CWD - Will we ever know?
General Topic
Always interesting to see the latest.
I know it’s real and legit, but man if I took every news article seriously you’d feel like your life is one giant game of frogger. There certainly is no shortage of ways to die and ways the world will end.
On the CWD particularly, it is interesting though
When it makes the jump to humans or starts majorly effecting game, I'll move it up the list of stuff to worry about. My only concern with it now is how wildlife managers over react and cull populations in an effort to have an impact on the spread.
My armchair science stance is that its likely been around long before we discovered it.
Like Glunt, I suspect it has been around long before it was "discovered". I was bowhunting antelope in NW Colorado about 1978 and my partner and I found a doe staggering around- was real sick and in poor condition. One of us killed it, but had no interest in taking it home to eat. Today, we would probably be thinking CWD for that doe. When I see CWD has popped up in this state or that, many hundreds or thousands of miles apart, it seems unlikely it has "just suddenly spread that far".
A reindeer herd in Norway has it.
I am also of the belief that it has been around for a lot longer than we have known about it, and more than likely meat from CWD infected animals has been consumed by many. Until someone can show me a true jump from deer to humans, or an actual scenario where it has "wiped out" herd without the DNR intervening and killing everything before it could die, I am not going to even think about it.
Food for thought? Speaking of food, we are killing ourselves eating too much sugar, too much salt and the list goes on. But that is another subject.
Where is all the panic over rabies?
As of 2016, only fourteen people had survived a rabies infection after showing symptoms. Rabies caused about 17,400 deaths worldwide in 2015. More than 95% of human deaths from rabies occur in Africa and Asia. Human rabies cases in the United States are rare, with only 1 to 3 cases reported annually. Twenty-three cases of human rabies have been reported in the United States in the past decade (2008-2017). Eight of these were contracted outside of the U.S. and its territories.Aug 23, 2017
Wild animals accounted for 92.4 percent of reported cases of rabies in 2015. Bats were the most frequently reported rabid wildlife species (30.9 percent of all animal cases during 2015), followed by raccoons (29.4 percent), skunks (24.8 percent), and foxes (5.9 percent).Jul 5, 2017
P.S. My wife saw a racoon walking down a busy intersection in broad daylight. It was walking back and forth and in circles. People were blowing their horns at it and it was ignoring them. I told her it was probably sick and disoriented (rabies) possibly. Just stay away from animals that do not act normal. So I guess this was on my mind.
It's like every other disease. It's always been here and always will be. Some have symptoms more visible than others and everybody freaks out.
Not true Thornton. It wasn’t in Texas until it migrated from Colorado to NM and then to west Texas and the Texas panhandle from NM. The only other cases were hauled here in a trailer to deer farms. It is not on my ranch currently and I don’t want it there. So no, it hasn’t always been here.
More concerned about the Influenza virus mutating into a strain that kills 100's of thousands.
