Deadly Zombie Deer
General Topic
Interesting news, and headline.
No facts at all to back it up. Other than some guy that spend way to much time in school saying so.
Left wing propaganda designed to curtail hunting. LOL!
If this becomes a government sponsored public health issue, what happens to wonton waste laws? Can the government make you pack venison out and legally suggest consumption of something deemed a public health concern ? Unfortunately, we have not seen anything yet, this is only the beginning.
In CO testing for CWD is sometimes mandatory in some unit and will do in for any deer or elk killed in CO for a fee. If tested positive they recommend not eating. And will either replace tag or refund cost of tag and points or something to that effect. I think they will even pay for processing or has in the past.
I test my venison if testing is available. I will not feed untested venison to others without their full understanding and consent, especially to children.
This is not a good situation, will be a real game changer on how consumers look at wild game for consumption.
If CWD is such a problem, why the heck does Colorado issue elk and deer tags in the many GMUs in the state that are declared to have CWD Positive animals within their game regulation's unit boundaries? Seems like a huge liability issue if it were truly a threat. Someone is trying hard to make up a fake situation to get their agenda passed. I call BS.
Let's face it they dont like the fact that even millennials are understanding the benefits of killing their own food the old fashioned way. These people will eventually be the ones defending our right to hunt and bare arms. They want to nip that in the bud and this I believe is part of that....
Back in the mid 2000"s I came upon a buck one morning in early September while out cutting wood that was not acting right. I assumed that he had been struck by a car with the way he was acting so I contacted local law enforcement and they came out and put him down and gave me a salvage tag.
I was in the process of going through a divorce at the time and the ex was to get half of the meat in the freezer. So I thought well why not give her this buck. So I took the buck home and hung him in the garage and skinned him. There was not a single mark on this deer that would indicate that he had been struck by a vehicle and after some time had passed I got to thinking that this deer was at least a half mile from any road so it probably wasn't likely that he had been struck.
More than likely this deer had either CWD or possibly EHD, but back then those diseases were not even on the radar here in Michigan.
Well anyways I processed the deer myself and gave it to the ex and she ate it. I cant tell you if eating a deer with CWD has any side effects as the ex is just as crazy today as she was when I gave her the deer.
Couple this article with the "$110,000 Markor" and just recently the "endangered Hippo" (WTH) articles and we can see where this is all heading.
I think hunters are putting their heads in the sand and buying into this CWD nonsense and not seeing it as the Trojan Horse it really is. There is a couple of sentences in Missouri`s link that should scare the hell out of all of us.
The goal is to make consuming wild meat a thing of the past no more hunting.
Just saw a feature on Denver 9 news about how "Zombie deer disease now found in Colorado". Newsflash... only about 51 years late on the story...
It was on the news screening below the main picture on GMA this morning Lewis
The “zombie deer disease” news stories are making the rounds on our regional newscasts here in Iowa right now as well.
390,000 people are killed or injured by texting drivers every year. 0 people have been killed or injured by eating potentially infected animals in the past 50 (or more) years.
And the national news the past few days is about something that hasn't ever happened?
Does “Fake News” ring a bell ?? Lewis
Kinda like that attack on that Jussie Smollett guy :/
Not true Fuzzy. There are lots of holes in Hedgehunters comments:
"No evidence that CWD has not been in herds since time began...………... It kills older deer, deer can be Pos and never show up in testing as it takes a long time to show in blood."
There is LOTs of evidence that the US version of CWD showed up in the pens of CSU in the 60s for the first time. Still debatable, but pretty solid evidence.
In Texas, it was not here until it migrated to West Texas and the Pandhandle from infected animals in New Mexico. Then recently it was brought here in a trailer to a deer farm just a few miles from where I live. One of the deer that was positive on that farm was 1 & 1/2 years old.
There is no blood test for CWD that has proven to be reliable and pick up positive animals. If there was, every deer farm would be using it. Questionable to have any blood testing done at this point.
I am a hunter, a ranch owner, and a veterinarian who works on deer.
That said, there is NO evidence that CWD has ever been transmitted to people. The use of the word Zombie in the title was obviously used to garner attention
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/Patient-Caregiver-Education/Fact-Sheets/Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Disease-Fact-Sheet
Interesting reading.
My question is this: if scientists are fairly convinced that the Mad Cow Prion can cause variant CJD after eating infected meat, they why is everyone so skeptical that CWD can eventually infect people???
Because the link/correlation of vCJD to consumption of BSE in time and place was absolutely overwhelming in the late 80's and early 90s.
In contrast, there have been exactly 0.00 cases of a confirmed TSE like disease in humans as a result of the consumption of meat from an animal with CWD. That and how TSE diseases in general have a very robust "species barrier". The obvious caveat to this species barrier is the jump from BSE to vCJD and the presumed jump from scrapie to BSE via the consumption of rendered meat-and-bone meal. The rendering process changed slightly just prior to the BSE epidemic in the UK (presumably allowing the diseased form of the protein to then "survive" the rendering process when prior it was "killed"). This change in rendering is the most accepted reason scrapie infected sheep material was able to cross the species barrier and infect cattle.
Killing all the deer ( which they are working on here also) completely eliminates any deer that may build a resistance to this and pass on thier genes. Let it run it's course...some WILL survive. Kinda the way Colorado is handling it I believe. Probably been around forever,they've just recently developed a test to detect it.
After the "kill 'em all" experiment failed in CO and the deer herds (slowly) rebounded, the latest experiment is to knock the buck-doe ratio back. It appears that bucks visiting different doe groups during the rut may exacerbate the spread. So far there are indications it may have a positive effect, since the percentage of infected deer appears to be lower where the bucks are being reduced.
This year, in part of the core infected area, the rifle buck season has been extended from four short seasons - you pick which one to hunt -to one long 6 week season, and buck tags are "B" list, meaning the hunter can get a second buck tag for that unit or a different unit. They want more bucks killed while sparing does.
'Newsflash... only about 51 years late on the story... ' Likewise, CWD in central NY (literally in my back yard) occurred around the 'turn of the century' (LOL) when a taxi, a guy I actually graduated from high school with imported some CWD effected elk from CO, and they spread the disease to whitetails in Oneida County. There were DEC officers testing deer on my own and adjacent property. Only two were found to test positive over several years, and the problem has since been declared a non-issue over a decade ago. My sister, who lives in California, sent me the Zombie deer article yesterday and said "Be Careful". There is a little red splotch on the map for Central NY where it once 'was'. It almost floored me that she believes this and thinks like the far left whackos but look at where she lives!!! Total misinformation and a left nut agenda to further attempt to scare people to keep them from hunting. To further their gun control agenda, demote hunting however they can. WAKE THE HELL UP AMERICA! Yes, CWD is a problem and it is spreading, but they are taking this and running with it out of control now since it is more widespread, and they see this as an opportune time to use it to their advantage. Believe the reality of it, not through Facebook media, go to the scientific pubs for answers, not HuffPost, Twitter, and FB, folks! Now we have all these uninformed dolts out their in the universities crying wolf for every deer is diseased in the red zones!
Cervus:
And how many years/melinium did Mad Cow JUST infect cows before it jumped to humans??
As this thing spreads to the far reaches of the earth, it will adapt and evolve to survive. That is the way of all living things. The scary part of CWD is that with Scrapie and Mad Cow, you simply kill all infected animals and no more disease. Not so with CWD.
So you can eat infected meat, and I would bet $1 million that you will never get infected with vCJD. But for me and mine, I don't want it on my ranch and I will never knowingly feed it to my family. The first individuals to get it would probably be immunocompromised in some way...… very young, very old, cancer patients...……..
Silver lining for me is that the best venison on my ranch in Texas are axis deer and they don't seem susceptible, at least so far. So will always have good venison to eat. But would hate to start tossing my whitetail.
I do not feed venison ( especially untested, which also is not 100% accurate) to unsuspecting family members and friends. I will never feed it to children. Why take the risk with all the other protein sources, it is simply unnecessary? I do however consume tested and negative venison myself, as do my adult and consenting friends.
My 3 kids have eaten venison since they were old enough to chew. Sad to think I will have to test everything in the future.
10 years ago when I started hunting I read the pamphlet strayed reaserchong everything. Looked on the internet about CWD. They found a deer in gunnison mounted a big buck on the Wall. It had viable tissue and it tested positive for CWD. It was shot in the 1908 ish. So it been around a while.
This is a propaganda fire storm hell bent on eliminating hunting from society. Once guns are gone the masses can be subjugated and be made to obey!!!
No matter how you slice it, CWD is some bad stuff....that needs more research devoted to it.
IMO this article bringing the problem to light is a good thing........and should help direct more research and money at the problem.
Yep, nothing to panic over. Precautions can and should be taken, until more comes to light.
txhunter58 - Obviously no one truly knows the answer to that. But the evidence is overwhelming that the change in the rendering process allowed the misfolded isoform to survive and eventually infect cattle. Prior to that, the rendering process presumably inactivated the diseased isoform.
A lot of people then ask, well what about before the initial rendering process? Why didn't it infect cattle then? The answer to that is feeding meat-and-bone meal never happened in the far-past. There wasn't the technology to utilize those resources. Feeding ruminant byproducts to other ruminants is a relatively new idea in human history.
It is highly unlikely anything like BSE existed in cattle prior to 1986(ish). There is no historical documentation of such a disease at all. Scrapie on the other hand, was known about in ancient Japan. Their sign for pruritic or itchy is a hybrid between sheep and disease. Pretty interesting stuff.
I agree that the troubling part of CWD is managing a disease in a wild population is not as simple as scrapie (where it's essentially been bred out of nearly- less than 10% of scrapie cases today compared to 50 years ago) and BSE where we can test animals on the rail and remove them from the food chain, while tracing back to the herd of origin and testing them, etc...
It is not just managing a disease in a wild population that makes CWD so bad. When you kill all infected animals with scrapie and mad cow, the disease is gone. Not so with CWD. If you could somehow kill every deer infected with the disease it would continue to infect more deer from the environment. That is the most discouraging thing about this disease. Once you got it, there is no way to ever get rid of it.
Cheesehead. Please show documentation of your claim. This is the first I have heard of this and sounds like some deer breeder propaganda.
About the commercial blood test for CWD
: A statement from the United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Health Inspection Service (APHIS) reports that SAWCorp's treatment is not APHIS-approved. APHIS does not recognize protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) prion blood tests as an official test for CWD, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or scrapie. While APHIS supports emerging technologies, no company has submitted the data needed for APHIS to evaluate the PMCA prion blood test. In addition, APHIS is aware of no peer-reviewed scientific publications that establish the efficacy of PMCA as a detection method for CWD in cervid blood.
Also BTW. A whitetail in Texas was released after testing negative on the live test ( rectal mucosa). However it was then released into the “wild” and killed by a hunter and tested positive
