles to the southwest of the tree that I'm sitting in last year CWD had been detected in another in a second deer in Crawford County this time one mile to the northeast of where my tree stand is I find myself looking at deer differently I'm looking for those subtle cues of disease and it's so it's changing the experience I get calls pretty regularly from from hunters who

129:49are like you know really it's a coin flip out there I'm not so sure I want to hunt there anymore I know because I'm on that deer Advisory Committee a group of hunters came in who bought land south of us you know 20 miles south of us in a significant portion and they're doing they were they bought it to manage it for for bigger bucks in population and all that they came in to the county deer Advisory Committee and talked to us about what they're doing they shot 43 deer on that property last year all of the box tested all the antler Bucks tested positive for CWD about 25% of the dose and some of the fawns so a DILF one who has CW who has CWD and she's gonna be clinical and died in two years she's never gonna have phones of her own that's the population issue but what I you know I hope those guys are listening um what I applauded about them is what they've done is really worked with

130:56bringing in other people and I'm gonna do the same on our place bringing in more people to hunt to to take more deer and to do what they can manage because they saw it well they you know what they're not seeing big little bucks anymore because they're dead they're dying they're fine a number they're finding them yeah we've seen that in in Wyoming you know I mean we look at the long-term impacts of disease I talked a little bit about population impacts driving populations down the other thing we would identify is changes in that demographic structure so you you know when you were hunting for the big antler deer you're looking for animals that are four five years old mature or over mature animals in an area where CWD is established at high prevalence levels those animals are not going to exist or will be extremely extremely rare they're rare now there's

131:52an example of a very large ranch out in Wyoming there's about a hundred thousand acres and they managed historically exclusively for these over mature mule deer you know the ones with the antlers you know like that monstrous mule they're even in the good times they probably killed maybe three of them a year something like that on that vast acreage because it you know there's a lot of sources of mortality they're not anymore because you know those deer aren't living that long think about a math question math quiz for during here so in this population with super high prevalence so let's say at 18 at 18 months of age yearling deer let's say they have 20% prevalence and we have that we would have demonstrated that at two-and-a-half it's probably 30% prevalence at three and a half and four and a half and above it's it's close to 40 45 50 percent prevalence so this is a

132:47two-year disease right so half your prevalence dies every year so if you have twenty percent prevalence half of those deer are going to be dead the next year and half the year after that okay so over time you would expect these cohorts to diminish so the math question is in that population how many five-year-old Bucks are there because disease penetrance grows over time the answer is not man no it's not yeah yeah no and and that you know that really is the case and it's it's all right you know again that's why I wanted to bring Brian long because he's gonna provide the science and I'm gonna try to break it down to you know Doug's level and and and hopefully that you know folks can understand and I know I get emotional about it but you know part of it is you care yeah well my dad was 94 years old today and he's the guy that I started deer hunting with you know he

133:49died a couple years ago and I he grew up with that farm you know was my great grandfather's farming and that area in the Driftless area and you've heard me talk about the Driftless area before and how important that area is to me and this is a big you know part of that area it is an emotional thing for me which is why I then look at the science and what can we do about this and I think about you know I think about elder Leopold what Leopold do right now I mean what would he be thinking about this you know man be thinking about this you know I know what my dad would be saying he iced out my my antler thing was every time he'd see a bucket on the trail camera no shooter it's like he was just an old school buck hunter man yeah antler on it you shot it so all those things are in my head was I think about this and you know it's it's the emotions important and I get the emotion part

134:46from all of these these these folks and I understand that some of them want to kill big bucks and and you know maybe because I have killed a couple of big ones that's not as important maybe it has something to do with being 60 years old and movies also you understand the consequences I mean this is a real serious issue forget about the ego of killing a big buck or you know this desire to achieve something that's more difficult than shooting a young one there's more at stake here yeah so you brought up an interesting what would Leopold do and yeah I mean I saw this disciple you know father of modern wildlife ecology started the first program of wildlife ecology at University of Wisconsin in the 1940s populations of deer in the northern part of Wisconsin were growing by leaps and bounds and they were dramatically changing the landscape you know to nuding the

135:40landscape you know eating the eastern white cedar and deer in northern latitudes tend to yard together in the wintertime and so Leopold knew that this was you know deleterious to the long-term viability of that ecosystem he took people out landowners out hunters out into these deer yards in the spring to show them how there was nothing to eat within reach of a deer on its hind feet and there were bodies at that deer that had stopped through the wintertime in order to demonstrate to them the consequences of mismanagement of deer herds so he he was a real proponent of showing people the results of doing things the wrong way in education so I think you know it comes back it's what we're trying to do not saying that you know we're Leopold in or anything like that but education getting information about getting accurate information honest maybe one of the biggest things we can do I think you

136:37guys did down here today so thank you thank you for being here Brian thank you Doug for organizing this shooting together really happy we got a chance to talk and scare the out of me thanks for the opportunity my pleasure thanks thank you