Ep. 937: What Happens If We Let CWD Rip?

Steven Rinella talks with director of the Missouri Department of Conservation, Jason Sumners, about: honest updates on the state of chronic wasting disease in America; managing deer herds; what other states can learn from Missouri; keeping hunters at the core of conservation; whether we might be seeing the end of big bucks; and more! Follow Jason Sumners on Instagram: @huntmo_jason https://www.instagram.com/huntmo_jason/ 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

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  This is the story of the one. As a shipping manager, he's running the dock, stocking supplies, and making sure every order goes out on time. And Granger helps him stay prepared. From shipping supplies to PPE to hand tools, he counts on Granger to keep products moving and trucks rolling. So his operation runs smoothly, no matter the shift. Call 1-800-GRANGER, click Granger.com, or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multi-sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any door is open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Football season is here, and if you're looking for the boldest bourbon on the roster, look no further than Wild Turkey Bourbon. Kentucky born with 100 years of know-how. Wild Turkey Bourbon never compromises. It's aged longer, never watered down. So enjoy a bourbon that's filled with character and bold flavor this football season. Wild Turkey. Go bold. Go home. Copyright 2026, Campari America, New York, New York. Never compromise. Drink responsibly.

• 1:44Speaker 04

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

• 1:53Speaker 03

  You can't predict anything.

• 1:55Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 2:18Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Joined today by Jason Sumners, who's the Director of Missouri's State Fish and Game Agency, which is called the Missouri Department of Conservation. He's a deer biologist by training, worked his way up from being a guy biologist out in the field to running the whole show there. Also sits on the Board of National Deer Association. What we're going to talk about primarily, we're going to talk about whitetail deer and deer management, mostly going to focus on what I think, what, what, what in my mind is the number one issue

• 2:54Steven Rinella?

  impacting deer and deer hunting and deer hunters today, which is chronic wasting disease. And, and, and when I say that it's number one issue, is even for you listeners, and I know there are many, even for you listeners that feel that it's overblown, it's all hysteria, it's like, it's, it's, it impacts all conversations about deer. It impacts decisions about deer management. It impacts how money is spent on deer management. For people out there that are worried about the future of deer herds, you know what I'm talking about. For people that are worried about the potential for human transmission, that, that a disease

• 3:36Steven Rinella?

  would jump from deer to humans, you know what I'm talking about. Even people that, that the whole subject of CWD drives them nuts, they spend time and energy explaining why the conversation drives them nuts. This is the, there is no other issue that comes close to chronic wasting disease. And when it comes to impacts, again, to deer, deer hunting, deer management, it is, it is the issue of the moment, and at this point, the moment is decades long. Agree or disagree?

• 4:09Speaker 06

  Oh, no, no, I completely agree, Steve. It's one of those that I, you know, we found chronic wasting disease in Missouri in, in 2010. And I, I often tell folks that there's pre-CWD State Fish and Wildlife Agency, and there's post-CWD State Fish and Wildlife Agency, just because of, yeah, the very things that you mentioned. It is a challenging topic, and, and it's one that we just have to deal with.

• 4:35Steven Rinella?

  It's challenging, and it, and it is, we'll touch on this. It is from my view, this is me talking, right? I don't want to, I don't want to conflate my viewpoint and your viewpoint, but it is also contentious. And it's contentious, and, and it's contentious different than kind of the playful arguments that we have around deer, where, you know, you could have, like, I'll debate buddies of mine about whether you should be shooting crossbows at deer during archery season or not. Like this, these are like the old debate. Should you, is the guy that shoots forkeys, is he a bad player because he's not letting deer grow up? Are the big

• 5:18Steven Rinella?

  buck blowhards ruining deer hunting for everybody else because they're chasing numbers and not quality of experience? Like, all these little pet fights. There's all these little pet fights about deer. But this one is like, this one takes on an existential, has an existential tone to it. Because we're talking about, in some ways, we're talking about, what will the future of deer hunting look like? Beyond any kind of regulatory question? Like, it's gotten to, will there be deer around? Right? And these are some of the things I want to explore with you. And we've had, if you listen to this show, you might have

• 6:02Steven Rinella?

  noticed over the years that this show, there's some things we talk a bunch about. I was just talking with Jason before the show began. We talk a bunch about Ice Age hunters, which is not existential. That's just interesting. And we have talked over the years a lot about CWD. And a listener might be like, well, what more is there to say? But I feel that,

• 6:30Steven Rinella?

  that I feel strongly enough about educating people on this subject. And by that, I don't mean telling you what to think. I mean, I feel strongly enough about exposing listeners to the different viewpoints and the research on CWD, that if someone came and told me that we took a major ratings hit every time we talked about CWD, I would talk about CWD more. Because I'd be like, okay, if less people listen to the CWD episodes, I'm going to do more of them to make sure that more people get exposed to this information. And I am not trying to sit here on the CWD debate. I am not trying to sit here as a host and

• 7:13Steven Rinella?

  be like, here's what you ought to think. Here's what you ought to think. I'm trying to, like, I try to bring in people that have a rational, educated perspective about what's happening and what we need to do about it. And, and you are regarded among the wildlife biology community as a person that, like, ought to be listened to and that you have an educated perspective. And so I want to hear what you think. Right? I'm like, I'm not here to tell you what I think about CWD. But to start that conversation, why don't we, why don't we back up to where you were at when, was it, you said 2010?

• 7:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, 2010.

• 7:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay. What were you doing? Where were you at? What was your career looking like? And, and how did you first conceptualize this thing? You, you had to have some pre-awareness. But tell me, like, what you thought then about CWD?

• 8:17Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I, I think you're absolutely right in terms of this interconnecting so many, like, challenging topics. And for us, it hit directly at one of those. So, I grew up in Missouri, a country kid, loved nothing more than hunting and fishing. We had coon hounds growing up, right? So I grew up chasing coon hounds and, and all that kind of stuff, and wanted to field and, but wanted a job in conservation. And I went south, got a master's degree at Mississippi State, working on deer biology. And so I was in, in Mississippi in 2001, when CWD was found in Wisconsin. Right? So, in graduate school, right at that turn of like, okay, this is kind of big, something's gonna happen, don't know what, right?

• 8:59Steven Rinella?

  God, it hasn't been a quarter century.

• 9:01Speaker 06

  Isn't it hard to believe? Yeah.

• 9:03Steven Rinella?

  It's been a quarter century since people started talking about CWD in Wisconsin.

• 9:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to believe that's been that long. But yeah, so that's where I was, wanting nothing more than to be a deer biologist, and work on deer and deer management. And so at that time, CWD was sort of just kind of a curiosity thing in many ways. Hey, is this something here? Certainly created some fears, no doubt, but one that I was just kind of peripheral to. Got a chance to go to Texas, was at Texas A&M for a while, working on private deer ranches, doing research in South Texas. Went in 2000, late 2008, got the chance to come back to Missouri, you know, where I grew up, and deer, deer biologist, right? Like, man, this is awesome. Nothing more than wanting to be a deer biologist, then the opportunity to do it in your home state.

• 9:48Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 9:48Speaker 06

  When I got.

• 9:49Steven Rinella?

  Do you mind real quick saying, like, pre-CWD, or just what, what that, like, when you say, a deer biologist? Tell people what, what, what all that means.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. So for the state, you're responsible for all establishing or recommending all the rules and regulations that manage the deer population in the state, right? And so in Missouri, we just, we have a very small statewide deer management team at the time. And we just had one statewide deer biologist. I came to Missouri to stand up a private lands deer program. How are we going to work with private landowners to implement good management practices on the ground? Right? Try to meet their management objectives while also addressing concerns of agricultural producers and all those kinds of things that we can set these statewide season frameworks that kind of push a population one direction or the other in a, in a, in a big way. Um, but to really dial it in on a small scale, you gotta work with private landowners.

• 10:41Speaker 06

  So that's where, that's where my frame of mind was, and especially across a lot of these.

• 10:45Steven Rinella?

  And that was your initial assignment?

• 10:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're going to do. But I got to Missouri and, and so CWD, you know, had just been found in, you know, West Virginia in like 2005. And so for the first time, kind of outside of Wisconsin in the eastern U S. And so folks are starting to pay attention. Got to Missouri and it's like, so what's our CWD plan? Should we, should we get it? And, and effectively it just said that we'd play nice with the Department of Agriculture. Should it be found in a captive facility? And they'll play nice with us. Should it be found in a free ranging population? But it really didn't detail what we would do.

• 11:18Steven Rinella?

  What, what, I don't, I don't understand when you say that play nice. What do you mean?

• 11:21Speaker 06

  In, in terms of, um, dual regulatory responsibility that kind of exists between the Departments of Agriculture and the State Fish and Wildlife agencies in a lot of states. Right? So deer and elk and a lot of captive service kind of sometimes fall into this space where the state agriculture department may have some responsibility and the state fish and wildlife agency may have responsibility.

• 11:42Steven Rinella?

  I see. So what you were getting at.

• 11:43Speaker 06

  Depending on which side of fence they're on.

• 11:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 06

  Right. And so how are we going to just make sure that that relationship was good and that we worked together?

• 11:50Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 11:51Speaker 06

  And got to the same space.

• 11:52Steven Rinella?

  I mean, if you knew if it first popped in a captive service facility.

• 11:56Speaker 06

  Right.

• 11:57Steven Rinella?

  There'd be communication with the wildlife people and vice versa.

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Yep. And that's about all it said.

• 12:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:02Speaker 06

  Cause they hadn't really, they'd been doing sampling. So in Missouri in 2002 to 2004, did really extensive CWD sampling, sampled 22,000 deer across the state. And the idea was that we would try to sample enough deer that if the disease was present, um, we would detect it at some reasonable level.

• 12:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Turns out in that three year period, um, there was like a 98% probability that had the CWD been present in a county, it had to have been present at like less than 1%. So that gave us a baseline, right? In the early 2000s that says, we've done a ton of sampling. If it's here, we should have detected it unless it's a relatively recent introduction.

• 12:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay. That, that, that's interesting. And I wanna, I wanna.

• 12:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:50Steven Rinella?

  Just stop on that for a minute and, and, and, cause, cause this, this is a question I've always had.

• 12:56Steven Rinella?

  It, you remember like COVID testing?

• 12:59Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 13:00Steven Rinella?

  I remember someone saying like, a great way to find COVID is to do a lot of testing.

• 13:07Speaker 06

  Right.

• 13:07Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, meaning sort of the perception was after a while it's just there.

• 13:12Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 13:12Steven Rinella?

  Right. COVID was there. And if you test a bunch, you're like, oh, it's, it's all over. And it would just generally be like, testing reveals that it's there. And I've always wondered on that percentage you just said, is I always felt that as CWD started to hit and seemed to spread, was it that anytime a state said, well, let's go check? And they really checked heavily, they'd always find it.

• 13:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:40Steven Rinella?

  But you were saying you were checking heavily.

• 13:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 13:43Steven Rinella?

  In what year again?

• 13:44Speaker 06

  In 2002 to 2004.

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  So you were looking heavily those years and in fact not finding it.

• 13:51Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 13:51Steven Rinella?

  It wasn't like, once you looked, there it was.

• 13:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh yeah. No, it's massive. You know, the staff that worked for the department at that time, they were collecting heads and barrels and hauling them everywhere. I mean.

• 14:01Steven Rinella?

  And not finding it.

• 14:02Speaker 06

  And we didn't find any.

• 14:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 14:04Speaker 06

  Right? And so this whole idea that, well, it's always been there. You're just doing more testing. So you're detecting more is just not true.

• 14:12Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 14:13Speaker 06

  And so from that time, and then in 2006, we shifted really hard, kind of the first state to really shift hard to using taxidermists to do sampling.

• 14:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 14:22Speaker 06

  Cause it started to become clear that adult males showing it at a higher prevalence, which meant that if we were sampling adult males, we'd have better likelihood of detecting it really early in that sample. So, so from 2006 on, we started using taxidermists statewide, collecting several thousand samples a year.

• 14:40Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Meaning, cause then, cause it's sort of like selective.

• 14:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 14:44Steven Rinella?

  Did, you know, some dudes do, my dad did one time, but most dudes aren't bringing does down to get, are bringing yearling does down to get stuff. So you're like, well, let's go look at mature bucks.

• 14:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:55Steven Rinella?

  Three and a half, four and a half. They turn up at the taxidermist.

• 14:58Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And so it was, it was a way that we could sort of, sort of wait towards that group that's most likely to have the disease.

• 15:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:07Speaker 06

  And increase the likelihood of detecting it early. So, so much about CWD and CWD management is about the time of introduction to the time of detection as to how you can do it.

• 15:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:18Speaker 06

  So several of the states that, you know, are pretty notorious for having found it and then found a lot like Arkansas, Arkansas was doing testing, but they weren't doing a really intensive testing.

• 15:31Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 15:31Speaker 06

  So the likelihood of it setting there at a higher prevalence and going undetected is higher.

• 15:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. That, that's what I was kind of getting at. That's, that's the sort of strategy I was getting at, which means that a state's like, damn, let's go look all over. And all of a sudden there it is. And they go like, well, it must've got here yesterday.

• 15:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 15:52Steven Rinella?

  And I might as well, I don't know. Did it? You know, or has it been there for forever? No one looked.

• 15:57Speaker 06

  Right. Right.

• 15:57Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, I get the, I get the point you're saying where you feel like you were, were, were, you're, you're confident that you were finding it in its early stages in the population.

• 16:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that's played out through time, right? That, that has repeated itself over and over again. When we've detected CWD in a new location and we go in and do even more intensive sampling, oftentimes it is extremely rare.

• 16:23Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 16:23Speaker 06

  Right? Very, very few.

• 16:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:25Speaker 06

  So what we're seeing is slow spread. So it, it, it gives confidence back to that early sampling period.

• 16:31Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 16:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. If it was there, is it really low prevalence? So, so some of these, um, southern states that they were doing testing, but they may have only been doing, you know, 1500 a year.

• 16:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 06

  Kind of statewide.

• 16:43Steven Rinella?

  And what's a big number for a state like Missouri?

• 16:45Speaker 06

  Um, so we've been 25 to 30,000 samples a year.

• 16:49Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 16:49Speaker 06

  Most recently, and it really is about trying to detect that first spark, that first introduction or the first, the slow spread, right? So the management action can be more effective.

• 17:01Steven Rinella?

  When you were looking, if you, if you go back to those days, when like, here you are, your deer biologist, clear mandate on herd health, um, here it is, you're, you're finding that it's popping up, it's spreading. Are you looking at, at that time, are you seeing it as a human health concern? Or a herd health concern?

• 17:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. Most of our focus is a herd health concern.

• 17:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 17:27Speaker 06

  I mean, we can talk about the human health side of it, but it's really for the herd health thing.

• 17:32Steven Rinella?

  But yeah, I mean, like at, like at that time.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 17:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Cause as much as I told you, I wasn't going to tell you what I think.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:38Steven Rinella?

  At that time, for me, and, and to some degrees remaining still today, at that time for me, it was virtually all human health. Just a, like purely personal, purely personal.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 17:52Steven Rinella?

  But, but you, you were viewing it like a deer issue.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  And we heard from, I heard from a lot of folks in that, with that same kind of concern. I, I didn't recognize a number of folks had been, you know, in the military or whatever, and had been in Great Britain, uh, in England at the time of the BSE situation.

• 18:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  And finding themselves having to make some of those hard decisions and then calling and saying, hey, what do I do? And so, yeah, certainly recognize the concerns that folks had, but it was really from a herd health standpoint.

• 18:19Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 18:20Speaker 06

  That we were concerned about it. Cause we were just starting to see some of the data starting to creep out of the West, things that were happening in Colorado with population reductions and lower survival and that kind of stuff. But to kind of back up, so, so we had this background history of, we think it's relatively, if it's here, there's not much of it. So when we found our first detection, before that, I was looking to other places to say, what if, what are folks doing? So we had what was emerging, the, the difference in management approach, what was happening in Wisconsin and what Illinois was doing.

• 18:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 18:53Speaker 06

  So Illinois had taken a very aggressive, very localized approach, whereas Wisconsin had taken a much more broad sweeping, um, kind of management regulation based approach.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Lay those, lay those two approaches out.

• 19:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. So Illinois, what they, what they did when they'd find a CW positive detection is they'd identify a couple, they'd identify the section, the one square mile section in which the positive deer was around, and then define a core area around it, another block. So it ended up being three miles by three miles around any positive. And then they would go in, they would issue additional permits, but following the hunting season, contracting with USDA Wildlife Services and their staff, they go in and try to do additional localized removals.

• 19:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 06

  To try to remove the social groups where a, a positive female, for example, has been. So we know most likely other positive deers, ones that are related to a positive deer.

• 19:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:48Speaker 06

  So where they interact and engage with one another. Whereas Wisconsin's approach was to be a lot more broad brush, you know, the Ernie Buck program was in place, trying to massively reduce deer populations.

• 19:59Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 20:00Speaker 06

  A lot of additional opportunities outside of the season, um, less kind of surgical, I would say.

• 20:06Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 20:07Speaker 06

  And so you could start to see the trends and indicators, especially after Ernie Buck went away, that, that population trajectory was changing between the approach Wisconsin was taking versus Illinois.

• 20:17Steven Rinella?

  Who, which, which, which, who was right?

• 20:19Speaker 06

  Well, Illinois has been able to maintain relatively low prevalence rates through this past 25 years post introduction.

• 20:27Steven Rinella?

  Through the little.

• 20:28Speaker 06

  Through the very localized, very intensive approach and working with landowners.

• 20:33Steven Rinella?

  But man, did that one piss people? Go off though.

• 20:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, it has. Yeah, it has. And so, so that was the approach we took. So we wrote the plan to say, okay, what can we learn from Illinois? Very localized management, trying not to, not to tremendously negatively impact hunters outside of where CWD is, right? So this is a little bit of this balancing that has to occur. How do you, how do you address the disease without negatively impacting everybody? And so that was our approach in, in 2012, when we had our first detection of free ranging herd. Very localized, work with landowners, try to give them additional authorizations during the season. And then with their permission, we would come in after the season and do additional removals.

• 21:14Steven Rinella?

  With the objective of, how, how big is the box? How big is a box in Missouri that you're talking about at this time?

• 21:22Speaker 06

  Well, they, they vary in size because some of them are pretty big because we've had slow spread.

• 21:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay, give me a medium sized box.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  A medium sized box would be forty square miles.

• 21:32Steven Rinella?

  Forty square miles.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  You know?

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  And at that time, and tell me the year roughly that this happened.

• 21:37Speaker 06

  Twenty twelve, twenty fourteen, that timeframe.

• 21:39Steven Rinella?

  At that time, when you had a box, let's say you got a forty square mile box, okay? Um, how many, like a township is six by six, right?

• 21:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 21:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so picture like a roughly township sized township, for, for, for those of you in the eastern US, a township, basically, six by six square miles. Um, you, you would, the objective would be to reduce the population by what percent?

• 22:04Speaker 06

  We really didn't set a target at that time.

• 22:07Steven Rinella?

  Just reduce it.

• 22:08Speaker 06

  Just reduce it. And, and a lot of the focus was, hey, do you have a positive on your property? How can we try to reduce some of the deer that likely would have came into contact with that individual?

• 22:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 22:18Speaker 06

  Right? And so kind of both during the season, we gave, we gave landowners the opportunity to get what we at that time called CWD management seals, which would allow them to even shoot additional bucks.

• 22:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 22:29Speaker 06

  During the regular hunting season. And then after the season, we say, hey, do you want to shoot some additional deer? If you, if you do, great, we'll give you that authorization. If you don't, would you let MDC staff do that? And if you don't want to be involved, that's fine too, right? Like completely voluntary from their standpoint. And so then we would go through about a two month period. The thing we also did is we offered those deer back to the landowner. So we take them, get them tested. If they test not detected, offer them the opportunity to have that deer back. If they didn't want it back, then we donated all those to share the harvest. So one of the things that also goes around is that, well, those deer got wasted, they got shot, nothing got done with them, and that's just not true either.

• 23:15Speaker 07

  911, what's your emergency? Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. Oh, since swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the places to buy them. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 23:44Speaker 07

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and scents to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or Sons Affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 24:46Steven Rinella?

  So I know you didn't have an objective, but can you find, can you think of an example, again, of a township sized chunk of ground? For roughly forty square miles. Can you think of an example during that time when you wanted to do a reduction? What, like, just looking back, what did you ever achieve for percent reduction?

• 25:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, so probably thirty to forty percent.

• 25:07Steven Rinella?

  Reduce it to thirty forty percent?

• 25:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so, because I think when we talk about population management, we've always targeted in the eastern US about, if you remove about 25% of your adult females on an annual basis, you're kind of keeping the population steady.

• 25:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 25:22Speaker 06

  And so when you look at historic harvest trends, we could look at the historic harvest trend of a county and say, what does that look like? We were, we were shooting for another 10% reduction, potentially, right? Just, just trying to get over that hump of just normal harvest probably wasn't going to be enough. Some additional localized focus would be.

• 25:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 06

  Or should help. And that pattern's played out through time, where we've had good landowner cooperation, where we had, that box was smaller.

• 25:53Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  And we got more intensive harvest. Those prevalence rates in those core areas is still flat or steady, even now a decade later.

• 26:01Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 26:01Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 26:03Steven Rinella?

  What, let, let's play the why game. You'd, at that time, you'd go to a landowner and you'd say, we want to, we're, we're looking to reduce deer herds. And he says, why? And you're like, well, because we're trying to slow the spread of CWD. Why? What was that why?

• 26:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, that why was because of the long-term impacts of CWD on the population.

• 26:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 26:26Speaker 06

  Because everywhere else we'd seen it, we knew kind of three things were happening. It kills deer.

• 26:31Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  It spreads and it increases in prevalence. We know that to sort of be uniform, uniformly true.

• 26:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  Everywhere we've found it, with the exception of, you know, New York, where they probably got super lucky and shot the three deer that were actually positive, right? And we've had some core areas where we've detected a positive, shot one or two more positive deer, and haven't had any more.

• 26:57Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 26:58Speaker 06

  It's really rare, right? Like really rare. And we continue to monitor those kinds of things, but, but it does happen. But you don't count on it.

• 27:07Steven Rinella?

  I want to, I want to stick with, I want to stick with the timeline, but I want to take them and jump out of the timelines. We're talking about the whys, okay? And like the why you gave is probably still relevant today, long-term impacts. But let me hit with like, what would be a paradox? Okay? I think this is a paradox. It'd be, we have a fear that CWD

• 27:36Steven Rinella?

  will cause a decline in the deer herd. Therefore, to stop it, we will do the very thing that we fear will happen from CWD, which is decline the deer herd.

• 27:52Steven Rinella?

  Help me through that.

• 27:53Speaker 06

  No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

• 27:55Steven Rinella?

  But I mean, like, like, like, help, help me through that puzzle.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. And to me, it's about sort of attempting to control the fate of the herd.

• 28:06Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:07Speaker 06

  Right? And continue to have prevalence relatively low, that it is not impacting the population. And that we, by reducing the population, can keep prevalence rates low, and we continue to maintain a healthy deer herd that folks can use and enjoy and appreciate.

• 28:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:25Speaker 06

  And not have a higher proportion of sick animals on the landscape.

• 28:28Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  You know, the idea that, you know, we had, we've had two deer in, in a small rural community along the Mississippi River, Missouri, just crawl up in folks yard and, and die, right? Like, yes, CWD, we don't want CWD to control the herd in that way.

• 28:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 06

  We want hunters to be in a position where they continue to appreciate having these deer on the landscape. And then whatever other concerns folks have, whether it is human health or otherwise, but that it's just an important part of the landscape.

• 28:56Steven Rinella?

  So is, is it fair to, to say, like, I'm just going to use rough numbers, is it fair to come and say to somebody or a community of hunters, a county or whatever, where, where deer hunting is popular, be like,

• 29:10Steven Rinella?

  Right now, we have a, we have a ton of deer. Okay, we have a hundred deer per unit of space. And you would say to a group of hunters in a, in a region, you would say,

• 29:24Steven Rinella?

  if we just let CWD rip and we don't do anything and we just let it run,

• 29:31Steven Rinella?

  you could feasibly wind up in a situation where, we don't really know, but let's say there's a situation where there's 20 deer per unit of space instead of a hundred. There's 30 deer per unit of space instead of a hundred. And those 20 or 30 deer, 50% of them are going to have this disease. Blank percent of them are going to be dying from this disease. And that's what it's going to look like. Or we hunt them down to 20 or 30.

• 30:01Steven Rinella?

  And those are disease free and those demonstrate the age class we want to see. And those have mature bucks in them. And, and, and that is the thing, but yes, either way, we're talking about you're going to see less deer from your tree stand.

• 30:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

• 30:19Steven Rinella?

  People look, I'm telling you, man, like you know this. People look and they'll be like, how can someone try to tell me that me seeing fewer deer from my tree stand is good?

• 30:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:31Steven Rinella?

  Like I, like I don't, no person comes in excited. They're like, how was your hunt? Awesome. Didn't see nothing. Right. Like no one's chasing that evening.

• 30:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that collided with the raise, the rise of trail cameras. The rise of the intensity of deer management that happens today. Folks understanding what age means to potential of antler development.

• 30:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 06

  Sort of this, this possessive nature of the way that we feel about deer now because we get them on camera. I got a deer on camera. That's a bit of it's my deer.

• 31:08Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 31:08Speaker 06

  Kind of the intensity of management. And then we also had folks because of that, investing a ton of money in recreational land.

• 31:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 31:16Speaker 06

  I mean, some of the most valuable land in Missouri is for recreational opportunities, hunt deer turkeys. Right? And that's very true across much of the Midwest.

• 31:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, man.

• 31:24Speaker 06

  You can't grow crops on it, but it can grow deer, good deer turkeys. It's extremely valuable. So you've got folks who invested or made the lifetime sacrifices to buy land to, to be able to shoot giant bucks. And then this idea that, well, I'm going to have a few deer. Now what are we going to do? It's a, it's a tremendous ask and it's one that we had some, yeah, really challenging conversation with folks about. The other thing that with CWD, if CWD is controlling the population, it'll be a much younger herd too. Right? Because it's going to crop off that older age class. And we know even when we, we had smaller deer populations, we were shooting them pretty hard. We still had bucks in older age classes. We didn't have as many numerically, but we still had them.

• 32:09Steven Rinella?

  They were present.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 32:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So let's go back to that. Let's go back to that chronology a little bit. You were, you were taking this, what, what we'll call the Illinois model. If we're setting it up like, like two different perspectives. Wisconsin generally trying to use programs to generally lower deer statewide. Illinois being like, no, man, we're going to find a hotspot. We're going to shoot them out. And you were doing that Illinois model and finding that you could sort of keep prevalence. Low or lower.

• 32:43Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 32:43Steven Rinella?

  Walk through what, how these prevalences move.

• 32:49Steven Rinella?

  Meaning you find a spot with one or 2%.

• 32:53Steven Rinella?

  How does it grow when it's unchecked? And, and what does it look like when you're taking steps to check it?

• 32:59Speaker 06

  Yeah. So what you see is it's a, you know, the, those deer have to come into contact one another to spread it. Right? So it's that social interaction and engagement that occurs. Fewer deer on landscape, fewer deer spreading it to one another, especially in the east where they don't move a ton. Right? It's not like the migration corridors we see in the west where they might be moving long distances. Especially when you get into like the eastern Ozarks, home ranges are pretty small.

• 33:24Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 33:24Speaker 06

  In the agricultural parts of the state, the, the, you know, the movement between habitat patches might be longer. Right? So you'll see, you'll see a very different dispersion of the disease in those kinds of landscapes as well. Just based on deer movement.

• 33:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 33:37Speaker 06

  West Virginia is a great example. Hampshire County, they found CWD in 2004, 2005. It hasn't spread all over West Virginia. It's still pretty localized and contained largely because deer in those landscapes just don't move a lot.

• 33:54Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 33:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. So you'll see some of that. So that's the way it spreads out.

• 33:58Steven Rinella?

  More, they move more in ag areas than they do in mountain areas.

• 34:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Any heavily forested landscape, they move far less.

• 34:06Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 34:06Speaker 06

  And that's pretty well known.

• 34:07Steven Rinella?

  What do you, at, at the risk of this being a huge tangent, why, why is that?

• 34:13Speaker 06

  Available resources and cover.

• 34:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  Right? You know, you think about an ag, ag country, while there's food everywhere, there's bedding cover and and escape cover may not be in those spots.

• 34:24Steven Rinella?

  They're traveling longer distances for this primo food sources and then.

• 34:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. And cover, right? That being the big limiting thing. In a forested landscape, they're using terrain and topography. They're using small, you know, woody cover.

• 34:37Steven Rinella?

  They're more of a homebody. I never knew that.

• 34:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. So, so you see that. But what we see is through the first several years of a detection, a really early detection is really slow increase in prevalence. I mean, less than a, like a half a percent per year, kind of really slow. But then once it hits about 5% in any reasonable sized area, you start, it's like an inflection point.

• 35:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:05Speaker 06

  And prevalence starts to really speed up. Because I think you've got enough deer then that are infected, that, that contact rate almost becomes exponential.

• 35:14Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 35:14Speaker 06

  And this has played out in a lot of places. Mike Miller, you know, I mean, I think some of the work Mike's done in Colorado and a lot of the early research, they, they talk about 5%. Somewhere between five and seven percent really being this tipping point.

• 35:27Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  So can we detect it before that? Before that's the point where we can actually have management interventions that are probably meaningful and impactful.

• 35:36Steven Rinella?

  Before that?

• 35:37Speaker 06

  Before that.

• 35:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 35:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so we, we, we published a couple of papers in, in, you know, 2020, 2021, really looking at, what is that window of opportunity? And it really gets back to your detection, your ability to detect and the intensity of sampling that you've done. To be on the front end of it. Once it gets past that point, the geographic spread has started to become wide enough that your area of impact and influence becomes so large. It's an entire county. It's a couple of counties, right?

• 36:06Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 36:07Speaker 06

  And the ability to do this localized management like Illinois had been doing and like we had been doing really gets diminished. So we've had to take a different approach in a lot of places. Like where CWD drifted up into Southern Missouri from Arkansas. It's much more widespread. It, it's not like it was just a single introduction where we could go track that.

• 36:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 36:27Speaker 06

  It's spread out over across, you know, half the southern border.

• 36:32Steven Rinella?

  So are there cases where, um, are there cases where you just walk?

• 36:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, we have. Yeah. Yeah. When you look at Southwest Missouri, south of Taylor Rock and Bull Shoals Lake, um, where it is kind of the northern edge of the Arkansas outbreak because of access, um, because of small landowner acreage, because tough terrain and hard to get in and do additional deer management. We just don't even get many deer killed in that area anyway. Yeah, we've chosen to let it run its course outside of just carcass movement regulations, some testing to monitor prevalence and that kind of stuff.

• 37:10Steven Rinella?

  Well, how with, I, I understand coming to that decision because you have limited resources.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:16Steven Rinella?

  That I guess you didn't even mention that in your list of reasons, but that's got to be on there somewhere. Like you've limited money, limited people.

• 37:25Steven Rinella?

  But how does that edge not just march?

• 37:30Speaker 06

  We got a couple of big reservoirs.

• 37:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so physical barriers.

• 37:34Speaker 06

  Create a bit of a physical barrier. They're not an incomplete and they're not a complete barrier. We know deer swim the, the rivers and, and the lakes, but it at least is going to slow it down.

• 37:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:44Speaker 06

  So it gives us the opportunity to say, okay, well, on the north side of the lake, if one does come across, it's probably a relatively new spark, right? It's jumped the line, right?

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 37:54Speaker 06

  Then we could be a little more aggressive in addressing those.

• 38:00Steven Rinella?

  Tell me a little bit about how, um, tell me a little bit about what you're hearing through this, what you're hearing from deer hunters in Missouri. If you had to make that there's, if you had to say that there's two groups or four groups or whatever the number, like, what are the groups that, that, that are, are coming to the meetings, right? That are, that are articulating a viewpoint, like, what are their viewpoints? And you can, you know, with, I don't, you don't even, you can disparage the ones you want to disparage, or you can just give it in their words, like, who's coming to talk to you?

• 38:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't think folks do it intentionally, right? Like, so I'm not going to disparage anybody. I value their perspectives and their opinions and based on, on what they know. So we've got, so interestingly, so we perked along with a few additional detections kind of from 2012 to 2018, and then started to detect it in a couple of other spots. And then post, and, and I felt like we had pretty good communication, we had pretty good understanding of what was going on with local landowners.

• 39:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  And then really post-COVID, attitudes and perceptions changed pretty dramatically.

• 39:14Steven Rinella?

  Ah.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  A lot of mistrust, a lot of questioning of intentions that we just didn't face before that. It was a really different time period. But we've got folks who, and I don't believe it, right? Like, show me the facts. You gotta spend time trying to share information with them. You got folks that inherently just trust and will believe, you know, the agency voice as experts. And a lot of folks who are just complacent or not aware.

• 39:46Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 39:46Speaker 06

  I, it, it, it was really hard for our team and myself, too, as we'd find new detections that felt like Groundhog Day. Man, I'm talking about CWD management in Missouri since 2010.

• 39:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 06

  I couldn't tell you how many thousands of people I've talked about it, how many articles in the conservationist, how many news programs, pod, right? Like, all the things, talking about CWD, you find it in a new place and it's like, they had no idea.

• 40:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 40:11Speaker 06

  Right?

• 40:12Steven Rinella?

  So, like, people not following it.

• 40:14Speaker 06

  Not the way passionate folks do.

• 40:17Steven Rinella?

  National conversation, state conversation, they're following it like, like, my deer.

• 40:22Speaker 06

  My deer.

• 40:22Steven Rinella?

  And then when it's my deer, they're like, now what? They're, they wake up to it.

• 40:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and it just, and I've used this, the Bill Murray slide of Groundhog Day numerous times in presentations because it feels that way. It's like, oh my gosh.

• 40:37Steven Rinella?

  Like, you know, sir, with all due respect, like, I, I, I don't understand where you've been.

• 40:43Speaker 06

  Right, right. And so that's really hard. And from a communication standpoint to say, here's where information is advancing, and then you've got a bunch of, of folks, a large number of folks who aren't as tied in and paying attention.

• 40:57Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:58Speaker 06

  And so then, and then you've got those that are paying attention, but they get fixated on certain issues.

• 41:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 41:05Speaker 06

  Or certain parts of it, which I think is where this sort of broader concern starts to creep back in. Things like, well, it's clearly just the captive guys moving deer around the landscape. It's all their fault.

• 41:17Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 41:18Speaker 06

  Right? Or, no, it's not our fault. No, it's, it's all the deer hunters' fault, right? Like, it's, or it's the guys pouring urine on the ground. It's their fault, or, right? Like, that, those things that start to say, well, that's part of it. In this case, it might have been. In this case, it wasn't. But it creates these lines for, for us to be tribalistic in some ways.

• 41:42Steven Rinella?

  Hugely.

• 41:42Speaker 06

  Right?

• 41:43Steven Rinella?

  And, and, but, but you, you, the, you feel the tribalism emerged with COVID? Or was it, was it taking shape?

• 41:54Speaker 06

  A new one.

• 41:54Steven Rinella?

  A new tribalism. And that was a skepticism, that was a skepticism from, of, like, being skeptical of, like, officialdom.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  And science.

• 42:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because, because elements of that, like, because elements of that community on the human health end of the landscape really made some big mistakes.

• 42:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:18Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 42:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:19Steven Rinella?

  And then it became, I'm done with all y'all.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, all of you all, right? And so then.

• 42:24Steven Rinella?

  Like, any egghead scientist guy is out.

• 42:27Speaker 06

  Right. And so then you, then, then the, then the, the real conspiracies start to, to creep in.

• 42:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 06

  Well, what's their motivations? What's their intentions? Why are they doing this? There must be something more we don't understand.

• 42:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 06

  Right?

• 42:43Steven Rinella?

  But, but an early, to, to, to stick to this timeline a little bit, like, I appreciate what you're saying about a heightened skepticism.

• 42:51Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  But I, I don't have these dates down, but I know that there was a lot of that prior. And it would be, and, and maybe you can visit with me, um, or try to remember with me, pre-COVID, back more in the timeline, we're talking about like 2014, 2015, it's on the ground, you're dealing with it. Are you doing baiting restrictions?

• 43:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:20Steven Rinella?

  Because I feel that one of the earliest, in my recollection, one of the earliest sort of tribalism things that came up. And I'm, I'm thinking particularly of Michigan where I grew up, baiting restrictions, okay? Where there was a narrative spun there that the same, the view would be, the same kind of people who are worried about herd health and who are worried about human health are the same kind of people that have kind of always looked down on deer baiting.

• 44:05Steven Rinella?

  They've always felt that it was deer baiting was beneath them, or deer baiting wasn't sportsmanlike. And hunting high fences wasn't sportsmanlike. Like, this community, and now they're able to go, aha!

• 44:18Speaker 06

  Gotcha.

• 44:19Steven Rinella?

  Gotcha. It is bad. It's bad because it spreads CWD, and I'm going to use it now to do a thing I've always wanted to do. I've always wanted to get rid of deer baiting. I've always thought it was bad. I always thought you guys were rednecks. I always wanted to get rid of shooting high fence deer, because I've always thought you guys are rednecks. And now here I got my thing. Right?

• 44:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 44:41Steven Rinella?

  And that was, that was on the ground pre-COVID in Michigan.

• 44:45Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 44:47Steven Rinella?

  Right? And, and, um, in all clarity, like, I grew up sitting over piles of carrots and apples, but I didn't have that, I didn't get that feeling, because I was out of there by then. I had moved away. But I just observed it happen in Michigan, you know?

• 45:04Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 45:04Steven Rinella?

  So there was, like, a tribalism. But, but I guess the question to you is, did you guys do that? Did you guys do restrictions that, in those years, that created these little camps?

• 45:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so for us, the first one that emerged was the captive cervid industry.

• 45:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:26Speaker 06

  And then our first CWD positive was found in a captive facility.

• 45:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 45:30Speaker 06

  And then our first free ranging positive was found right outside of it.

• 45:33Steven Rinella?

  I want to get to this.

• 45:34Speaker 06

  Right? And so, yeah, that whole, um, yeah, here's the chance, here's the space where it got projected on us.

• 45:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, because you never liked me, you never liked me anyways.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  And I've never been one of those. I'm not, you know, it's like, they, they existed on the landscape for a long time, but we need to do it right, right? Like, we need to try to keep herd health safe. So in Missouri, though, the baiting thing wasn't as big of an issue.

• 46:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Because, um, it was prohibited back in the 1980s.

• 46:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 46:07Speaker 06

  And so baiting was actually legal in Missouri. Nobody did it. We didn't have robust deer populations, and quite honestly, through the 60s and 70s and early 80s, man, I grew up hunting deer like rabbits, right? Like, a lot of drive on it, because there just wasn't very many deer.

• 46:23Steven Rinella?

  So Missouri was a no-bait state.

• 46:24Speaker 06

  So we didn't have bait, but we had feed.

• 46:27Steven Rinella?

  We're in a no-bait, we're in a no-bait state right now. So it's, it's, it's not part of the conversation.

• 46:31Speaker 06

  Right, right. So that wasn't.

• 46:33Steven Rinella?

  Because it's always been no-bait.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that wasn't a space where we had sort of controversy.

• 46:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I see.

• 46:38Speaker 06

  We had, we did prohibit the placement of, of food, salt and minerals.

• 46:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 46:42Speaker 06

  In a core area, right? And then with the rise of, of placement of minerals on the landscape and stuff like that, certainly that was challenging, um, but not one that was like dyed in the wool, we've been fighting over it for decades kind of thing.

• 46:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Speaker 06

  Um, like some places have certainly had.

• 46:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Speaker 07

  911, what's your emergency? Please help us, they're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  What's the homicide detective doing here?

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  All sins swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. Does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Breathe in and reset with Lincoln rejuvenate. An available multi sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Experience the luxurious massage visuals and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 48:31Steven Rinella?

  So, so pick that.

• 48:34Steven Rinella?

  I want to return to. The spread.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:39Steven Rinella?

  But, but pick up this, this kind of evolution through time. Of mid teens and, and sort of walk through from there to where we are now.

• 48:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. So one of the things, so mid teens, we started to slowly detect it in a, in a couple of additional places. Some of the lessons we learned and making in Lynn County, we sort of took with us to the, to, to when we'd get a new detection.

• 49:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 49:01Speaker 06

  Well, where we found ourselves a couple of years ago is, is the disease kept spreading. We kept finding additional detections, again, all of them very low prevalence. So from, from a management standpoint, it's like, well, we've only got a couple. We've sampled hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of deer in this area. We've only got a couple. Well, we need to be working there because we've got the opportunity to do that. You start to spread that out over, you know, 50 or 60 or 70 different core areas across the state. And while we have a relatively large team to help work on that, it gets really diluted. And so we were starting to have, ask the hard questions of where do we, where do we continue to work?

• 49:46Speaker 06

  Who do we work with? How do we continue to incentivize landowners and hunters to do that?

• 49:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 06

  So at that same time, so that's where we find ourselves in the early, you know, 2020s is starting to have these kinds of conversations. The distrust, declining participation, anywhere we, anytime.

• 50:03Steven Rinella?

  Were you seeing that for real?

• 50:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we, we, with these additional detections and the spreading and diffusion, diffusion of it, our ability to continue to manage the disease was being really challenged.

• 50:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:15Speaker 06

  So you add to that, the growing narratives through social media and other places about ulterior motives, ulterior intentions. Tensions started to get pretty high, right? Like real serious questions and mistrust of why we were doing what we were doing.

• 50:32Steven Rinella?

  Hit me with a, when you say that. Hit me with an idea, an ulterior motive idea. Like I, I don't really, I don't get who. No, I do, I do, I do get it. I hear that it's like, um.

• 50:48Steven Rinella?

  You all make your living doing deer management.

• 50:54Steven Rinella?

  And this means more funding.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:58Steven Rinella?

  But what, what are the, what are the other ones? Like, like.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Well.

• 51:01Steven Rinella?

  Like you're incentivized to create an issue because you'll get, because somehow even though you're like out of set state salary. There's somehow money to be made. Like, like what is it?

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. The, the federal funding is supporting the work and the more deer that test positive, the more federal funding we get. And so the more money the agency can generate, that's the only reason we're doing the work.

• 51:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:23Speaker 06

  That's not true in Missouri because for a long time in the 20 teens, there was no federal money at all. It had completely gone away and we'd continue to do the work. We were doing the work with, with commission funds and resources to do that work. There's the, you know, well, it's good for the insurance companies. The insurance companies are happy because this means there are fewer deer on the landscape, right? Like it's these things that start to creep in. And, and another one that I think is completely legitimate is folks who say, well, I get it. But it's not going to work in the end.

• 51:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:57Speaker 06

  We're still going to get to the same endpoint.

• 51:59Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 51:59Speaker 06

  Right? I think we'll get to that endpoint on very different time scales and different time horizons. Based on whether we're doing something or we're not.

• 52:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 06

  And then again, back to, I don't want to impact my hunting today.

• 52:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Speaker 06

  And that really hard conversation.

• 52:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I'm alive now.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  I'm alive.

• 52:15Steven Rinella?

  I'm hunting now. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe the world will be done in 20 years. Like, I don't know. I want to go in my tree stand now and see a bunch of deer.

• 52:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Enough.

• 52:23Steven Rinella?

  I'm not interested in playing long-term like deer management games that are uncertain.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Unknowns into an unknown time period.

• 52:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 06

  And folks say, well, you gotta have an exit strategy. I'm like. There's no exit strategy. There's just changing and adapting our management approach. That's not an exit strategy. It's just recognizing where we are. And so last fall, we made the, the tough decision to say. It's gotten spread far enough. We've got enough positives on the landscape. We've had enough.

• 52:58Speaker 06

  Loss of support from landowners in core areas that were likely no longer being as effective as we were. So we're going to stop what had become the most controversial part of our program. That's the postseason targeted removal work.

• 53:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 06

  And say, how do we then work inside the hunting season? To support hunters and landowners harvesting more deer. And so that's where we are today. It's like re-engaging, trying to have new conversations with folks to say, this is a reality we've, we've just got to address. Like all other sources of things that kill deer. How do we recognize this in the, kind of the broader deer management landscape?

• 53:35Steven Rinella?

  Your move in some circles.

• 53:40Steven Rinella?

  In some circles, your move was that was treated.

• 53:47Steven Rinella?

  As Missouri has decided. To again, they've decided just to let it rip.

• 53:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. And that's not true.

• 53:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. I, I think it's a realization that. The disease been introduced into our state enough times and we had enough areas that our ability to have. Enough pressure and impact on the population of the local scale, the way we were doing it was getting extremely diluted. And it was causing a lot of additional mistrust, a lot of additional concerns. So if you're not going to be effective and all you do is pissing people off.

• 54:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 06

  Doesn't seem like that's the path you ought to continue to charge down.

• 54:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  And so this last winter, we went to, we went back out, myself and others went back out and had a lot of conversations with folks that. Help us understand where you are. What are you willing to do? What, what do you want to work together to try to accomplish? This isn't just something the Missouri Department of Conservation is trying to force on you. We're going to determine the fate of the deer herd together. Cause ultimately hunters willingness and ability to harvest deer is what dictates or regulates the deer population across the eastern U.S.

• 54:59Steven Rinella?

  What percentage, if you just take Missouri, what percentage of the state? Is. In your view.

• 55:09Steven Rinella?

  What percentage of the state is in a position where doing these. Targeted removals, we're, we're doing enhanced management strategies won't be effective because the disease is so prevalent.

• 55:24Speaker 06

  Small area along the southern border and then a small area in St. Genevieve County, south of St. Louis.

• 55:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So, so.

• 55:31Speaker 06

  Which we've got.

• 55:32Steven Rinella?

  25%?

• 55:33Speaker 06

  Oh yeah. Yeah. Less than 5%.

• 55:35Steven Rinella?

  Less than 5%?

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. That's the other thing is that we still got a lot of really healthy deer populations across the state. Right? We've got it in a number of spots. And when you start to put management zones on a map, or you start imposing, you know, restrictions on feeding and things like that, carcass movement. It starts to make it look like. The whole state's covered up. But part of it's because we're slowly getting sparks everywhere.

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 06

  But in terms of. Kind of maybe above that tipping point, only a couple of areas.

• 56:08Steven Rinella?

  One of the things that seems magical about CWD.

• 56:15Steven Rinella?

  Is.

• 56:17Steven Rinella?

  The, the pop-up. The isolated positive. Pop-ups, the kind of out of nowhere spots, right? We talked about COVID earlier. You had air travel. So air travel. Made it that.

• 56:37Steven Rinella?

  Once COVID got cooking. You anticipated the weird pop-up spots and it became global. And you're like, well, why is it global? Cause humans move around. It, it's, it's, it's just. A fundamentally different situation than you expect with deer, where deer aren't flying around. Okay.

• 56:58Steven Rinella?

  What is your understanding of?

• 57:02Steven Rinella?

  When it jumps?

• 57:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. This is one of those.

• 57:06Steven Rinella?

  And then you test and you find that there's a moat of negativity around a new positive. I traditionally.

• 57:17Steven Rinella?

  I traditionally would look at that and be like, that has to be captive servants. And I would also look and be like, I don't believe, I don't believe that it's some guy with a bottle of deer piss.

• 57:29Steven Rinella?

  I don't believe it's a guy who like, you know, boned out a deer and threw a shoulder blade out in his, in his ditch. And all of a sudden, not as much of positive CWD positive deer. I'm like, I, I don't think like, I can't even tell you why. Just my biases where my head would work. I would say to myself, it's not a deer pee. It's not a bottle of deer pee.

• 57:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm, I'm right there with you.

• 57:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, but, but I'm not, I don't think I'm right. I'm just saying like where, how a person's head works and how their, and how their assumptions go, like that's where I would fall in years past. Is I would be like, there's no, it wasn't this, you know, that, that whole thing for a while that once you cut a deer up on a cutting board, the cutting board will, unless you melt it with an oxyacetylene torch, it'll always be, I'm like, that's not spreading CWD. I don't know why, but I just know that it's not.

• 58:27Speaker 06

  Right. And, and that's where, you know, my thoughts on it have evolved some too, right? Through time as to what, what really is driving this and one of the reasons.

• 58:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The, the ones where it jumps the border.

• 58:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and part of that is because folks, folks outside of Missouri have, have, have been asked us like, well, what's going on in Missouri? Right? Because we do have like a number of these, what very much would appear to be probably independent introductions of the disease.

• 58:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  But I agree with you. There's this thing that we haven't quite figured out and it's, and it's what is an infectious dose? So how much of the prions does an animal actually have to get? That results in them getting infected at a point where they've become a CWD afflicted animal.

• 59:12Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 59:13Speaker 06

  And so the things that you're describing are all on that spectrum of

• 59:19Speaker 06

  a carcass. I've had folks worried about hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park and then coming home. I'm like, if you're dragging it in the dirt on your boots, it would be everywhere, right? Like if you drove through a pasture, if you drove through a pasture and then drove across somebody else's pasture, that is not the way this is spreading.

• 59:41Steven Rinella?

  I had, I had an awkward, I'm just sorry to interrupt, but I had a awkward conversation. I don't want to name the name. I had an awkward conversation with someone one time and I, I was saying, you guys gotta stop. With the cutting board.

• 59:59Steven Rinella?

  Like the cutting board stuff, you gotta stop. I felt the same way. A, like you are creating a level of fear and hysteria that, but you have no ability to back this up.

• 1:00:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:13Steven Rinella?

  You've got to stop telling people that.

• 1:00:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. I felt the same way about some of the

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  urine conversations. And again, not to say that we haven't gotten to a much better place with that. If you're a faraway place like Alaska, like the likelihood of the disease getting there through the live importation of an animal is nearly zero. Like nobody's likely to carry a carcass all the way to Alaska and introduce it there. And the like, this is one more hole in the bucket that you could, would, could close, then absolutely.

• 1:00:48Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:00:48Speaker 06

  Right? Like completely understand it. But if you're in the eastern U S and the biggest fight that you're doing now is over whether we all do urine based bans. There's other higher risk activities that are occurring on landscapes. So how do you, how do you, yeah. How do you have the conversation about what really matters and what's really impactful?

• 1:01:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  And in some cases, you know, it's not disparaging to my colleagues in, in other states. They pulled the levers. They felt like they had authority and public will to, to pull. Whereas some of these other ones are really hard.

• 1:01:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so get, get back into what you're saying about what is going on when one jumps the line?

• 1:01:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I think early on, it very much was and, and could likely have been pointed to captive servants moving the disease across the landscape.

• 1:01:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:44Speaker 06

  I mean, we knew that, right? Like it was in elk well before we understood what was happening. It doesn't show up in Toronto in the zoo. Randomly it got moved in there by an elk. It got moved to South Korea in an elk, right? So like, we know those things were absolutely happening.

• 1:02:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Wasn't a cutting board.

• 1:02:06Speaker 06

  Wasn't a cutting board, right? Like it's the whole biological package moving around.

• 1:02:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:11Speaker 06

  And so I think that's, that's absolutely true. But then what, what I don't think we appreciated soon enough was that hunters likely were unintentionally moving it around too.

• 1:02:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:02:23Speaker 06

  And in the form of carcasses.

• 1:02:24Steven Rinella?

  You think so?

• 1:02:25Speaker 06

  I, I do think so. I don't know how else we would explain that it has moved to other places, the way that it has. Yeah.

• 1:02:34Steven Rinella?

  And, and I think it's. You feel fairly confident. I know you can't, like, I know you can't say for certain because we don't have that understanding yet. You feel fairly confident

• 1:02:44Steven Rinella?

  that, that there has been movement of non live, that, that you've had infections come from something other than contact with a living, breathing deer.

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I think so. I think it's completely reasonable.

• 1:03:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  But it's not just the, hey, I went to Colorado and hunted west and dumped one carcass on my property.

• 1:03:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:09Speaker 06

  I, I likely think it's folks who, who were very consistently doing it.

• 1:03:15Steven Rinella?

  And what, what way?

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  Taxidermists that were, that were consistent. Hey, we go to Colorado every year and shoot mule deer and we bring them home every year, right? Like in a way that you concentrate enough material or you concentrate enough of that material in a particular spot. I think that's the only way that you can reasonably explain how it's jumped.

• 1:03:34Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. Either that, or it was so prevalent in, in captive servants way beyond what we believe it was.

• 1:03:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:44Speaker 06

  And that, that there were more captive servants on the landscape than we appreciate. And they didn't have to be there very long for them to create an infection, which I just don't think is necessarily true. But it's the, definitely the first one that folks jumped to. They want to say, oh, well, there used to be an old deer pen down this road. Well, yeah, they were there for like five years. We don't know what happened.

• 1:04:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 06

  It, it gets really touchy as to whether that's the real source of it moving around.

• 1:04:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  But I think it, I think it's not so easy that carrying dirt on your boots or pouring pee out on the ground is the most likely way that it happens. But I don't think it is so hard that it has to be a live animal.

• 1:04:25Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:04:25Speaker 06

  Right? So it's somewhere in between there that I, I don't, I don't think we understand it.

• 1:04:30Steven Rinella?

  Cause you don't understand what, how much dose it takes.

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  Right. Exactly.

• 1:04:33Steven Rinella?

  Is anybody looking at how much dose it takes?

• 1:04:35Speaker 06

  There've been a number of trials trying to look at it and it's only until more recently that we've been able to quantify how much prions are even in something. So only with the modern techniques, all of our diagnostic stuff was just detected or not detected.

• 1:04:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 06

  Not quantify how many prions are in saliva or urine.

• 1:05:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:01Speaker 06

  Or, you know, bone or the muscle tissue.

• 1:05:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:06Speaker 06

  And all that depends, likely depends on the stage of progression of any individual animal.

• 1:05:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:11Speaker 06

  As to how far along the disease progression is. So it's just a super complicated one that I don't know that we'll get to.

• 1:05:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's like, it's, it's totally different. I don't in any way want to conflate it, but I remember looking at

• 1:05:26Steven Rinella?

  completely different. It's not a prion disease, completely different. I remember looking at like, like Trichinella larva. Right? There's a number per unit of weight. And you can measure like how infected a tissue is with Trichinella larva, which gives, which brings about Trichinosis. Be like, there are blank larva per blank ounces. And there's things that are very infected and there's things that are not very infected. Right? Is, is it, with, with a deer, is, is there a thing like that? That there's a deer that really has it? And a deer that, that kinda has it and a deer that doesn't really have it?

• 1:06:05Speaker 06

  You talk to pathologists and they, yes. And that's that stage of progression of the disease.

• 1:06:11Steven Rinella?

  And how, but, but there's no way to measure like the thing.

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  Not, not that I'm, that's a whole nother realm.

• 1:06:18Steven Rinella?

  This person is riddled with cancer, right? They have cancer and their lymph nodes, they have, right? And this person kind of barely has cancer.

• 1:06:26Speaker 06

  Well, we do see this though.

• 1:06:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:27Speaker 06

  We do see this and you see it, one of the, one of the, one of the reasons why we shifted the tissues that we test. In the early 2000s, you had to test the OBECs. It was believed that that was a gold standard. Had to test the OBECs.

• 1:06:39Steven Rinella?

  What is that?

• 1:06:40Speaker 06

  Base of the brain.

• 1:06:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  That's where the prions were accumulating. That's where they were seeing it in mule deer and elk. Well, through looking at other tissues, what they recognize that it actually accumulates in the, the lymph nodes. Especially the medial retrofaryngeal lymph nodes, like these, the ones that set right up here.

• 1:06:56Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:06:57Speaker 06

  Which again suggests some sort of an ingestion of the prions as part of that pathway. So what you'll see is when they do necropsies of animals that are in like really early stages versus very late stages, you'll see progression of that disease through different tissues.

• 1:07:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:12Speaker 06

  And the presence of them in different tissues is a part of that.

• 1:07:15Steven Rinella?

  But that's like internal spread.

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  Right. Right.

• 1:07:19Steven Rinella?

  Like that's, that, that's it running its course.

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:07:23Steven Rinella?

  And once, I, I guess it's kind of a little bit ties into, it'd be like,

• 1:07:30Steven Rinella?

  Once a deer gets some.

• 1:07:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Steven Rinella?

  Once it's detectable in a deer somewhere. It's a matter of course. That as far as we know, it's a matter of course that that disease will spread.

• 1:07:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Steven Rinella?

  Throughout its body.

• 1:07:46Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:07:47Steven Rinella?

  Meaning he never gets, you know, when you think you're getting a cold? And you swear you're getting a cold, but then all of a sudden the next day you're like, oh, it didn't take.

• 1:07:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:07:57Steven Rinella?

  Whatever, you know what I mean?

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  Like.

• 1:07:58Steven Rinella?

  Right. Like I beat it. I don't know. Like I didn't get it. I never got sick. This isn't a thing with CWD as far as we know.

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  As far as we know, that is absolutely the case.

• 1:08:08Steven Rinella?

  Like its immune system can't beat it.

• 1:08:10Speaker 06

  There is no immune response to prions. The body recognizes them as a protein. That's all it recognizes it has. It doesn't recognize it as some foreign body that needs to be attacked.

• 1:08:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  So you don't get any sort of an immune response. So discussions around like vaccines and treatments and all that kind of stuff. It's like a lot of other neurological diseases in people and animals otherwise. There's no reversing the course of.

• 1:08:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 06

  And so with advanced testing techniques where we're able to detect them kind of in those earlier stages, which is what's allowed, you know, there to be an understanding of the in utero transmission. So a fetus can actually get CWD from a heavily infected female, right? Like when.

• 1:08:56Steven Rinella?

  Can or cannot?

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  They can.

• 1:08:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:58Speaker 06

  Like they're just now starting to, to be able to, to demonstrate that.

• 1:09:02Steven Rinella?

  So that fawn hits the ground with CWD.

• 1:09:04Speaker 06

  Right. And if they're born to an infected female, even if they don't hit the ground infected, through all the social grooming and all those kinds of things, the likelihood that they will then be infected is, is extremely high.

• 1:09:17Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Got it. That a little bit answers that question in mind about.

• 1:09:23Steven Rinella?

  Again, and so much like, I guess so much of my understanding about disease comes from thinking the things that are pathogen, or not pathogen, but like viruses and.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Steven Rinella?

  Bacterial infections that, that it doesn't make you well equipped to understand like a prion disease.

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  It's so different, right? Yeah. Cause we think, oh, well, they'll just develop resistance to it, right? We'll figure out some other way to deal with it. We talk about hemorrhagic disease in that same way, right? Like that's the deer disease everybody knows about. Well, it's a virus. Deer develop antibodies to it. They provide protection. They're able to push those antibodies, female that gets infected is able to push those antibodies through her colostrum to her fawns, which give them protection, right? Like that is not known to happen with CWD because the body doesn't recognize it in that same way. And yeah, I think it in and of itself is a huge communication challenge because we think of it in our typical disease or pathogen based approaches.

• 1:10:19Steven Rinella?

  I'm glad you brought up blue tongue and EHD. Because I feel like

• 1:10:28Steven Rinella?

  the, the, the people I talk to and the people I kind of follow who would tip on the CWD. That on the spectrum of people's perception of CWD of hunters and deer enthusiasts. That would be if, if from lookers, if you imagine this spectrum and from lookers, the looker's right perspective being the sky is falling, the end of the world is nigh. On the extreme of lookers left.

• 1:11:03Steven Rinella?

  Which I will call, and I don't mean to, and I don't mean to diminish the perspective, but I would call it like the CWD denier end. But what it means to be a CWD denier has evolved over the quarter century that we're talking about.

• 1:11:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Steven Rinella?

  It's evolved. It, it went from, it's not actually a thing. It's a make, it's make believe.

• 1:11:26Steven Rinella?

  To it is a thing.

• 1:11:29Steven Rinella?

  Probably always been there. It's a thing. Um, and there's emerged in this end of it. Not as bad as EHD.

• 1:11:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41Steven Rinella?

  Like, why are we talking about CWD? Why are we not talking about EHD? And there's kind of become this, this rhetorical strategy they use.

• 1:11:50Steven Rinella?

  Of all of a sudden being like hyper focused on EHD die-offs. How bad EHD is as a way to sort of demonstrate these people, the eggheads are missing the story.

• 1:12:05Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:06Steven Rinella?

  There's an EHD story. EHD comes and kills all the damn deer. But it's fine. Cause they come back. Why are you guys so focused on this CWD thing? This is what's killing deer.

• 1:12:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. Because they come back.

• 1:12:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Speaker 06

  That's the big difference. We've been dealing with EHD outbreaks. The best you can track back is kind of the early 1900s where were reports of late fall. Unexplained deer mortalities that we believe probably was some of the first indications of it. But yeah, in, in Missouri, you know, from anywhere a seven to 10 year cycle of a, of an EHD outbreak that we've been dealing with through time. And those populations recover three to five years, very localized and impact. Like I was describing passing on of antibodies. They get the disease. Doesn't kill all of them despite the, the belief that some have.

• 1:13:02Speaker 06

  It can be extremely lethal, especially where they're really naive to it and haven't been previously exposed. But the pattern of EHD is changing too.

• 1:13:10Steven Rinella?

  Is it?

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  In terms of where we see it and how we see it. In the South, EHD is present or the, one of the hemorrhagic diseases are present in the midflies. Kind of there all the time.

• 1:13:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:23Speaker 06

  And so a lot of those southern latitudes, the times that you see more significant outbreaks is when, when kind of presence of the antibody starts to dip. And then you'll get a little bump in mortality, but you'll have sick deer all the time.

• 1:13:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:37Speaker 06

  Nearly every year in a lot of the southern states, they'll have deer die of EHD.

• 1:13:42Steven Rinella?

  And what we're. That's an area, that would be an area where there's been EHD for a long time.

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  Long time.

• 1:13:47Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:47Speaker 06

  Been there for a long time. And what I think we're seeing is we're seeing that line drift north. Because Missouri, we used to have just massive outbreaks.

• 1:13:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  1987, 1997, 2012 was unbelievable. I, I bet we lost a quarter of a million deer statewide.

• 1:14:07Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  I mean, it was awful and across much of the Midwest. But most of the time it's in a corner of a county.

• 1:14:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 06

  Or it's two parts of a county. And yeah, a lot of sick deer and a number of them die. Ohio made the news last year, right? Small area, southeastern Ohio, I say small area, but an area in southeastern Ohio. Really significant mortality.

• 1:14:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  But in almost every scenario, you shoot a few less does for a couple of years. Deer population respond and recover. And what often folks see is that they actually see a little bit better buck production in those next couple of years.

• 1:14:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:14:45Speaker 06

  Cause there's less social stress, there's less nutritional stress on them.

• 1:14:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 06

  And they respond. But what we're seeing is now is, as weather patterns and climate's changing a little bit. We see the impacts of the massive impacts of EHD occurring even farther north.

• 1:15:00Steven Rinella?

  In places it hadn't dealt with before.

• 1:15:02Speaker 06

  Not dealt with it before. Um, and so it is more dramatic. It is a little scarier, but it gets back to that conversation we started on is, is to you individually. It has a heck of an impact. If you've been getting a bachelor group of bucks on camera and they're all dead.

• 1:15:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Speaker 06

  Like that. Then yeah, it has a real direct impact, but that happens.

• 1:15:25Steven Rinella?

  You go to a dirt tank and there, there they all floating in the dirt tank.

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  But that happens once.

• 1:15:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  A decade at most. We had a research project a number of years ago in which had a bunch of deer collared. This was before I worked at the department. Had a bunch of deer collared and they think they lost somewhere between seven and 10% of those collared deer to a fall EHD outbreak. Never got a single report from the public of a sick or dead deer. So it's something that's kind of always happening.

• 1:15:52Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:15:53Speaker 06

  Kind of happens in the background. A deer disappears and you don't know why. But we definitely get pulses. And so I'm not, I'm not discounting the fact that EHD can have a huge impact on populations. It's that we can then regulate that through backing off of antlers harvest for a few years. We can do something about that. CWD is just going to slowly take more and more of the deer population.

• 1:16:15Steven Rinella?

  Got it. So you view these two things as just like fundamentally different conversations?

• 1:16:19Speaker 06

  Fundamentally operating very differently from a population dynamics standpoint. I mean, I think, I think about it in the same way that if a new predator gets introduced onto the landscape, right? That imposes a new mortality factor as those populations increase. What's the impact of that on the deer population, the ability of that deer population to grow? CWD is the same way. It's now there. It absolutely kills deer. It's going to kill older age class deer disproportionately, which is going to make your age structure a lot younger. And it's going to make it less, less resilient.

• 1:16:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  Ability and the ability of it to thrive will just be sort of topped off.

• 1:17:00Speaker 07

  911, what's your emergency?

• 1:17:04Speaker 07

  Please help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  911 Nashville returns. It's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. Allson swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe joins 911 Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu. OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  $400,000 make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star trust pilot reviews. OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln rejuvenate. An available multi sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage visuals and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 1:18:29Steven Rinella?

  Crystal ball it for me if you're comfortable.

• 1:18:33Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 1:18:35Steven Rinella?

  Let's go down to that. What percentage of the state did you say it's just like?

• 1:18:40Speaker 06

  I would say 5%.

• 1:18:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay, 5% of Missouri is there's diminished public will to address it or a lack of public will to get aggressive about it. Percentages are high enough that the tools that you have at your disposal have become not really helpful. Right? And you could picture the same thing with with other issues like I remember just we keep going back to these COVID things. I remember one of the greatest emails I ever got from our public school system here in Bozeman was when they finally like were throwing in the towel on it. We got an email because for a while they're trying to track. You know, little Johnny had it and so little Johnny doesn't, you know, can't go to school.

• 1:19:25Steven Rinella?

  And eventually they we got an email. That said, if your kid goes to school, consider them a direct exposure.

• 1:19:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:19:34Steven Rinella?

  Like we're done. We're done. They all got it. It's like we're done.

• 1:19:38Speaker 06

  Like done what we can.

• 1:19:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we tried all that stuff sending Johnny home and he can't come. And at this point it's just if your kid goes to school, they're direct exposure. We're not telling anybody anymore like we're done. Because whatever they had at their disposal, they had like reached the end of public will. And they reached the end of there was no tricks to try anymore. It was just there. It's they got to where it's like, it's like them having colds. It's like, it's just whatever. We're done. We're done. We walked away.

• 1:20:09Steven Rinella?

  Very different than this disease, but like it was like a public will thing and you hit that in 5% of the state. You're done. For kind of.

• 1:20:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Steven Rinella?

  I suppose you could always go revisit it with some kind of new understanding.

• 1:20:21Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:20:22Steven Rinella?

  But like, take that 5% and crystal ball it.

• 1:20:28Steven Rinella?

  What? What does that area look like in 10 years? What does that area look like in 20 years minus some scientific breakthrough that I can't even picture what the breakthrough would be? I don't know what it would be.

• 1:20:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think we're seeing especially in eastern whitetail deer populations, that trajectory push a little quicker than we may have thought. I may have thought it was going to take decades to play out. Yeah, I think if you, because we have this, we have this opportunity now to kind of jump in the time machine and say, oh, well, states are now finding it at, you know, 20, 25, 40% prevalence.

• 1:21:06Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  And here's what they're seeing in these localized places, whether that's, you know, southwest Tennessee, northeast Mississippi, where they're going, wow, there just aren't as many deer here.

• 1:21:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:21:18Speaker 06

  And what's happening, right? Like mortality.

• 1:21:21Steven Rinella?

  Not as many deer and it's not because we're sharp shooting them.

• 1:21:24Speaker 06

  And it's not because we're sharp shooting them. Because in a lot of those places is they, it was farther progress than they ever understood it to be.

• 1:21:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:21:33Speaker 06

  In terms of kind of low surveillance and kind of low diligence.

• 1:21:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:38Speaker 06

  So I think what plays out is that you lose the older age structure of bucks because most of them become infected and die at a relatively early age and you have a younger age.

• 1:21:49Steven Rinella?

  Are you saying you think what plays out or is it like, does that seem like?

• 1:21:53Speaker 06

  That seems like that's what's playing out.

• 1:21:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, okay, not, it's not theoretical.

• 1:21:59Speaker 06

  No, it's not theoretical because you can look at the harvest data from like eastern Wyoming and eastern Colorado.

• 1:22:04Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:05Speaker 06

  Age structure has absolutely shifted. They're shooting far fewer older age class bucks.

• 1:22:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:11Speaker 06

  So there's just fewer deer on the landscape. The herd is younger because of that.

• 1:22:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:17Speaker 06

  The primary mortality is killing deer at older age class. And my CWD is the primary factor drive mortality. So it's killing deer at older ages.

• 1:22:25Steven Rinella?

  Like CWD is has passed up cars. It's passed up hunters.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  Pretty close to it. Yeah, yeah. What West Virginia's current research project, that's what they're demonstrating. CWD is like next to hunters. It's the next highest source.

• 1:22:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so it's it's number two to hunters.

• 1:22:41Speaker 06

  It's number two to hunters. But it might be there pretty quick in terms of once that population continues to draw itself down farther.

• 1:22:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:51Speaker 06

  And so, so the my concern is, is that, yeah, that opportunity for recreational harvest gets diminished. Every deer that gets killed by CWD is a deer hunter can't kill and eat and enjoy and appreciate, right? So, so the number of deer on the landscape would just be fewer.

• 1:23:06Steven Rinella?

  Do you feel that CWD, because, because

• 1:23:11Steven Rinella?

  earlier you mentioned like a buck, a mature buck is the most likely deer within a population to get CWD. Probably because he travels more, I don't know. He's around more.

• 1:23:22Steven Rinella?

  Does CWD kill big bucks at a higher rate than hunters kill big bucks? Do you understand like if we're looking at a populate, like whatever, there's a population of, there's a population where hunters are killing 13, 14, 20% of the deer. And blank percent of those are big bucks. And then within that same population, CWD kills 13, 14, 20% of the deer. Is it whacking off more bucks than hunters? Like, is it better at selecting bucks than hunters are?

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  Well, there's some interesting data. If you look at the long term research Wisconsin has done.

• 1:24:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:03Speaker 06

  It's fascinating and what they've been able to do is through time, track deer that not detect positive and then deer that have been positive, right? Separate them out into those two groups. During the fall hunting season, you see a disproportionately high number of CWD infected deer get shot.

• 1:24:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  Like the mortality on CWD infected deer through hunter harvest is substantially higher than the mortality of an uninfected deer.

• 1:24:32Steven Rinella?

  Like they're easier to dupe.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, right? And so it, it, I think in ways can send this perception, well, we're still shooting a lot of nice antlered bucks, right? Well, you're shooting the slower three and a half and four and a half year old bucks. But at some point, CWD will just crop them off. And the proportion of them that are infected that are going to survive to the next fall is going to be really low.

• 1:24:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

  I mean, a deer, the progression of the disease.

• 1:24:56Steven Rinella?

  This is prophecy.

• 1:25:00Speaker 06

  I think it's just a numbers game.

• 1:25:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  Right? It's like, how much infection do you have? And how many deer are infected? Is a deer itself infected? Because, you know, the data certainly suggests that 18 to 24 months post infection that we can detect a deer's dead. It finally goes through the processes that comes to the disease.

• 1:25:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:20Speaker 06

  So if you got two and a half year old buck that is CWD positive, the odds of him making it to four and a half are extremely low.

• 1:25:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:29Speaker 06

  That, that, that's just, it just isn't going to happen. And so that's going to crop it off. Hunters are going to kill some of those in the meantime.

• 1:25:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 06

  Right? And those are the CWD positives when we remove through hunter harvest.

• 1:25:43Steven Rinella?

  Have you, are you aware of anyone or is this possible?

• 1:25:49Steven Rinella?

  To

• 1:25:52Steven Rinella?

  fill a research facility

• 1:25:57Steven Rinella?

  with, with a bunch of infected animals?

• 1:26:00Steven Rinella?

  And take totally good care of them?

• 1:26:04Steven Rinella?

  And just see what happens? Like, can this be done? Because what a way to either to demonstrate to the public or just like to, to, to support these ideas or disprove these ideas? Is you have a population in a fenced area with triple fence, whatever the hell you got to do. It might be just unethical to do this, I don't know. And within there, you're going to say like, no, we're going to put, we're going to have 100 deer in here. And it's just balls out infested. They all got it.

• 1:26:37Steven Rinella?

  And we're gonna take care of them. We're gonna do all the things and we're just gonna watch. Do, do what happens to the age class within this population? Is that unethical?

• 1:26:47Speaker 06

  It's been done.

• 1:26:48Steven Rinella?

  And what happens in those situations?

• 1:26:50Speaker 06

  They die.

• 1:26:52Steven Rinella?

  And they don't make adults.

• 1:26:53Speaker 06

  They don't make, yeah, they don't make adults.

• 1:26:56Steven Rinella?

  It's just as a young population.

• 1:26:58Speaker 06

  It would be, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's been, it's been done in, I mean, Colorado's been doing this kind of work for a long time in terms of what does it mean to cause disease transmission? What's the progression of the disease? That's how we know 24, you know, 18 to 24 months till clinical symptoms start to show up. That's how they die. This work's been done.

• 1:27:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so that's been done in a closely observed population, not wild animals?

• 1:27:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, and a closely observed populations. And so this is part of that, like, well, there's no research. We don't know what's going on. No, we, we know a lot.

• 1:27:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  A lot has been done. And this isn't just speculation as to what will happen, how the disease will progress, and what some of these other questions are.

• 1:27:38Steven Rinella?

  But some of that reproduction just trickles on because you have some animals making it to two, three years old.

• 1:27:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Steven Rinella?

  And they're dropping fawns.

• 1:27:46Speaker 06

  I think that's what does happen.

• 1:27:48Steven Rinella?

  Reproduction trickles on.

• 1:27:49Speaker 06

  Right? It will trickle on, and so long as young females be responsible for a disproportionate amount of the reproduction.

• 1:27:56Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:27:57Speaker 06

  So your ability for that population to really grow and thrive is gonna be based on the condition and ability of younger individuals. Whereas a four and a half, five and a half, six and a half year old adult female, really good mom, right? Like, really highly likely to be able to produce two fawns, get them, you know, through the tough parts of, of early recruitment into the population. Younger females, not as good, right? Like, they'll more likely to only have a single fawn, more likely to have not both fawns survive to, to kind of recruitment into the fall population. And so it's just a real dampening of the population.

• 1:28:36Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:28:37Speaker 06

  Through time. And so that's the concern. As it gets younger, they're not able to, to withstand it.

• 1:28:43Steven Rinella?

  What's the highest prevalence you've seen in a wild population?

• 1:28:49Speaker 06

  So reports of, you know, adult males prevalence in like Alberta and Saskatchewan in the neighborhood of 75%.

• 1:28:57Steven Rinella?

  Damn, really?

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  Right. And you think about that, that's, that's likely got to be a population that's pretty heavily infected, which means that at some point, the environment has become so infected that they just can't help but get it.

• 1:29:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Speaker 06

  While they're interacting, engaging with one another. And then by the time they get to two and a half plus, they've been exposed. There's just no way around it.

• 1:29:20Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:29:21Speaker 06

  I don't know that that's how it plays out everywhere. And again, that's a little bit of the numbers game. I think some of their data is from adult males, but some of the stuff seen from southeastern Wisconsin or southwest Wisconsin, you know, 50% of the two plus year old males and females have it.

• 1:29:38Steven Rinella?

  That's where my buddies, the, in the hunt, in those hot areas down there, that's where my buddies are at.

• 1:29:43Speaker 06

  And so.

• 1:29:44Steven Rinella?

  They're at, that like, they're at some years, it's when you tally up all the bucks that everybody got in your social circle, when you tally them all up and you're doing testing, it's gonna be that more, the numbers vary, but it's gonna be the assumption is half, more than half of the bucks that the people in your community got were positive bucks.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And that's the story.

• 1:30:08Steven Rinella?

  But within those bucks, and here's the deal though, where they're at still, within those boxes, some damn nice bucks.

• 1:30:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Because a whitetail in really good condition in great habitats like exist in southwest Wisconsin, like exist across much of the northern two thirds of Missouri, three and a half, four and a half, with a little more food on the landscape because there's fewer deer.

• 1:30:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:30:35Speaker 06

  They do have some of that opportunity to express their potential.

• 1:30:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Speaker 06

  Right? So you, you can still have bucks into older age. I mean, nice antler bucks.

• 1:30:44Steven Rinella?

  Not old, but big.

• 1:30:45Speaker 06

  Not old, but big. Yeah. But not as many either.

• 1:30:51Steven Rinella?

  Understood.

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  Right?

• 1:30:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What is your, what is your guys' take on this, this conversation that's going on now? I should call it a conversation that's going on, research and other things suggesting that

• 1:31:08Steven Rinella?

  within the captive deer world, they're finding that some of these deer maybe are immune, but there's some segment of the population that it doesn't hit them as hard as quickly.

• 1:31:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Steven Rinella?

  And that through simple, like,

• 1:31:31Steven Rinella?

  uh, survival of the fittest, like through classic Darwinian evolution, eventually will emerge this population of deer that it doesn't hit them as hard, it doesn't hit them as quick. Maybe they get it, but they do live to be six or seven years old by the time it takes them down. And that you could speed this up by pumping these deer into wild populations to be like, hey, it'll happen, it'll likely happen in time, that there's gonna be some

• 1:32:09Steven Rinella?

  deer that for whatever reason, don't die in two years. They die in four. Uh, so part one of my question is, what do you think of that? Does that, does that seem to be true or not? And then what do you think of the idea that you would speed this along or help this along by injecting these identified deer into wild populations?

• 1:32:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we've known for some time that the 96 SS deer are, have a little higher survival, little less susceptible to the disease. That, that's not, that's been known for, you know, a decade.

• 1:32:52Steven Rinella?

  What was the term you used? I never heard the name.

• 1:32:53Speaker 06

  It's 96 SS.

• 1:32:55Steven Rinella?

  96 SS.

• 1:32:56Speaker 06

  So it's a prion protein coating gene.

• 1:32:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:00Speaker 06

  And, and again, I don't know that we know all of it, and you'd have to talk to a prion biologist and a geneticist to completely describe all of it.

• 1:33:07Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:08Speaker 06

  But they have, uh, they have a G or an S at the, the 96 codon. Those that are SS do appear to show delayed effects of the disease. And we've known that for some time.

• 1:33:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:22Speaker 06

  And the GG are show the, the shortest duration of the disease.

• 1:33:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:27Speaker 06

  So, so if a 96 GG deer, let's say it has 18 month incubation, right? An SS might have 36 month incubation.

• 1:33:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:38Speaker 06

  Right? Where there is some time scale difference there. What exactly it is, I don't know.

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:43Speaker 06

  And there's some stuff published, they published in 2017 about this. And then the, the GS through Darwinian selection, right? Like the GS somewhere in between.

• 1:33:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:54Speaker 06

  So having one of those S alleles gives it some, some greater slower progression of the disease.

• 1:34:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:01Speaker 06

  Interestingly though, a lot of the early survey work suggested that the presence of the S allele is relatively low in the wild populations.

• 1:34:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:12Speaker 06

  So it's rare for some reason, and we don't understand why.

• 1:34:16Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:34:17Speaker 06

  And some work done, like Colombian whitetails, it's not even present. Key deer, I don't believe it's even present. So there's some of these small isolated populations where not even known to occur.

• 1:34:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:29Speaker 06

  Um, so something through selection has kept that relatively low.

• 1:34:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:33Speaker 06

  If they're somehow a superior deer, something's kept them relatively low. But, but we just don't fully completely understand what all the other attached survival impacts are.

• 1:34:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Speaker 06

  And, and, and this is work that's, I think, starting to come to light. And certainly Chris Seaberry and his work on the genetic breeding value things that's been funded by USDA to try to understand what this looks like. So it has, it has merit.

• 1:35:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:35:01Speaker 06

  In that we know that in scraping, right? The way that we eradicated scraping and sheep, or largely eradicated scraping and sheep was through very intensive breeding programs.

• 1:35:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:35:10Speaker 06

  In which they identified this delay or this resistance to the disease. It still pops back up.

• 1:35:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:16Speaker 06

  It still comes back. But that's through very, very extensive animal husbandry kind of activities.

• 1:35:23Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:35:23Speaker 06

  Tracking lineages and, and, and being very intense in that breeding. So the, the ability for that to happen in a free range population is, is, it's limited, um, in the scope and scale. I will, I would also say that I don't know that we can speed it up. And I don't know what speeding it up does.

• 1:35:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 06

  So they live longer, they spread more prions onto the landscape, which will probably advance the disease maybe quicker.

• 1:35:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:52Speaker 06

  So that's some of the questions that we have.

• 1:35:54Steven Rinella?

  What you're looking at is you're looking at.

• 1:35:58Steven Rinella?

  You're looking at that you've arrived at that a manager such as yourself arrives at an idea where they look back at the landscape and they look at the history and they arrive at a thing that this is always, it's a one-way trip.

• 1:36:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:36:17Steven Rinella?

  We can slow it, right? We've had a couple of victories. You mentioned New York went from a, like, being one state that at one point in time went from a positive to a negative state. There's been some victories. We can slow it, but you get to a point where you're like, it's, there's really, when we're talking about decades, nothing anybody's gonna do. It would be the last hope.

• 1:36:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And I think it's a matter of how quick, how can through management and the way that we're shooting deer change the trajectory of the disease?

• 1:36:55Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:36:56Speaker 06

  Or do we just gotta let it play out?

• 1:36:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Speaker 06

  And I think the way that we manage deer, we can change that endpoint by decades.

• 1:37:03Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:37:04Speaker 06

  In terms of thinking about the way that we hunt deer, the way that we shoot them. But it's counter to where we are in a deer hunting culture today.

• 1:37:12Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, I wanna make you, I wanna make you clarify your point. Management, okay, if we, if we sit here and agree that, if we sit here and agree that if we do nothing, if all's testing and all, everything stops right now, no management's, no nothing, we never talk about CWD again, and we would say in a century, um, we land at like, in a century, this country will just be like, like deer in America are 50, 60, 70% positive for CWD.

• 1:37:56Steven Rinella?

  Are you uncomfortable with that statement? We do nothing.

• 1:37:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, if we do nothing.

• 1:38:00Steven Rinella?

  In a hundred years.

• 1:38:01Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:02Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:38:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Steven Rinella?

  In a hundred years in America, deer writ large are 50, 60, 70%. Okay. Do you feel that if, if we say like, no, no, no, we're gonna manage, we're gonna continue management, we're gonna try to do what we can do, do you feel that in a century, we could have a different result in a century's time?

• 1:38:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:27Steven Rinella?

  Or do you think just in 10 or 20 years, we could make it be different?

• 1:38:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, I think in decades, we can make it be different. I don't know in a century, right?

• 1:38:34Steven Rinella?

  A century's crazy.

• 1:38:35Speaker 06

  It's crazy.

• 1:38:36Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:38:37Speaker 06

  Forget a century.

• 1:38:38Steven Rinella?

  A quarter century.

• 1:38:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think decades for sure.

• 1:38:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:38:41Speaker 06

  And I think what's, what's starting to come together, there was, you know, Wyoming recently, the co-op unit recently published a paper looking at different trends in hunt units in, in eastern Wyoming, based on buck harvest rates. And the West has really leaned into adaptive harvest management strategies about the timing of the seasons and what are buck harvest rates look like? And they've sort of plateaued in a few places where they had higher buck harvest rates. Are they turning the population over a little quicker? Are they suppressing some of the transmission as a result of that? So those are some of the questions we're asking about inherently the way that we hunt deer and the way that we turn the population over, is that, are there things we can do that will help minimize prevalence?

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  Well, you're talking about even, and this is, I didn't know this, is I imagine that in any given population, it's always up. Prevalency is always up. But you, you're, you're saying that you could have a given population, and not like the New York example, where maybe there's three deer that had it and they killed them all. But you're saying within a population, there can be a down?

• 1:39:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, or it can be stable. Yeah. Or slowly growing. Yes. By having enough harvest on the population where you remove deer faster than they can get infected from other deer. And you have a higher likelihood of removing those positive individuals from the landscape. Yeah, no, it's played out through time, and that's a lot of what Illinois' data suggests too. But once it does spread, and if you don't stay on top of it long enough, then prevalence takes off.

• 1:40:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Speaker 06

  But I think there is inherently something about, and this has been demonstrated through some modeling stuff, right? Trying to think about how do we predict some of this stuff out?

• 1:40:25Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:26Speaker 06

  That certainly the age structure of the population, the sex ratio of the population, all dictate how quickly that might happen.

• 1:40:32Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:33Speaker 06

  So there's probably some underlying things that we just need to understand about. How do we manage eastern whitetail deer populations in a way that tries to minimize the progression of the disease?

• 1:40:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So I guess, I mean, I, now I'm realizing that you kind of clarified this point earlier, but I didn't pick up on it, is that, and maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but I don't think so. I think you were saying that, and I didn't get the ramifications of it, but that 5%, is that the number where it seems to just that it's gonna grow?

• 1:41:06Speaker 06

  It does. Yeah. That's the point at which.

• 1:41:09Steven Rinella?

  Got you.

• 1:41:10Speaker 06

  You have enough infected individuals on the landscape that they're just gonna continue to spread it at a rate faster than you can remove them from the landscape.

• 1:41:18Steven Rinella?

  So a 3%, a 3% can become a 2, but, but a 10 probably doesn't become a 9.

• 1:41:27Speaker 06

  Or a 3, right?

• 1:41:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 06

  And because it gets back to, okay, where if it were at 3% in a relatively small area, it's because there's a small chunk of land somewhere where there's a small little pocket of does that has the disease.

• 1:41:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 06

  And if you can remove a high proportion of those does in that spot, you've got the opportunity to set it back.

• 1:41:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:52Speaker 06

  And that's where that time of detection becomes really important. Small scale, low level prevalence. By the time it's gotten widespread, the idea, the other thing is that folks think we're trying to eradicate deer. We're absolutely not trying to eradicate deer. That is not the intent or purpose, right?

• 1:42:07Steven Rinella?

  I know people say that, but I don't know any really serious people that don't have some big axe to grind. I don't know any serious people to think that.

• 1:42:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, but it, it's in the psyche, right? Like that when you're going in, no, it's like trying to figure out how we remove a high enough proportion of those that were likely infected.

• 1:42:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Speaker 06

  But back to the question on, on, uh, kind of the next steps of the genetics work.

• 1:42:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30Speaker 06

  And is it possible to then reintroduce, um, individuals with the 96SS gene and a high breeding value into a population? The only way that's gonna be successful would be is if we get to a spot where we have pulled populations way down.

• 1:42:48Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:42:49Speaker 06

  Right? The idea that, you know, with, with hundreds of thousands of deer in a, in a state, a million, right? Like, we probably got a million and a half deer in Missouri. What it would take to shift the genetic makeup of that population by introducing deer into the population would be astronomical.

• 1:43:08Steven Rinella?

  That's what I've looked at.

• 1:43:11Speaker 06

  So from a practical standpoint, I appreciate where the captive deer folks are, and I, and I encourage them to continue to try to like, study it, understand it, figure out if there are ways that we can make the populations more resilient. I, I think it's good work, and somebody needs to be doing it to continue to build our understanding. The practical application of it, and the idea that somehow we could, we could get enough deer to put back out on the landscape, that we would change the back to the century sort of thing, that we would change the trajectory of the disease by reintroducing some of these deer? Um, I, I just, the numbers don't add up.

• 1:43:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So you know how some humans have like a connected ear lobe and some have a, like my kind, whatever you call that, right? It'd be like, if you like, said like, hey, we're gonna take two people with connected ear lobes and move them into town here.

• 1:44:02Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:44:03Steven Rinella?

  And we'll see.

• 1:44:04Speaker 06

  Right, we'll see what happens, right?

• 1:44:06Steven Rinella?

  In a few years, are there way more people than?

• 1:44:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:09Steven Rinella?

  Right? You'd be like, dude, come on.

• 1:44:11Speaker 06

  Well, nature's doing it though, right? Like, we, we, you know, there's definitely data suggests that in some of these free-ranging populations, as prevalence is creeping up, they're seeing a higher percentage of 96SS in the population. So it's like, okay, something's going on.

• 1:44:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:25Speaker 06

  That's happening. I had, and so folks have concerns like, well, then, shooting deer in those spots, are you risking shooting those that are advantaged?

• 1:44:35Steven Rinella?

  The good ones, yeah.

• 1:44:36Speaker 06

  The good ones. I point back to the, to the Wisconsin data. I point back to the Wisconsin data, which suggests, no, in fact, if you got CWD, you're probably more susceptible to harvest.

• 1:44:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Speaker 06

  And so maybe thinking about the two of them together is probably where we'll end up at some point in time. It's not a one or the other.

• 1:44:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:58Speaker 06

  I think there's a reason why really intensive localized harvest can still be very advantageous in shifting the potential of the population.

• 1:46:02Speaker 02

  Deck or Celtic Bank. On Deck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. Breathe in and reset with Lincoln rejuvenate. An available multi sensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage visuals and sense to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit Lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

• 1:46:38Steven Rinella?

  I'm sure you guys have thought of this, but this is backing up a ways.

• 1:46:43Steven Rinella?

  If CWD deer are easier to do, they're easier to get.

• 1:46:52Steven Rinella?

  Is perhaps hunter samples, hunter submitted samples skewing the data?

• 1:47:01Steven Rinella?

  Meaning 50% of the bucks getting harvested in X county are CWD positive. Is that maybe not an indicator that 50% of the bucks on the landscape are positive? They're getting the sick ones because the sick ones are dumber and easier to get.

• 1:47:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is a whole conversation that drives statisticians completely crazy.

• 1:47:19Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it does?

• 1:47:20Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, it drives them crazy and it drives me crazy. Sometimes we talk about apparent prevalence versus observed prevalence.

• 1:47:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:47:29Speaker 06

  And what the real prevalence is.

• 1:47:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:47:31Speaker 06

  Right. And it's this thing, right? It's like the sampling mechanism in which you get at, are there inherent biases? Which is what we started this conversation and talking about. We inherently biased our CWD sampling towards adult males to try to better detect it.

• 1:47:46Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:47:47Speaker 06

  And what we try to report is that of the samples we've collected, this is the percentage that are positive.

• 1:47:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54Speaker 06

  Not that this is what if you randomly sampled on the landscape, randomly sampled all age classes, represented them as their proportion of the population, would you get a different number? Absolutely.

• 1:48:07Steven Rinella?

  You think so?

• 1:48:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, but it doesn't matter, right? Like whether it's 23% plus or minus 2% or it's 30% plus or minus 2%.

• 1:48:19Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  Doesn't matter.

• 1:48:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 06

  You know?

• 1:48:21Steven Rinella?

  It's zero.

• 1:48:22Speaker 06

  It ain't zero. It ain't zero. And what's the trajectory? And so that's a lot of the way, it's even the way we managed deer populations, right? Like we can argue over, well, are there 35 deer per square mile? Or are there 40 deer per square mile? Or are there 50 deer per square mile? What I care about is what's the trajectory?

• 1:48:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 06

  And what are the attitudes around that population? That gives you a better handle on as a manager, what levers can and should you pull to change the direction?

• 1:48:52Steven Rinella?

  This is, this is very Ansley, but it's interesting. I've had it explained to me that when you look at doll sheep harvest in Alaska.

• 1:49:02Steven Rinella?

  Year to year rates, you know what you're mostly looking at? You're mostly looking at the weather.

• 1:49:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Steven Rinella?

  It's 10 day seasons, right? And more than an indicator of how many sheep around the landscape.

• 1:49:20Steven Rinella?

  It's primarily an indicator of like, was it a high ceiling? People could fly.

• 1:49:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:25Steven Rinella?

  Could glass, people could hunt because in a 10 day season.

• 1:49:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29Steven Rinella?

  If six days are fogged in and it's raining the whole time, it's like, there's no doll sheep left. If you look at harvest data.

• 1:49:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:35Steven Rinella?

  Right. It's just like a way of understanding it.

• 1:49:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, we see that our, our November portion of firearms deer season can start as early as November 10th and as late as November 16th.

• 1:49:46Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:49:46Speaker 06

  You see a very different composition of the harvest based on six days. And that narrow window of difference of the peak of buck movement activities. We start on the 16th, we shoot more does. We start on the 10th, we shoot more bucks. It's completely a product of that.

• 1:50:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, yeah. So you'd look and be like, okay, I see that you're seeing that you think there's deer trends, but there's also, it's just like, you're looking at a calendar.

• 1:50:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. In some ways folks will get all up, kind of up in arms. They're like, ah, why was the harvest down? Well, weather was bad on opening weekend or something like that can absolutely drive that. It's become less and less of an issue as seasons have expanded, as opportunities have increased.

• 1:50:29Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:50:29Speaker 06

  But it's, you still see it.

• 1:50:31Steven Rinella?

  Cause those little blips get leveled out by this long seasons.

• 1:50:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And early antlers kind of, you know, masks some of those kinds of things or longer, you know, more participation in the late muzzleloader season can kind of mask some of those things, but.

• 1:50:45Steven Rinella?

  What do you feel? We've talked a lot about hotspots. We've talked a lot about areas that have it. Let's go to where you got a pristine area.

• 1:50:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay. You got a, you got a island, a pristine island, and it seems like there's nothing going on there. And it's got a good moat around it.

• 1:51:06Steven Rinella?

  What do you want to do there? Are you like, no, we're just going to kick back and hunt deer like normal?

• 1:51:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. And we're not going to bring anything with us, right? Do everything we can to make sure we don't introduce the disease.

• 1:51:17Steven Rinella?

  So you don't go to that area. You don't go to that county and be like, let's get out ahead of it and knock these suckers back now.

• 1:51:25Speaker 06

  It, it's an interesting conversation and it's one that we found ourselves in very early on.

• 1:51:30Steven Rinella?

  Finding it all the time.

• 1:51:31Speaker 06

  Right. So we had, we had, we implemented antler point restriction. So four points on one side. We started that work in early 2000 and trying to encourage folks to shoot more antlers deer, let bucks grow to older age classes.

• 1:51:45Steven Rinella?

  Even in, even in CWD.

• 1:51:47Speaker 06

  Before CWD.

• 1:51:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:51:49Speaker 06

  So that, that really changed hunter behavior, hunter harvest age structure, starting to get older age class bucks.

• 1:51:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:51:57Speaker 06

  You introduced CWD into the equation in 2012. We removed that in six counties. They went back to shooting deer like the antler point restriction that never existed. Certainly there's been some slow trends since that time. But we started asking the question of, is it a good proactive preemptive step to take the antler point restriction away from other areas where we had not yet detected? To remove it because we were knew we were protecting bucks into older age classes.

• 1:52:25Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:52:26Speaker 06

  Which again, from a disease management standpoint is not what you want to do.

• 1:52:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Speaker 06

  And so we, we chose not to, and I, I many times, same thing on the feeding and placement of mineral restrictions, right? Like, are we setting ourselves up where you're creating a deer population that's more susceptible to it once it gets there?

• 1:52:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Speaker 06

  And I don't know that there's a right answer to that question.

• 1:52:47Steven Rinella?

  Well, home, you've leaned, I'm sorry, I got confused. In those cases, those free, those, those CWD free areas, you've leaned toward adjusting?

• 1:52:57Speaker 06

  We didn't.

• 1:52:57Steven Rinella?

  You, okay.

• 1:52:58Speaker 06

  We did not. We left them in place until we had a CWD positive detection in the county.

• 1:53:03Steven Rinella?

  But you don't, you can't, you don't know that that was all.

• 1:53:06Speaker 06

  I don't know that that was the right thing to do or not. Yeah.

• 1:53:09Steven Rinella?

  Where do you sit right now on it?

• 1:53:11Speaker 06

  I don't know that we can answer that question. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I don't think we know enough about how the structure of the herd might impact the way that the disease takes off in early stages.

• 1:53:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 1:53:25Speaker 06

  But yeah, I made the argument, if there are good deer management techniques in the absence of disease, then we should continue to promote them. We shouldn't shy away from good deer management for fear of something that's not yet happened.

• 1:53:39Steven Rinella?

  I, no, I got, I got what you're saying.

• 1:53:41Speaker 06

  And so, so we did not proactively remove them. Recently, we did do away with antler point restriction statewide. And part of that was because we were down to like 14 or 15 of our 80 counties that still had the antler point restriction in place. It's just another level of regulatory complexity. We're starting to have enough spread where we're catching four or five or six additional new counties every year, kind of expanding into that. So from a simplicity standpoint, we're like, look, this doesn't make sense anymore. But very early on, yeah, there were folks that like, no, we should, we should increase the buck harvest bag limit. We should remove the antler point restriction. We should proactively do these things. And we chose not to, and I, and I don't know that that was the right decision or not.

• 1:54:24Steven Rinella?

  How much have you felt you, you've been able to influence hunter behavior? Like I, I hear again and again and again, all around the country.

• 1:54:35Steven Rinella?

  That, that people, they don't want to shoot does.

• 1:54:41Steven Rinella?

  They don't want to shoot does.

• 1:54:43Speaker 06

  They don't.

• 1:54:43Steven Rinella?

  Like the days of people living off venison and stuff, it's not like it was in the old days. And, and it's just ingrained in people like they don't want to shoot does, you can't incentivize them to shoot does. How, how true, how true have you found that to be?

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  We don't rely on venison as our course horse protein anymore.

• 1:54:59Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 1:54:59Speaker 06

  Or it's so small and the number that do are, are insignificant in the grand scheme. Not to say people that shoot deer don't eat them, they eat them, right? Or they give them away, they turn them into snack sticks and they get really expensive to shoot one. So yeah, no, there's no question that that has shifted deer management.

• 1:55:16Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:55:17Speaker 06

  Missouri had long been one of those states where we did not have a problem having folks shoot antlers deer. We've been very successful through time with folks shooting a high number of antlers deer. And it goes back.

• 1:55:29Steven Rinella?

  You, you, today still.

• 1:55:30Speaker 06

  It's, it's gotten, but it's a little more challenged today than it was.

• 1:55:35Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:55:36Speaker 06

  Um, but yeah, some of the perspectives of just got to shoot a buck. Um, just weren't present in Missouri as a hurdle to get over. It's a more modern shift in perspectives.

• 1:55:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:49Speaker 06

  And part of that, uh, you know, I think goes back to the history of deer management in Missouri. I've got notes of folks in the fifties when we had, still had very few deer and certainly didn't have them statewide. That we're already starting to talk about, we need, we need doe harvest to start to manage some of these populations.

• 1:56:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Speaker 06

  So it was a very early part of the conversation. Introduced antlers harvest very early and kind of the deer management progression in Missouri. And so I think it become adopted as a, as a normal practice, something we needed to do. Folks were excited when they got to shoot one antlers deer and then really excited when they got to shoot two antlers deer. Now they're saturated with opportunity. There are so many deer.

• 1:56:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Speaker 06

  I think procrastination is one of our bigger challenges. They got all kinds of time to shoot a deer. And they don't really want to shoot one anyway. Unless it's got big antlers, cause they're not hungry. They're not hungry in the same way.

• 1:56:42Steven Rinella?

  It's the craziest thing. I got, I've had an old timer in the township where I grew up, Michigan. I remember old timer telling me about growing up and they used to rig their own deer snares, the garage cable.

• 1:56:53Speaker 06

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:56:54Steven Rinella?

  Living off deer.

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:56:56Steven Rinella?

  Does, and they were trying, this is back in the day when you were like, you had a problem with people poaching does. And now it's so funny that you're sitting on the other extreme.

• 1:57:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:04Steven Rinella?

  Can't talk people into getting does. And back then you couldn't talk people out of stopping killing does.

• 1:57:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it is, it is a huge, so it's a bit of a paradox, right? We've got this disease issue that's more than happy to kill deer.

• 1:57:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 06

  And we got some really big deer management challenges in places where we don't have CWD, where we need hunters to be able and willing to shoot more deer. And so states, you know, like Missouri and others are trying to find ways that they make it easier for hunters to donate deer.

• 1:57:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 06

  Simplify that process. We've, we've just hired a detailed position to work for two years. Trying to better understand what the relationship with meat processors looks like. What does a, what does a meaningful deer donation process actually look like? What's that experience for a hunter? How do you, how do you get there and how do you make it economically viable for processors to participate? Um, it, it's a challenge, it's a huge challenge.

• 1:58:01Steven Rinella?

  It brings up a thing that I hate even talking about. Cause I don't fully understand the impacts. And I think the impacts would be many, particularly in terms of access. But it brings up this conversation that it's like, that's like anathema to American deer management. Would be, what about if you could sell them?

• 1:58:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:26Steven Rinella?

  And there's a little. I just came back from Florida, we're down in Florida gator hunting and they, the, we go to the gator processor guy that does the leather and stuff, you know, he's got a big sign, not buying gators. But he said, that's, this is the first year I've ever had the sign, meaning prior to this year. And it's not illegal, it's just he's not doing it. Prior to this year, you went gator hunting, one option is you take that sucker down and they measure it as 10 feet long, it's 60 bucks a foot. And you walk out the door with cash in your hand.

• 1:59:00Steven Rinella?

  If you brought a system.

• 1:59:04Steven Rinella?

  If you introduced a system where you're like, no dude, you got it and bring it to me, 200 bucks.

• 1:59:12Steven Rinella?

  People are shooting does. My kid and his buddies, like they're young enough where they don't have all this history. If you told my kid and his buddies, hey, I'll give you 200 bucks for every doe you bring me, they're, dude, they're bringing you does.

• 1:59:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I think this is this wide.

• 1:59:27Steven Rinella?

  Quitting their job.

• 1:59:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is this wide ranging conversation that the true believers in the North American model would string us up for.

• 1:59:36Steven Rinella?

  I hate even talking about it, like to be intellectually honest, I can't not talk about it. The, the, the director of, the guy in your position in Michigan, we, we read the letter on the show. The guy in your position in Michigan sent a letter, it was, it was printed in newspapers. Sent a letter begging people to kill does.

• 1:59:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:56Steven Rinella?

  And you, the one thing you look at, like I'll tell you the one thing that'll get them to do it. And it's the same thing that tanked American wildlife populations in the old days.

• 2:00:07Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:00:08Steven Rinella?

  It was you and, you put a value, you incentivized the meat harvest. And I don't even know, you'd have to bring in, you'd have to bring in a whole different team of people to go and look at, well, what is the commercial demand? If we're incentivized to do this because of CWD.

• 2:00:27Steven Rinella?

  How hungry is the market for CWD meat?

• 2:00:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:00:31Steven Rinella?

  Do people in grocery stores want CWD meat? If we're going to do this in an area with 50% prevalence, does that mean that the 50% that come to us by the hunters that are hunting them for market? Do they not get paid?

• 2:00:47Steven Rinella?

  For those, do they, like, do they get their money for those, but then they go into a dump? Do they get their money for those and then they go to the grocery store? Is, in the grocery store, is the bag labeled CWD positive, CWD negative? Like, I don't know.

• 2:01:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 2:01:01Steven Rinella?

  It's like, you'd have to, there's so much to figure out, but it's, it's.

• 2:01:07Steven Rinella?

  That's what you would do. And all of a sudden you would have, you did, your doe killing problem would be over.

• 2:01:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's why, as I indicated earlier, we've sort of tried to double down on these conversations with local landowners and hunters and say, look, guys. Hunters have been the original tool for managing deer populations in the regulated way that we've been doing it. It may not be sustainable into the future.

• 2:01:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Speaker 06

  And you have a part in that, right? Like we together share the fate of the outcome of deer and deer management. And how are we going to work together to do that? Because an alternative that will be very real for some folks and probably not in the terribly distant future. If you have fewer hunters and they are unwilling to shoot antlers deer. They create enough problems and enough incentive for others to change the system.

• 2:01:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:00Speaker 06

  And we can either be part of informing the way that change happens, or we can be subjected to it.

• 2:02:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Speaker 06

  And so I, that's where my mind is on that conversation. And what, what's it going to take for us as hunters to take some responsibility in this effort? And a state agency's trying to work with hunters. To, to manage a deer population that is challenging.

• 2:02:23Steven Rinella?

  I have a dear friend and I, and I know, I've known him a long time and I know him well. And he's like, he's uncorrupted, okay? And where he's landed is he's landed, just, he's sort of landed at just a general sense of dismay and disappointment with the American deer hunter. And he's like, stop talking to me about all this conservation bullshit. And you're Pittman Robertson money and you're all this and that. Managers ask you again and again and again to kill some does. And you can't be bothered, you can't be troubled that much. Like you can't be troubled as much as what it takes to gut a doe in the woods.

• 2:03:09Speaker 06

  I'm envious of the West a lot, right? Where, where you have way more demand and pressure for tags. Then, then there are animals to provide that opportunity, right? In the East, you, you, you, you can't give out enough tags to create an incentive. And you can't give them enough days to hunt to create an incentive to harvest what would be an appropriate number of deer.

• 2:03:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:33Speaker 06

  The other thing we face is small land ownership, private land owner, you know, decisions. Um, that dictate what a local deer population looks like, right? There's a non-migratory species that exists based on what the pressure locally does to that population. So rules and regulations can't really help address this challenge. It really is about individuals taking some level of ownership of managing their deer herd together and with their neighbors. Um, especially in states that have small land ownership. If you've got tens of thousands of acres in South Texas, right? Like you control the way everything happens. But in much of the East, you've got small land parcels and you gotta be working with your neighbors to figure out what deer population is going to look like.

• 2:04:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:18Speaker 06

  And folks just aren't terribly willing to work with one another.

• 2:04:24Speaker 06

  But we can't do it through regulatory, we, we just can't. Regulations aren't going to get us out of this problem. They haven't got us into it and won't get us out of it.

• 2:04:31Steven Rinella?

  I judge hunters by what they're eating at dinner.

• 2:04:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:04:35Steven Rinella?

  If I go to a big hunter's house and I'm like, dude, what?

• 2:04:40Steven Rinella?

  You're eating stuff from the store.

• 2:04:41Speaker 06

  Chicken breast, right?

• 2:04:42Steven Rinella?

  Dude, you could be shooting does for eight bucks a piece.

• 2:04:44Speaker 06

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:04:47Steven Rinella?

  You know, they're begging you, it's eight, it's eight dollars.

• 2:04:49Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:04:50Steven Rinella?

  Get a doe.

• 2:04:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're not hungry, right? Like we don't rely on that.

• 2:04:54Steven Rinella?

  For what you pay for that steak, dude, you could have bought a whole deer.

• 2:04:57Speaker 06

  Yep, yep.

• 2:04:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, not hungry, not hungry. So what, is there anything that I should have asked you about that I didn't ask you?

• 2:05:06Speaker 06

  Gosh, we've covered the wide range of things.

• 2:05:14Steven Rinella?

  I thought of the thing I didn't ask you about. We don't need to spend time on it. Um, earlier I was saying my early perception of it was human health, which is shifting over time. Uh, how much does that linger around in your head?

• 2:05:29Speaker 06

  So I think, I think, you know, the mountain of data suggests that the risk to humans from consuming a CWD infected deer is pretty low.

• 2:05:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:39Speaker 06

  If there is one.

• 2:05:41Steven Rinella?

  Well, at this point it's zero.

• 2:05:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, we don't know. We don't.

• 2:05:44Steven Rinella?

  I shouldn't say zero risk. There's.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, there's no, no, no known evidence that it's been transmitted to people. And so I think in a lot of ways that, that we need to remain diligent and understanding. It's one of those, also the space where what's possible and what's probable.

• 2:06:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:01Speaker 06

  Right? Is, is a really hard one to have that conversation.

• 2:06:05Steven Rinella?

  I used to be petrified by it. And now, and well, also now I know that I've like, I'm sure I have all along. Now I know for a fact that I've eaten positive meat. So I used to be petrified of it. Now I've just, now it just sort of lives in the back of my head.

• 2:06:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, I think we have to communicate what the public health officials tell us they want communicated in terms of out of an abundance caution. We tell you not to eat any sick deer, regardless of.

• 2:06:30Steven Rinella?

  Is that your state stance?

• 2:06:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:32Steven Rinella?

  I get why you have to do that, but I'm also, I don't think the agency should be saying that without simultaneously saying, but no one's ever gotten it.

• 2:06:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I think we try to do that too. And it's your decision, right? Like we don't tell you, you, you shouldn't. We, here's what is communicated. It's recommended not to, you choose to, that, that's your decision to make.

• 2:06:55Steven Rinella?

  I don't even know what the asterisk is. Is it, should it be, no one's ever contracted CWD? The asterisk being, but there's a recommendation, you don't eat it. Or should it be, we recommend you don't eat it. And the asterisk is, no one's ever gotten it.

• 2:07:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:07:12Steven Rinella?

  What's the headline?

• 2:07:13Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:07:14Steven Rinella?

  I used to think, I used to think the headline was, don't eat it. And the asterisk was, no one's ever gotten it. In my head, it's switched. The headline is, no one's gotten it.

• 2:07:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:07:24Steven Rinella?

  And the asterisk is, maybe don't eat it. I don't know.

• 2:07:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so then those that drift down the, you know, the extremely cautious approach, you know, are somewhat fearful that as more folks consume, more of them, our behavior of consuming deer, you know, when you, when you shoot a deer, the likelihood of you consuming the vast majority of it is much higher than, than for example, when they were dealing with BSE in, in England, when you were eating one meal of an infected cow. Right? And so that's some of the concerns those folks have. It's, it's the repeat, potential for repeated exposure. And then through time.

• 2:07:59Steven Rinella?

  Meaning you're eating the whole damn deer.

• 2:08:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, right. And through time, there are suggestions that the prions are changing, right? That the confirmation of the prion protein look, is looking a little different, or there's slight variations, which may interrupt some of that, um, species specific barriers. But again, we don't have any evidence that that's happened yet.

• 2:08:20Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Well, anything else I should have asked you about?

• 2:08:25Speaker 06

  Not that I can think of. There's probably something, but.

• 2:08:29Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming on, man. Again, this is, you've been listening to Jason Sumner's, the director of the Missouri Department of Conservation. And on all that, uh, last note, on all that subject of whitetails, oh, deer in general, uh, it's Whitetail Week at Meat Eater, September 28th to October 4th. We got a big giveaway. Um, we got the ultimate whitetail giveaway, which is live at the Meat Eater store. So check this out. We got the headline prize where you win a guided whitetail hunt with Mark Canyon and our friend Jordan Budd as a guide to whitetail hunt in Nebraska. I've been out there hunting, the place is sweet. There's a Matthews bow, a tethered saddle, a meat brand meat grinder, a grill

• 2:09:13Steven Rinella?

  of smoker, Sig binos. And dude, Sig binos are the best binos. First light whisper down, crispy boots, Onex membership. Okay. So keep an eye on Meat Eater channels all week for everything whitetail. And head to the Meat Eater store to sign up for the ultimate whitetail giveaway. If you get to hunt Jordan's place, you're going to be loving it. And, uh, once again, Jason Sumner's, thanks for coming on, man.

• 2:09:36Speaker 06

  I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something I care about a lot, whitetail deer. And it's an important topic and it's one we're just going to have to continue to talk about.

• 2:09:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep. If you hate hearing about it, you people that listen, uh, tough titty. We're going to keep talking about it. So thanks, everybody.

• 2:10:19Speaker 02

  Now more than ever, basketball teams are embracing advanced analytics. Nothing's more popular right now than coming up with a fancy new stat that helps teams gain an edge on the court. And this season, Bet365 is embracing a fancy concept of its own. Bet $10, get $200. Here's how it works. When new users sign up with Bet365 and place their first $10 bet, they'll get $200 in bonus bets. Fine, maybe it's not that advanced, but an offer this good doesn't have to be. Bet365, where winning is everything. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MYRESSET. Must be 21 plus and present in a state where Bet365 operates. Please gamble responsibly. Restrictions and TNCs apply. Void where prohibited. Download the app today.

• 2:11:01Speaker 03

  Someone once said, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. I did. Mike Tyson. Oh, well, Mike Tyson and Boost are here to tell you that your mobile plan is punching you in the mouth with prices that can knock you out. That's a low blow. Totally. But you can do something about it. You have to punch back. No, Mike, you gotta switch to Boost with a plan that's $25 a month forever. Oh, that's a great plan. Maybe you can do both. Boost Mobile. What's your plan?

• 2:11:30Speaker 07

  Okay. Laundry stinks. Literally. I mean, you could just keep buying new underwear. Not that I've ever done that. Or maybe sort your clothes into piles based on how re-wearable or filthy they are. Or just use Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. It's made for real life stinks and stains. So even if you don't do laundry the quote, right way, Deep Clean will knock it out. I mean, it is from the number one liquid detergent brand that tackles more loads than any other. Come clean with Arm & Hammer Deep Clean. Number one claim based on total wash loads sold.

• 2:12:06Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.