CONSERVATION
One of the best defenses against CWD seems to be to stop transporting
deer from one place to another. Pictured is a head drop off station for elk
in Wyoming.
cent.”
That’s manageable, say most
CWD experts, who say the trig-
ger to activate more aggressive
containment to control the
disease is when more than 5
percent of the herd is infected.
More troubling is that within a
core of the Montana hunting
area, prevalence is closer to 10
percent. The state is still mull-
ing what to do to manage the
disease in that portion of the
hunting district.
But back to me and my
hunting area. Montana FWP
is moving its surveillance to
the northern border this fall.
That’s my neck of the woods,
and we will see CWD sampling
stations set up along the Ca-
nadian border starting in Sep-
tember. I have no doubt it will
be detected. After all, based on
that national map, I assume
we’ve had CWD-positive ani-
mals in our area for years. But
when a sample test does come
back positive, here are the
handful of things we know will
happen.
First, there will be preva-
lence testing in the affected
area, using either general-sea-
son tags or a special CWD hunt
to collect and test a statistically
valid sample of the population.
Second, there will be trans-
portation restrictions, prohib-
iting the movement of whole
animals—or even brain and
spinal tissue—from the affect-
ed area. Third, people who get
their animals tested will need
to process the meat and mark
the packages in a distinctive
way. If a test comes back pos-
itive—it takes a few weeks to
get results—the hunters will
be advised to dispose of the
meat. Commercial butchers in
affected areas are discouraged
from grinding meat in batches,
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WESTERN HUNTING JOURNAL
or dumping meat from multiple
hunters’ game in a single grind.
There is no known transmis-
sion of CWD to humans, but
disease experts recommend
that humans do not consume
meat from CWD-positive ani-
mals. After all, before the dis-
ease jumped the species barri-
er, it was thought that scrapie
couldn’t be transmitted to un-
gulates. And epidemiologists
note that CWD is in the same
family as bovine spongiform
encephalopathy, or BSE, bet-
ter known as mad-cow disease
that did infect humans who ate
meat from diseased cattle.
Take Defensive Action
If you live in a state where CWD
hadn’t been detected, be thank-
ful. But don’t be complacent.
There are a few things you can
do to delay its arrival.
First, advocate your legisla-
ture and wildlife and livestock
commissions for better reg-
ulation of game farms. There
seems to be some evidence that
CWD is spread when ungulates
eat the brain tissue of affected
animals. In the wild, that al-
most never happens, but high-
fence operations often feed
animals meal made from the
ground bones and tissue of un-
gulates. Deer farms and high-
fence shooting operations ha-
ven’t made much inroad in the
West, and this is a good enough
reason to keep them from be-
coming established.
Also, support prohibitions
on feeding wildlife. Wisconsin’s
CWD outbreak was probably in-
tensified by the custom of feed-
ing game, which unnaturally
concentrated animals around
bait sites and led to increased
contact between infected and
non-infected animals.
Second, get accustomed to
deboning your trophy in the
field and leaving as much bone,
spinal fluid, and brain matter
as possible in the specific area
where you killed it. There is lit-
tle danger of CWD being pres-
ent in clean venison. And then
when you process your meat—
either yourself or at a commer-
cial butcher—make sure you
clearly label the packages with
sex, species, date, and area
where it was killed. That will
make identifying the meat easy
in case CWD is detected in the
area where you hunted.
Advocate for more fund-
ing for CWD research and