CONSERVATION
ask a fundamental question:
Do I feed potentially infected
venison to my family?
Is The West Next?
As of mid 2018, CWD had not
been detected in states west of
Montana. That includes Idaho,
Oregon, Washington, Califor-
nia, Nevada, and Arizona, as
well as British Columbia. Be-
cause of its geography and its
public policy (more on this in a
bit), the West isn’t at high risk
of the disease, but that’s cold
comfort considering many
Western states—including my
Montana—also felt they were
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WESTERN HUNTING JOURNAL
more or less immune from
CWD. Then they went looking
for it.
The origin of the disease is
as debatable as the vectors of
its transmission, but we know
that it first showed up in the
late 1960s in northern Colora-
do, in a research facility where
mule deer were confined for a
forage and nutritional study.
The facility also contained a
population of domestic sheep
that tested positive for scrapie,
a brain-wasting disease simi-
lar to CWD. There is some evi-
dence that scrapie jumped the
species barrier in the facility.
Exactly how that happened is
unclear, just as it’s unclear how
the disease escaped the facility.
What is even more clear is that
once CWD entered the game-
farm pipeline, it spread around
the country in a pattern that
correlates with captive deer fa-
cilities.
“There certainly seems to
be a link between transport-
ing deer and the spread of
CWD,” says Dr. Grant Woods,
a biologist, land-management
consultant, and host of Grow-
ing Deer TV. He notes that the
detection of CWD among wild
populations of deer and elk
(the gray shading on our map)
is in counties near game farms
and high-fence deer shooting
operations (the yellow and red
dots).
One of the first and best
defenses against CWD seems
to be to stop transporting
deer from one place to anoth-
er, whether live in the back of
a stock trailer or dead in the
beds of hunters’ pickups. The
other defense is early detec-
tion, and that brings me back
to my home state, and the most
recent and relevant model for
how CWD response is likely to
play out in your Western state.