Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is now the defining issue in deer management, deeply impacting hunting practices, public trust, and state regulations. In Missouri, first detected in 2010, CWD initially appeared rare due to extensive early sampling, which found no cases—suggesting a recent introduction. The state responded with a localized, targeted approach inspired by Illinois, using taxidermy sampling to detect the disease in adult bucks and implementing small geographic "management boxes" of about 40 square miles to reduce deer populations and slow spread. Research shows CWD spreads slowly at low prevalence but accelerates significantly once it reaches 5–7%, making early detection vital. Over time, however, public skepticism grew, fueled by misinformation, social media narratives, and perceived conflicts of interest—such as accusations that agencies prioritize funding over public welfare. These concerns intensified after the pandemic, creating tribalism between hunters and officials. As CWD spread across more areas, especially in southern Missouri and near St. Louis, the effectiveness of localized removals declined, leading Missouri to pause its post-hunting deer culls. Today, the state emphasizes collaboration with landowners and hunters, recognizing that long-term deer herd health depends on shared responsibility, transparency, and adaptive management. While CWD’s exact transmission route remains unclear—though carcass movement and captive animal trade are key suspects—consensus holds that it spreads through contact with infected animals, not through urine, cutting boards, or human activity. Ultimately, the focus is no longer on containment, but on maintaining viable, healthy deer populations through inclusive and science-based stewardship.
This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. The best part of a Whitetail sit is often the part you have to earn. The temperature drops, nothing's moving, and climbing down starts sounding pretty good. The difference between seeing it through and climbing down early is about heart, but it's also about heat. That's why first light built whispered down. With 900 fill power, muscovy down, box bathful construction, and quiet water resistant fabric, it delivers serious warmth without weighing you down. First light whispered down, pack light, stay longer. Check it out now at firstlight.com That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E. All right, man. Join today by Jason Summner, who's the director of Missouri 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 run in 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 in my mind, is the number one issue, impacting deer and deer hunting and deer hunters today, which is chronic wasting disease. 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 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 a disease would jump from deer to humans, you know what I'm talking about. Even people 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 the issue of the moment and at this point the moment is decades long. Agreed? No, no, I completely agree Steve, it's one of those that I, you know, we found chronic wasting disease in Missouri in 2010, and I often tell folks that there's pre-CWD state fish wildlife agency and there's post-CWD fish wildlife agency, just because of, yeah, the very things that you mentioned, it is a challenging topic and it's one that we just have to deal with. It's challenging 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 view point and your view point, but it is also contentious, and it's contentious, and it's contentious, different than kind of the playful arguments that we have around deer, where, you know, you could have like all debate bodies of mine about whether you should be shooting crossbows at deer during archery season or not. Like these are like the old debates, should you, is the guy that shoots forkies? Is he a bad player because he's not letting deer grow up or the big buck blow hards, ruining deer hunting for everybody else because they're chasing numbers and not quality of experience like all these little pet fights. There's always little pet fights about deer, but this one is like, this one takes on an existential, it 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 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 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, 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 be like, here's what you ought to think, here's what you ought to think. 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 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. 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? Yeah, 2010. Okay. What were you doing, where were you at, what was your career looking like, and how did you first conceptualize this thing? You had to have some pre-awareness, but tell me, like, what you thought then about CWD? Yeah. So 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 coonhounds growing up, right? So I grew up chasing coonhounds and all that kind of stuff and wanted to feel incarcerated. But wanted job and conservation. And I went south, got a master's degree at Mississippi State, working on deer biology. And so I was 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 going to happen. Don't know what, right? God, it hasn't been a quarter century. Isn't it hard to believe? Yeah. It's been a quarter century since people started talking about CWD in Wisconsin. Yeah. It's hard to believe that it'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, this is something here. Certainly created some fears. No doubt, but one that I was just kind of peripheral to, got chance to go to Texas was a Texas A&M for a while, working on private deer ranches, doing research in South Texas, and in 2008, got the chance to come back to Missouri where I grew up and do your deer biologists, right? Like, man, this is awesome. Nothing more than wanting to be a deer biologist than the opportunity to do it in your home state. Yeah. When I got, do you mind real quick saying, like, pre-CWD or just what that, like, when you say a deer biologist, tell people what, what, what all that means? Yeah. So for the state, you're responsible for all set 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, but to really dial it in on a small scale, you got to work with private landowners. Okay. So that's where, that's where my frame of mind was, and especially across a lot of these areas. For those initial assignments. Yeah. Yeah. That's what we're going to do. But I got to Missouri. it 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 US. And so folks are starting to pay attention. Yeah, to Missouri. And it's like, so what's our CWD plan? Should we should we get it? And effectively, it just said that we 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. What I don't understand when you say that play nice. What do you mean? In terms of dual regulatory responsibility that kind of exists between the departments of agriculture and the state fish and wildlife agency. A lot of states. Right. So deer and elk and a lot of captive servants kind of sometimes fall into this space where the state agriculture department may have some responsibility in the state fish and wildlife agency may have responsibility. I see thought you're getting on which side of fence they're on. Yeah. Right. And so how are we going to just make sure that relationship was good and that we work together? I see. And got to the same. I mean, if you knew if it first popped in a captive servant facility, right, there'd be communication with the wildlife people and vice versa. Yep. And that's about all it said. Okay. Because they hadn't really they've been doing sampling. So in Missouri in 2002 to 2004, did really extensive CWD sampling sample 22,000 deer across the state. And the idea was that we would try to sample enough deer that if the disease is present, we would detect it at some reasonable level. Okay. Turns out in that three year period, 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, we've done a ton of sampling. If it's here, we should have detected it. Unless it's a relatively recent introduction. Okay. That that's interesting. And I want to, I want to yeah, just stop on half a minute and because this, this is a question I've always had. If you remembered like COVID testing, yep, I remember someone saying like a great way to find COVID is to do a lot of testing, right? Like, right? Like, meaning sort of the perception was after wireless is there, yep, right? COVID was there. And if you test a bunch, you're like, oh, 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 always felt that as CWD started to hit and seem to spread. Was it that any time a state said, well, let's go check. And they really checked heavily, they'd always find it. Yeah. And you were saying you were checking heavily, yeah, in what you're again, in 2002 to 2004. So you were looking heavily those years. And in fact, not finding exactly. It wasn't like once you looked, there it was. 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 hall and everywhere. I mean, and not finding it. And we didn't find any. Okay. 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. And so from that time. And then in 2006, we shifted really hard, kind of the first state to really shift hard to using taxidermis to do sampling. Okay. Because 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 taxidermis statewide, collecting several thousand samples a year. Got it. Meaning because then because it's sort of like selective. Right. You know, some dudes do my dad did one time, but most dudes aren't bringing doves down again. I'm bringing healing doves down to get stuff. So like, let's go look at mature bucks. Yeah. I'm sure they turn up at the text. 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. Okay. And increase the likelihood of detecting it early. So so much about CW and CW management's about the time of introduction to the time of detection as to how you can do it. Okay. 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 it really intensive testing. Yeah. So the likelihood of it setting there to higher prevalence and going undetected is higher. Yeah. 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 also there it is. And they go like, well, it must have got here yesterday. Right. And I don't know, did it? You know, it hasn't been there for forever. No one looked. Right. Right. So I get the I get the point you're saying where you feel like you were you're confident that you were finding it in its early stages in the population. Yeah. And that's played out through time. Right. 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. Right. Very, very few. Okay. So what we're seeing is slow spread. So it gives confidence back to that early sampling period. Yeah. If it was there, is it really low prevalence? So some of these Southern states that they were doing testing, but they may have only been doing, you know, 1500 a year. Yeah. Kind of statewide. What's a big number for a state like Missouri? So we've been 25 to 30,000 samples a year. God, 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. When you were looking, if you if you go back to those days, when like, here you are, your dear biologist, clear mandate on herd health. Um, here it is, you're finding that it's popping up. It's spreading. Are you looking at it at that time? Are you seeing it as a human health concern or herd health concern? Yeah, most of our folks with herd health concern. Okay. I mean, we can talk about the human health side of it, but it's really for the herd health thing. But yeah, I mean, like at like at that time, absolutely. Yeah. Because as much as I told you, I wasn't going to tell you what I think, yeah, at that time. For me, and into some degrees remaining still today, at that time for me, it was virtually all human health. Just a purely personal, purely personal. Yeah. Yeah. But but you you reviewed it like a deer issue. And we heard from I heard from a lot of folks in that with that same kind of concern, I didn't recognize the number of folks had been, you know, in the military or whatever, and had been in Great Britain, an England at the time of the BSE situation. Yeah. 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 have, but it was really from a herd health standpoint, that we were concerned about it, because it was 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, say, what if what are folks doing? So we had what was emerging to the difference of management approach to what was happening with constant and what Illinois was doing. So Illinois had taken a very aggressive, very localized approach, whereas Wisconsin is taking a much more broad sweeping kind of management regulation based approach. Yeah, let me lay those lay those two approaches out. 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 to find a quarry 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 to try to remove the social groups where a positive female, for example, has been. So we know most likely other positive deer's ones that are related to a positive deer. Okay. So where they interact and engage with one another, whereas Wisconsin's approach was to be a lot more broad brush, you know, the earn a buck program was in place, trying to massively reduce deer populations. A lot of additional opportunities outside of the season, less kind of surgical, I would say. So you could start to see the trends and indicators, especially after earn a buck went away, that that population trajectory was changing between the approach was Wisconsin was taken versus Illinois, which which which which who was right? Well, Illinois has been able to maintain relatively low prevalence rates through this past 25 years, post-introduction through the little through the very localized very intensive approach and working with landowners. But man, that one pissed people off though. 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 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 land owners, 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 with the objective of how big is the box, how big is a box, Missouri that you're talking about at this time? Well, they, they vary in size because some of them are pretty big because we've had slow spread. Okay. Give me a medium size box. Like medium size box would be 40 square miles, 40 square miles, you know. And at that time and time of the year, roughly did this 2012, 2014, that time frame, at that time, when you had a box, let's say you got a 40 square mile box. Okay. Um, how many like a township of six by six, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So picture like a roughy township size township 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? We really didn't set a target at that time. Just reduce it, just reduce it. 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? Okay. 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. Okay. During the regular hunting season. And then after the season, we say, hey, do you want to shoot some additional deer? Okay. If you, if you do, great, we'll give you that authorization. If you don't, would you let MDC staff do that? Okay. And if you don't want to be involved, that's fine too, right? Like completely voluntary from their standpoint. So then we would go through about a two month period. The thing we also did is we offer those deer back to the landowner. So we take them, get them tested, 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. It's Steve Rennella here, and it is White Tail Week at Me Eater. That's right. The most anticipated week of the year, White Tail Week at Me Eater. Both seasons are open boxer making rubs. And all week, we're going deep on the most hunted big game animal in America. We're also running the ultimate White Tail giveaway that the sort of the premier part of this package is you win a hunt with Mark Canyon and Jordan Bud at Jordan Bud's family ranch in the brasket where I have hunted Jordan is cool as hell. Her family's ranch is cool as hell. It is great hunting. You're going to have a blast plus yet gear free gear from over 20 brands. So keep an eye on meat eater channels all week and head to the meat eater store to sign up. No purchase necessary. Get all your rules at the meat eater store. 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 40 square miles? Can you think of an example during that time? And he wanted to do a reduction. What like just looking back, what did you ever achieve for percent reduction? Yeah, so probably 30 to 40 percent. Reduce it to 30 to 40 percent. 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 percent of your adult females on an annual basis, you're kind of keeping the population steady. Okay. 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 percent reduction. Okay. Tentially, 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 or should help. And that pattern is played out through time where we've had good landowner cooperation where we had that box was smaller and we got more intensive harvest. Those prevalence rates and those careers is still flat or steady even now a decade. That's right. Absolutely. Let's play the Y game. At that time, you'd go to a landowner and you'd say, 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? Yeah, that why was because of the long-term impacts of CWD on the population. Okay. Because everywhere else we'd seen it, we knew kind of three things were happening. It kills deer. It spreads and it increases in prevalence. We know that to sort of be uniformly true everywhere we've found it with the exception of New York where they probably got super lucky and shot the three deer that were actually positive. 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. Really? It's really rare. We're like really rare and we continue to monitor those kinds of things but it does happen but you don't count on it. I want to stick with the timeline, but I want to take a minute and jump out of the timelines or talk about the Ys. Okay. And like the Y 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 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. Yeah. Help me through that. No, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean like help me through that puzzle. Yeah. And to me, it's about sort of attempting control the fate of the herd. Okay. 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 and not have a high proportion of sick animals on the landscape. Got it. You know, the idea that we had we've had two deer in a small rural community along the Mississippi River Missouri just crawl up in folks yard and die, right? Like yeah, CWD, we don't want CWD to control the herd in that way. Yeah. 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. So is it fair 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, we're deer hunting is popular. Be like, 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 region, you would say, if we just let CWD rip and we don't do anything and we just let it run, 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 percent 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. And those are disease free. And those demonstrate the age class we want to see. And those have matured box in them. And that is the thing. But yes, either way we're talking about you're going to see less deer from your tree stand. Yeah, because 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. Yeah, like I don't know. Person comes in excited. They're like, how was your hunt? Awesome. Didn't see nothing. Right. No one's chasing that evening. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that collided with 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. Yeah. Sort of this possessive nature of the way that we feel about deer now, because we get on one camera, I got a deer on camera. That's a bit of it's my deer kind of the intensity of management. And we also had folks because of that, investing a ton of money in recreational land. Okay. I mean, some of the most valuable animals are for recreational opportunities, hunt deer turkeys. Yeah. Right. And that's very true across much of the Midwest. Oh, yeah, man. 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 be able to shoot giant bucks. And
then this idea that I'm going to have a fewer deer. Now what are we going to do? It's a tremendous ask. And it's one that we had some 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 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. They were present. Yep. 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 we 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 hot spot. 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. Yeah. Walk through what how these prevalence has moved. Meaning you find a spot with one or two percent. How does it grow when it's unchecked? And what does it look like when you're taking steps to check it? Yeah. So what you see is it's, you know, those deer have come into contact one another, spread it. Right. So it's that social interaction and engagement that occurs. If you're deer on landscape, if you're deer spraying 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 because they might be moving long distances, especially when you get into like the eastern Ozarks. Home ranges are pretty small really in the agricultural parts of the state that, 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 and those kinds of landscapes. Well, just based on deer movement. Okay. West Virginia is a great example. Hampshire County, they found CWD in 2004 or 2005. It hasn't spread all over West Virginia. It's still pretty localized and contained largely because deer in those landscape ships don't move. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So you'll see some of that. So that's the way it's to move more. They move more in ag areas than the damn mountain areas. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any heavily forested landscape, they move far less. Really? That's pretty well known. What do you at the risk of this being a huge tangent? Why? Why is that? Available resources and cover. Okay. Right. You know, you think about an ag country while there's food everywhere, there's betting cover and an escape cover may not be in the spot. So their traveling long distances for this primo food sources and 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. They're more of a homebody. I never knew that. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. So, so you see that. But what we see is through the first several years of a detection of really early detection is really slow increase in prevalence. I mean, less than 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. Okay. 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. Got it. 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 talk about 5% somewhere between 5% and 7% really being this tipping point. Got it. 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 before that before that. Okay. Yeah. So we we we published a couple papers in, you know, 2020, 2021 really looking at what does 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? 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 an different approach in a lot of places like we're seed up. He drifted up into Southern Missouri from Arkansas. It's much more widespread. It's not like it was just a single introduction where we could go track that. Okay. Spread out over across, you know, half the southern border. So in other cases where other cases where you just walk. Yeah, we have. Yeah. Yeah. When you look at Southwest Missouri, south of Taylor Rock and Bullsholes Lake, where it is kind of the northern edge of the Arkansas outbreak because of access because small landowner acreage because tough terrain and hard to get in and do additional deer management, we just don't even get made 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. Well, how with I understand coming to that decision because you have limited resources. Yeah. 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. But how does that edge not just march? We got a couple bigger reservoirs. Oh, physical barriers create a bit of a physical barrier. They're not an incomplete and they're not a complete barrier. We know deer swim, the rivers and the lakes, but it at least is going to slow it down. Okay. 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 jump the line. Right. Got it. Got it. Then we could be a little more aggressive in addressing those. What? 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 are coming to the meetings, right? That are articulating of 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? Yeah. I don't think folks do it intentionally, right? Like so, I'm not going to disparage anybody. Yeah. I value their perspectives and their opinions and based on what they know. So we've got, so interestingly, so we parked 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 I felt like we had pretty good communication. We had pretty good understanding what was going on with local landowners. Okay. And then really post COVID attitudes and perceptions changed pretty dramatically. A lot of mist. A lot of questioning of intentions that we just didn't face before that is a really different time period. But we've got folks who I don't believe it, right? Like show me the facts. You got to 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. Okay. It was really hard for our team and myself too, is we'd find new detections. It felt like Groundhog Day. Man talking about CWD management, Missouri since 2010. I couldn't tell you how many thousands of people I've talked about it, how many articles in the conservation is 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. Oh, is that right? Right. So like people not following it, not the way national conversation or state conversation, they're following it like, like my dear, my dear, and then my cameras are like, they wake up to it. Yeah, absolutely. And it just, and I've used this, the Bill Murray slide Groundhog Day numerous times in presentations because it feels that way. It's like, oh my god, we got it. Like, you know, sir, with all due respect, like, I don't understand where you've been. Right. Right. And so that's really hard. And from a communication standpoint to say, here's where information is advancing. And then you got a bunch of folks, a large group of folks who aren't as tied in and paying attention. And so then, and then you got those that are paying attention, but they get fixated on certain issues or certain parts of it, which I think is where this sort of broad concern starts to creep back in. Things like, well, it's clearly just the captive guys moving deer around landscape. It's all their fault. Sure. Right. Or no, it's not our fault. No, it's, it's all the deer hunters fault. Right. Like, it's where 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. and in this case it wasn't, but it creates these
these lines for us to be tribalistic in some ways. - Oh, hugely right. - But you feel the tribalism emerged with COVID. Or was it a new way? - A new way. - A new one, a new tribalism. And that was a skepticism from like being skeptical of like official dumb and science. - Yeah, because elements of that, like because elements of that community on the human health and of the landscape really made some big mistakes. - Yeah. - Right. - Yeah. - And then it became, I'm done with all y'all. - Yeah, all of you all, right? And so then-- - Like any egghead scientist guy is out. - Right. - And so then the real conspiracy start to creep in. Well, what's their motivations? What's their intentions? Why are they doing this? There must be something more we don't understand. - Yeah. - Right? - But an early, to stick this timeline a little bit, like I appreciate what you're saying about a heightened skepticism. But I don't have these dates down, but I know that there was a lot of that prior. And it would be, and maybe you can visit with me, 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? - Yeah. - 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 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 always looked down on deer baiting. They've always felt that it was deer baiting was beneath them, or deer baiting wasn't sportsmen like, and hunting high fences wasn't sportsmen like. Like this community, and now they're able to go, aha! - Gotcha. - Gotcha, it is bad. It's bad because it's spread CWD and I'm gonna 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 are red necks. I always wanted to get rid of shooting high fence deer 'cause I've always thought you guys are red necks. And now here I got my thing, right? - Yeah, absolutely. - And that was on the ground pre-COVID in Michigan. And 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. 'Cause I was out of there by that. I had moved away, but I just observed it happen in Michigan. So there was like a tribalism, 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? - Yeah, so for us, the first one that emerged was the Campus Servant Industry. And that our first CW Posit was found in a captive facility. - Got it. - And then our first free ranging Posit was found right outside of it. - I wanna get to this. - Right, and so I wanna get that whole, yeah, here's the chance. Here's the space where you got projected on us. - Oh, 'cause you never liked me. - You never liked me anyway. - And I've never been one of those. I'm not, you know, it's like they existed on the landscape for a long time, but we need to do it right, right? Like we need to try to keep her health safe. So in Missouri though, the baiting thing wasn't as big of an issue because it was prohibited back in the 1980s. 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 earlys, Matt grew up hunting deer like rabbits, right? Like a lot of drive on it. 'Cause there just wasn't very good deer. - So Missouri was a no bait state. So we didn't have bait, but we had to feed you. - We're in a no bait state right now. So it's not part of the conversation. - Right, right, 'cause it's always been no bait. - Yeah, so that wasn't a space where we had sort of controversy. - We had to. - We did prohibit the placement of food salt minerals in a core area, right? And with the rise of placement of minerals on the landscape and stuff like that, certainly that was challenging. But not one that was like died in the wool, we've been fighting over it for decades kind of thing. - Yeah. - Like some places have certainly had. - Yeah. - It's Steve Renelli here, and it is White Tail Week at Meat Eater, that's right. The most anticipated week of the year. White Tail Week at Meat Eater. Both seasons are open, boxer making rubs, and all week we're going deep on the most hunted big game animal in America. We're also running the ultimate White Tail giveaway, the sort of the premier part of this package, is you win a hunt with Mark Kenney and Jordan Bud at Jordan Bud's Family Ranch in Nebraska, where I have hunted. Jordan is cool as hell, her family's ranch is cool as hell. It is great hunting, you're gonna have a blast. Plus, you get gear, free gear from over 20 brands. So pick that, I wanna return to the spread. But pick up this kind of evolution through time of mid teens and sort of walk through from there to where we are now. - Yeah, so one of the things, so mid teens, we started to slowly detect it in a couple of additional places. Some of the lessons we learned in making inland counting, we sort of took with us to when we get any detection. - Okay. - Well, where we found ourselves a couple of years ago is the disease kept spreading. We kept finding additional detections. Again, all of them very low prevalence. So 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 50 or 60, there's 70 different queries 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 ask the hard questions of where do we continue to work? Who do we work with? How do we continue to incentivize landowners and hunters to do that? - Yeah. - 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, anytime-- - Would you see an F for real? - Yeah. So with these additional detections and the spreading and diffusion of it, our ability to continue to manage the disease was being really challenged. - Okay. - So you add to that, the growing narratives through social media and other places about ulterior motives, ulterior intentions, tension started to get pretty high, right? Like real serious questions and mistrust of why we were doing what we were doing. - Hit me with a, when you say that, hit me with an idea, an ulterior motive idea. Like I don't really, I don't get who, no, I do get it. I hear that it's like you all make your living, doing deer management, and this means more funding. - Right. - But what are the, what are the other ones? Like, well, you're incentivized to create an issue 'cause you'll get, 'cause somehow, even though you're like out of set state salary, there's somehow money to be made. Like what is it? - Yeah, the federal funding is supporting the work and the more deer the 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. 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 would be doing the work with commission, funds, and resources to do that work. There's the, well, it's good for the insurance companies, the insurance companies are happy 'cause this means there are fewer deer on the landscape, right? Like it's these things that start to creep in. And another one that I think is completely legitimate is folks who say, well, I get it, but it's not gonna work in the end. We're still gonna get to the same end point. - Sure, right. - I think we'll get to that end point on very different timescales and different time horizons based on whether we're doing something or we're not. - Yeah. - And then, again, back to, I don't want to impact my hunting today. - Yeah. - And that really hard conversation. I'm alive now. 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 on my tree stand now and see a bunch of deer. Yeah. Enough on the interesting playing long term like deer management games that are uncertain. Yeah. Exactly. Unknowns into an unknown time period. And folks say, well, you got to 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 tough decision to say, it's gotten spread far enough. We've got enough positives on the landscape. We've had enough 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 target removal work. 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 just got to a dress like all other sources of things that killed deer. How do we recognize this in the kind of the broader deer management landscape? Your move in some circles in some circles, your move was that was treated as Missouri has decided to again, they've decided just to let it rip. Yeah, and that's not true. Yeah, 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, it doesn't seem like that's the path you ought to continue to charge down. And so this last winter, 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 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, as ultimately hunters willing us an ability to harvest deer's what dictates and regulates the deer population across the Eastern US. What percentage, if you just take Missouri? What percentage of the state is in your view? What percentage of the state is in a position where doing these tarded removals, we're doing enhanced management strategies won't be effective because the disease is so prevalent. Small area along the southern border and then a small area in St. Genevieve County, South St. Louis. So 25%. Oh yeah, less than 5%. Less than 5%. Yeah, that's the other thing is that we still got a lot of really healthy deer populations across the state. We've got it in a number of spots and when you start to put management zones on the map or you start imposing restrictions on feeding and things like that carcass movement, it starts to make it look like the whole states covered up, but part of it's because we're slowly getting sparks everywhere. But in terms of kind of maybe above that tipping point, only a couple areas. One of the things that seems magical about CWD is 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 once COVID got cooking, you anticipated the weird pop-up spots and it became global and you're like, why is it global? Because humans move around. It's just a fundamentally different situation than you expect with deer. Where deer aren't flying around. Okay. What is your understanding of when it jumps? Yeah. This is one of those places. And then you test and you find that there's a moat of negativity around a new positive. I traditionally, 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. I don't believe it's a guy who like you know, boned out of deer and threw a shoulder blade out in his ditch. And all of a sudden, not as much a positive CWD positive, dear. I'm like, 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. Yeah. I'm right there with you. But I don't think I'm right. I'm just saying like, where how a person's head works 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 whole thing for a while that once you cut a deer up on a cutting board, the cutting board, unless you melt it with an oxy acetylene torch, it'll always be. I'm like, yeah, that's not spreading CWD. I don't know why, but I just know that it's not right. And that's where, you know, my thoughts on a hip of all some too, right? Through time as to what, what really is driving this and one of the new, yeah, the ones where it jumps the border. Yeah. And part of that is because folks that folks outside of Missouri 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. Yeah. 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 pre-earns does an animal actually have to get that results in them getting infected at a point where they become a CWD afflicted animal? Yes. And so the things that you're describing are all on that spectrum of 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. I had an awkward, I just started to interrupt, but I had an awkward conversation. I don't want to name the name. I had an awkward conversation with someone one time and I was saying, you guys got to stop with the cutting board. Like the cutting board stuff, you got to stop. I felt like you were creating a level of fear in hysteria, but you have no ability to back this up. Yeah. I felt the same way about some of the urine conversation. And again, not to say that we haven't gotten to a much better place with that. If you're a far away place like Alaska, like the likelihood of the disease getting there through the live importation of an animal's nearly zero, like nobody's likely to carry a carcass all the way to Alaska and introduce it there. And this is one more hole in the bucket that you could close. Then absolute, right? Like completely understand it. But if you're in the eastern US and the biggest fight that you're doing now is over whether we ought to do urine-based bans, there's other higher risk activities. It feels like a distraction. Yeah. How do you have the conversations about what really matters and what's really impactful? And in some cases, it's not disparaging to my colleagues in other states. They pulled the levers. They felt like they had authority and public will to pull where some of these other ones are really hard. Yeah. Okay. So get back in what you're saying about what is going on when one jumps the line. Yeah. So I think early on, it very much was and could likely have been pointed to captive servants moving the disease across the landscape. 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 we know those things were absolutely happening. Yeah. It wasn't a cutting board. Wasn't a cutting board, right? Like it's the whole biological package moving around. And so I think that's absolutely true. But then what I don't think we appreciated soon enough,
was that hunters likely were unintentionally moving it around to you, okay, and in the form of carcasses. You think so? I do think so. I don't know how else we would explain that it has moved to other places the way that is. Is that right? Yeah. And 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 that there has been movement of non-live it that you've had infections come from something other than contact with a living breathing deer. Yeah, I think so. I think it's completely reasonable. Okay. But it's not just the, hey, I went to Colorado and hunted west and dumped one carcass on my property. Okay. I likely think it's folks who who were very consistently doing it. Or do it in a way that we're consistent. Hey, we go to Colorado every year, chew meow deer, and we bring him 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. Really? Yeah. Either that, or it was so prevalent in captive servants way beyond what we believe it was. Yeah. And 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 definitely the first one that folks jumped to. They want to say, oh, well, there used to be an old deer pin down this road. Yeah. They were there for like five years. We don't know what happened. It gets really touchy as to whether that's the real source of it moving around. Okay. But I think it, I think it's not so easy that carrying dirt on your boots or pouring pee 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. Really? Right. So it's somewhere in the tree there that I don't I don't think we understand it. Because you don't understand what how much dose it takes. Right. Exactly. Is anybody looking at how much dose it takes? There've been a number of trials trying to look at it. It's only until more recently that we've been able to quantify how much preons are even in something. So only with the modern techniques, all of our diagnostic stuff was just detected or not detected, not quantify how many preons are in saliva or urine or bone or the muscle tissue. And all that likely depends on the stage of progression of any individual animal 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. Yeah. It's like it's totally different. I don't know. Anyway, I want to conflate it. But I remember looking at completely different. It's not a preon disease completely different. I remember looking at like like Trichonella larva. Right. There's a number per unit of weight. And you can measure like how infected a tissue is with Trichonella larva, which gives which brings about trigonosis. Be like there are blank larvae per blank ounces. And there's things that are very infected. And there's things that are not very infected. Right. Is it with a deer? Is there a thing like that that there's a deer that really has it and a deer that that kind of has it and a deer that doesn't really have it? You talked pathologists and they yes. And that's that stage of progression. But there's no way to measure like the thing. Not not that I'm that's a whole other realm. This person is riddled with cancer. Right. They have cancer in their lymph nodes. Right. And this person kind of barely has cancer. Well, we do see this though. Okay. 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. Okay. Nearly two thousands. You had to test the yobex. It was believed that that was a gold standard. I had to test the yobex. What is that base of the brain? Okay. That's where the preons were accumulated. That's where they were seeing it and you'll do an elk. Well, through looking at other tissues, what they recognize that it actually accumulates in the lymph nodes. Okay. Especially the medial retropharyngeal lymph nodes. Like these the ones that set right up here. Yep. Which again suggests some sort of an ingestion of the preons as part of that pathway. So what you'll see is when they do knee crops, these other animals that are in like really early stages versus very late stages, you'll see progression of that disease through different tissues. Okay. And the presence of them in different tissues is the fact. But that's like internal spread. Right. Right. That's it running its course. Right. And once I guess it's kind of a little bit ties into it would be like once a deer gets some. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And inside the body. Yes. Meaning he never gets, you know what you think you're getting a cold and you swear you're getting a cold. But then also in the next day, you're like, oh, it didn't take right or whatever. You know, I mean, like, right. Like I beat it. I don't know. Like I didn't get it. I never got sick. This isn't the thing with CWD as far as we know. As far as we know. That is absolutely the case. There is a immune system can't beat it. There is no immune response to preons. The body recognizes them as a protein. That's all it recognizes. It doesn't recognize it as some foreign body that needs to be attacked. Okay. 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. Yeah. And so with advanced testing techniques, 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 that in utero transmission. So a fetus can actually get CWD from a heavily infected female, right? Like when they can. Okay. Like they're just now starting to be able to demonstrate that that fawn with CWD. 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 in fact, it is is extremely high. Got it. Got it. That a little bit of answers that question in mind about 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 yeah, bacterial infections that that it doesn't make you well equipped to understand like a preion disease. It's so different, right? Yeah. Because 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 in about a female. It gets infected. They will push those antibodies through a colostrum to her fawns, which give them protection, right? 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. I'm glad he brought up blue tongue and EHD because I feel like 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 lookers right perspective being the sky is falling the end of the world is nigh. On the extreme of lookers left, which I will call 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. It's evolved. It went from it's not actually a thing. It's a make it's make believe to it is a thing. Probably always been there. It's a thing. And there's emerged in this end of it not as bad as the HD. Yeah. Like why are we talking about CWD? Why are we not talking about the HD? And there's kind of become this this rhetorical strategy they use of also being like hyper focused on EHD diodes. How bad EHD is as a way to sort of demonstrate these people the egg heads are missing the story. There's an EHD story. EHD comes and kills all the damn deer. But it's fine because they come back. Why are you guys so focused on this CWD thing? This This is what's killing deer. - Yeah.
because they come back. Yeah, 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 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 an EHD outbreak that we've been dealing with through time and those populations recover. Three to five years very localized in impact, like I was describing passing on of antibodies, they get the disease, doesn't kill all of them despite the belief that some have. It can be extremely lethal, especially where they're really naive to it and haven't been previously exposed. But the pattern of the EHD is changing too. In terms of where we see it and how we see it. In the South, EHD is present or one of the hemorrhagic diseases are present in the midflies, kind of there all the time. Okay. 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. Okay. And then you'll get a little bump in mortality, but you'll have sick deer all the time. Okay. Like nearly every year. And a lot of the Southern states they'll have deer die of EHD. And what we're in that's an area, that would be an area where there's been EHD for a long time. Long time. Okay. 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. Okay. 1987, 1997, 2012 was unbelievable. I bet we lost a quarter of a million deer statewide. Is that right? It was awful and across much of the Midwest. But most of the time, it's in a corner of a county 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 of Southeast or no, I say, small area, but an area in Southeast or no, Ohio really significant mortality. Yeah. But in almost every scenario, you shoot a few less dose for a couple of years, deer populations 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. Oh, is that there's less social stress? There's less nutritional stress on them than they respond. But what we're seeing is now as weather patterns and climate is changing a little bit, we see the impacts of the massive impacts of EHD occurring even farther north. In places that have been dilated, not dealt with it before. 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, you know, like that, then yeah, it has a real direct impact. But that happens. You go to a dirt tank and there they all floating in the dirt tank, but that happens once a decade at most. We had a research project a number of years ago in which had a bunch of deer collar this before I worked the department had a bunch of deer collard and they think they lost somewhere between seven and 10% of those collar 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. I see it 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 a van Lewis harvest for a few years. We can do something about that. CWD is just kind of slowly take more and more of the deer population. So you view these two things as just like fundamentally different conversations. Fundamentally operating very differently from a population dynamic 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 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, you know, in the ability of it to thrive will just be sort of topped off. It's Steve Renelli here and it is Whitetail Week at Me Eaters. That's right. The most anticipated week of the year, Whitetail Week at Me Eaters. We're also running the ultimate Whitetail giveaway. The sort of the premier part of this package is you win a hunt with Mark Kenney and Jordan Bud at Jordan Bud's family ranch in Nebraska where I have hunted Jordan is cool as hell. It is great hunting. You're going to have a blast. Plus you gear free gear from over 20 brands. So keep an eye on Me Eaters channels all week and head to the Me Eaters store to sign up. Get all your rules at the Me Eaters store. Crystal Ball at For Me if you're comfortable. Let's go down to that. What percentage of the state did you say it's just like I would say 5% 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 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 Boseman was when they finally like we're throwing in the towel on it. We got an email because for 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 and eventually they we got an email that said if your kid goes to school consider them a direct exposure. We're done. We're done. They all got it. It's like we're done. Like done what we can. Yeah we tried all that stuff standing Johnny home and he can't come and at this point just if your kid goes to school they're a 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. 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 yeah I suppose you guys go revisit it with some kind of new understanding right but like take that 5% in crystal ball. 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 yeah so I think we're seeing especially in eastern white till dear populations that trajectory push a little quicker than we may have thought okay if thought it was gonna 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 yeah 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 they're just aren't as many dear here okay and what's happening right like more talent is not because we're sharp shooting them and it's not because we're sharp shooting them because in a lot of those places is the it they it was farther progressed than they ever understood it to be okay in terms of kind of low surveillance and kind of low diligence you know so I think what plays out is that you lose the older age structure of bucks because most of them become infected and died at a relatively early age and you have a yes are you saying you think what plays out or is it like this is that seem like that seems like that's what's playing out like oh yes okay not it's not theoretical no it's not theoretical because you you can look at the harvest data from like eastern Wyoming and eastern Colorado okay age structure is absolutely shifted they're shooting far fewer older age class bucks okay so there's just fewer deer on the lane escape the herd is younger because of that okay 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 like CWD has passed up cars it's passed up pretty close to it yeah yeah what West Virginia's current research project that's what they're demonstrating CWD's like next to hunters it's the next highest source okay so it's it's number two to hunters 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 okay so so the my concern is is that yeah that opportunity for recreational harvest gets to diminish every deer that gets killed by CWD is a deer hunter can't kill him
Yeah, and eat and enjoy and appreciate, right? So so the number of deer on the landscape will just be fewer Do you feel that CWD because it because Early you mentioned like a buck a mature buck is the most likely deer within a population to get CWD Proxy travels more. I don't know. He's around more Does CWD kill big bucks at a higher rate than hunters kill big bucks? Jump saying like if if we're looking at a popular 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? Well, there's some interesting data if you look at the long-term Research, Wisconsin has done okay It's fascinating and 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 Oh like the mortality on CWD infected deer through hunter harvest Is substantially higher than the mortality of an uninfected deer like they're easier to do. Yeah, right? And so it's it I think in ways can send this perception. Well, we're still shooting A lot of nice antler bucks, right? Well, you're shooting those are 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. Okay. I mean a deer the progression I think it's just a numbers game okay, right? It's like how much infection do you have and how many deer 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 it finally goes through the processes that comes to the disease. Okay, so if you got two and a half year old buck that is CWD positive The odds of making him making it to four and a half are extremely low. Okay, that that that's just 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. Yeah, right? And those are the CWD positives when we remove through hunter harvest Have you are you aware of anyone or is this possible to Fill a research facility With with a bunch of infected animals and take totally good care of them 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 Fence area with triple fence, whatever you got to do it might be just unethical to do this. I don't know And within there you're gonna say like no, we're gonna put we're gonna have a hundred deer in here And it's just balls out and fasted They all got it 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? It's been done and what happens in those situations they die And they don't make adults they don't make yeah, they don't make adults. It's just as a young population It would be yeah, yeah, I mean it's been it's been done and cat 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 a progression of the disease? That's how we know 24 you know 18 to 24 months still Clinical symptoms start to show up. That's how they die. This works been done. Okay, so that's been done in a closely observed population Not while yeah, 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. Yeah a lot has been done and this isn't just speculation as to what will happen Have a disease will progress and what some of these other actions are but some of that Reproduction just trickles on Because you have some animals making it to two three years old Yeah, and they're dropping fawns. I think that's what does happen reproduction trickles on right? It will trickle on and so long as young females will be responsible for a disproportionate amount of the reproduction So your ability for that population to really grow and thrive It's going to 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 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 fawn survived to to kind of recruitment into the fall population And so it's just a real dampening of the population because through time is so that's the concern as it gets younger They're not able to to withstand it What's the highest prevalence you've seen in a wild population? Sir reports of you know adult males prevalence in like Alberta and Saskatchewan in the neighborhood of 75% Damn really 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 Yeah, they're interacting engaging with one another And then by the time they get to two and a half plus They've been exposed or just no way around it god. I don't know that that's how it plays out everywhere Um, 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 south eastern west constant or southwest was constant um, you know 50% of the Two plus year old males and females have it. That's where my buddies the in the hunt and those hot areas down there That's where my bodies are at and so they're at that like they're at Some years This 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 going to be that more The numbers vary But it's going to be the assumption is half more than half of the bucks The people in your community got Repositive bucks. Yeah. Yeah, and that's the story But within those bucks and here's the deal though where they're at still within those boxes some damn nice bucks Yeah, yeah because of white tail and really good Condition in great habitats like exist in southwest was constant 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 landscape because there's fewer deer. Mm-hmm. They do have some of that opportunity to express their potential Yeah, right. So you you can still have bucks into older age. I mean nice ain't not old but big yeah But not as many either understood right? Yeah What is your what is your guys take on this this conversation that's going on now? I should call it conversation. It's going on research and other things suggesting that 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 him as hard as quickly. Yeah And that through simple like Uh survival the fittest like through classic Darwinian evolution Eventually will emerge This population of deer That it doesn't hit him as hard It doesn't hit him as quick Maybe they get it but they do live to be six or seven years old by the time it takes him down And that you could speed this Up By pumping these deer into wild populations to be like hey It'll happen it it'll likely happen in time That there's going to be some 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 Yeah, so we've known for some time uh, that the 96 s s deer Or um have a little higher survival little less susceptible Um To the disease that that's not That's been known for you know was it the terms you use I never heard of it's 96 s s 96 s s a pream protein Um coding gene okay
And again, I don't know that we'd know all of it and you'd have to talk to a pre-embiologist and a geneticistic and completely describe all of it. But they have a G or an S at the 96 coat on. Those that are SS do appear to show delayed effects of the disease. We've known that for some time. And the GG show the shortest duration of the disease. So if a 96 GG deer, let's say it has 18 month incubation. - Right. - An SS might have 36 month incubation. - Okay. - There is some timescale difference there. What exactly it is, I don't know. - Okay. - And there's some stuff published in 2017 about this. And then the GS through Darwinian selection, like the GS, somewhere in between. - Okay. - So having one of those S leals gives it some greater slower progression of the disease. Interestingly though, a lot of the early survey work suggested that the presence of the S leal is relatively low in the wild populations. - Okay. - So it's rare for some reason and we don't understand why. And some work done like Columbian white tails, it's not even present. It's a key deer, I don't believe it's even present. So there's some of these small isolate populations where it's not even known to occur. - Okay. - So something through selection has kept that relatively low. - Okay. - If there's somehow a superior deer, something's kept them relatively low. But we just don't fully completely understand what all the other attached survival impacts are. - Sure. - And this is worth this, I think, starting to come to light. And certainly Chris C. Berry 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 merit in that we know that in scraping, right? The way that we eradicated scraping sheep or largely eradicated scraping sheep was through very intensive breeding programs. - Okay. - In which they identify this delay or this resistance to the disease. It still pops back up. It still comes back. That's through very, very extensive animal husbandry kind of activity. - God of tracking lineages and being very intense in that breeding. So the ability for that to happen to free range population is limited to scope and scale. 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. - Yep. - They live longer, they spread more pre-ons onto the landscape which will probably advance the disease maybe quicker. - Yeah. - So that's some of the questions that we had. - Well, I think that what you're looking at is you're looking at that you've arrived at the 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. We can slow it, right? We've had a couple of victories you mentioned in New York, went from a pot, 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, there's really, when we're talking about decades, nothing anybody's gonna do. - It would be the last hope. - Yeah, yeah, and I think it's a matter of how quick, how can through management and the way that we're shooting dear, change the trajectory of the disease or do we just gotta let it play out? - Yep. - And I think the way that we manage dear, we can change that endpoint by decades. - Really? - In terms of thinking about the way that we hunt dear, the way that we shoot them. But it's counter to where we are in a deer hunting culture today. - Oh, I wanna make you clarify your point. - Management. Okay, if we sit here and agree that, if we sit here and agree that if we do nothing, if all is testing and all everything stops right now, no management is, no nothing. We never talk about CWD again. And we would say in a century, we land at like the, in a century, this country will just be like, like, dear in America are 50, 60, 70% positive for CWD. Are you uncomfortable at that statement? - We do nothing. - Yeah, if we do nothing. - In a hundred years. - Oh, yeah. - Okay. - In a hundred years, in America, dear, writ large are 50, 60, 70%, okay. Do you feel that 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? - Yeah. - Or do you think just in 10 or 20 years we could make it be different? - Yeah, I think in decades we can make it be different. I don't know in a century, right? - I think it's crazy. - It's crazy. - Okay, forget a century. - But I think decades for sure. - Okay. - And I think what's starting to come together, there was, you know, Wyoming recently, the co-op unit recently published a paper looking at different trends and hunt units 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? - 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're saying that you could have a given population and not like the New York example or maybe there's three deer that had it and they killed 'em all. But you're saying within a population there can be a down? - Yeah, or it can be stable. - Yeah. - Or slowly growing. - Yes. - By having enough harvest on the population where you removed 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's data suggests too. But once it does spread, and if you don't stay on top of it long enough, then prevalence takes off. 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 that certainly the age structure of the population, the sex ratio of the population, all dictate how quickly that might happen. So there's probably some underlying things that we just need to understand about. How do we manage Eastern white-tailed deer populations in a way that tries to minimize the progression of the disease? - Yeah. So I guess, I mean, I know I'm realizing that you kind of clarified this point earlier, but I didn't pick up on it, is that maybe I'm putting words in my 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 suggested it's going to grow? - It does. - Okay. - That's the point at which you have enough infected individuals on the landscape that they're just going to continue to spread it at a rate faster than you've removed it. - From all of it, that's a three percent can become a two, but a 10 probably doesn't become a nine. Or a three, right? And because it gets back to, okay, 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 pocketed dose that has the disease. And if you can remove a high proportion of those dose in that spot, you got the opportunity to set it back. And that's where that time of detection becomes really important. Small scale, low level of 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. - I know it's right. 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. - Yeah, yeah, but it's in the psyche, right? 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. But back to the question on kind of the next steps of the genetics work, and is it possible to then reintroduce individuals with the 96 SS gene and a high breeding value into a population? The only way that's going to be successful would be as if we get to a spot where we have pulled populations way down. - Got it. - Right? The idea that, you know, with hundreds of thousands of deer in a state, a million, right? Like we probably got a million and a half deer, Missouri. one.
it would take to shift the genetic makeup in that population by introducing deer into the population would be astronomical. So from a practical standpoint, I appreciate where the captive deer folks are 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 population more resilient. 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 that back to the century sort of thing that we would change the trajectory of the disease by reintroducing some of these deer. I just the numbers don't add up. Yeah, so you know how some humans have like a connected deer lobe and some have like my kind whatever you call that, right? It'd be like if you like it said like, hey, we're going to take two people with connected deer lobes and move them into town here. Right. And we'll see. Right. We'll see what happens in a few years of their way more people than yeah, right? You'd be like, dude, come on. 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 the 96 SS in the population. So it's like, okay, something's going on. That's happening. I add, and so folks have concerns like, well, then shooting deer in those spots, are you risking shooting those that are abandoned? They're good ones. Yeah. The good ones. I point back to the to the west constant data question. I point back to the west constant data, which suggests, no, in fact, if you got CWD, you're probably more susceptible to harvest, you know, 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. I think there's a reason why a really intensive localized harvest can still be very advantageous in shifting the potential of the population. It's Steve Renella here, and it is Whitetail Week at Me Eaters. That's right. Whitetail Week at Me Eaters. We're also running the ultimate Whitetail giveaway that the sort of the premier part of this package is you win a hunt with Mark Kenney and Jordan Bud at Jordan Bud's family ranch in Nebraska where I have hunted Jordan is cool as hell. It is great hunting. I'm sure you guys thought of this. This is back in up a ways. If CWD deer are easier to do, they're easier to get is perhaps hunter samples, hunter submitted samples skewing the data. Meaning 50% of the box getting harvested in X County are CWD positive. Is that maybe not an indicator that 50% of the box on the landscape are positive? They're getting the sick ones because the sick ones are dumber and easier to get. Yeah. This is a whole conversation of drive statisticians completely crazy. Oh, it does. Oh, yeah. It drives them crazy and it drives me crazy sometimes when we talk about apparent prevalence versus observed prevalence. Okay. And what the real prevalence is. Okay. Right. And it's this thing. It's like the sampling mechanism in which you get at are there inherent biases. This is what we started this conversation and talked about. We inherently biased our CWD sampling towards adult males to try to better detect it. And what we try to report is that of the samples we've collected, this is the percentage that are positive. 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? You think so? Yeah. But it doesn't matter, right? Like, while there it's 23%, plus or minus 2%, or where it's 30%, plus or minus 2%, I got you. Doesn't matter. Yeah. You know, zero zero. What's the trajectory? And so that's a lot of the way it's even the way we manage 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? Yeah. And what are the attitudes around that population? That gives you a better handle on. As a manager, what levers can it should you pull to change the direction? This is this is very answering, but it's interesting. I've had it explain to me that when you look at Dolcee, Parvastin, Alaska, year-to-year rates, you know what you're mostly looking at? You're mostly looking at the weather. Yeah. It's 10 day seasons, right? And more than an indicator of how many sheep around the landscape, it's primarily an indicator of like, was it a high ceiling? People could fly, people could glass, people could hunt, because in a 10 day season, if six days are fogged in and it's raining the whole time, it's like there's no Dolcee left if you look at Harvest Data, right? It's just like a way of understanding it. Yeah. We see that our our November portion of firearms deer season can start as early as November 10, and as late as November 16th. You see a very different kind of situation 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 doves. We start on the 10th. We shoot more bucks. It's completely a product of that. Yeah. So yeah. So you'd look at me like, okay, I see that you're seeing that you're think there's deer trends, but there's also just like you're looking at a calendar. Yeah. Yeah. In some ways, folks will get all up kind of up in arms. They're like, Oh, why was the harvest down? Well, whether it 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. But it's you still see it. Because those little blitz get leveled out, but it's long season. Yeah. An early analyst kind of, you know, masks some of those kinds of things or longer, you know, more participation in a late muscleover season can kind of mask some of those things. But what do you feel? We've talked a lot about hot spots. We've talked a lot about areas that have it. Let's go to where you got a pristine area. 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. What do you want to do there? Are you like, no, we're just going to kick back and hunt deer like normal. 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. We got into this. Go to that area. You don't go to that county and be like, let's get out of it and knock these suckers back now. It's an interesting conversation. And it's one that we found ourselves in very early on. Find it all the time. Right. So we had, we had, we implemented an antler point restriction. So four points on one side, we started that work in early 2000. And trying to encourage folks to shoot more antlerist deer, let bucks grow to older age classes. Even even in CWD, no four CWD. Okay. So that that really changed hunter behavior, hunter harvest, age structure, starting to get older age class bucks. Okay. 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. It 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 removed it to remove it? Because we were new. We were protecting bucks into older age classes. Yeah. Which again, from a disease major standpoint, it's not what you want to do. Yeah. And so we chose not to and I, I many times, same thing on the feeding in placement of mineral restrictions, right? Like, are we setting ourselves up where you're creating a deer population is more susceptible to it once it gets there? Yeah. And I don't know that there's a right answer to that question. Well, homie, you've leaned. I'm sorry, I got confused. In those cases, those, those, those CWD free areas, you've leaned toward adjusting. We didn't. Okay. We did not. We left them in place until we had a CWD positive detection. But you don't, you can't, you don't know that that was old. I don't know that that was the right thing to do or not. Yeah. Where do you sit right now on it? I don't know that we can answer that question. Yeah. Yeah. Because 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. Okay. Yeah. But yeah, I made the argument, if they're 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. No, I know where you're saying. 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, 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 don't know that that was the right decision or not. How much to have you felt you've been able to influence honor behavior. Like I hear again and again and again all around the country that that people they don't want to shoot dose. There's no one shoot dose. They don't like the days of people living off venison and stuff. It's not like it was in the old days. And it's just ingrained in people like they don't want to shoot those. You can't incentivize them to shoot those. How true how true have you found that to be? We don't rely on venison as our core source protein anymore. Right. Or it's so small. And the number that do or are insignificant in the grand scheme. Not to say people to shoot deer don't eat them. They eat them. They give them way. They turn them into snack sticks and they get really expensive to shoot one. So yeah, no, there's no question that that is shifted deer management. Missouri had long been one of those states where we did not have a problem have folks shoot analyst here. We've been very successful through time with folks shooting a high number of analysts here. And it goes back today still. It's it's gotten but it's a little more challenged today than it was. But yeah, some of the perspectives I've just got a shoot a buck just weren't present in Missouri as a hurdle to get over. It's a more modern shift in perspectives. Yeah. And part of that, you know, I think goes back to the history of deer management in Missouri. I've got notes of folks in the 50s when we had still had very few deer certainly didn't have them statewide that were already starting to talk about we need we need dough harvest to start to manage some of these populations. Yeah. So it was a very early part of the conversation introduced analyst 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 analyst deer and then really excited when they got to shoot two analyst deer. Now they're saturated with opportunity. There's so many deer. Yeah. 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 because they're not hungry. They're not hungry in the same way. It's the craziest thing. I've had 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. Oh my gosh. Living off deer. Yeah. Absolutely. Living off those. And they were trying this is back in the day when you were like you had a problem with people poaching those. Now it's so funny that you're sitting on the other extreme. Yeah. You can't talk people into getting those back then. You couldn't talk people out of stop and killing those. 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. Yeah. 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 like Missouri and others are trying to find ways that they make it easier for hunters to donate deer. Yeah. 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? It's a challenge. It's a huge challenge. It brings up a thing that I hate even talking about because I don't fully understand the impacts. And I think the impacts will be many, particularly in terms of access. But it brings up this conversation that's like that's like anathema to American deer management would be what about if you could sell them? Yeah. Yeah. And there's a little I just came back from Florida. We're down Florida gator hunting and they 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 that this is the first year I've ever had the sign meaning prior to this year. And it's not illegal. She's not doing it prior to this year. You went gator hunting. One option is you take that sucker down and they measure it is 10 feet long. It's 60 bucks a foot and you walk out the door with cash in your hand. If you brought a system, if you introduced the system where you're like, no, dude, you got it and bring it to me 200 bucks. People shooting those. My kid and his bodies like they're young enough for they don't have all this history. If you told my kid and his body's how I'll give you 200 bucks for every doe you bring me they're doing they're bringing those. Yeah. And I think this is this why I quit their job. Yeah. This is wide ranging conversation that the true believers in the North American model would string us up for. I hate talking about it. Like to be intellectually honest, I can't not talk about it. The director of the guy in your position in Michigan, we read the letter on the show. The guy in your position in Michigan sent a letter. It was printed in newspapers, sent a letter begging people to kill those. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And 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 tank to American wildlife populations in the old days. It was you and you put a value, you incentivize 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 what is the commercial demand. If we're incentivized to do this because of CWD, how hungry is the market for CWD meat? Yeah. Do people in grocery stores want CWD meat? If we're going to do this in an area with 50% prevalence, C, does that mean that the 50% that come to us by the hunters that are hunting them for market? Do they not get paid 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. Yeah. I don't know. It's like you'd have to there's so much to figure out, but it's that's what you would do. And all of a sudden you'd have your dough killing problem to be over. Yeah. And that's why as I indicated earlier, we sort of tried to double down on these conversations local land owners and hunters and say, look guys, hunters have been the original tool for managing to your populations in the regulated way that we've been doing it. It may not be sustainable into the future 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. Yeah. And we can either be part of informing the way that change happens or we can be subjected to it. Yeah. And so I think that's where my mind is on that conversation and what's it going to take for us as hunters to take some responsibility in this effort in a state agency's trying to work with hunters to manage a deer population that is challenging. I have a deer friend and I know I've known him a long time and I know him well. And he's like, he's uncorrupted. 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 your Pitman Robertson money and you're all this and that. Managers ask you again and again and again to kill some doves. And you can't be bothered, you can't be troubled that much. You can't be troubled as much as what it takes to gut a doe in the woods. I'm envious of the West a lot, right? Where you have way more demand and pressure for tags than there are animals to provide that opportunity, right? In the East, you can't give out enough tags or 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. The other thing we face is small land ownership, private land owner decisions 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, especially in states that have small end ownership. If you got tens of thousands of acres in South Texas, right? Like you control the way everything happens. But in much of the east, you got small end parcels and you got to be working with your neighbors figure out what the deer population is going to look like. And folks just aren't terribly willing to work with one another. But we can't do it through regulatory. We just can't. Regulations aren't going to get us out of this problem. They haven't got a chance to it. Won't get us out of it. I judge hunters by what they're eating at dinner. Yeah. If I go to a big hunter's house, and I'm like, dude, what? You're eating stuff from the store. You're eating chicken breast, right? Dude, you can be shooting doles for eight bucks a piece. Right. Right. Right. Right. You know, they're begging you. It's eight dollars. Right. Right. We're not hungry, right? Like we don't. We pay for that. What you pay for that state, dude, you could have bought a whole deer. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Not hungry. Not hungry. So was there anything that I should have asked you about that I didn't ask you? Gosh, we've covered the wide range of things. I thought the thing I didn't ask you about. We don't need to spend time on it. It's early. I was saying my early perception of it was human health, which is shifting over time. How much is that linger on in your head? 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. Yeah. If there is one. Well, at this point, it's zero. Yeah. Yeah. We don't know. We don't know. It's just a zero risk. There's. Yeah. Yeah. There's no. Yeah. No, no, no 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. Yeah. Right. Is is a really hard one to have that petrified. I used to be petrified by it. Yeah. 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. No, I've just, no, I just sort of lives in the back of my head. Yeah. I mean, I think we have to communicate what the public health officials tell us they want communicated in terms of out of abundance caution. We tell you not to eat any sick deer regardless. So is that your state stands? Yeah. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And I think we try to do that too. And it's your decision, right? Like we don't tell you, you shouldn't. We hear what is communicated. It's recommended not to. You choose to that, that's your decision to make. 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. Right. What's the headline? Right. Yeah. I don't think I think the headline was don't eat it. And the asterisk was no one's ever gotten it. And my head is switched. The headline is no one's gotten it. Yeah. Yeah. And the asterisk is maybe don't eat it. I don't know. Yeah. And so then those that drift down the, you know, the extremely cautious approach, you know, are somewhat fearful that ask 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 and 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 the repeat, potential for repeated exposure. And then through time to mean you mean the whole damn deer. Yeah, right. And through time, there are suggestions that the preons are changing, right? That the confirmation of the preon protein look is looking a little different or there's slight variations, which may interrupt some of that species specific barriers. But again, we don't have any evidence that that's happened yet. Got it. Yeah. Any else I should have asked you about? Not that I can think of. Never probably something, but thanks for coming on, man. Again, this has been listening to Jason Sumner's, the director of the Missouri Department of Conservation. And I, I know that last, last note, I know all that subjective whitetails, all deer in general. So whitetail week at meat eater, September 28, October 4. We got a big giveaway. We got the ultimate whitetail giveaway, which is live at the meat eater store. So check this out. We got a headline prize where you went a guided whitetail hunt with Mark Kenyon and our friend Jordan Bud as well. We got a whitetail hunt in Nebraska. I've been out there hunting the places sweet. There's a Matthews bow, a tethered saddle, a meat brand meat grinder, a grilla smoker, sig binos and dude, sig binos are the best binos. First light whisper down crispy boots on X 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 once again, Jason Sumner's thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about something I care about a lot of the whitetail deer. And it's an important topic and it's one we're just going to have to continue talking about. Now, and if you hate hearing about it, you people that listen, uh, tough titty. We're going to keep talking about it. It's Steve Renella here and it is whitetail week at meat eater. That's right. The most anticipated week of the year, whitetail week at meat eater, both seasons are open boxer making rubs and all week we're going deep on the most hunted big game animal in America. We're also running the ultimate whitetail giveaway that the sort of the premier part of this package is you win a hunt with Mark Kenning and Jordan Bud at Jordan Bud's family ranch in Nebraska where I have hunted Jordan is cool as hell. It is great hunting. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is now the top concern in deer management, affecting hunting, regulations, and public perception far more than any other issue.
Missouri first detected CWD in 2010, and early intensive sampling found no cases, suggesting the disease was either rare or newly introduced.
A shift to targeting adult male deer via taxidermy sampling improved early detection, as mature bucks are more likely to carry the disease.
Missouri adopted a localized management strategy inspired by Illinois, using small "boxes" of 40 square miles to remove deer and reduce disease spread while minimizing impact on hunters.
The disease spreads slowly at low prevalence (under 5%) but accelerates once prevalence reaches 5–7%, making early detection and intervention critical.
As CWD spreads, public distrust grows, fueled by misinformation, tribalism, and social media, leading to skepticism about agency motives and deer management practices.
Missouri has now paused its post-hunting removal programs due to declining landowner support and diminishing effectiveness in spreading areas.
The focus has shifted to collaborative, transparent deer management that respects hunters’ rights and acknowledges uncertainty in long-term outcomes.
Summary:
Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is now the defining issue in deer management, deeply impacting hunting practices, public trust, and state regulations. In Missouri, first detected in 2010, CWD initially appeared rare due to extensive early sampling, which found no cases—suggesting a recent introduction. The state responded with a localized, targeted approach inspired by Illinois, using taxidermy sampling to detect the disease in adult bucks and implementing small geographic "management boxes" of about 40 square miles to reduce deer populations and slow spread.
Research shows CWD spreads slowly at low prevalence but accelerates significantly once it reaches 5–7%, making early detection vital. Over time, however, public skepticism grew, fueled by misinformation, social media narratives, and perceived conflicts of interest—such as accusations that agencies prioritize funding over public welfare. These concerns intensified after the pandemic, creating tribalism between hunters and officials.
As CWD spread across more areas, especially in southern Missouri and near St. Louis, the effectiveness of localized removals declined, leading Missouri to pause its post-hunting deer culls. Today, the state emphasizes collaboration with landowners and hunters, recognizing that long-term deer herd health depends on shared responsibility, transparency, and adaptive management.
While CWD’s exact transmission route remains unclear—though carcass movement and captive animal trade are key suspects—consensus holds that it spreads through contact with infected animals, not through urine, cutting boards, or human activity. Ultimately, the focus is no longer on containment, but on maintaining viable, healthy deer populations through inclusive and science-based stewardship.
FAQs
Chronic wasting disease is a fatal, contagious neurological disease affecting deer and elk. It's a top concern in deer management because it spreads through social interactions, can reduce deer populations, and threatens the long-term health and sustainability of deer herds across the U.S.
CWD spreads primarily through direct contact between deer, especially in areas where they interact socially. It can also spread via environmental contamination, such as through infected carcasses or feces, which may persist in the environment for long periods.
Missouri's initial response involved extensive sampling of deer, with over 22,000 tests conducted between 2002 and 2004. This helped establish a baseline showing that if CWD were present, it would have been detected at low levels, indicating the disease was likely new and not widespread.
A prevalence of around 5% marks a tipping point where CWD spreads more rapidly due to increased contact between infected and uninfected deer, leading to exponential growth. This is when management efforts become more critical to prevent wider spread.
Missouri uses a localized, science-based approach, such as creating 'management zones' where deer populations are reduced through targeted hunting and landowner collaboration. These efforts are designed to slow disease spread without drastically affecting overall deer hunting opportunities.
Yes, hunters are key partners in CWD management. Missouri works with landowners and hunters to promote responsible hunting practices, including enhanced harvest in affected areas, and to maintain public trust through transparency and shared decision-making.
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