Sick buck couldn't get up when I walked right up to him |
During the archery season in September, a hunter killed a young buck just west of Highway 63 between Houston and Licking Missouri. It looked healthy but testing showed it to be infected with TSE, (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy). That is the disease where disfigured proteins riddle the brain. Thousands of humans have died from those proteins, known as prions, infecting the brain. In England, years back many humans died from eating cattle infected with those prions. That was TSE… but called Mad Cow Disease in England.
In deer and elk TSE is given the common name of ‘Chronic Wasting Disease’. It is said often that humans cannot get Chronic Wasting Disease or CWD. Doctors I have talked to and researchers from other states say otherwise. Relatives of people who have died of TSE from eating deer meat are never allowed to tell their stories in the media, though I have interviewed several whose accounts of their loss of a loved one sounds very credible and horrible. Two men in a Montana hunting lodge died recently from TSE. They had cleaned and eaten the same deer meat one had killed. I am certain that people have died from getting prions from deer meat, and I am also certain that there are some people that have eaten deer with the disease who didn’t get it. It may well be like the roll of the dice.
Whatever you believe, you darn sure aren’t going to eat a diseased deer if you know it. I hope that bow-hunter who killed the diseased buck didn’t eat any of that one. The Missouri Department of Conservation will not give his name. Now the MDC wants to create a twenty-five square mile of ground around where that buck was killed and send their ‘shooting teams’ to kill and sample another 110 deer.
Shooting teams are made up of Conservation Department personnel and some members of the US Dept of Agriculture, according to MDC’s deer biologist Jason Gabriel. He spoke to a gathering of about 75 people, most of them from that 25 square mile area, this past Tuesday night in Houston. His presentation was very good, but much of the terminology is difficult for the average person to understand. Gabriel did his best to explain it all. But the gist of his talk was trying to explain that the MDC feels they have, by using this late winter harvesting tool, held CWD at bay in the Ozarks. While other states, especially Wisconsin and northern Illinois have found 60 percent of the deer with the disease; in Missouri the percentage is only two percent of those sampled.
Gabriel felt the ire of audience members who owned land in that square who did not want the sampling to take place because at this time of year, many doe deer carry two or three fawns almost ready to be born. When looked at in such a manner, the 110 deer killed ends up taking perhaps 300 deer from the 25 square miles because of the unborn fawns. And then there’s the method used; deer killed by spotlighting over bait. Big antlered bucks aren’t spared, and hunters who want those antlers will never be able to take them next deer season. Too many big trophy bucks will be in that total of 110.
So while Gabriel’s biological method of controlling CWD in the Ozarks makes scientific sense, that approach does not set well with hunters and landowners. Of course individual landowners can say no, but deer do not confine themselves to fenced-in boundaries. If the guy next to you welcomes those shooting teams to his land, the deer killed will likely be part of the deer herd that spends time on your place. Whether you like it or not, big bucks and pregnant does will be killed… a lot of them. The whole thing can be forced upon those landowners, and will be. No one can stop it from happening short of a court order, and no judge will go against the MDC with their money and power!
A good alternative was discussed at that meeting… why not start checking the deer killed along the highway? No dice! “It isn’t necessary,” was the response from Jason Gabriel, sewing a seed of discourse amongst country landowners and hunters all around Texas County and elsewhere. That approach may be sound reasoning, but the MDC often rejects sound reasoning. Gabriel has people above him who control what he does. Even if he thinks having a team to check road-killed deer is a good idea, he can’t say it should be done. Such a decision would likely get him fired.
But why not check road-killed deer? If 30 or 40 deer killed along the highway had glands removed and sent in, that would mean Gabriel’s shooting team could kill less live deer. If you use volunteers like me, who know where the glands are and how to remove them, then think of the money that would be saved. And after all, money is the greatest motivating factor in everything the MDC does. Who knows how much money will be spent in having those shooters kill 110 live deer in that 25-mile square acreage.
I will discuss this more in next week’s column and then promise to move on too more important things, like catching winter crappie or walleye.
Speaking of walleye, I will be speaking to a walleye fisherman’s club at Clinton Arkansas, at the Fairfield Bay Resort on Greer’s Ferry Lake the evening of January 20. If you have an interest in attending, there is further information about this event on my BlogSpot, larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. Or you can contact me at lightninridge47@gmail.com or by calling my office at 417-777-5227.