CWD effects on deer

So with CWD being found on the Hi Line and now some in ND supposedly. What is the real damage that it can do. It seems to have been around for a while. But when is the last time you have ever heard of a whole herd or massive die off attributed to CWD? Seems to me people should be finding dead animals all over if it's as horrible as G&F make it out to be. In ND I really think G&F is trying to push someone's own moral agenda of not allowing hunting over bait.

I believe it shows up in more of a gradual decline. I know Wyoming is doing some studies that may take some time to figure out the results.

Ypu should donsome googling and listening to the podcasts on it. There are areas of significant size that have lost over 40% of the herd. In some areas it oushes 80%. Even more, we dont fully know its effects or persistence yet. It is as horrible as it is made out to be.

Dieseldog said:

So with CWD being found on the Hi Line and now some in ND supposedly. What is the real damage that it can do. It seems to have been around for a while. But when is the last time you have ever heard of a whole herd or massive die off attributed to CWD? Seems to me people should be finding dead animals all over if it's as horrible as G&F make it out to be. In ND I really think G&F is trying to push someone's own moral agenda of not allowing hunting over bait.

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Ask the Wyoming biologists how it has affected mature mule deer bucks in their herds. They have done a lot to restrict hunting harvest on the older bucks and the populations continue to decline in areas within the core CWD area. Some of them will tell you that they could close all hunting and CWD will continue to push the herds to lower numbers in the area where CWD is prevalent.

Wyoming G&F folks don't have any "moral agenda" and they've been dealing with it for years.

The way I see it. There are two issues here. First, when most folks hear disease they want to see bodies. They think of this like blue tongue or EHD where you can see extensive die offs and local population level affects are noticeable. CWD is not a disease like that. CWD took decades to get to 40-50% prevelance in deer herds in SE Wyoming. It takes 1-2 years for a deer that is positive to show clinical signs of CWD and then they may last a month. In that time they are at increased risk of predation or being hit by cars. You aren’t going to see a giant pile of bodies. And in the early years of CWD being found in an area, it’s not going to affect deer at a population level. Depending on how high deer densities are prevelance will increase slowly (took 40 years for prevelance to reach 40% in SE WY) or quickly (took 20ish years for prevelance to reach 50% in southern Wisconsin).

Long story short. It is a big deal. It’s probably the largest wildlife issue at this time. And it’s going to keep getting worse for the foreseeable future, because at this time there is nothing we can do about it.

The second issue I see here is a distrust for biologists in general. I can assure you that those folks with boots on the ground have the resources best interest at heart. I don’t know what moral agenda you could possibly be referring to, but I can tell you with absolutely certainty it doesn’t exist. Frankly, the assertion is ridiculous.

"............... It seems to have been around for a while".

Can't speak for NoDak, but Montana has conducted surveillance for ungulate CWD for around 25 years +/-. FYI (facts you'll ignore).

Dieseldog said:

So with CWD being found on the Hi Line and now some in ND supposedly. What is the real damage that it can do. It seems to have been around for a while. But when is the last time you have ever heard of a whole herd or massive die off attributed to CWD? Seems to me people should be finding dead animals all over if it's as horrible as G&F make it out to be. In ND I really think G&F is trying to push someone's own moral agenda of not allowing hunting over bait.

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You will never see carcasses littering the landscape due to CWD because it is a chronic disease. So you see a course of disease more similar to cancer (months to years) vs something like EHD (hours to days). That’s what chronic means - it takes a long time. Animals don’t exhibit obvious outward signs until very late stages of the disease, but research shows that CWD affected populations experience abnormally high mortality with positive animals becoming much more susceptible to predation, vehicle collisions and other accidental causes of mortality long before they start staggering and drooling. Couple that with reduced recruitment also being observed in some affected populations and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that populations can’t persist under those dynamics.

Interestingly, I just read new research on humans with CJD that described startlingly high levels of prion in eyeballs. They were trying to figure out why patients having corneal transplants seem to contract CJD at higher rates than others. When they discovered the high prion loads, they analyzed records of CJD patients and realized that vision problems are often one of the first complaints of people with very early CJD, before any other symptoms and before they are suspected to have CJD. A similar phenomenon could explain this differential susceptibility in CWD positive ungulates to these other causes of death.

I get so tired of the conspiracy theories about how the “Game and Fish” have some agenda when it comes to CWD. In my experience, a sizable segment of hunters couldn’t care less if populations disappear, so long as they can continue to bait deer and shoot big bucks for as long as they’re still hunting. “Game and Fish” has to worry about things much further down the road than that. I find it morbidly comical that those who are the most vocal opponents of agency attempts to manage CWD are also going to be the ones screaming about “mismanagement” and wondering why the agency didn’t do anything to stop CWD when eventually hunting seasons go away because populations can no longer sustain any harvest at all. At that point, it will be much too late for “I told you so” to be satisfying.

Thanks guys that is some of the first hand info I was looking for. Will be doing a bunch of reading on it this winter.

This is a good place to start: http://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-070-chronic-wasting-disease

I had two CWD research specialists on the podcast recently. They were very helpful - https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/hu...rg-unfiltered-hunting-conservation/e/56376551