Oklahoma plan for cwd
Whitetail Deer
Already a thread on this. As I've said before better then the "kill them all to save them" technique implemented by some wildlife agencies.
When you claim CWD you get federal money. P&Y sent out an email against this and asked members to contact the Governor to not sign it.
If it jumps to humans it will be because of stuff like this.
this sounds like a horrible recipe for disaster
My concern is that it will allow breeding and then release with very little regulation. That will certainly lead to undesired consequences.
The basic core biology is actually very positive. It's already well established that sheep with a certain natural gene do not get scrapie (sheep CWD). So a lot of folks are developing sheep flocks resistant to scrapie by breeding for this gene just like they would wool quality or meat quality.
There are apparently some deer whose genes make them resistant to CWD in a similar way. Over many years deer with this makeup will likely become more prevalent naturally in CWD areas unless they are more susceptible to something else. We can let this occur naturally but it will happen very slowly. And we may see some herds collapse because very few of their deer have the resistance.
It makes sense to investigate whether we can speed up the process of a herd becoming resistant but it seems these folks want to leap forward a bit too fast. I wouldn't be opposed to issuing permits for private breeding programs to develop resistant deer if regulations were in place to prevent release. If those programs become successful then it should be up to each state (not private individuals) to determine whether they want to develop resistance in their herd.
Utterly ridiculous they don't even understand the disease.I guess they haven't seen Planet of the Apes.
Count me in the “let nature figure out the resistance to cwd” group. I don’t foresee big population crashes. It’s been in noco for many years, and although mule deer are down the only major crashes are occurring when tag allocations go sky high. Whitetail are crashing in eastern CO because of the unlimited doe tags they were giving out. Put that on top of the occasional outbreaks of ehd, and the normal cwd and it’s been terrible. It would be one thing if we were seeing cwd population crashes, but we haven’t.
