S
OMEBODY INSIDE THE LOW-SLUNG brick building that hous-
es the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisc.,
has a grim but vital job.
They are responsible for updating the national CWD
map, a digital graphic that tracks the spread of chronic
wasting disease, an affliction of North America’s deer populations.
Every time a new instance of the fatal neurological disease is con-
firmed, the federal employee adds another coordinate to the map
that looks exactly like what it is: an epidemiological dot plot, on
a continental scale. Each yellow or red point represents another
CWD-positive animal in a game farm or deer-breeding operation.
Each gray shade represents an expansion of CWD in wild, free-roam-
ing ungulates, including elk, whitetails, mule deer, blacktailed deer,
and moose.
I’m paying especially close attention to the map these days, as
my deer paradise of eastern Montana becomes a shrinking island of
CWD-free real estate, and I wonder for how many more seasons I’ll
have the original luxury of feeding my family venison uninfected by
a brain-wasting disease that makes Alzheimer’s look almost humane
in comparison.
Unconditionally fatal, untreatable, capable of lying dormant in
soil for years, mysterious, arbitrary, and confounding, chronic wast-
ing disease is arguably the greatest modern threat to America’s deer
herd. Where its prevalence is especially high, it has shown the ca-
pability to depress local ungulate populations to an unrecoverable
level. And it is slowly but inexorably marching westward.
But before you sell your deer rifle and all your camouflage, go
steady. While there’s a lot we don’t know about CWD, there is plenty
we do, including the fact that it moves slowly, that even in infected
herds, most individual deer and elk are disease-free, its detection is
WASTING DISEASE
Still inscrutable, chronic wasting desease marches
steadily west. By Andrew McKean, WHJ Conservation Editor
possible with a few simple tests, there is no evidence that CWD-in-
fected meat can infect humans who eat it, and hunters in many ar-
eas of the country have been living with CWD for decades.
But back to that map.
If you’re an elk or deer hunter—and that includes whitetails,
mule, and blacktailed deer—you should familiarize yourself with the
graphic, because it’s a good bet that those color codings will eventu-
ally converge on the place where you hunt. The map has splotches
and dots in western Pennsylvania and upstate New York, a few more
in Missouri and Michigan, and a big smear in Wisconsin before it
jumps west and dominates the states of Colorado and Wyoming,
with tendrils extending into Nebraska, Kansas, and Utah. North
of the 49th Parallel, there’s a significant concentration of CWD in
southern Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Hunters in the places where CWD has been confirmed know this
fact: You’re better off with wolves, occasional hemorrhagic disease,
or periodic winterkill than with CWD, which kills every animal it
infects and can lay dormant for years until it expresses itself again.
That expression is gruesome. CWD-positive animals lose their ap-
petites, become disoriented and listless, and in the final stages of
the disease, drool excessively and stagger around until they die in an
emaciated, helpless state of physical and mental vacancy.
“Death is inevitable,” says the NWHC website, the repository for
all CWD-related research and public information. If predators don’t
kill CWD-positive animals, then they either die lonely, agonizing
deaths or they’re killed by licensed human hunters who then must
www.westernhuntingjournal.com
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