Where Common Sense Doesn’t Work…Isn’t Tried

 

CHECKING DEER FOR CWD

       The Missouri Department of Conservation has told a few dozen landowners in Texas county they intend to come into a 25-square-mile tract of land and set up bait and lights to night-shoot 110 deer.  This is part of an attempt to find transmissible spongiform encephalitis, which they commonly call CWD or ‘chronic wasting disease’. It is all the result of finding one buck with the disease last September. And yes there are better ways to do this, but the MDC is accustomed to telling folks what they are going to do whether it makes common sense or not, and whether they like it or not.

       If they were to send their biologists to the area in September and October and require hunters to check the first 110 deer killed they would accomplish the same results.  They won’t! Common sense and the wishes of the landowners be damned!   If they checked road-killed deer over the next year in the county they could accomplish the same result… but they won’t.    Again, that makes too much sense.

       What they have chosen is an ‘in your face’ method that will result in the   taking of probably 80 or so pregnant does with fawns soon to be born, which will make the total of the kill more like 200 to 250    deer, considering what those fawns will amount to, fawns that will die inside the womb of those female deer.  Of course 30 or so of the 110 deer killed by spotlighting over piles of corn at night will be bucks that local landowners who hunt with their families will never see next fall.

       One of the landowners told me…”I don’t want to be a part of that… bucks don’t   set in one place, they travel in the fall and one or two that I might see on my place then might be killed this month by these government shooters. It is going to affect my deer hunting in a bad way, and they just don’t care.”  He is right… they don’t care.  The MDC doesn’t need country people.  As long as St. Louis and Kansas City and Springfield hunters give them thumbs up, they can do without landowners and rural people.

        The science of this is faulty, because this isn’t necessary.  The landowners who permit this will not be scattered.   The 110   deer will come from a concentrated area, and that area will lose a lot of deer over the next three years because of it.  And all because the MDC wants to test these deer NOW rather than next fall.  It seems so senseless.

       I met   with and interviewed the new MDC director a month ago and brought up that very thing.  “You seem to grab onto your own answers and ignore others that make more sense”.  That interview led me to believe nothing is going to get better.   That director has an attitude of being carried away with their power to do whatever they want, and then pass it off as science. The truth is, the people they have hired have been through what is known as DEI and there is rank inefficiency and incompetence.  I see it when I talk to biologists. I have the same degree from Missouri University they have and years of study and experience they do not have. The MDC is a bureaucracy out to make as much money as possible and country people are of little consequence.  They see public-land timber as a money maker, deer as a money maker, wild turkey as a money maker and declines in all three can’t cost them anything.  This killing of 110 deer in that small area by spotlighting over bait, is ridiculous.  But again, it is what happens when you give a state agency ultimate power, as that 1/8^th cent tax did, decades back.  The state legislature can do nothing about any of this. 

This slaughtering of 110 deer in a confined area cannot be stopped, and it has been and will be carried out  in other parts of the state.  But it is fake science.  How I wish common sense could come back.