Ep. 766: The Truth About Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Mark Ruder https://vet.uga.edu/person/mark_ruder/, Michael Chamberlain https://www.instagram.com/wildturkeydoc/?hl=en, and Ryan Callaghan https://www.instagram.com/olcal406/. Topics discussed: The premier of MeatEater Sheds https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterTV; back to the 101 of what CWD is and the myths surrounding it; it’s just not a hoax; the slow, cryptic nature of the disease; are we still going to be able to grow old, big deer?; how there's no test for live deer; filling up space in the brain stem; high prevalence rates; how the skeptical public wants an answer; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 0:45Steven Rinella?

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• 1:30Steven Rinella?

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• 2:04Speaker 02

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• 2:44Steven Rinella?

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case, underwearless.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  We're the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:54Steven Rinella?

  You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

• 3:19Steven Rinella?

  All right, real quick, right up, right up top before, before anything happens. You know it's hunting season when Phil starts prepping for a theater production.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  That's how I mark the seasons too. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:29Steven Rinella?

  Phil, Phil stepped away from theater.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  I never really stepped away. It's just tough. It's tough on the family for me to do shows because I miss bedtime for months and it's just a lot of commuting, you know? I live out of town, so.

• 3:41Steven Rinella?

  And that one year, he was kissing the other lady besides his wife a whole bunch.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  I was.

• 3:45Steven Rinella?

  In the play, he had to kiss the lady.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  It was scandalous to no one besides Steve, but yeah.

• 3:50Steven Rinella?

  Rehearse that for all fall.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Well, I did, I did one.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  As long as you keep it to the regularly scheduled rehearsals.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  That's, that's correct. I did a play in January, Steve. You just weren't there. You didn't see it. I think the only person at the company saw it was Randall.

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  So you're prepping. Up now to do.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  I'm doing Christmas Carol again.

• 4:08Steven Rinella?

  You're doing it straight.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Did you? Yeah, I think we're doing it straight. We're no, no, no steampunk icing on it, which I think you were referring to.

• 4:15Steven Rinella?

  That's why I wanted to talk, touch on this very quickly.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:18Steven Rinella?

  There's one modification.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:22Steven Rinella?

  When they're always talking about buying that goose, you know?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah, the big Christmas goose.

• 4:26Steven Rinella?

  A farthing.

• 4:29Steven Rinella?

  A shilling for a farthing. Like, is that an expensive goose or not? You know what I mean?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I think it's supposed to be an expensive goose.

• 4:39Steven Rinella?

  I know, but if they would, if you would just try this this year.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 4:44Steven Rinella?

  Switch it to US currency and just for inflation.

• 4:48Speaker 03

  Okay, I'm listening.

• 4:50Steven Rinella?

  The kid's like, $300 for a goose?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Or maybe they just.

• 4:56Steven Rinella?

  The crowd be like, oh shit, that's a very expensive goose.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Sure, or they, they could say, you know, a shilling and a farthing and then just turn to the audience, break character and just kind of whisper.

• 5:06Steven Rinella?

  Be like, that'd be like, you know, it's like, it's like $300 today.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Uh huh. Isn't that nuts? Can you? Okay, back to the program.

• 5:12Steven Rinella?

  Is it? I would enjoy that place so much more.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:15Steven Rinella?

  If they weren't talking about that.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, currency conversion live.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Does he, is it an actual line or is it from Scrooge where he says the biggest goose in all of London? Cause when that imply it's gonna be expensive?

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, when he's had a change of heart, I think, you know, but go buy the, the, the biggest goose you can find. Yeah, something like that.

• 5:35Steven Rinella?

  A farthing?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  That's a great accent.

• 5:37Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I could do that whole damn play.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:40Steven Rinella?

  I might.

• 5:40Speaker 03

  You should. Christmas tour's coming up.

• 5:44Steven Rinella?

  All right, the wild turkey doc is back. Now we're actually starting the show. The wild turkey doc is back. Mike Chamberlain, very popular guest on the show. It came in and then tells you everything you ever want to know about turkeys. Today, we're not talking about turkeys though, except we're gonna talk about turkeys a little bit.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 6:00Steven Rinella?

  We're here to talk about chronic wasting disease.

• 6:03Steven Rinella?

  And an interesting, some, some interesting findings about that, which is gonna stir the old pot. Uh, the hoax, the CWD is a hoax, CWD is a scam, pot. You know the pot.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  Lot of guys stirring that pot. There are. That is a big pot with lots of spoons. Uh, Mike, uh, Dr. Chamberlain is from the Warrenell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia. He's the National Wild Turkey Federation Distinguished Professor, A or V? The. The, there's only one. Only one. Hmm. This is the first endowed position that's turkey centric. I might like to have that role. Come on. I'm a few years from retirement, so.

• 6:51Steven Rinella?

  And he leads the Wild Turkey Lab. Uh, Mark Ruder, am I saying that right?

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 6:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Mark Ruder's here, a colleague of Dr. Chamberlain's. He's from the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia.

• 7:09Steven Rinella?

  You got some accolades here that I don't understand. Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Study, what's that mean?

• 7:16Speaker 05

  So, um, it's Squidus for short. You'll hear most in the wildlife community call it Squidus, even though it has nothing to do with squids. Um, so we're a cooperative. So Squidus was founded in 1957 by state wildlife agencies in the southeastern United States.

• 7:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  And it was really founded at a time where we had no, no capacity, no expertise within state wildlife management agencies for disease and health topics. And, uh, it was actually founded in the face of, uh, one of the better known diseases of, of whitetail deer, and that's, uh, hemorrhagic disease, EHD and blue tongue. And, uh, so we were founded at this time to sort of provide expertise, diagnostic capacity, and understanding of diseases in whitetail deer at a time where restoration efforts were, you know, still kind of ongoing.

• 8:07Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 8:07Speaker 05

  Um, because the, the fear was that this disease was going to complicate the recovery of whitetail deer. And so states couldn't individually stand up capacity to have a, a person or facility for just focused on disease. Um, so they went the cooperative model. And so that was a long time ago and we're still, still here. We have, uh, today we have, uh, 17 state wildlife agencies, one territory in the southeast, um, and then have federal partners, US Fish and Wildlife Service and US Geological Survey. Sort of provides our core sort of funding and we serve the states.

• 8:42Steven Rinella?

  And you're the director?

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  Do you carry one of these in your wallet? Someone gave me this. Oh, not that.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Your insurance card?

• 8:53Steven Rinella?

  It's this little card that if you start dying of something.

• 8:57Steven Rinella?

  It tells people.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  What you do.

• 8:58Steven Rinella?

  At the hospital. Someone gave that to me at Cornell. It tells people at the hospital, hey, man.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  I do some weird stuff.

• 9:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you I should give that card to you.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  I don't have one of these cards, but all of this.

• 9:09Steven Rinella?

  I feel obligated to give you that card because it would apply more to your line of work than my line of work.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Does somebody ever go, have you ever come in contact with?

• 9:18Steven Rinella?

  Have you been in contact with any animals that seem sick?

• 9:22Speaker 04

  That's my job.

• 9:24Steven Rinella?

  Um, and then Dr. Callahan's here.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 9:28Steven Rinella?

  He's not a doctor.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  Got an honorary doctor, no.

• 9:31Steven Rinella?

  No, just straight up. Straight up old Cal, Doc, Doc Cal, Doc Callahan's grandkid Callahan.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Yep. I like that.

• 9:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, we're gonna talk about some interesting findings around chronic wasting disease. And don't be worried, we will start out by talking about what in the hell is chronic wasting disease? And why is it controversial?

• 9:53Steven Rinella?

  Not yet. Because first. Uh, let everybody know we got, we got a new show coming out called Meat Eater Sheds. It's drops Thursday, September 25. We got episodes. We don't go into people's homes, we go into their sheds, barns, whatever. We profile their properties. Uh, we got one with Jeff Foxworthy's, uh, game room. Kevin Murphy's. Exceptionally chaotic shed.

• 10:24Steven Rinella?

  Heather DuVille's, uh, fur processing facilities and more. One episode every Thursday. Kicking off on September 25. All right, I, I've been, I've been thinking about. For a couple of minutes at a time, for days, I've been thinking about how to start this conversation. I think I want to start it like this. One of you guys, and you can pick, you can, you can thumb wrestle or, so who gets to do it? One of you guys has to very quickly, just to get people up to speed. Very quickly explain.

• 10:58Steven Rinella?

  What is chronic wasting disease? Okay. A super quick explanation of what is chronic wasting disease? Then I'm gonna explain, I'm gonna devil's advocate a little bit. And I'm gonna explain what guys on the street, in the bars, not so much on the street, what guys in the field and in the bars say about it.

• 11:19Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 11:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay, in a way that will um

• 11:25Steven Rinella?

  capture my own concerns and then capture the other people's concerns and then we'll dig in. Is that fair?

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:32Steven Rinella?

  All right, cuz I wanna do a little bit about like, what are we talking about? And then, and then kind of why someone should be paying attention to this?

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:39Steven Rinella?

  All right.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so chronic wasting disease is if you if you kind of think about it 30,000 foot, so proteins are, if you go back to grade school, proteins are comprised of amino acids, right? They're the building blocks.

• 11:55Steven Rinella?

  I believe you.

• 11:55Speaker 03

  Okay, so these amino acids that build these proteins are supposed to fold naturally. And though they fold to support basic cell functions in the body. So what happens with CWD is you have this particular type of protein called a prion protein, and it misfolds. And we don't know why that misfolding occurs. But when it misfolds, the body can't shed the protein through enzymatic breakdowns like it would normally shed proteins. And so the proteins accumulate. And they tend to accumulate in the brain. And what that, that accumulation causes is neurological impairment.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  If you look at the brain through microscopically, it essentially looks like it has holes in it.

• 12:43Steven Rinella?

  Why does something accumulating create holes?

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Because the body cannot shed the, the protein. And so I, I, this is, this is the dumb.

• 12:51Steven Rinella?

  But I feel like that would make a ball, not a hole. If it was shedding too many. It'd make a hole. I mean, this is not coming from a professional person. Yeah, Mark would have.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, it'd be like a tumor buildup, a mass versus.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Once you have this, you know, the, the normal protein in the body, which we all have right now, it goes through a sort of a recycle process, right? It's all the, a lot of proteins in our body are, are built. And then after its sort of lifespan, enzymes in the body will kind of surgically kind of break it apart and recycle those components and you, and you start over with other proteins. Once this preon protein takes this different shape, then the enzymes that the body has to sort of snip it apart, don't recognize it anymore. They can't get to those sites. And so rather than naturally degrade and recycle this protein over time, it just persists and then it's sticky

• 13:49Speaker 05

  and more sort of kind of can, can glob onto it. And so you, you end up accumulating these proteins that your body can't break down anymore, where the deer's body can't break down anymore. And so it's that accumulation of material in a very sensitive space. Neurons around neurons in the brain, this your information superhighway controls everything in your body. And you start to put stuff in there that's not supposed to be in there. It's going to be less efficient.

• 14:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Have you ever tried to fold them? When you say a hole, do you mean a hole?

• 14:19Speaker 05

  So how that start, what they're talking about is when you're looking at a tissue microscopically. So if we were to take a deer's brain out and, and cut it into super thin chips, you know, we put that on a microscope slide, we stain it, we look at it under a microscope, then you can see the individual cells and, and.

• 14:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh, at that level.

• 14:40Speaker 05

  At that level. So we're talking about in a neuron, which is right, it's kind of the workhorse of your, the central, like the brain and, and sending, you know, information down to everywhere in your body. Those neurons that are the cell. You know, you can get, we call them vacuoles, clear spaces, basically, when you're looking at it in the neuron and around the neuron. And when you do a special stain to look at that, you'll see that's where this prion is accumulating. So you can see a lot of these, these prion proteins, abnormal prions accumulating in a very sensitive spot in the body.

• 15:16Steven Rinella?

  Good, good.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  I use the bed sheet analogy. Have you ever tried to fold a fitted bed sheet?

• 15:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you know what? It's funny you mention that. My wife is yelling at me a whole bunch every night about that.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yep. There's only, if you think about it.

• 15:29Steven Rinella?

  I was almost gonna look it up.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  There's only one way to do it.

• 15:31Steven Rinella?

  I don't understand how she gets a legit fold.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  Right. And, and so I was in my early 30s when we had a literal bar room discussion on what a duvet cover is. And that's when I learned what it, what it was.

• 15:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I hate them. We use them and I hate them.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. How I thought that that was an option. Yep. It's not a mandatory piece of bed kit.

• 15:56Speaker 05

  It's a blanket for your blanket.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Years ago, when I, when I started reading about CWD, I was trying to think of an analogy that would allow me to conceptualize it in dumb mic speak. And I was like, okay, so these, these proteins are, they're folding and they're, it's misfolded. And then the, the fitted bed sheet came to mind because I've never understood why I can't fold it and my wife can. But all I know is the way she does it is perfect and it fits. And the way I do it and Mark does it and you do it is all wrong.

• 16:28Steven Rinella?

  Me to fold it up and put it on like a shelf?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yes. It never fits in the same space.

• 16:33Steven Rinella?

  Fly down there and see what she's got going on.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  That her sheet fits it. And that's the way I kinda, in my dumb mic brain, that's how I kinda think about it is when it's folded perfectly, it works every time. When it misfolds, it never functions the same.

• 16:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Well, plus it's just another level of a household too, to have more than one of those or more than one per bed. Yeah.

• 16:54Steven Rinella?

  Now we got a lot of beds now, a lot of people living there.

• 16:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so keep going. So that's what

• 17:02Speaker 05

  That in essence is

• 17:03Steven Rinella?

  That's a prion disease.

• 17:04Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:05Steven Rinella?

  In humans, we call, there's, is there only one prion disease in humans?

• 17:10Speaker 05

  There's Creutzfeldt-Jakob's disease.

• 17:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay, that's it?

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  And I, I didn't understand that, that we all carry these, these prions currently either. For whatever reason, I think that's the first time I've heard that.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  We all have normal, in, in animals as well, normal prion proteins. The functions aren't entirely known, but their, their fate is, right? They recycle and they have a lifespan and they move on. And when, when they don't, and it's that accumulation slowly over time that, that leads to the actual disease.

• 17:44Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And we, there, in cattle, there's a prion disease called mad cow disease. In sheep, there's a prion disease called scrapie.

• 17:55Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 17:56Steven Rinella?

  Um, humans, Yakob, Creutzfeldt, was it, what is it?

• 18:00Speaker 05

  Creutzfeldt.

• 18:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Creutz, always, yeah, screw up which one comes first. Um, these are all kind of the same thing. It's just manifests a certain way in cattle, manifests a certain way in sheep. Is that a fair way to think about it?

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, there, it's a family, it's, it's basically a category of pathogen, right? So we think, you know, normally, more commonly about bacteria, or a virus, or a fungus, or a parasite. So the prions are sort of in this umbrella category known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or TSE. Transmissible, meaning, you know, moving from one animal to the other. Spongiform gets at what we just talked about with those prions accumulating, kind of creating holes more or less in the brain. Encephalopathy just means disease of the brain.

• 18:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 18:47Speaker 05

  And so cattle, BSE, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, scrapies, CJD in humans. Uh, one of the earlier described was Kuru, um, in Papua New Guinea, um, some ritualistic cannibalism that led to, in humans, um, you know, a prion disease. There's transmissible mink, uh, encephalopathy. So there's, there's

• 19:08Steven Rinella?

  With mink?

• 19:09Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:10Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 19:10Speaker 05

  So there's, there's others, but they all kind of share similar traits. The one that makes CWD so wicked is that it, it's shed and

• 19:23Speaker 05

  passes from animal to animal efficiently. So Scrapey does as well. Those two kind of set apart as far as uniqueness among some of the the TSEs.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  And and Scrapey is

• 19:38Speaker 04

  is preventable through a a vaccine, right?

• 19:44Speaker 05

  Not a vaccine. It's it's really through. So one thing Scrapey and Scrapey and CWD share some similarities relative to, you know, like I just said, that the prions actually leave the animal's body and can transmit to one another. There's environmental component. So animals can get infected from the environment or they can get infected from their buddies. But one thing that that Scrapey had sort of that that led to some effective management for the domestic livestock industry is that genetically, there are some some different genotypes of sheep related to that, you know, that prion protein

• 20:26Speaker 05

  that I mentioned. Well, that prion protein is encoded by a gene. And so there's a there's a particular genotype in in domestic sheep that they're they're pretty resistant, very resistant to CW or to Scrapey. And so through intensive

• 20:45Speaker 05

  you know, breeding management in domestic sheep and then culling of everybody else. They've been able to get on top of it. And so that's a tool that Scrapey has that we don't we don't have access to with deer.

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Got it. I didn't I didn't realize that. I do know that the culling part of that in the domestic world is severe. There's no, nobody gets left behind.

• 21:11Steven Rinella?

  And when we talk about chronic wasting disease, we're talking about one of these prion diseases

• 21:18Steven Rinella?

  that afflicts members of the deer family.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:22Steven Rinella?

  So servants. Deer, whitetail deer, mule deer, elk, moose, caribou.

• 21:32Steven Rinella?

  Servants.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  Think of things that if you're sitting there at home, think of things that have antlers and shed those antlers.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  Yes. And it's it's a 100% fatal disease.

• 21:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay. This has been.

• 21:51Steven Rinella?

  Now, we're gonna lay out, I wanna, I wanna briefly lay out what, what different, what you hear different hunters say about this situation.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Sure, it's part of why we're here.

• 21:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Um, it was first identified in the seventies in Colorado.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  1967.

• 22:06Steven Rinella?

  Was it 67?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:08Steven Rinella?

  On a research facility.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  That's right. I think it was formally described in 80, 1980, I believe.

• 22:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, we found out about it, um, not to say, you know, who knows the history of it? Who knows? Did it, did it emerge one day? Did it emerge that year? And we found it? That's like an outstanding question. But it was identified on a research facility in Colorado. Um, and as we've looked for it more, we find more of it, though it definitely seems to spread. It's not just detection.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:45Steven Rinella?

  Fair?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:46Steven Rinella?

  Uh, we tend to find a lot of CWD in places that have a lot of deer. Which leads people, um, has historically led people to say, if it's in a place that has a lot of deer, then it must not be that much of a problem.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:08Steven Rinella?

  Because how could it be that bad if the places that have the most deer have CWD? I'm still shooting bucks.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:16Steven Rinella?

  I'm still shooting big bucks. We got some of the highest deer densities in the country. Um, where's the problem? And in fact, at times, people have come in, early on in the, early on in the battle against CWD, you'd have an outbreak in an area and, and wildlife managers would propose, well, let's try to go in and eradicate every deer in the area to stop the spread.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 23:41Steven Rinella?

  Which struck people as like quite counterintuitive. Here we're talking about a disease that could potentially kill the deer, but there's a ton of them around, and the remedy is to, um, kill them all?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:55Steven Rinella?

  That seems odd.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:57Steven Rinella?

  Right? So that strikes people as odd. Another thing will come in and they'll say, hey, we have this disease that's spreading from, seems to be spreading from animal to animal. And so we're gonna make it that you're not supposed to put bait out on the ground. Because uh, that'll make deer come together. And people might point out, uh, I don't use bait, but I see deer together all the time.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:21Steven Rinella?

  They have sex. They hang out, they nurse from one each other, they socialize.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  They're always together. They feed under the same tree.

• 24:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they, they, they play grab ass, whatever, like, they're always in contact. I don't see how me not putting, like, I don't see how me putting bait out is, is making deer socialize when I've been watching deer my whole life and they socialize. So what's the big deal? Uh, another thing guys might come and say, and again, this is all stuff from like well-meaning people that love deer. Guys might come and say, um,

• 24:54Steven Rinella?

  they're, they're advising me against eating deer that, that, uh, you know, I should, no deer, no deer test negative. A deer might test, uh, not detectable. Right? Meaning, you get either, if you'd submit, if you kill a deer and you wanna be like, hey, I wanna find out if it's got CWD. You don't get negative, you get not found. You get not detected. So often guys will say, it tested negative. And people will point out, it didn't test negative, it tested not found. Okay? So we have no case. Um, we have no case ever. In, in the history of the United States of America, the world, whatever, there's no case ever where it has been shown

• 25:37Steven Rinella?

  that a human has contracted chronic wasting disease. So people will say, why is my game agency, why is Centers for Disease Control? Why are they saying, don't eat positive meat? Because of a health risk? But there's no demonstrative health risk.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:00Steven Rinella?

  It winds up smacking a little bit of to people. It winds up smacking a little bit of COVID. Right? Be really afraid. Be really afraid, but we don't really know what you're supposed to be. Just be afraid.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:11Steven Rinella?

  And that is the thing that that strikes people is like, you keep telling me not to do it, but no one's gotten it.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:18Steven Rinella?

  Um, various versions of this, the annoyances around baiting restrictions. The idea that we're going to cull or eradicate deer in certain areas.

• 26:32Steven Rinella?

  The restriction, like you're not supposed to bait, you can't put bait down anymore. Has, in my view, has turned people a lot where they don't want to hear about research anymore. They just want to say it's all bullshit.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Right. Yep.

• 26:48Steven Rinella?

  To bring COVID back, I'm about done setting this whole thing up, but I'm just trying to tell you like to bring COVID back would be.

• 26:56Steven Rinella?

  There was a thing. People were getting sick. People were dying of COVID-19. At the same time, people were like, oh, if someone brings a box to your house, don't touch the box. Your kids can't go to school. You can't fly on an airplane. Your business needs to go out of business.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  You need to change your behavior.

• 27:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And then in the end, people are like, man, I'm not going to listen to anything. Anybody says I'm just fed up.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Yep, I'm done.

• 27:23Steven Rinella?

  And then they're done.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:26Steven Rinella?

  We've hit a, I, in my, this is my view. I, in my view, we've hit a dangerous spot around conversations around chronic wasting disease. Cause we've had a lot of guys are like hit the done phase. They're done. And, uh, I don't think we should be done.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:47Steven Rinella?

  I, like, we should be asking questions and looking at what's going to happen because I think that this conversation. The conversations about this could be very different in 20 years.

• 27:58Steven Rinella?

  This episode is sponsored in part by BetterHelp. Holiday season is damn near upon us. In my house, we've been talking about Thanksgiving and pretty soon we're going to start talking about Christmas, and it could bring on a lot of stress. Also, holidays could bring on a lot of family issues. And sometimes, when it comes to family issues, it might be smart for you to go and find someone you can talk to about it and to help make sense out of it all. Well, insurance options may now be available nationwide with BetterHelp. With insurance, many members pay $15 or less. Some pay nothing. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences.

• 28:40Steven Rinella?

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• 29:25Steven Rinella?

  I use the thing on a daily basis. Here's a new feature I'm very excited about. OnX Hunt's location sharing puts your whole group on one live map, so you can look and tell where everyone is. And if at night it gets dark and someone's not back yet, you don't got to guess what happened to them or where they are. You can just look and tell where they are. It has implications for safety, coordination. I can't even list all the ways in which this is helpful. You opt in, and then when you guys are done, the data goes away. It's not stored. Keep the folks in your deer camp on the same page with location sharing from OnX Hunt. If you spend a lot of time outdoors, or you've got dogs, or you've got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig.

• 30:07Steven Rinella?

  Clean a thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household. If you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got weather tech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in weather tech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault. Doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put weather tech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out, American made floor liners and cargo liner. Okay. They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  I think it would be worthwhile to kind of dissect the done.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Like what done looks like?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, because there's, as with everything, there's people who get there through, for a bunch of different reasons.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. Like self, like, like selfish reasons.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's like the, um, the, what we talk about in hunting all the time, which is like the, the heritage part. It's like, well, grandpa managed whitetails this way. Grandpa was awesome. How could anything he do be wrong? And that offends me personally, we can't change. There's the, I don't care what anybody says, I just want big bucks. This is the way that we get big bucks. And then there's the vein of folks who are like, well, what's the bigger crime here? Eating CWD meat? Or throwing it away.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  Right. And there's people who are like, this is my, my time in the deer woods and the meat is a huge part of it. And, and they struggle and I run into these people a lot. They, they really struggle with, um,

• 31:56Speaker 04

  having to face that decision. So instead of facing that decision, they just go full ignorance. They're like, I will not get this thing tested because I don't want to face that decision.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  And notify me and, and if things change.

• 32:11Steven Rinella?

  All of that, that you just brought up as context is what Mark and I have been talking about for weeks.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 32:19Steven Rinella?

  And is largely why we're here, sitting with you is to have that conversation because.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  As researchers, we look at CWD through a certain lens. As a deer hunter, I look at CWD through an entirely different lens. I, I understand the frustration that you just mentioned, Cal. And then I, I have to, I have to step back and realize that one thing we're seeing with CWD is it, it doesn't function the same across the landscape. Okay. It can affect certain populations differently. Um, we are also seeing that you, it takes, this disease has a long incubation period. And it takes decades to run its course, not months or years, decades. And so.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  You mean, within a population? Within a population, so. Not within an animal, but within a population. Within a population, yeah. So within, at the animal level, you're talking, you know, 18 to 24 months for this disease to progress. And at the population level, you're talking decades for the population to, so in it, in essence, kind of think about it like this, you have these two axes on a graph. Okay. On the bottom, you have time, you have years. And on the vertical axis, you have prevalence, right? And what you're seeing is that in, in low prevalence, a population can literally trend through time at 1% prevalence, almost undetectable, for years.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. And then it slowly starts to increase in prevalence. And when I say slow, I'm talking a decade to go from 1 to 2%. Okay. And then 2 to 3%, and then to 5%, and then to 20%. And, and you start seeing this exponential increase in prevalence rates.

• 34:19Speaker 03

  And we don't know.

• 34:21Steven Rinella?

  At what, give me like a place, give me a place in the country where we could be talking about, where like 1% for a decade.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  So.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  And then there, but you, you said there is like a, a takeoff point.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. So what, so what Mark and I run into is we do research, like this Arkansas study we, we just finished, and you don't know when you start the study where you are on the curve.

• 34:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  And so you have prevalence data. So in other words, as we can talk about, you know, an agency collects prevalence data and they, let's say they think they're at 5% prevalence. Well, then they start expanding testing and they realize, yeah, that we are at five, or maybe we're at 15, or maybe we're at 20. And then you have other situations where you have, we think we're at 20 and we're at 35 or 40.

• 35:15Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  And then you have other situations where you have a single detection and then after lots and lots of testing in that area, you have two or three or five animals that, that are positive. So the, the disease is functioning differently across the landscape.

• 35:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  And so that creates confusion and frustration and uncertainty because this disease, as Mark can explain, didn't read the book on how to be a disease. So that creates a lot of uncertainty. And so when we go does, design these field studies, trying to get information to assist agencies with their decision making, we don't really know where we are on that curve. And once we, we think we figure out where we are, sometimes, you know, some of the, some of the work that's coming out now, Arkansas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, they're seeing that they, they're at a different point along this curve than they believed they were when

• 36:17Speaker 03

  the research project started, which is what we saw in Arkansas. We, we thought we were at a point and in reality, we were much farther up the curve to where prevalence was extremely high. Um, and that just speaks to the, the complexity of the disease.

• 36:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. Just to follow up on a couple of things. I think, I think at the root of so much confusion relative to CWD is adjusting our time scale.

• 36:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 36:43Speaker 05

  Right? So hemorrhagic disease, for instance, there's not a deer hunter who doesn't fear. Hemorrhagic disease, you know, messing up a season, right? And it's sweeping through and that's actively happening right now.

• 36:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so like just for, just for people that, that know some terms. You might hear EHD, you might hear blue tongue.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 37:04Steven Rinella?

  Which comes in and just wham.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  Yes, it's, it's, it comes in, you know, it's a flood, a, a quick one, right? You, you can go from zero to 60 in, in the span of weeks, right? And you'll have, it's very visible, it's explosive, it's clustered. So you can, you see death, you smell death, it's everywhere, right? It's very jarring, very alarming. And so, you know, and I've spent a long time studying that disease and it's, you know, it's a,

• 37:36Speaker 05

  it's, it's got a lot of sort of, um,

• 37:40Speaker 05

  it, it'll grab your attention really quick, right? It's very concerning. CWD and it's, and it's all boom, right? It's, it's in, it's in a matter of weeks or months, right?

• 37:49Steven Rinella?

  Dead deer floating in ponds.

• 37:50Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly.

• 37:51Steven Rinella?

  People finding huge boxes they didn't know were around.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're wondering about how do I deal with all these carcasses that are starting to smell bad, right? Flip that to CWD, it's, it's completely opposite. There's, there's multiple examples in the country of it hiding in plain sight, not for years, but for decades, right? It's cryptic on this landscape, you don't see it until you, until you see it. And so when I think about CWD, I think about it in individuals and I think about it in populations. At the individual level, you know, we're talking about, we think of it in, in terms of months and years, not days and weeks like we would hemorrhagic disease. So months and years for an individual, but like Mike said, for a population, we think in terms of years and decades.

• 38:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 38:37Speaker 05

  And so it's that slow, cryptic nature of the disease that just, I think that that is the root of so many challenges for people to wrap their heads around in terms of, you know, do we need to care about it? Why do I need to care about it? I'm not seeing anything on the landscape. Hemorrhagic disease just stacked up a bunch of bodies in my property. CWD, I don't see anything.

• 38:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, meaning some guy turns in a deer for testing. First time in his county, there's a deer that's positive in his county. Wildlife manager's then like, good lord.

• 39:10Steven Rinella?

  Let's rewrite the rulebook and, and people at home, deer hunters at home are like, I just don't see the issue.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 39:18Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 39:18Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 39:19Steven Rinella?

  That, that might be a thing that they come away with.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 39:22Steven Rinella?

  Cause they're like, I, I don't get it. I saw all kinds of deer.

• 39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:26Steven Rinella?

  You know, everything seems fine. I'm having great hunting. Why is there a problem?

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Right. I can't speak for a state agency, but, but Mark and I can both, you know, state agencies take a very, most state agencies take a fairly scripted approach to, to dealing with CWD. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to reduce transmission rates amongst individuals. They're trying to prevent the transport of the disease outside of the immediate local area because what we do know with CWD is it starts out as a focal spot on the landscape and then it slowly spreads outward from that spot.

• 40:06Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  And so what agencies are trying to do, you'll, you'll see common responses be the creation of a CWD management zone, right? So they'll delineate an, an area, a geographic area, and they'll create restrictions on import and export of carcasses or parts of carcasses. They will, uh, ban sometimes, you know, ban or alter how feed is applied to the landscape.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, baiting bans.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  Yep. They'll often liberalize, um, regulations. Exactly. And, and remove antler point restrictions and things like that because what they're doing.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  And here's like one of those major friction points is like the state is actively working against the quality of my personal deer hunting.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yep. And what, what, so what's at play there, and I get it as a deer hunter, I totally get that, but you have to look at it through their lens. They are publicly by law charged with managing for conservation and sustainability of the species of wildlife in their state. And so they're dealt this gut punch of being told, you have this disease on, on your landscape. They, they have two approaches. They can, they could be nihilistic and just say, I'm not doing anything, or they could take this approach that we don't know where we are on the curve.

• 41:26Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 41:26Speaker 03

  So we're going to create this zone. We're going to. Expand our surveillance and testing and meanwhile, we're going to try to reduce transmission. Right? We know that deer are licking each other and we know that they're feeding under the same tree and all of that. But what, for instance, what ban, what feeding is doing is putting animals at the same spot on the landscape repeatedly. And therefore changing how the preon can get into the environment and then remain in the environment. So an animal coming to a feeder every day and eating at that feeder every day.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  Is very different from a preon accumulation standpoint than if he's walking around in a food plot or going under an oak tree. And the acorns are there, he's around other deer for a couple of weeks and then he's gone. That's not the way a feeder functions. So that's what the agencies, I'm not, I'm not trying to justify their actions. I'm simply explaining.

• 42:31Steven Rinella?

  That's the argument.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  That's the logic is that let's put this zone out.

• 42:34Steven Rinella?

  Pulls more deer from farther away and puts them on the same, like literally the same square footage of ground.

• 42:39Speaker 05

  You're mixing social groups that normally wouldn't have those interactions.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  That has been shown that, you know, you, you will bring multiple social groups. Think about does, for instance, matriarchal family groups. You will bring multiple family groups to the same location and otherwise would not be there at that time.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  The, uh, one of the issues is like, just like how I personally contextualize these things. And when, um, we had talked about like preons are on the landscape forever. You can't get rid of them.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  My visual, my mental visual, right, is like that little tiny sucker or group of them is sitting there on the tip of that, uh, forb or grass forever.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  And then I somebody produced something that showed like how those preons eventually like work their their way down into the soil to where they're they're just effectively not able to come in contact with any sort of a grazer. Right? Which makes like it rains, there's dew in the morning, it starts like working its way down into the soil. Um, and and that to me was one of those like really like, boy, you're kind of stupid for not having thought about this yourself moments. Right? But it that is how you kind of think about these things on first glance, right? It's like, oh, it's there forever.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  Which means then then what's the point in controlling this?

• 44:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 04

  Right?

• 44:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I wanted to revisit one of the things you said, Cal, um, about sort of the disruption that CWD has once it's detected in an area to someone's here and now opportunity. Right? And I think a lot of those those, you know, common actions that an agency takes, it does, it seems restrictive. It's how CWD has kind of become vilified in some ways. But really, those those actions target trying to lower the risk of other deer getting CWD. So again, time scale, it's got to adjust it. Those actions are they're for the now, but they're also for the future. To Mike's point about stewardship and sustainability of the population, because we've got these examples now of

• 44:57Speaker 05

  when we're at the end of that curve, like when we're way toward decades down the road, we we have glimpses into what that picture looks like. And so, so a lot of those actions are trying to prevent or slow the movement in time along this this sort of uh, what what phase of disease is the population at?

• 45:18Steven Rinella?

  I I desperately wanted to get into what you guys found when you did your work in Arkansas, but I want just a little more. We're very heavy on front loading here, so apologies, but has it ever been demonstrated? This is a huge question, apologies. Have any of these early detection restrictions? Has any of them ever been demonstrated to be effective?

• 45:46Steven Rinella?

  Is that yes, they have, or yes, you understand the question?

• 45:49Speaker 03

  I do.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  That I think that I do is to both as well as the uh huh.

• 45:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's it's that's challenging, right? Because that that's a big desire among many, right? Is in the end, we and we often will sort of isolate one, right? We'll isolate, you know, carcass movement, or we'll isolate baiting restrictions, or feeding restrictions, or fawn rehabilitation, or or removal of APLRs, or whatever. You know, it's sort of the à la carte menu of options for these are the tools we got in the toolbox. The the challenge with evaluate evaluating one at a time is that's not how they've really been deployed.

• 46:30Steven Rinella?

  When you apply it, let's say, I'm saying, does applying the whole toolbox? I don't mean to carve out what restriction was effective. Have we ever had a situation where there was a detection of the disease of a novel detection? So a detection of the disease in a in a place that had been previously unknown? The toolbox is applied, and then low and behold, we never get another detection.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, there was New York.

• 46:57Steven Rinella?

  Or is it always it's just full blast ahead?

• 47:01Speaker 05

  No, it's not always. There there are successes, right? So there's, you know, there's you also have to kind of reframe the the version of success, too. Like, the best example of success would be New York, right? Where they they had a detection. There there was a captive facility involved. There was depopulation of those facilities and aggressive, you know, removal of deer in a in a tight radius around that area.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  That was sustained for several years, and they did not have another detection, despite having detections not only inside the fence, but also in in wild deer outside the fence. So that's kind of.

• 47:37Steven Rinella?

  You're that's reminding me, I'm familiar with that story.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  So they caught it early. They caught it early enough as that epicenter was growing that that focal area was small enough around that captive facility that they could catch it in time. And with that intensive calling around that facility, they caught the spread before it had gotten too far, which is what we're finding in a lot of our wild populations. By the time a, an animal's detected as being positive, the follow-up surveillance is showing that it's more widespread and more prevalent in some situations. In that situation, to Mark's point, that is incredibly challenging to try to manage that disease when you realize that you're farther along that curve than you thought you were.

• 48:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like you get a county, I keep talking about county level, but a county, say a county in, I don't know, pick a state. A county in Missouri gets its first ever CWD hit from a hunter submitted deer.

• 48:37Steven Rinella?

  That's the first, but then you're saying, then they'll come in and be like, okay, let's go test a thousand deer. And they test a thousand deer and they're like, well shit, there's 50, there's 50 positives. So they didn't catch the first deer.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  It had been there for some time.

• 48:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like, yeah. So at that point, you're like, is it the first? And then like, oh no, it's not the first. This has obviously been here. We just never caught it. We weren't looking and now that we're looking, it's all over the damn place.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Right.

• 49:01Steven Rinella?

  It's too late, it's too late to, it's too late to isolate that little square mile.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 49:08Steven Rinella?

  Of ground, yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it changes the options, right? If you, because that's, you know, if, if you have, if you have, say, robust surveillance in a state and you really have some confidence that like, this might not be the first, but maybe it's really early, right? That, that could, that could sort of justify some pretty severe aggression to try to like, okay, if we got a chance, let's try to stamp this out.

• 49:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  And to that, to that point, to your, your victory point earlier, um, you know, there are examples, Minnesota, like a, you know, within a state, sometimes we get, we get focused on the state, but, but there are victories within states too, right? So you might have an endemic region in a state or an area that has CWD established and you get a spark somewhere else and through, you know, it's early, through aggressive action, they kind of stamp it out and there's no new cases, right? And so. That shouldn't be lost, I think, in terms of victory, even within an unaffected region of a state. States are big areas and the disease moves slowly. So as long as we can

• 50:11Speaker 05

  be aggressive on those outliers, you know, that will save, you know, it will, it will reset the time scale of this disease in those areas, right? Then we're not marching up that path. We're, we're kind of starting over again and waiting until the next one. As far as other successes, that's where it gets a little bit more challenging with some of these regulations in areas where CWD is established. It's about living with CWD, right? And so our goals might be different. You know, some agencies are controlling, you'll, you'll hear, you know, the term managing for prevalence, right? So basically, these

• 50:50Speaker 05

  actions are just trying to keep that prevalence down to the, to that, like as, as Mike was talking about earlier, like, you know, 1% to 5%, you know, trying to, to prevent it from increasing sort of exponentially up that slope. The, the more you can keep it suppressed down, the, the, the more you suppress the, the very negative consequences at the population level, right? And so a lot of agencies are doing that. That's a hard, that's a hard, like, happy pill to swallow sometimes, right? It's like, we're sort of redefining what success means.

• 51:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because success is no longer putting it back in the bottle.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  No, no, no. Yeah, that's a hard, hard one to swallow.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  As a deer hunter, I, I think about it like, like, like this. Okay. So the agency is telling me I have to behave differently. Well, why are they doing that? To Mark's point, they're trying, if, if the prevalence is low, they're trying to keep it low because a deer that contracts CWD is going to die. And so that is an animal that is not, as we're going to talk about, they're not going to have the same reproductive potential as other deer. They're going to have lower survival. They are not going to contribute to the population in the same way as a CWD negative animal. And therefore, they're not part of that surplus, that harvestable surplus moving forward,

• 52:14Speaker 03

  particularly if they contract the disease when they're young. And so what the agencies are trying to do is keep CWD from not being a relevant form of mortality. If that makes sense. They're trying to keep it to where it's really not relevant at a population scale. And if they, if they can do that, then that is in many ways a success. Like to Steve, to your point, you're not putting it back in the bottle. But what you're doing is you're minimizing the impacts of the disease at a population scale so that you don't go to where some of these populations are going, which is there is no more harvestable surplus. The disease has affected the population in a way.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  The prevalence has gotten so high that there is no more surplus there.

• 53:02Speaker 04

  Meaning, any hunter harvest is going to have a population level effect?

• 53:07Speaker 03

  You, you start getting to a point where harvest is truly additive. Like, you have such a significant percentage of animals that are dying solely from CWD, that when you start tacking on harvest and predation and these things that just affect deer populations, you've changed, you've tipped the pendulum to the point where the lens doesn't look at all like it looked if the prevalence was 2% when you get to 20% or 30% or even higher, as we see in some populations. That's what the agencies are trying to do, is to keep it low enough to where it's not relevant.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  And that's, that's scary what Mike is outlining there, but I think it's really important for listeners to understand that that... That can happen at the same time, even in the same state, in different areas as record harvest, you know, everything you would want as a deer hunter is available to you in one area and then in another, that's it's this focal nature of these very severe impacts and that slow sort of expansion over time. And that's where it's like that, that can happen, you know, in the same state or in the same general area for a long time where you have great opportunity, great abundance, sort of juxtaposed with this other scenario. It's hard to, I think that that's challenging for people because unless you've been on the

• 54:30Speaker 05

  ground and you see sort of some of the stuff Mike's talking about, you're on the landscape and you see some of these, these population level impacts of CWD, you just hear about them.

• 54:40Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  It's different from seeing it, you know, and experiencing it. And so I think that's a challenge for people because, you know, you harvest a buck and it tests positive, it was, you know, it was a healthy fat, you know, totally normal looking deer. That's your experience as a hunter with CWD, the real experience. You hear all this stuff, but then your real experience was that was a great looking deer.

• 55:04Speaker 03

  And to Cal's point.

• 55:05Speaker 05

  What is all this noise about CWD?

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And to Cal's point, now I have to, I have to discard that deer.

• 55:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 55:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's extremely frustrating and it causes confusion.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I shot a doe at Doug Durand's place that you were just like, like people stopped and looked at it and they were like, that is a damn good looking animal.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Right? You're just like, she's mature and, and just big and healthy and always and she tested positive.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  For CWD and that was just a gut punch, you know?

• 55:32Speaker 03

  And what Doug is experiencing, and I spoke with Doug prior to coming here, and what he's experiencing is very comparable to what's going on in Northwest Arkansas, where you've got parts of the landscape where, to Mark's point, where you're in these focal centers and, and you flip a coin and every other deer is testing positive or more, particularly for bucks. And then in the next county over. They're testing positive and the prevalence is lower, but the pendulum hasn't swung far enough to start seeing these population level consequences. You still see deer, you still harvest deer. They're not all positive. And so the chatter at the local feed store is different

• 56:17Speaker 03

  from this county to this county because it's taken 30 years for this disease to get to where the snapshot that we as human beings are seeing right now today. And we can't, I suck at this. I think about today and tomorrow. That's just the way I'm wired. It's hard for me to think about 20 years from now. What, you know, what's my camp in Louisiana going to look like 20 years from now versus today? What's a client's property going to look like 30 years from now? Now the prevalence on, you know, in that area that he manages that property is 1%. But what's it going to look like in 30 years?

• 57:00Speaker 03

  If, if we just throw our hands up and do nothing versus if we try to minimize transmission potential and try to, to do these things that, that logically would impact pre-on accumulation in the environment. That's hard to conceptualize and wrap your head around 30 years from now or 50 years from now.

• 57:26Steven Rinella?

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• 58:08Steven Rinella?

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• 59:33Steven Rinella?

  So you get the alert, the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. Among people that are among guys such as myself, that are concerned about CWD, that want more information about CWD, that want us to pay attention to CWD. I think there's like these, these kinds of camps. We're talking about Doug Durn. Like Doug Durn and I sit in sort of different camps. He gets frustrated with my camp.

• 1:00:08Steven Rinella?

  Cause I have always looked at it. I've always looked at it as primarily a food safety issue.

• 1:00:16Steven Rinella?

  How heartbreaking, how like culturally devastating for American hunters it would be. If all of a sudden, a deer wasn't like a, a good source of venison. Wasn't something people were excited to see on their property. Wasn't something that we celebrated.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:35Steven Rinella?

  But all of a sudden, they were like, the way you'd look at a rat.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Ugh.

• 1:00:39Steven Rinella?

  Like, ah, get that thing out of here.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:42Steven Rinella?

  Shoot, like shoot the deer, there's a deer in the yard.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:00:45Steven Rinella?

  Right? Before we all get sick, like, that it would just, that what a deer stands for would change from a human safety standpoint. That, that haunts me. And, and, and my own, the, the diet that my family eats.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:00:57Steven Rinella?

  Which is like.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 1:00:58Steven Rinella?

  Like, the, with the, the bulk of the protein we take in is from servants.

• 1:01:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:03Steven Rinella?

  It'd be devastating, it'd be heartbreaking. I've looked at it like that. Doug looks at it, one, just animal welfare, meaning, you know, he, he grew up with a farm background. Um, sick animals equals no good.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:01:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so he just instinctively doesn't like the thought of sick animals, loves deer, doesn't like the thought of sick deer. So that turns him off. Two, he's often said, we will get to a point, and he, he reads more and studies more than I do. We will get to a point where this does impact deer hunting. He feels we'll get to a point where we don't see big bucks anymore. Um, and it, and it used to be kind of like, I, I felt like it was like he was predicting or, or, you know, prophesizing or trying to crystal ball it. Right? But that's like two different things. And I think there's probably a lot of people who hold both those at the same time, where they're like very concerned with food safety.

• 1:02:00Steven Rinella?

  And then very concerned down the road of, um, are we gonna have big whitetails?

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Steven Rinella?

  Like, are we still gonna be able to grow seven year old bucks?

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  I also think part of Doug's frustration is what I see with, with private landowners. All over the south is that they they buy these recreational properties. They put so much of themselves and their resources into creating this recreational opportunity for them and their families. They want their kids and their grandkids to come experience and to have this legacy of deer hunting.

• 1:02:32Steven Rinella?

  They have it all written out.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  And they've got this grand plan. I'm envisioning one of my clients is 72. He has this like exactly what he's wanted forever. He finally worked his ass off enough to be able to afford this property, to put the resources on it. He hires a biologist. He does these things and his deer herd is terrific. And the thought of that being undermined by this disease is something that causes him incredible frustration and angst.

• 1:03:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  And because and then having clients that own properties in CWD zones, that is what they tell me. They're like, I'm having a hard time thinking through what the future's going to look like because I'm 60 and I want my grandkids, you know, I have two new grandsons and this is theirs. This is, I've been working all these years to create this opportunity for them so that I can facilitate the next generation of hunters and land managers and conservationists. And now you're telling me that there's a chance that could be undermined by this disease. And that is incredibly frustrating and upsetting for them. That's

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  what I hear. Not so much the food, although that is incredibly frustrating, is the legacy, the property legacy, the generational impact that this disease could have on land management, on land value, on the deer hunting, you know, fraternity. That's what I hear with the conversations that I have.

• 1:04:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So as the guy that's worried, how warranted is someone who's worried about the future big buck potential in their area?

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  Well, there's no question like what we're seeing with these, with the research that is occurring in populations with high prevalence.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  The age structure which Doug is seeing in his area as well, the age structure is getting progressively younger, meaning that you're just not, you're not carrying older males over into the five and six-year-old age class. And so I know we're going to talk about Arkansas, but

• 1:04:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, let's talk about Arkansas.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  So what we found in Arkansas, which we'll circle back to, but you know, we found that 50% of all two and a half-year-old males tested positive, more than 50% of three and a half-year-old males. And so if you look across the South, a lot of the buck harvest is comprised of three and a half-year-old males. So if you're in a, you know, you think about this population in Arkansas, super high prevalence, which we'll talk about, most of your bucks by the time they're three have the disease, well over 60% have the disease when they're four. And if half of them have it at two, they're not surviving past four. And so, you know, I'm thinking

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  And that timeline is so crucial to these arguments as well, right?

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:05:44Steven Rinella?

  Because he's a jumbo at five or six.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, in my world, working with landowners, you know, we're not, we're not harvesting, at least southern whitetails, we're not, we're not harvesting many of our bucks until they're at least four, and most were going to five. And so in that vein, you know, under that scenario I just described, which is on the ground in Northwest Arkansas, you're not going to have five and six-year-old bucks.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Well, I guess I bring up that timeline too, because you do hear in certain areas of the country, they're like, well, who cares? Our deer don't live till six anyway.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  Right? And so if they're, if they're showing signs of the disease at six, what is it again to me? Like, why is this a backyard issue to me and how I hunt and manage deer? Right? But you're saying that in, it progresses to where when, by the time they're showing signs of the disease, that, that gets younger.

• 1:06:47Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  As well, right?

• 1:06:48Speaker 05

  Another thing is the farther, we keep talking about that time scale, right? And the farther down that path you get and sort of the percentage of animals infected in the population is, is that increases. The age at which those animals get infected tends to be earlier in life. And I was just talking with Mike about this, this morning, there's a particular spot in, in the Arkansas study site where the prevalence is very high. We suspect it's been on the landscape for the longest. And we've got, you know, all these collared deer, we, you know, they, we investigated the, you know, the death site, you know, full field necropsies, lots of photos, you

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  know, sent back lots of laboratory analysis to sort of understand why these deer died, individual causes of death.

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  So there's a, there's a particular buck that was, that was captured in this area. He was, it was about eight or nine months at the time of capture, just as kind of a normal, average looking body weight.

• 1:07:54Speaker 05

  Did a rectal biopsy. He was, uh, so this is a, a common diagnostic test that you could use for CWD. You take a little snip of, sounds kind of weird, but like of the rectal, like tissue.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  It was positive, right? And so.

• 1:08:10Steven Rinella?

  How'd you get this deer in your hands?

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  Tranquilize it?

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so let, you want.

• 1:08:15Speaker 05

  Oh, so this is a lot. We'll revisit it later.

• 1:08:17Speaker 03

  Let's cover this.

• 1:08:18Speaker 05

  I'll come back to that.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a big deal.

• 1:08:20Speaker 05

  I'll come back to the end of his life.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah, so what we did in Arkansas is, so Arkansas Game and Fish Commission first detected CWD in 2015 in an elk.

• 1:08:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  They subsequently detected it in a whitetail in 2016.

• 1:08:35Steven Rinella?

  A farm elk?

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  No, this was a wild elk.

• 1:08:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  And so they, as an agency, decided to submit an RFP, Request for Proposals, a few years later, to solicit proposals from researchers to try to understand.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  As soon as they started testing, once these two positives occurred, they realized their prevalence was well over 20%. And so-

• 1:09:03Steven Rinella?

  And that's from Hunter's submissions?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  And so suddenly they went, oh wow, we need to understand where we're at, what's going on?

• 1:09:12Steven Rinella?

  So they, they found one-

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  Started testing-

• 1:09:15Steven Rinella?

  Properly started taking a lot of samples.

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:09:17Steven Rinella?

  People turning their deer head.

• 1:09:19Speaker 05

  Well, some, some of it was agency collection too, in that initial response. Their goal was to shoot, they basically, so they, they had that positive elk and they also had a positive whitetail deer that was clinically affected. And so they kind of drew big circles around these, used them together and their, their goal was like, we're going to go shoot 300 deer within this area because we need to understand what we're facing.

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  And in that area, is that a lot?

• 1:09:43Speaker 05

  It's a lot of deer. Yeah. It had been more than they had sampled there previously. Yeah.

• 1:09:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:48Speaker 05

  But they didn't even get to 300 because by 260, they saw that they were facing this 20% plus prevalence. Yeah. So they're like, okay, it's a bad deal.

• 1:09:55Steven Rinella?

  So they wanted to go get an immediate snapshot.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:57Steven Rinella?

  And their immediate snapshot was like one in five deer-

• 1:10:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Steven Rinella?

  Are positive for chronic wasting disease.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  Yeah. It was, it was a gut punch.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and Mark was living that. I was not involved at that time. I, I was hearing about this peripherally.

• 1:10:12Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:12Speaker 03

  And then I got this email with a request saying that we would like you, among others, it was sent to a number of researchers. We'd like you to consider putting together a research project, excuse me, that would answer these relevant questions we have. And so what I did, excuse me, what I did was I reached out to Mark and colleagues at the University of Georgia. We reached out collectively to, to colleagues at Colorado State at the Pre-Young Research Center there. And we put together this, this very large five-year study. To try to help the agency do everything from understand abundance or deer density,

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  prevalence rates, to look at behavior of CWD positive and negative deer, to look at, um, to survival and habitat use and all these things that you would get from just capturing and collaring deer. And then we designed this study plan to come back at the end and to also collect coal animals that were radio marked at the end of the study to try to figure out if their disease, if their disease, you know, prevalent, oh, I'm sorry, if they're positive or negative would change at the, you know, by the time the end of the study occurred. So what we did is we, we captured and GPS collared hundreds of deer.

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  We, we ended up- Trapping them or what? We would dart them, rocket net them and drop net them. Okay. And what we were trying to do is put GPS collars on adults. And we put vaginal implant transmitters in does, which are these, as you know, these transmitters that when they give birth, it kicks the transmitter out, alerts the researcher that there's fawns on the ground. We would then go in and collar the fawns. At every capture, of course, to Mark's point, which he can explain, we would take a rectal biopsy for CWD testing. We would then track these deer. We programmed the collars to, to have battery life over several years because we were interested

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  in obviously studying the deer for as long a term, you know, timeframe as we could. We tried to recapture as many deer as we possibly could from year to year so that we could repeatedly test them. Yep. Um, we set up camera arrays all over the study site. And the way this, the initial study site came to fruition is through the, the testing that Arkansas Game and Fish had already done. They had evidence to show that there was a progression of prevalence from higher to lower as you went from west to east. So we set our study design up to where we captured that variation. We had, we had sampling in the highest, what appeared to be the highest prevalence all

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  the way to the lowest prevalence. And we captured deer and put camera arrays and did all of this work the same across all kind of three study sites that, that spanned from high prevalence to lower prevalence, certainly not low. And we did this for, for four years and then we had a fifth year where we went in and tried to collect marked animals off of public lands. At the same time, which Mark can talk about because he saw this with his own eyes, he, you know, we're, deer are dying while this study is ongoing.

• 1:13:43Steven Rinella?

  Deer with your collars on them?

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  Yes, are dying and we're recovering those animals and we are field necropsying and beyond. We are testing them for CWD and we are seeing that this disease is becoming more prevalent right before our eyes. And so we did this, we recently provided the findings to the agency. The penultimate piece of information from this study was a population model, an integrated population model where we took all of this data and we used it to model, to tell the agency, where are you at on that curve?

• 1:14:20Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  And more importantly, where's the, what's the future for you? Given where you are on the curve, what does the next 10 years or 20 years look like for, for you as, as an agency relative to this population? And what we realized pretty quickly is we were, we as a, as a research group and the agency were farther along on that curve than we thought. And so. As of 2025, the prevalence rate is about 50% in that part of Arkansas. About 35% for does and about 68% for bucks. So, most bucks have CWD in that area.

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  And so incredibly high prevalence, which is that's that's context the listener needs to understand. That CWD had been on this landscape for years before it was ever detected. And so this population had gone quote unquote unmanaged.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  Just normal harvest regulations that the state would implement. There were endpoint restrictions in place trying to improve aid structure and allow animals to be to grow to be older. And so what was occurring is for decades prevalence was just slowly creeping up. And then suddenly an animal's detected positive because they're clinical. And the agency realizes, oh, wow, we're farther along.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  Sorry, when you guys say clinical, are you saying like it visually is showing signs of?

• 1:15:51Steven Rinella?

  Like a sick deer shows up in someone's yard or something.

• 1:15:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's not something, you know, that Mark, that's something Mark and I talk about a lot is these clinical animals. You're not likely to see this, unlike a hemorrhagic disease outbreak where you've got animals laying everywhere. As we saw with our with our movement data, these animals, as they're becoming positive, as they're as the disease is progressing. So I'll give you a scenario. You you catch a two-year-old buck, you put a radio collar on him and he tests positive. He looks fine, everything, he looks great, but he he tests positive. Now we're tracking his movements over the next two years as the disease progresses. And he starts becoming compromised.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  And so what we saw is they they don't behave like uninfected deer. They are less vigilant. Um, they move differently. They will expand their home range. They, which is interesting, if you think about pre on transmission, they're actually expanding their area. That puts them in contact with other animals that they may not.

• 1:17:02Steven Rinella?

  Why are they doing that?

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  Don't know.

• 1:17:04Steven Rinella?

  If they're sick.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Don't know.

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  The pre on wanting to spread, it's like a sci fi magazine.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  It's hard to say, I mean, you would, I would think that they would hunker down.

• 1:17:12Steven Rinella?

  Oh, sure, man.

• 1:17:13Speaker 03

  But we didn't see that. We saw the opposite, that they actually expanded their home range.

• 1:17:18Steven Rinella?

  And you sure that's not just like its function of his age?

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  No, no, I mean, so we, we control for age in our.

• 1:17:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh, cause you got all kinds of other ones that aren't positive.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:17:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 1:17:30Speaker 03

  Um, we also saw that, interestingly enough, they started interacting as they became positive. They started interacting with other deer differently. And they were much more likely to interact with another positive deer. And so they start changing.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  Because of the change in their behaviors and movements?

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  They're, they're less likely to run with, uh.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  They're more likely to be around another deer, which makes sense.

• 1:17:59Steven Rinella?

  Why does that make sense? He's sick.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  They're letting them do the thinking, maybe, yeah?

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, I don't, I don't know. The, I mean, could it be, could it be a combination of the change in vigilance behavior with, hey, I don't.

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  Um, I'm not, things just aren't clicking with me. So for instance, we had a, you remember that polar vortex? We had a severe weather outbreak. I, was that the first year or the second year?

• 1:18:27Speaker 05

  We had a couple polar.

• 1:18:28Steven Rinella?

  Down in Arkansas, the one that froze all the woodpeckers and everything.

• 1:18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Steven Rinella?

  I was down there for that.

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  So we had positive deer that just laid down in the woods and died. Like, and they didn't seek refuge at all.

• 1:18:41Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:18:42Speaker 03

  And so there's something that.

• 1:18:43Speaker 04

  Is that where the term stiff as a pecker comes from?

• 1:18:46Steven Rinella?

  I don't know, but you know this, you remember that massive cold snap? We went down to hunt squirrels.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:18:50Steven Rinella?

  And out in the woods.

• 1:18:53Steven Rinella?

  I mean, it was like national news cold.

• 1:18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Steven Rinella?

  Freezing everything to death, but out in the woods, all over the place, it's just birds. Totally fine. Except dead on the ground. Not a feather ruffled.

• 1:19:07Steven Rinella?

  Freezing to death in the trees, falling to the ground. I mean, we like all day long.

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they're they're.

• 1:19:13Steven Rinella?

  Killed Clay's whole bamboo patch.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Something that, you know, their behavior is becoming compromised in some way, which makes sense.

• 1:19:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that like that clicks.

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:22Steven Rinella?

  Like that click that it that it that it doesn't have the wherewithal to do what it needs to stay alive, but just like increased social. Unless that's somehow attributed to its lack of vigilance or it's paranoia is collapsing.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  And some of that, some of that we could possibly understand with this resolution of this data we have because our vigilance data are coming from cameras. From observing animals, you know, head up, head down. The spatial and interaction data are coming from GPS locations and we know we don't have all deer marked, right? So there's inherent bias there.

• 1:19:54Steven Rinella?

  Well, I can tell you a sick kid is more likely to end up in his mom and dad's bed.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:00Steven Rinella?

  I don't know why.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  Been a long time since I was exposed to that.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  Marketing communications folks for the state agency saying like, are you sure you want to? Capture sick deer and then let them go again?

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Mark and I talked about this this this morning. We wanted to understand how this disease looked. Without intervention, like, so we wanted to see exactly what was going on with these animals. So yes, we were capturing animals and we were allowing this to proceed as it would.

• 1:20:36Steven Rinella?

  Like, what would have happened if you weren't doing the study?

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so we. We do, we collect all this information. We see, you know. For instance, one of the more kind of concerning outcomes was the prevalence is so so high. Another outcome that was interesting, um, if you look at. Doe survival, like annual survival of negative does, it was about 80%. Pretty high. It was 60% for positive does.

• 1:21:10Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  If you looked at. Buck survival, annual survival, if it was a negative cohort, it was about 70%. Pretty high. It was 40% for positive animals.

• 1:21:22Steven Rinella?

  And and that is is above and beyond.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  Normal mortality.

• 1:21:28Steven Rinella?

  Is that above and beyond just the disease killing them? Because you know, like, like, like, if you think back to like HIV AIDS, right? People that die are dying from pneumonia. Or they're dying from complications from other things, right? They're they're they they more likely like die from the flu.

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:21:49Steven Rinella?

  So if if if it takes two years to kill a deer. Um, if the disease takes two years to kill a deer. Then, of course, from one year to the next, 50% of the deer that have it should be dead because it kills them. It's always fatal.

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  So, yes.

• 1:22:07Steven Rinella?

  So like, no shit, like, like, of course, they're dead because they have a disease that always kills them. But are they?

• 1:22:12Speaker 04

  But if they get hit by a car.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so what we did is we categorized if they, even if they were CWD positive, but they died from a car, a vehicle collision or harvest or predation. We considered that not CWD related.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:30Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  We only categorized mortalities to CWD that had no other links and and Mark was the one.

• 1:22:37Steven Rinella?

  Like it lays down and dies?

• 1:22:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  That's fascinating.

• 1:22:40Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  And so.

• 1:22:41Steven Rinella?

  That's what I was.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:43Steven Rinella?

  That addresses what I was getting at, meaning he's positive and gets smoked by a car.

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  That's called.

• 1:22:47Steven Rinella?

  Maybe he's a little bit less vigilant, but how do you factor that in?

• 1:22:50Speaker 03

  Right, so we we were trying to be conservative in that vein. To not link mortalities to CWD that had approximate, you know, some other type of

• 1:23:02Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  of cause. And what we found was about 20%, just under 20% of all mortalities were linked directly to CWD. And so that's that's in addition to predation and harvest and these other things.

• 1:23:20Steven Rinella?

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• 1:24:05Steven Rinella?

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• 1:24:47Steven Rinella?

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• 1:25:29Steven Rinella?

  To mkc.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So you get the alert, the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to mkc.com today. That's mkc.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. Have you ever tested a live deer? With the, with the rectal thing you're talking about?

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  That's what we do.

• 1:25:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But have you ever tested a live deer? And then had it be that that deer was still alive?

• 1:26:04Steven Rinella?

  25 months later?

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  Are you asking if you, if it tested positive at the rectal?

• 1:26:12Steven Rinella?

  I'm sorry. Have you ever had a deer test positive? And then 25 months later, that deer is still running around alive?

• 1:26:21Speaker 05

  I'd have to look.

• 1:26:22Steven Rinella?

  I'd have to look at the data.

• 1:26:24Speaker 05

  I would think that would be the, you know, that would be the exception, not the rule, but not impossible.

• 1:26:29Speaker 04

  Well, this-

• 1:26:30Speaker 05

  Based on the incubation period of the disease.

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  I wanted to ask this too, because this test is pretty darn new, right? I mean, I feel like I just was talking about this last week and I'm like, there's not a test for CWD. For live deer that.

• 1:26:46Speaker 04

  So is there, and, and this was because?

• 1:26:51Speaker 04

  That it takes a while for the prions to build up to a detectable stage unless you're taking biopsies from the brain, uh, brain stem, spinal column. Then lymph nodes. So is the, the rectal test, is that?

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  Only giving you positives? At a certain progression point of the disease?

• 1:27:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's, there's a lot of nuance here with the testing, but it also gets back to that time scale that I was talking about with, in an individual deer, we're talking about, you know, months and years. And so a lot of that has to do with the progression of the disease, the movement of the, the abnormal prion in the body. So, you know, if a deer gets exposed to, you know, infected with CWD, the first place where we're typically going to have a detectable amount in there is in the lymph nodes, right? And everybody's probably familiar with the retrofingal lymph nodes.

• 1:27:54Speaker 05

  That's part of what people will call the lymphoid system. So like, you know, there's lymph nodes all around the body. So that little piece of the rectum that we're taking, there happens to be like little tiny, they're not lymph nodes, they're little, almost like little islands of lymphoid tissue. That's what, we have those all throughout our, all throughout our intestinal tract. And so that's what we're grabbing there. But that's typically a little bit later in disease. So you could easily have, if we were to just have a deer that, you know, several months or, you know, three months, four months, five months after infection, we, we test its lymph node and we test its rectal biopsy, there'd be a decent chance that that lymph node sample is positive and that rectal biopsy is not positive.

• 1:28:37Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:28:38Speaker 05

  And, and a lot of that just has to do with the timing. The last place that it goes is going to be the brain, right? The, the brain stem, the OBEX, people will have that referred to, the information superhighway for us, right? And so, um, that process takes a long time. That's the months and years process, right? So you can have an animal, it's, you know, where that prion is kind of just slowly accumulating in these tissues and it's doing normal deer stuff and it looks totally healthy. That's why you can harvest an animal that tests positive for CWD. It's hard to say, does that animal have CWD, the disease? Well, probably not exhibiting any signs of it yet, but he's test positives

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  on the path to disease, right? And so, you know, by the time, by the time you get, you know, a year, sometimes, two years, sometimes, there's been experimental studies where they don't really see disease out until three, four years. So the time is, is pretty weird sometimes.

• 1:29:42Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So why do people say that CWD is always fatal?

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  Because you start-

• 1:29:49Steven Rinella?

  But like, like life always, like, life ends.

• 1:29:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're all gonna die, right? Everything's fatal. And so-

• 1:29:55Steven Rinella?

  So if he could have it for four years? Why do people also often say that they're dead in two years?

• 1:30:01Speaker 05

  I guess it's like you can predict, okay, so if something else, you can start a clock. The deer gets CWD, tests positive for CWD, it's like, I don't know when. If you evade all other causes of mortality, this is what you're gonna die from. There's very few of us that can say that.

• 1:30:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, okay, but at what point? So I'm saying like, if he, if.

• 1:30:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, the point would have to be prior to the naturally

• 1:30:27Steven Rinella?

  Natural mortality.

• 1:30:28Speaker 04

  Average mortality mark, right?

• 1:30:31Steven Rinella?

  So yeah, so when they say it's always fatal, meaning if he doesn't get shot, doesn't get hit by a car, doesn't get killed by a coyote, whatever. Um, that will be his cause of death.

• 1:30:41Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:30:44Steven Rinella?

  But if it could be that he carries it for four years, it almost kind of doesn't matter because most like deer don't live that long. Do you follow me? Like if you could, if you tested a deer, like if you guys go out and put, if you go out and test deer and collar them, and you're like, okay, here's a positive deer. Uh, I would expect you to say, since that he's already had it, he's already somewhere along the line, I would expect you to say that mortality, CWD mortality in and of itself is, is 60% or 70% or certainly more than 50%. Because it's always fatal and it kills them within a couple of years.

• 1:31:24Steven Rinella?

  So any deer that's already positive, the clock has already started ticking, he's already into his two years of life. So why is it not that by two years, every one of them is dead?

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, that's part of the, you know, Mike mentioned earlier, like this disease is just atypical. It doesn't read, read the book, you know, there's not a, you know, with most infectious diseases where there's a highly predictable time course. It's a little bit unpredictable, once you get into sort of that, when is a deer gonna start to show clinical signs, right? Usually, once that happens, you know, whether it's 16 months, 18 months, 20 months, once they start to, you, if you were watching a deer and you're like, that deer is off, it's not doing, not doing right, that course is going to be pretty quick, probably within weeks or a couple of months.

• 1:32:19Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:32:19Speaker 05

  So, once they hit that point, it's downhill. And those, those are the deer that you can, you know, like some of those subtle changes that Mike was talking about relative to vigilance or home range size, all that stuff, that's probably even something different than we can perceive visually sometimes even.

• 1:32:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 05

  You know, it's the classic deer everybody sees in the pictures. It's A-frame stance, head drooped, slobbering, zombie kind of stare, just like looking into space, nothing like, those deer are circling the drain. Those deer are so far down this path.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Speaker 05

  You know, they, a lot of them would have died earlier. You know, I look at animals as like, wild animals as akin to professional athletes, right? They, they have to be at their peak constantly to migrate, spar, evade predators, evade threats. If you're, if you're just like a little bit off, think about how many professional athletes sit on the bench when they're just, I'm just not a little bit right, you know? So, that's where it gets really hard, those other mortalities, you know? Killed by a hunter, nabbed by a predator, hit by a car, whatever. You know, what role did it have in sort of sealing its fate?

• 1:33:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  Into that? Like, there is, there is something there, it's hard to quantify. There have been studies that have shown, you know, more prone to predation, more prone to harvest, more prone to vehicle strike. Um, there seems to be regional differences with that stuff, but certainly gives us the impression that like, this stuff matters, right? That when you're, when you're adjusting an animal's ability to interact with its environment, perceive threats, move, all these things, it's going to be more prone to an unthrifty life, you know?

• 1:33:56Steven Rinella?

  We one time saw a coyote that must have got hit by a road going up the hill by our house, got hit by a car, but eagles were killing him. So, did eagles kill him?

• 1:34:06Speaker 05

  I don't know.

• 1:34:06Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 1:34:07Speaker 05

  This is tricky.

• 1:34:10Speaker 03

  Question is.

• 1:34:10Steven Rinella?

  He's just dragging himself along and they're just like taking advantage of the situation. So yeah, it's it's hard to sort it out. But I'm just trying to get to you again, trying to get from the perspective of someone looking at. Someone looking at it and and saying like, like if if I took a human, like you take a a an American male. Like, okay, if he doesn't die of, uh, you know.

• 1:34:34Steven Rinella?

  He doesn't die of an opioid overdose. If he doesn't die in a vehicular car accident, if he doesn't die from lung cancer. He will die from heart disease.

• 1:34:47Steven Rinella?

  Right? It's always fatal like because like, of course, something will end up getting you. And if you take all the other things that kill shit and set it to sides, like of of course it'll be heart disease.

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  But I think that I think the point that that argument misses is that these animals on average are not living as long. As non diseased animals, therefore their net reproductive potential is less. Than negative animals and therefore you you factor in that that reduced lifespan. That's the answer to that question from my perspective is these animals. Are not going to live as long on average as a negative animal and therefore. The consequences to the population are going to be.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and as you get along that curve. You go from a population uh that on average. You could take like one of those crazy Maryland deer, remember learning about those? Well, the the whitetails on like the. All the weird government ground in Maryland that, you know, they have like ancient whitetail does that. Live to regularly like sixteen or whatever.

• 1:35:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I don't know about this.

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, but like on average. The population starts is like they live to eight years old. And then a decade goes by and it's like, well, it's seven and a half and then. All of a sudden it's like, oh, on average, everybody lives till five. On average, everybody lives till three and a half.

• 1:36:12Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  And then you got. Serious problems because you're not producing deer at that.

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  That's why the agencies are trying to keep that prevalence so low is because at a low prevalence, these, this discussion that we're having about, you know, mortality causes, it becomes largely irrelevant because only a tiny percentage of animals have the disease to begin with. And therefore, an even smaller percentage of that are dying specifically just from CWD.

• 1:36:43Speaker 04

  You're killing big bucks, people are getting food to eat.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  But as you get up closer, farther up that curve, then this conversation becomes more relevant because now you're losing a significant percentage of your population to just the disease. And so if we looked at, at, of all the positive deer that we put our hands on, a third of them died just from CWD. So about 20% of the total population was impacted.

• 1:37:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  But a third of the animals that were positive died solely from CWD. And so, again, that's why we.

• 1:37:22Steven Rinella?

  And because prevalence rates are so high, you're losing 20% of the population to the disease, strictly to the disease.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:37:30Steven Rinella?

  And what, and harvest wouldn't even be that high, would it? Hunter harvest isn't.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Uh, it was. Um, so the most impactful, you know, from a, from a population perspective, you had three competing mortality sources. You had harvest, predation, and CWD.

• 1:37:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:48Speaker 03

  Whereas in a, a, a normal population, you would have harvest and predation.

• 1:37:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Speaker 03

  Right? And so you're adding this mortality source that's becoming increasingly more relevant as prevalence increases. And so not surprisingly, the final product that we produced with this, with this study was this population model. And what we, what we showed clearly is this population's declining about 13 to 14% per year.

• 1:38:13Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  And so now you're looking at deer densities that are in the one to five deer per square mile range.

• 1:38:21Steven Rinella?

  From a high of what?

• 1:38:22Speaker 03

  Well, we came in. We only have a snapshot, right? We, we, we came in and we-

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  Oh, because you don't trust other, you can't trust other, other guesses.

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  Well, you don't know where, I mean, we don't know 20 years ago what the, I mean, we, we come in as researchers and we get a snapshot of where we are right now. And that's another problem with this, with the, with trying to understand this disease. It's kind of like, the other analogy I have, it's kind of like wild turkey declines. I mean, you're, you're coming in and you're trying to study something that's been occurring in the South over 25 years. And you come in and you, you get a little snapshot of data from a population and then now you're trying to figure out from a snapshot what the bigger picture is. And we're dealing, you know, you're talking about a disease that takes decades to, to kind of operate. And we come in and a five-year study is a pretty long field study in my world.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  And even in, it, it, that's not near enough. Well, I would have loved to have had 15 years of data before and I'd like to keep studying the population, but that's just not, that's just not realistic. But, and so we, we, we show clearly that this population is, is declining and it's going to continue to decline. And now you have prevalence that, you know, is, is exceeding, you know, is at 50% across the population, which is incredibly high. And now you start thinking through scenarios of what, what does the agency do? Right? And so, back to where, kind of where we started, when the agency detected this disease, they took a fairly standard approach.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  Let's create his own, let's in, in, increase harvest or opportunity, let's liberalize bag limits, let's remove antler pointer restrictions, let's ban feeding. And what they're trying to do is, is control the spread of the disease, but they didn't know where they were on the curve.

• 1:40:18Steven Rinella?

  So now that they know it's too late to do that, and they know that, that the population's declining. At what point do they reverse strategy?

• 1:40:30Speaker 03

  I think that that speaks to the complexity of this disease is, you know, in some situations, and this is certainly not doom and gloom, but when you get to prevalence as high as what you see in Northwest Arkansas, your your management options have changed from where you are if you're at 2% prevalence. At at two or three or, you know, on the low end of the curve, you have these options, Mark and I've talked about. When you get up to 50%, now your options are are limited because now your population is declining and now you're thinking about the future sustainability of the population.

• 1:41:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's what I, yeah, so i- if you go to a place that has 30, 40, 50% prevalence,

• 1:41:17Steven Rinella?

  you're not going to shoot your way out of it.

• 1:41:20Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  No, because you're not going to get rid of the disease.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  But it's there.

• 1:41:23Speaker 05

  That's the version of living with it.

• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, at at that prevalence, it's there. And so you're.

• 1:41:29Steven Rinella?

  So would you, is there an argument that you'd want more deer on the landscape to have a higher amount of deer and and test more that you'd have

• 1:41:41Steven Rinella?

  some sort of natural selection play out? Do you have more deer, more genetic diversity, and you'd start some new strategy of seeing who's resistant?

• 1:41:52Speaker 03

  Did one, were you asked this at that hearing?

• 1:41:55Speaker 05

  You know, there's, there's, you know, the the deer there are, it's basically trying to establish a new normal.

• 1:42:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:42:05Speaker 05

  Right, it's trying to, the the theory with CWD is that you're eventually going to hit some equilibrium, right, where you have, your prevalence is so high, that percentage of deer that are positive is so high, and you have this continual, you know, sort of.

• 1:42:20Speaker 05

  You know, the clock ticks and deer die, but you still have recruitment into the population. And so you really can't, at some point you'll have like that percentage of positive deer is going to kind of like.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, because if it's good habitat, right, like it's going to suck in other deer who are like, oh, there's not deer here.

• 1:42:37Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  Lots of food around.

• 1:42:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, and there is that, there are studies ongoing, and this is like real world mother nature experiments right now, like trying to look at these populations that are at this state and start to understand genetics, like what is that equilibrium, what's the new balance? Is there shifting of, you know, like we talked about that, that prion gene, the PRNP gene, that's kind of a metric that some places will use to sort of monitor, um, you know, how, how a population is maybe shifting based on a new selection pressure, right? Like this is a relatively new selection pressure for most, um, most populations. And so the, all that work is sort of, you know, ongoing.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  I think we're a little bit down the road from, from understanding it, but it's a very important area to sort of understand is what, what do we expect from these populations once they get to that point? I do want to circle back to one thing we were talking about dead deer, because that's my jam. Um, so yeah, you, you, like, say a buck, you can definitely have a scenario where, okay, he, he first tests, you know, he gets infected at, at two and a half.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:43:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, he'll live to four and a half and, you know, honky dory, everything's great, you know? Um, but I'll go back to that original story I was talking about with one of our collared deer.

• 1:43:58Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:43:58Speaker 05

  In sort of the hot zone where we are. And I, I do this not to like, I, I fear that sometimes this is the kind of stories that, you know, you get accused of fear mongering, but.

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  I'm very sensitive to that, I'll tell you.

• 1:44:12Speaker 05

  It's really not, you know, because like I just said, you can also have a scenario where you harvest the four and a half year old buck, right? Gets to these ages that are desirable. The opposite is also true. And we know that as prevalence increases in a population, that percent increases, you get to this point where the age at which. You're infected. Early in an infection cycle, you know, it's usually like those, the males are at greater risk of becoming infected. Older males are more likely of being testing positive. But as it becomes a highly endemic area, so you've had prions shed into the environment, into that habitat for many years, lots of direct contact between animals, the age of, like the, there's accumulation of risk, right?

• 1:44:57Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:57Speaker 05

  Your chances, once you are born, of encountering CWD are greatly increased, right? If you're born into that environment, chances are you're going to see CWD sooner rather than later. And so that, to that point, you know, there was a buck that was, was captured in 2022. He was about eight or nine months old at the time of capture, relatively normal body condition, wasn't thin, wasn't, you know, super chunky, just kind of, kind of average. We got the rectal biopsy, and that's not an immediate test, right? Months go by before we get that answer. Ended up testing positive. So that was in March. Okay? We got a mortality signal in September.

• 1:45:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:45:41Speaker 05

  He was dead along the Buffalo River, right on the shoreline. And to say emaciated is kind of an understatement. You know, this is a 1.5-year-old deer at this point, died of, of chronic wasting disease. He was completely wasted away. I can show you guys a picture later. No muscle mass, no subcutaneous fat, no visceral fat, fat inside, you know, and he had aspiration pneumonia, which is a common problem. You see an end-stage clinical CWD, you know, as, as you, as this disease begins to affect pretty much everything, right? Because it's, it's, it's filling up the space in that brainstem, like your information

• 1:46:25Speaker 05

  superhighway for your body. They lose control of their, you know, reflexes, right? So their swallowing reflex goes away. So they aspirate feed and then that settles down into the lung. So he had aspiration pneumonia and he had an old injury on his foot.

• 1:46:43Speaker 05

  Which I necropsy a lot of deer and an old injury on a foot. Deer do fine for a long time, putting up with little pesky problems like that.

• 1:46:52Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:46:53Speaker 05

  But by, it was, it was kind of an eye opening, you know, and I'm a disease nerd. You know, I like, I like, I like this stuff, but there's these certain moments where you see and touch something and it kind of hits different. And that was one of those moments, you know, like here's, here's a year and a half old male, you know, in this area that, that literally fell over dead in a riparian corridor on the Buffalo River from CWD. You know, and that's just a kind of a jarring moment, but, but again, that can happen, but you can also harvest in the same population, a four and a half old male that, you know, looks okay. But both things happen and over time, as you get more, one of the hallmarks of, of as it sets in that young, those younger age classes

• 1:47:37Speaker 05

  start to become a little more commonly infected and then that clock ticks earlier.

• 1:47:43Steven Rinella?

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• 1:50:07Speaker 04

  How much of the conversation, like legitimate conversation, is there around CWD resistant deer? Obviously, state of Oklahoma is going great guns in a way that I think is concerning. And I don't honestly know how it's legal to release game farm animals that are quote, unquote, CWD resistant, that unless they know also how to read state boundaries and maps and things, to stay in Oklahoma. How much, like, is there a conversation there of identifying deer that?

• 1:50:49Speaker 04

  Do have a resistance or are long-term carriers to the point where it just never manifests? Or like, what is the?

• 1:51:00Speaker 05

  So we know, we know with CWD, you know, saying in whitetail deer like that, again, that that pre-on protein gene, they'll refer to it as the PRNP gene. We've known for a long time that certain genotypes, so the, basically the configuration of that gene, um, certain genotypes are less susceptible. Doesn't mean resistant. It means they don't, they aren't as commonly infected. And when they are infected, typically what happens, to your point, Steve, earlier, that incubation period is longer. So those deer with certain genotypes might, rather than, you know, heading downhill at

• 1:51:44Speaker 05

  two years after, maybe that pushes out to three years after, four years after, right? So that's been known. That's, that's a thing, right? But they ultimately will, to, to our conversation earlier, if they live through all, if they, you know, dance through all the other flaming hoops of deer mortality causes, they'll ultimately bite it from chronic wasting disease.

• 1:52:03Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:52:05Speaker 05

  So, you know, we can't manipulate that, but Mother Nature can, if there's adequate selection pressure. Those more favorable, like less susceptible genotypes, historically in most, like, free-ranging populations are not well-represented, right? It's the exception. Those more, like those less susceptible CWD genotypes are the exception, not the rule. So, kind of in a simple sense, I'm not a geneticist, but it tells you that, that there's not adequate selection pressure on that, right? Fitness is greater in some of these other ones, so there's concern there. But as CWD sets in and selection pressure hits, you know, maybe, I would anticipate that in some of these populations, we start to see that.

• 1:52:48Speaker 05

  And they've, they've, they've started to do some of that, um, work in, in mule deer populations in, in Colorado, you know, where they've seen a little bit of a shift, maybe, to some of these less susceptible, um, you know, genotypes. But again, this is, this is-

• 1:53:05Speaker 04

  Takes time.

• 1:53:05Speaker 05

  Takes time. And I, I, there's a lot of smart people working on that, but I do think it's going to take time. To your point, though, relative to the issue in Oklahoma, so on the, the farm cervid industry-

• 1:53:19Speaker 05

  That's where that sort of desire originated, right? Let's, let's try to selectively breed whitetail deer to, that are resistant to CWD. All right, and they're, they're doing some new approaches. It's genome wide, so they're looking at the whole genome and all the other, you know, genes within the body that might impact susceptibility.

• 1:53:43Speaker 05

  And so that has bled out into, you know, it's kind of been talked about as the great hope in some degree, right? And, and I think that's because, this is a, it sucks to talk about this disease. It's just not, it's not a great disease to talk about. We don't have clear solutions. And so here, let's, let's try to march down this path of, you know, let's breed our way out of this.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:54:12Speaker 05

  You know, that's

• 1:54:13Speaker 04

  Because it can seem more proactive in certain circles than, well, there's this naturally occurring test that's going on in Colorado mule deer. And in a few decades, or longer, we might have something that comes out of it.

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  We want a silver bullet. That's the bottom line. We want something that will fix this. And I think, you know, a few things that Mark said I think are important. There's a difference between resistant and less susceptible. There's context there. The other thing, to go back to Steve's question is, you know, so if you have, if you have an animal that lives an extra two years longer, because he has a different genotype, he's, he's still spreading the prion in the environment for two additional years. Right, so that, that, I get it from the standpoint of, that those deer are living

• 1:55:09Speaker 03

  longer, but they're, if they have the disease, they're still contributing to, to a transmission. They're still, you know, there's still prions that they're putting into the environment. And, you know, I think my perspective from the genetic standpoint is, I think the scientific community recognizes that genetics may be one tool that we have at our disposal, but we're not there yet as a scientific community. And the idea that you're going to, I look at it as like antlers, antler quality, that you're going to take deer of a certain antler quality and release them into the environment and expect them to elevate the

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  antler quality for the entire herd, given that deer whitetails are promiscuous, is kind of crazy to think that. And, and I, when I looked at kind of this scenario, I, I thought, okay, so that the idea that you're going to release animals into the wild regardless of whether, where they go from when they're released, and that's going to immediately change how this population is functioning, I think that logically to me doesn't, doesn't make sense.

• 1:56:28Steven Rinella?

  Do you think it might have, that that might have an application if the worst fears come true? We wind up that areas that have CWD, whether it's 20 years down the road, 30 years down the road, 40, whatever, that it's going to wind up being that you're going to have, you know, 70% prevalence and you're going to have a deer or two per square mile.

• 1:56:54Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like if, if it lands there, at that point, that might become, we might land in a place where that is a conversation that warrants happening.

• 1:57:03Speaker 05

  The, the thing that, you know, with, I think within the fence, inside the fence, you know, they're going to go down this path, right? And if that leads to lowering risk of things getting out of control inside the fence, you know, that, that could be a favorable thing. I would not prefer it to be happening in replacement of surveillance, biosecurity, all of these, these routine, standard methods we do to prevent and manage disease in animal populations. That stuff has to. Invigorate and maintain in the face of this new tool if it's potentially, you know,

• 1:57:43Speaker 05

  useful. The fact is, is, is right now, it's still in that investigation phase.

• 1:57:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 05

  Right? Science is going to take time to, to understand if this is a tool that can be leveraged within captive cervid populations.

• 1:57:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Speaker 05

  And so that research should continue, but, but I think people are so desperately wanting an answer and a, and a solution, a silver bullet, whatever the case may be.

• 1:58:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:08Speaker 05

  That we elevate it before it should be elevated as a tool. It's not a tool in the toolbox right now.

• 1:58:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Speaker 05

  Um, and

• 1:58:14Speaker 04

  Cause at, at one point in time, if there was CWD, it was almost certainly associated with a captive cervid facility. Now we're, uh, much further down the road and the state of Oklahoma is, is very serious about allowing the captive cervid industry in that state to grow and sell, uh, deer that those breeders have determined to be, uh, tolerant or resistant to CWD by their own standards, meaning that they, they're just going to live a little, little bit longer.

• 1:58:55Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  Um, and then sell those outside of the fence for 600 bucks a pop to people in the state of Oklahoma.

• 1:59:04Speaker 05

  Hmm. Yeah. And it's, it's,

• 1:59:06Steven Rinella?

  That, that feels a little crazy. Like if you were trying to control a typhoid outbreak and you had, you're like, well, listen, man, normal people get typhoid and they die in six months. Uh, this guy, he'll, he'll die in a year, but he's got typhoid the whole time. We'll send them over to your area.

• 1:59:24Speaker 05

  Hmm. For, for decades.

• 1:59:26Steven Rinella?

  It does seem like someone would be like, wow.

• 1:59:29Speaker 05

  Yeah. For decades, to your point. The whole focus of, you know, the, from USDA, state agriculture agencies and state wildlife agencies has been separation of captive cervids and wild cervids, right?

• 1:59:43Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:59:44Speaker 05

  We need separation of these two populations for disease purposes. So to start suddenly talking about the idea of opening the fence and releasing captive bred animals that are selectively bred for the traits that humans think are favorable, not for what Mother Nature thinks is favorable, is, you know, there's no place for that, in my opinion, right now. Um, it's just, there's, we live in a world with wildlife disease of unintended consequences.

• 2:00:14Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 2:00:14Speaker 05

  There's always unintended consequences that are hard to predict. Um, and it's, it'd be super challenging to, to have a, um, have enough assurances that, that, that those animals are, you know, not going to put the populations at.

• 2:00:32Speaker 03

  Is it plausible that you're releasing something else into the environment?

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. I mean, listen to that. I mean, we, you hear that?

• 2:00:39Steven Rinella?

  That's Cal's wildlife disease book.

• 2:00:41Speaker 04

  That's, that's a whole book of wildlife diseases just found in the southeast. We're only talking about one.

• 2:00:48Steven Rinella?

  All right, let's go, let's take, uh, northwest, is it northwest Arkansas? Okay, northwest Arkansas, southwest Wisconsin. Here you got prevalence, you know, hunters, they're, the 40% of the deer they kill, 50% of the deer they kill have sub CWD. Deer populations, um, had a new form of mortality. Used to be hunting and predation, now it's hunting, predation, CWD. CWD is killing 20% of the deer herd. The deer herd is going down, down, down, down, down. What is the recommendation? I mean, like, like, what do you wind up doing with that information? Do you say, no more hunting?

• 2:01:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, uh, because we're gonna run out of deer? Do you say, hey, kill more deer? Because somehow that'll fix the problem? Like, like, what do you tell people?

• 2:01:42Speaker 03

  Well, as a scientist, what we told the agency is, we don't design regulations or tell-

• 2:01:50Steven Rinella?

  I know, but I'm asking you to stay outside of that.

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. But what, what we did is we told the agency, this is where you are.

• 2:01:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:57Speaker 03

  This is where you're headed. And this is how many deer per square mile you have, we think. And this is what the future looks like.

• 2:02:06Steven Rinella?

  And you, you figured they had how many per square mile?

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  About one to five, depending on-

• 2:02:10Steven Rinella?

  Unbelievable. And then you think they're headed where?

• 2:02:14Speaker 03

  It really depends on, you know, various factors, but I think-

• 2:02:19Steven Rinella?

  Potentially lower than that?

• 2:02:21Speaker 03

  Well, I, I mean, right now, in herb, in the one, the highest prevalence area, Mark and I talked about this over coffee this morning. From spending time there, you can't, you can't find deer. They're like, you can drive around at night, you don't see deer. You can drive around looking for deer and you, you don't see deer. And so, you know, what Mark alluded to this earlier, I mean, you're going to get to some point where the population is going to stabilize and it's going to increase, but it's not going back to where it was.

• 2:02:54Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:55Speaker 03

  And so, where it goes and how quickly it gets there could be influenced by, by regulations. So to your question, you know, should the agency, I, I'm not going to tell the agency, but could the agency consider, um, basically taking the foot off harvest? And, and, and instead of liberalizing harvest like many agencies do, thinking they're low on the curve. Now, when they're up high on the curve, do we take our foot off the gas? Do we reduce though harvest? Do we, you know, do we change our behavior because now we're in a new normal?

• 2:03:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  And I think the answer is yes.

• 2:03:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:03:34Speaker 03

  That be, because you're going to try-

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  At that point, the agency's goal, I would think logically would be recovery. Now, what's this going to look like in the next few decades? And we know we're not going back to where we were 40 years ago, but we have to get this population sustainable. And from the standpoint of, you know, I'm thinking about this as a deer hunter. I grew up in an area of Virginia, and at the time, if you saw a deer, you had, that was a great hunt. If you killed a deer, I was telling Mark, we would take Polaroids, brown deer, we shot brown deer. We would take a Polaroid and go to school on Monday and show it. And it was like you, you had struck the lottery.

• 2:04:22Speaker 03

  You know, and, and then I fast forward to, to where I am now and, and trying to raise kids and mentor young people through becoming deer hunters. They have to be successful. They have to see animals. They have to be able to grasp the, the fraternity of what you're doing and, and the success. And you build off of that. And then, then they, they want to learn about the process of managing for deer. And all this, that goes away if you can't see animals. And you can't harvest animals. So as a deer hunter, I would look at the agency and, and say, I need you as an agency to think about how to get, what, what does the future need to look like? To recover this population to the point where I can, I can see animals,

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  I can harvest animals. And we know that prevalence is not going to stay at that super, super high level. It's going to, it's going to reduce through time.

• 2:05:18Steven Rinella?

  You think so?

• 2:05:19Speaker 03

  Yes. And we hope to get it, you know, it, it's some, something where you're, you're not dealing with what you're dealing with now, which is.

• 2:05:29Speaker 05

  You know, every, every other animal in most box are testing positive.

• 2:05:34Steven Rinella?

  You think it'll go, you think it has the capacity to then go the other direction? To climb, climb, climb to fifty, sixty, seventy percent? And then it hits some point when prevalence goes down?

• 2:05:46Speaker 05

  I don't think it would go back down to. It will still, it'll be chronically high. Yeah. You know, it might come up and then just kind of level out and then wobble back and forth as you get recruitment and whatnot, and that would happen.

• 2:05:58Speaker 04

  But the effect there.

• 2:06:01Speaker 04

  Michael, to your point is like, people aren't going to want to hunt in that area. And so like the, the hunting participation in, in that zone and, and the culture around hunting is going to suffer. Alongside the low population prevalence.

• 2:06:17Speaker 05

  And this is the, this is the challenge with CWD is you hit that, that chronic steady state of this is the new normal, right? We hear a lot about EHD, right? And so we've had multiple large scale EHD outbreaks where like even in a given county, thousands of deer. Like that, right? In one transmission season, you might kill thousands of deer indiscriminately, right? The sky's falling, um. People back off of hunting that year. We've got multiple examples though through time of within a few years. That population is right back to where it was, or even beyond where it was.

• 2:06:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I, I'd like personally.

• 2:06:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Steven Rinella?

  I'm old enough where I personally lived through the cycle. Right?

• 2:06:59Speaker 05

  And that's where this is so different, right? And this is why this matters is like with EHD, you can get on the other side of it and get back to the normal state. With CWD, you don't, you just go to this new state of normal. And that's what we're trying to define of what that is. And that's where like, you know, Wisconsin, parts of Wisconsin, parts of Arkansas, Colorado, Wyoming. Part of West Virginia, like trying to figure out what that new normal state looks like. And I do think it's important too, to mention, like you mentioned, backing off a dose, for instance. I think it's a confusing point to hunters that that don't have the misfortune or pleasure, whatever the case may be of of of seeing the bad spots and and the not so

• 2:07:43Speaker 05

  bad spots if if because you might be in an area and your interaction with CWD is very early in that scale, right? There's just a couple of detections in the state or in a county. And what do they do? They liberalize most take, right? And so they're doing the opposite. And I think I think many folks, that's a little bit confusing based on, you know, what what phase of the disease you're in, the management agency seemingly from like on the surface level, doing completely different things. They're telling me not to shoot those. They're telling me to shoot those. It can be a little bit confusing, but it's all relative to that long protracted timescale. And in the early phase, you're trying to prevent from getting to that bad phase. And that's what all those actions are doing.

• 2:08:25Speaker 03

  And we don't know.

• 2:08:26Steven Rinella?

  Like if this place in Arkansas, it's got one to five per square mile, I just can't picture that they'd still be in the mind frame of we're going to do earn a buck, we're going to do, you can hunt deer through February.

• 2:08:40Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:08:41Steven Rinella?

  Like, because you're playing with fire at that point.

• 2:08:43Speaker 03

  Right. And we don't know. I mean, we tried to simulate what prevalence would look like, you know, through time. But again, we we kept, we capture a five year snapshot of this population in Arkansas. And it was extremely well done. Science is rigorous, but it's five years of data. And we're, we're trying to predict out, you know, to Mark's point, prevalence gets to some level, it's 50% right here. And then in the next county over, it's 30% or whatever, you know, so you've already got some complexity there. So we're, we're trying to inform the agency on where are you going to be? It's not going to disappear.

• 2:09:25Speaker 03

  But where are you going to be? Is prevalence going to remain high? In parts of the landscape, it's probably going to remain high. In other parts of the landscape, it, when it kind of starts oscillating to Mark's point and going up and down slightly. It very likely will remain at a prevalence that is at least palatable moving forward. You're going to, you're, you're still going to have situations where you're going to have a deer that you harvested test positive, but it's not going to be at the scale at which it is now, which is most are prevalent.

• 2:10:01Steven Rinella?

  Do you think there's a way that you could have, do you think there's a way you could have a county, Texas, Illinois, wherever to help, let's say there's a county in Texas that has 1% prevalence today, okay? Is there a way that in 40 years, that county will have the same deer density and 1% prevalence?

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  See, that's part of why we're having this conversation. Those questions are incredibly difficult, almost impossible to answer because there's so many factors that influence the transmission and accumulation. I mean, we know vegetative communities, soil types, deer density, social behaviors. There's so many factors that influence how this disease is operating on the landscape that there could literally be a thousand different scenarios. And that's part of why it's so difficult to have these conversations with hunters. To Mark's point is like, well, I see that this is occurring over here and I see that

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  this is occurring over here and that doesn't make any sense to me. They should be doing the same thing. And so to, to Mark's point, you know, Northwest Arkansas, that the context needs to be that this population is so far along on this curve and the disease has progressed the way it has here, but it's not going to operate like that everywhere.

• 2:11:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:35Speaker 03

  There's going to be situations where it's going to operate very differently. And then, so that context is lost on us as hunters. And I, I see the frustration as a hunter and.

• 2:11:46Steven Rinella?

  You see me getting frustrated over here.

• 2:11:48Speaker 03

  Well. As a scientist.

• 2:11:50Steven Rinella?

  I need to know what to do.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  As a scientist, damn it, I want to solve. I want this to be solved. And as a deer hunter, I don't want to deal with this. I don't want to deal with this. I don't want you to tell me that I have to behave differently. I don't want you to tell me that this thing that I've worked, let's say 50 years to groom this piece of property suddenly is is all undermined by the president.

• 2:12:12Steven Rinella?

  You gotta be all scared of your burgers.

• 2:12:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and and I I don't want I don't want there to be conversations where there are people that are telling the public that the science is a lie. I don't I I don't want to be in that discussion either, but that's where we are with this disease. And all of this creates confusion and the confusion creates nihilistic kind of attitudes.

• 2:12:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36Speaker 03

  Nothing's worked, to hell with it, let's just quit. And I just, I don't see that looking through the two lenses I'm looking through as an option.

• 2:12:46Speaker 05

  And to to your 1% question, my wheels had to turn for a minute on that. I'm a I'm a thinker. Um, no, it's not going to stay the same. You know, if you, Mother Nature's done that experiment for us, right? You know, if it, because it's operated, you know, cryptically underneath, hiding in plain sight right in front of us, right? No interventions.

• 2:13:09Speaker 05

  Status quo, right? What did it do? Goes up. It climbs. I mean, you know, there's just nothing, you know, without without intervention, CWD has proven to us over time that it will do two things. It will, the percentage of deer in that population that are infected with CWD, it's going to increase. And then the geographic footprint of where it is on the landscape, that's also going to increase.

• 2:13:33Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:13:34Speaker 05

  Like, those are the two things that we know with absolute certainty are going to happen over time.

• 2:13:39Speaker 03

  And that expansion is going to take time.

• 2:13:42Steven Rinella?

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• 2:14:25Steven Rinella?

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• 2:15:06Steven Rinella?

  Hands down, these are my absolute favorite hunting knives. Every blade they make is a high-performance durable tool that you can rely on whether you're butchering, hunting, working on the farm, out in the field, doing chores, whatever. And I've got a massive update for you. People have been asking for this forever. MKC finally did it. I've been asking it forever. The wait is over. They're launching their very first folding knife. It's called the Montana. It's going to be dropping very soon. I'm telling you right now, these things are going to sell out fast. If you aren't ready, the moment they go live, you're probably going to miss out. So here's what you need to do. Get over to MKC.com right now. Make sure you sign up for their email and text message notifications. So

• 2:15:50Steven Rinella?

  you get the alert, the exact second the knife drops. Montana Knife Company, working knives for working people. Head to MKC.com today. That's MKC.com. I can't wait to check out one of these folders. So in your professional opinions, if you're in like an area that has very low prevalence here, they just found their first case and your professional opinions is if your option, if you choose the option of ignore it and do nothing, in your professional opinion, decades down the road, you will be living under a new normal and it won't just be that you wished it away.

• 2:16:32Speaker 05

  Correct. Yeah. Yeah, I don't see, I don't see a scenario where, you know, if it's just one deer on the landscape, right, and it, it dies, it's not consumed and some, you know, somebody covers it up with a driveway, okay, maybe it's sealed in there, it's not coming anywhere, but like, but other than that, you know, the, these will, will fester, it will smolder until it's visible, you know, years down the road.

• 2:16:57Steven Rinella?

  Can you guys, is it, what blocks someone, what prevents a researcher from getting some whitetail deer in captivity and experimenting with different transmission things? Meaning it's only, you take a deer, it never comes in contact with another deer. You allow an infected deer to graze a, a, a one acre pasture for a week, pull that deer away and kill it. Then you take a known clean deer, um, that doesn't have interaction in their deer and you let it go graze on that pasture.

• 2:17:42Steven Rinella?

  And then you see, does it get CWD from grazing on the pasture? Like, did it happen that way?

• 2:17:48Speaker 05

  It's, that's been done. That, that kind of work gets done.

• 2:17:52Steven Rinella?

  And what, and is it, cause do you remember a few years ago, all this hysteria came out, like if you took stainless steel and you like cut a deer up on stainless steel, then scrubbed it and bleached it, it could still, I'm like, oh bullshit. Do you know what I mean? Like theoretically sure, but like people aren't getting it that way or like deer aren't getting it.

• 2:18:14Steven Rinella?

  Off stainless steel.

• 2:18:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:18:16Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, how are they getting it?

• 2:18:19Speaker 05

  Um, that's a, it's a, you know, for as much as we know about chronic wasting disease, there's a lot we don't know about chronic wasting disease.

• 2:18:25Steven Rinella?

  Does the, does the deer get it who only goes and grazes on the pasture?

• 2:18:31Speaker 05

  Well, well, that's one possibility and it's been shown. So, so Colorado Parks and Wildlife, they did a study where they had, you know, a decomposed carcass.

• 2:18:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:18:42Speaker 05

  From a clinical CWD animal. Like by decompose, I mean bleach white bones.

• 2:18:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:18:46Speaker 05

  Gone, years. Put deer in there and they get infected.

• 2:18:50Steven Rinella?

  They do.

• 2:18:50Speaker 05

  They do. Just not other deer in there. Just go into that.

• 2:18:54Steven Rinella?

  Clean deer in.

• 2:18:55Speaker 05

  Clean deer in, dirty deer come out. Yeah.

• 2:18:57Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm, that's what I'm saying. So this has been demonstrated.

• 2:18:59Speaker 05

  That has been done, but the exact mechanisms, right? Is it eating soil? Is it chewing on a bone? Is it getting in a plant? The exactly how it gets in there, they don't understand yet, but the, most of the evidence suggests that it's like oroneasal. So.

• 2:19:15Steven Rinella?

  But the highest chance is oroneasal.

• 2:19:16Speaker 05

  Through the nose, through the mouth is, is the highest chance, but there's multiple modes of transmission, you know, potentially. Um, and so, you know, so deer can get it through their social, direct contacts with one another, which obvious, you know, a lot of transmissible diseases are like that. The thing, the curve, one of the curveballs that CWD has is exactly what we just talked about. The environment, the habitat, right? And that's where, you know, if, if you can become sick or infected just from the habitat, which almost acts like a host. When I look at, through my lenses, I look at the landscape, I look at the habitat as a host, just like I look at a deer as a host.

• 2:19:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:59Speaker 05

  And the importance of that host, based on, you know, what we've seen so far in, in some literature is that the importance of that habitat as a, as a source of infection for deer. Becomes greater, the farther up that curve in the time scale you get. The more deer die, the more deer pee and poop and just, you know, live on the landscape, the more of those CWD preons are going to be put into that environment. And so as you get those prevalence, you know, of 30%, 40%, 50% of the deer, that's a lot of, it's a lot of pee, that's a lot of poop, that's a lot of saliva, that's a lot of flesh that goes on to the landscape and those preons just stick around.

• 2:20:38Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:39Speaker 05

  And so trying to control prevalence, right, trying to keep lower down that scale will, will in theory hopefully help minimize that environmental contamination, right?

• 2:20:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:49Speaker 05

  And so like Mike mentioned earlier, feeding and baiting, right? Those focal spot on the landscape put a lot of deer, which also pee and poop and other things. So you're, you're potentially depositing like sort of a, a hyper-focused area of preons on the landscape that would put a deer at greater risk of infection.

• 2:21:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:12Speaker 05

  If it forages there. That's what all those regulations try to sort of get at is like, okay, let's try to lower that risk. And that's why baiting and feeding are a common, you know, a common point of intervention for the state because, you know, you're just trying to break the chain of infection, right? Like what can we do that will try to lower risk on the landscape for deer encountering CWD, whether it's from another deer or from its habitat?

• 2:21:37Steven Rinella?

  Someone should make a handy chart. The chart would be zero to five.

• 2:21:42Speaker 05

  Here's what you do.

• 2:21:43Steven Rinella?

  Try this.

• 2:21:44Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:21:46Steven Rinella?

  Five to 10, or like zero to three, try this.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:21:49Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 2:21:50Speaker 05

  Well, would help.

• 2:21:50Steven Rinella?

  And when you get to 30 or 40, uh, that's, I guess that's where I'm like, I find my confusion is that 30 or 40 is it just say like, try to enjoy your last bit of great deer hunting?

• 2:22:02Speaker 05

  Well, and I think that, yeah.

• 2:22:05Steven Rinella?

  Say like.

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  More information to come soon.

• 2:22:07Steven Rinella?

  The suggestions kind of run out.

• 2:22:09Speaker 03

  Well, and I think that's, I mean, that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation is, is that there is no blanket prescription for this.

• 2:22:18Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 2:22:19Speaker 03

  And that just creates complexity and confusion. And so that's part of why we wanted to have this conversation is where you're at on the Curve matters and some of these prescriptions that agencies are taking like the banning feeding and liberalizing harvest. Those are applicable at the bottom of the curve. But when you get up to the top of the curve, the, as we now see that because we, the data are emerging from these populations that are high up the curve now. It's taken some time to get those field.

• 2:22:53Speaker 04

  That's an unfortunate takeaway for some of our naysayer crowd.

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:57Speaker 04

  Right? Like, well, you better be testing and turning in your deer because that's your best shot at being able to bait again.

• 2:23:04Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:23:04Speaker 04

  Is if the prevalence, if, if you show the prevalence is high.

• 2:23:07Speaker 03

  And the bottom line is, you know, there was a recent summary, National Academy of Sciences put this kind of state of the state of where we are with CWD. And in, in, in the preface, it says basically to paraphrase, albeit not perfect. Efforts to manage the disease, the progression and, and spread of this disease are, are our option right now. So you, you had this group of scientists that come from all these different perspectives that collectively agree that it's not perfect. The management strategies that agencies are, are implementing, they're not perfect, but they are where we need to be.

• 2:23:48Speaker 03

  Right now, given how much we don't know about this disease and there's just so much we don't know and it takes so much time.

• 2:23:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Cause I mean, the blue sky scenario really could be to, uh, be able to manipulate the new normal. Right? So like right now, you're like, yeah, we prob, if it, if the new normal, uh, levels out at 40% prevalence. We're probably not going to get lower than that, but maybe that is the, the ultimate goal is to be able to reduce those new normals or be able to manipulate them to some degree. Uh, ideally, right? If, if you, uh, through people turning in voluntary testing and, and good communication. You establish that new normal at five, 10% prevalence.

• 2:24:39Speaker 03

  Is that

• 2:24:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:24:40Speaker 03

  Realistic sounding?

• 2:24:42Speaker 05

  I mean, it all, it all sort of depends on where you're at in the, in the scale. I think some of those sort of real world experiments, you know, can be, can be happening, especially sort of in, you know, in parts of the West with some mule deer populations where you have, okay, you're at this high prevalence now. What, you know, what management actions or harvest, you know, sort of quotas could we, could we get to try to drop this back down? A lot of like where that intervention happens a little bit, the goal would be happen earlier, right? Before you get to this sort of

• 2:25:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:15Speaker 05

  30, 40%, like you're up at the five, eight, 10, 12, like, okay, let's, let's, you know, be aggressive and try to knock this, see if we can, through harvest, through our hunters, you know, decrease prevalence and stabilize prevalence, right? And, and so that's where a lot of the effort comes in is again, trying to, trying to prevent the climb up, you know, and I think now there'll be like, once we get to that mountain top, I guess, and trying to understand the new norm. Then it's like, what triggers are there? What levers can be pulled to manipulate that? Are there some, you know, can we bring it back down?

• 2:25:50Steven Rinella?

  I got two yes, no questions for you guys, but you can only do yes, no.

• 2:25:54Speaker 03

  Man, we don't, that's tough for scientists. It always depends.

• 2:25:57Steven Rinella?

  Cause that's, cause it's guessing. It's just guessing. No one's going to hold you to this. It's just crystal ball guessing.

• 2:26:03Speaker 03

  We both know that that is fundamentally a lie.

• 2:26:06Steven Rinella?

  In 25 years, in 25 years, will there be counties in the eastern half of the United States where CWD has not been detected?

• 2:26:19Speaker 03

  Yes. I agree. That was fast.

• 2:26:22Steven Rinella?

  If I made you a hamburger, I keep wanting to do this. I'm gonna, I, I have five CWD positive deer.

• 2:26:33Steven Rinella?

  And I handle them just like normal. I bone them out. I make burger.

• 2:26:38Speaker 04

  Which is a mix between the five.

• 2:26:40Steven Rinella?

  I got five CWD positive.

• 2:26:41Speaker 04

  Mix of the five.

• 2:26:42Steven Rinella?

  This is my, this is my thing for a while. I was like, the only CWD deniers I'm interested in talking to are the ones that eat this burger. I take five CWD positive deer. I grind it all up and I make a normal old burger.

• 2:26:58Steven Rinella?

  I grill that burger to medium. I know it doesn't matter, but I grill to medium. And I'm like, would you like a bite of that burger? The ones that eat the burger, I'm like, I'd like to hear what you think about CWD.

• 2:27:15Steven Rinella?

  The ones that don't eat the burger, I understand how you feel. Right? But the ones that are like, it's no big deal. I'm like, you eat that burger and tell me it's no big deal. Okay. If I made said burger, would you take a bite?

• 2:27:30Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:27:32Steven Rinella?

  You wouldn't.

• 2:27:34Steven Rinella?

  Me neither. So it kills me.

• 2:27:37Steven Rinella?

  Would you eat it, Phil?

• 2:27:38Speaker 04

  Oh, no. I don't think so.

• 2:27:41Steven Rinella?

  Get me the biggest burger in London.

• 2:27:45Speaker 04

  Five quid. It's so funny though, cause like-

• 2:27:49Steven Rinella?

  CWD burger in London.

• 2:27:51Speaker 04

  Meat, like the, it's in a direct attack on my ability to make stock, which is horrible, right?

• 2:28:01Steven Rinella?

  You do all the shit you're not supposed to do. You're like, got the backbone in there and everything.

• 2:28:05Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:06Steven Rinella?

  Spine turns all white.

• 2:28:07Speaker 04

  And for the longest time, like all, everything I, I did came out of the woods on my back. Typically a long way. So some of this, you'd be like, oh yeah, no bones, no problem. But then like, you get that big bull elk in a CWD management zone, right on the side of the road magically. You're like, oh my God.

• 2:28:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm making like T-bones and shit, you know, and then you get all scared about it.

• 2:28:34Steven Rinella?

  That's what continues to kill me.

• 2:28:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  I totally understand.

• 2:28:38Steven Rinella?

  It continues to kill me. And I know that's not what you guys are here to talk about, but like, I worry about- Like I I propose this to a bunch of people. I don't know if there's a good way to do it. It'd be like, I wish someone would have started a long time ago. Go to Buffalo County, Wisconsin. Okay. Used to be like, for a while, that was like Big Bucks. You know, Big Buck Central moves around the country. Like Big Buck Central was Alberta. Big Buck Central was whatever Illinois. Big Buck Central, Kansas, you know, just it hops around. There's multiple Big Buck Centrals at any given time, but they move. The places people are excited about move. Buffalo County had like a, for a while, they were Big Buck Central.

• 2:29:19Steven Rinella?

  Like go into areas, I wish I'd done it 10 years ago and start being like, man, let's track like Boone and Crockett entries. And overlay Boone and Crockett entries countywide, statewide, whatever, with CWD prevalence. And be like, or or some way, like is, if you just like to hunt big bucks and you're an antler guy, and I'm like 50% an antler guy and 50% a burger guy. But like, are we seeing that like antlers are going away from CWD? If someone demonstrated that, it would change a lot of the conversation people were having. But it would need to be like, not need to be, that would,

• 2:30:04Steven Rinella?

  that would impact people's behaviors. It would impact people's perspectives to see where it's headed. But just the uncertainty is just like, it just kills me. But you know, it's been killing me now for how many years has it been killing me? It's been killing me for my entire adult life, the uncertainty.

• 2:30:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. And this, the fact that this disease is so complex. We want answers. We don't like working under uncertain conditions. We don't like being told, well, you can't do this the way you've been doing it. Well, why? Well, we can't give you an answer, a precise answer for this question that you're asking because we don't know. And when somebody, particularly a scientist, says, we don't know. I've said, I don't know several times today. It's because we don't know. And. If you, I mean, all we can do is acknowledge what we know and what we can demonstrate with,

• 2:31:08Speaker 03

  with rigorous data. And if we don't have the data, we just have to say, we don't, we don't know the answer to that. That doesn't sit well with us as, as society.

• 2:31:17Steven Rinella?

  No, that's why the, well, like one certainty I have is, um,

• 2:31:24Steven Rinella?

  whatever we're spending on research, I'd be like, oh, let's quadruple it. I'll find the money somewhere. I'll find something dumb that we spend money on to make that go away. So we can spend four times as much money on research. So that like, I don't mean, my kids don't have to be paranoid about this shit for their entire adult life.

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. And one thing that doesn't help with CWD at all, it, it, but counterproductive is you have narratives, you have myths, you have nonsense that, that gets, that, Mark and I were talking about this on the drive over here, that just consumes state agency personnel and resources and time. They spend more time dealing with bullshit than they do trying to actually do their job and try to understand what's going on. And, and you, you put all that, you know, in a hat and you have something that's so, so complex that is cryptic to Mark's point, that you don't see it, that it takes generations to, to kind of manifest itself and really get

• 2:32:25Speaker 03

  going. And you and I think in year to year, month to month terms, and now you're talking, you know, now you have COVID and the skepticism of science in general, and you put all of that together and you've got a soup of crap that surrounds this disease. And then, then that's what we work in. We work in that soup. We're trying to provide data to inform decisions and have conversations that are difficult to have. Nobody want, I don't want to think about this in the future, but it's unfortunate reality on the landscapes that I hunt. And I that I do science on. And so you put all that together and and it's it's it's it burns

• 2:33:07Speaker 03

  your energy and that that's what you see when you talk to state agency personnel in these states that have these high prevalence rates. It is a gut punch to them. I mean, they their morale is down. They just are like, what what do we do? Like, there there's no answer that's going to work today. And the skeptical public wants an answer yesterday. And that's just not the way that this works. And that is a colleague to these agency biologists. That's frustrating to me because I see what they're going through. And I see that there are people in the public saying that the agencies, you know, this is a positive, because they can get federal money, for God's sake.

• 2:33:52Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I, yeah.

• 2:33:53Speaker 03

  Just give me a break. I don't.

• 2:33:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that that idea, like, I know plenty of people that are in wildlife management. The fact that like, that there's this idea that someone that some biologist, some deer biologist sitting there and he and they get a positive in his region.

• 2:34:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:09Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, oh, goodie.

• 2:34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:11Steven Rinella?

  Now I'll be able to buy that new car. It's like, are you kidding me, man?

• 2:34:14Speaker 03

  Their shoulders.

• 2:34:15Steven Rinella?

  It's so it's such it's so it's like so cynical and grotesque.

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, they just found out that let's think about it like this. You're the director of a state agency that just discovered CWD in your state for the first time. Everything just changed. Everything.

• 2:34:32Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, oh, good.

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  Everything just changed for that part, that man or woman.

• 2:34:37Speaker 04

  And yeah, and if you're a director of a state agency, you're already well aware that the subtlest changes in your state regulations for anything.

• 2:34:45Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:34:46Speaker 04

  Cause

• 2:34:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:34:47Speaker 04

  Quite the public uproar and backlash.

• 2:34:49Steven Rinella?

  My license went up $2.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  And now.

• 2:34:52Speaker 04

  They're doing what with snapping turtles? I don't I don't catch them. But boy, I got an opinion on it.

• 2:34:57Speaker 03

  Now, everything changes for these biologists.

• 2:34:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:35:00Speaker 03

  And and and it trickles down from the director all the way to the field staff. Everything changes about the way they do their jobs. The resource flow within the states change. Everything changes. And the idea that that is a positive? The amount of federal money that's allocated to deal with CWD is literally pennies to what it costs state agencies to deal with the consequences of this disease. So this myth that it's a money grab, it's ludicrous. It's absolutely ludicrous. It's the exact opposite of that. It is a money loss. It's a morale killer. It causes these state agency biologists to put their hands up because particularly

• 2:35:43Speaker 03

  in states like you see in Arkansas where you can feel it. Like in the room, you can feel it. You can feel the conversations about how exasperated they are. It's like, my gosh, this is where we're at and this is where we're headed. And it's just, you can feel it suck the air out of the room.

• 2:36:04Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, you're not on controllable timelines, right? And it's like the old gentleman that you talked about, like made his dream become a reality. He's been planning and scheming on this legacy whitetail property or just family ranch, right? It's like, how much of the planning has been done in the absence of real nature and real conditions, right? But it's like, yeah, this is the way it's going to be and this is the way it's going to be. And it just takes, it's not going to happen on our timeline, no matter what.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  I think about the other side because I have friends that are on the other side. Well, then what do we do? Nothing's working. Hell with it. Let's just, and the science shows that if you can keep prevalence to where CWD is not a relevant source of mortality, if you can keep prevalence low, then the future is not going to look like it's going to look if you put your hands up in the air and turn around and walk off. That's just the reality.

• 2:37:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's clear. And I guess what people are going to be waiting on is if you don't do that, then things go to hell. Uh, what you try and maybe the sometime down the road, there'll be some clarity about

• 2:37:22Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:22Steven Rinella?

  That.

• 2:37:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:37:24Steven Rinella?

  But I think if you're in the low area, I'd aim for low.

• 2:37:27Speaker 04

  Right. If you like the way things are right now.

• 2:37:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:37:30Speaker 04

  And your best chance of getting somewhere close to that is.

• 2:37:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that, and that's where like, you know, across the landscape, you know, in these areas where, where, you know, we don't think CWD exists, even if it's part of a state that has CWD, you know, all of the effort and energy should be at prevention still. You know, I think, I think there's this other narrative out there of, you know, we look at the states, what are we up to 35? I don't even remember because it's.

• 2:37:58Steven Rinella?

  35, I think.

• 2:37:58Speaker 05

  Changes, but then it's like, okay, well that's.

• 2:38:01Steven Rinella?

  35 states where it's been detected.

• 2:38:03Speaker 05

  Where it's been detected, right? Okay. So it's like, okay.

• 2:38:05Steven Rinella?

  Fifty.

• 2:38:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:07Steven Rinella?

  It's been hard to follow because we keep almost getting new states.

• 2:38:09Speaker 05

  Right, right, right, right. But, you know, like, it's almost like, you know, some, some people are like, oh, that state's positive now, whatever, it's done.

• 2:38:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 2:38:19Speaker 05

  To your one.

• 2:38:20Steven Rinella?

  It's a bad way of thinking about it.

• 2:38:21Speaker 05

  It's a bad way of thinking about it because to your question earlier, Steve, about in 25 years, there's going to be a county that's not detected in, in the state or in the, in the southeast, right? Those places where we know it not exist, you know, the whole effort of, of people in that area should be to prevent it from coming. So we often throw prevention to the side because it's a pain in the ass and it's, you know, it, it interferes with our way of doing things and what we want to do and how we've done it in the past. But the alternative is not great. I would much rather live in a, in a shroud of prevention.

• 2:38:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:58Speaker 05

  Than one of reaction and frustration and control.

• 2:39:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Meaning the fight shouldn't start when you find your first case.

• 2:39:04Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:39:04Steven Rinella?

  The fight should start before you find your first case.

• 2:39:06Speaker 04

  That's an excellent point. Very, very good point.

• 2:39:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. All right, guys, we got to wrap up, man. I appreciate you coming on.

• 2:39:13Speaker 04

  Thank you for having us.

• 2:39:14Steven Rinella?

  And I appreciate just like the, um.

• 2:39:18Steven Rinella?

  You're talking about wildlife managers being frustrated, you know? Like, I appreciate you guys entertaining the conversation. It just like is, it's hard.

• 2:39:28Speaker 05

  It is.

• 2:39:29Steven Rinella?

  Like it is frustrating because like you're coming out, you know, you're coming on with, with having done research and expert opinion. And you're just in a situation where you got to have a lot of like, I don't know. I don't know. It's got to be feel a lot better when you come on and be like, here's the deal.

• 2:39:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:39:46Steven Rinella?

  We're gonna do X, we're gonna do Y, we're gonna do Z.

• 2:39:49Speaker 03

  We're gonna fix this.

• 2:39:49Speaker 04

  But, but what is like the at home takeaway right now for folks going into their deer season?

• 2:39:57Speaker 05

  I, I always say, I mean, and I appreciate you for entertaining this topic.

• 2:40:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:03Speaker 05

  With, you know, your audience, because I think, I think as much as individuals can just be engaged, care, you know, and, and understand sort of the, the, you know, it's not, you know, some of these restrictions and quirky regulations and confusion around that. It's, it's all from a place of trying to prevent a really big problem in the future. And so trying to just, you know, embrace that and, you know, be an active participant in what the wildlife agencies need.

• 2:40:36Speaker 05

  That's one of the things I always lean into.

• 2:40:39Speaker 03

  And be willing to, I mean, from my perspective, I, I talk to hunters all the time that, that have various narratives that we've talked about today. Their minds, you know, their mindset is, is different than mine. I don't expect you to listen to this podcast and change everything you think about CWD. But if you will just sit back and just think carefully about the issues we've talked about and recognize that there's no, there's no answer. There's no clear answer right now. This is going to take time. There's always context involved. But if you're willing to at least entertain that there is work going on, that's showing these things that we've talked about, that this is a, this is a problem that is not going to just go away.

• 2:41:24Speaker 03

  To Mark's point, you not getting it is, in your area is, is important. And so I kind of look at it from, you know, the deer season framework is, one, I don't want CWD where I'm trying to hunt. And if I have it there, then I'm going to. Have to behave differently because the agency is going to implement changes to try to keep prevalence low. And that is key, not getting it and keeping prevalence low if you have it. That's, that's kind of where I see it.

• 2:41:58Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Thanks again, guys.

• 2:42:00Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:42:00Steven Rinella?

  Well, thank you for the book, Field Manual of Wildlife Diseases in the Southeastern United States.

• 2:42:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:42:06Steven Rinella?

  Which my first response upon seeing it is, it shouldn't be that thick.

• 2:42:12Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, it is.

• 2:42:15Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna read this to my kids at night.

• 2:42:16Speaker 03

  I wouldn't recommend that, yeah.

• 2:42:18Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, thanks, man.

• 2:42:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:42:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, if you want a real, uh, real eye burner, I don't know what you call this.

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  Well, it's a professional level book based off the intensity of the pictures, right?

• 2:42:31Steven Rinella?

  It's a professional book, but I'm taking a non-professional gander through here and it's an alarming collection of photos, which I think my, my kids would like.

• 2:42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're, yeah, we're still on, okay. I was actually gonna ask Marco, there's a, there's a disease, there's something that causes wild turkey feathers to be like soaking wet. With like an oil all over them.

• 2:42:52Steven Rinella?

  Whoa.

• 2:42:53Speaker 03

  Have you seen that?

• 2:42:54Speaker 05

  No, I haven't seen that.

• 2:42:55Steven Rinella?

  It's not in this book?

• 2:42:55Speaker 03

  It's not in that book, and I've searched.

• 2:42:57Steven Rinella?

  This book isn't complete.

• 2:42:58Speaker 05

  You haven't said, you haven't sent this one, Mike?

• 2:43:00Speaker 03

  No, we caught, we caught a hen in Louisiana in two thousand eight, and she was soaking wet, like, not wet. She had this oil all over her to the point where she looked terrible. And I put her in a capture box and it was greasy on the inside of the box. She was part of a brood. She, she had polts with her. And I've searched for that and I meant to ask you the other day about that.

• 2:43:26Speaker 05

  Is that your only encounter with it?

• 2:43:28Speaker 03

  Encounter ever.

• 2:43:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, weird things happen. I mean, is there any chance she got into a?

• 2:43:34Steven Rinella?

  Been a

• 2:43:35Speaker 03

  A bin of oil?

• 2:43:35Speaker 05

  A bin of oil, something, unusual thing happened.

• 2:43:38Speaker 03

  She was an Cajun country, so she could have encountered anything.

• 2:43:40Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:43:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, she ran through the deep fat fryer before she got there.

• 2:43:44Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:43:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:43:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 2:43:46Steven Rinella?

  Good lord, this book.

• 2:43:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, we, we make that for, that's intended for field biologists. So those, you know, most of our a, the agency personnel in the southeast kinda refer to that. So it's written for biologists, but

• 2:43:58Speaker 04

  No, I'm gonna

• 2:43:58Speaker 05

  Any hunter would enjoy it, I think.

• 2:44:00Speaker 04

  Put this in the camper, uh, we're gonna take my, my buddy's

• 2:44:03Speaker 05

  A little white reading?

• 2:44:04Speaker 04

  My buddy's 10-year-old kid, they're hunting with us this year. I'm gonna be like, well, you just gotta flip through that first before we

• 2:44:09Speaker 05

  But there's also some

• 2:44:10Steven Rinella?

  You're just be glad you're not that deer.

• 2:44:13Speaker 05

  There's also some normal stuff in there because disease is a part of life with wildlife, right?

• 2:44:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:18Speaker 05

  You can have a healthy deer that also has a disease. And so there's lots of, you know, parasites we commonly see in wildlife and other things that would be of, of interest for, for hunters when they're dressing an animal.

• 2:44:27Steven Rinella?

  I'm quite enjoying this book, man.

• 2:44:30Steven Rinella?

  All right, guys. Thanks again.

• 2:44:31Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:44:31Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:44:31Steven Rinella?

  See y'all.

• 2:44:59Speaker 03

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