Maybe They Ate Sheep - Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs Disease

 

Sick Buck

       Two hunters who were members of a hunting lodge in a western state have died from Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs disease, which they apparently got from eating venison from a CWD prion-infested deer.   But you can’t prove it because the disease, known as TSE, (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy) is found in cattle, goats, sheep and elk.  Maybe they ate a goat together? Can’t have a panic about this when it can cause hunters to stop buying deer tags.

         A few years ago, Carol Schroeder, from Camdenton, told me that her husband had died from the disease known as Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs disease in a St.Louis hospital in a quarantined room. After his death the Center for Disease Control took control of his body it was taken to the crematory by a highway patrol escort to be sure that if any accident occurred on the way his body would not be handled by unknowing first- responders. Mrs. Schroeder confirmed that he had eaten venison during the months before his death.

              “I never believed in assisted suicide,” she told me, “but I would have given anything if it could have happened for my poor husband.  It took him two months to die and what he went through, what I saw as his brain deteriorated, I cannot even talk about it to this day.”

         She isn’t the only one who has had a relative die of the disease in Missouri. There have been many.  But you will never hear about any of them. None of the deaths has been mentioned by the media, not anywhere!

              Bill Zippro, a resident of Joplin, will tell you that his brother died a young man with prions in his brain because he killed and ate a huge buck which was not acting right. His brother told him the buck didn’t make any attempt to escape and he told Bill he thought the deer had been turned loose from a nearby deer farm across the border in Kansas where they feed deer meat and bone by-products to make bigger antlers. He said his brother was shown to have the prions in his brain and spinal fluid, and the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta Georgia verified it.

         In Italy, two workers studying CWD (chronic wasting disease) in deer died from the Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy disease.  Now the big cover-up is about those two men in that western state where CWD is prevalent in deer and elk, have died from that same disease. Look for their deaths on the Internet. Make no mistake about it, Chronic Wasting disease in deer, Cruetzfeldt-Jacobs disease in humans and ‘Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy’ disease are all the same disease, like rabies and hydrophobia are the same disease with different names.

         Look it up on the Internet and notice that it says humans can get the disease through eating “contaminated foodstuff” which just might include venison, contaminated with prions. You reckon? You won’t be able to find the name of the hunting lodge or the state or the names of the two men but it will never be admitted that they ate elk and deer meat from the same animal.

         When it has the potential to make conservation departments lose a lot of money through the loss of deer tag sales, you keep the facts obscured.  Therefore, the Missouri Department of Conservation will tell you humans can’t get the disease from deer.  After all the people who died could have died from eating sheep or goat meat, right? But you cannot deny humans are getting the disease from handling or eating the meat from deer. In fact it is known that among the seven people who died of Cruetzfeld Jacobs disease in Arkansas, one was a taxidermist who mounted deer heads.

         Now in Oklahoma they have passed a law that CWD-diseased deer in deer-farm structures can be sold or legally released into the wild.  Some of Oklahoma’s wisest people in the legislature agree that exposing them to the disease may create immunity in wild deer.  Would it surprise anyone to know that one of the legislators who has caused the law to be accepted is a man who owns a deer farm?

 

         One  tip for you deer hunters… prions are found in the brain.  ‘Spongiform Encephalopathy refers to the holes in the brain the abnormal proteins cause.  The protein has not been found in the meat but rather brain fluid and spinal fluid and    perhaps bone marrow.  To avoid ingesting prions, first have your deer tested, then do not cut the spine or any bones.  If you put a bullet into the head or spine, you are risking having prions in the meat.  Another piece of advice.. do not eat any venison that you have not taken care of… don’t have anyone else butcher your deer and do not eat venison from the well-advertised “Share the Harvest” program.  That was created so that trophy hunters would not have to utilize the meat, but give it away instead.  None of those trophy bucks get tested.  And where are 75 percent of CWD cases found?… Older bucks!

 

Hot Summer, Cool Stream

 

            A cool, lazy river float during the summer heat

       If you have the ambition to get away from the air conditioning and get your body acclimated to summer, find an isolated section of Ozark river where canoe rental people do not operate, and plan a two- or three-day trip in the middle of the week with a friend who is inclined not to complain much about sleeping in a tent and having wet feet. 

By doing so, you can actually get off away from the world’s problems. Float downstream and find a gravel bar or sand bar to camp on, where there is some shade of course.  In the cool of the evening, find a deep shoal and wade out up to your waist above it or below it and cast a topwater minnow or a little popper of some kind with a spin-casting outfit or maybe even a fly-rod. There will be bass waiting to jump all over that lure, I’ve seen it happen! I have been there and done that, often. 

When it gets dark, push your boat or canoe out into a big eddy fed by that river current, where there’s some deep water and rocks, and fish without lights, letting your eyes become accustom to the night.  Cast a jitterbug toward the bank with a casting reel and a stronger line, and work it steadily across the surface.  If there’s a big bass anywhere close, he will jump all over that jitterbug.  This time of year, the rock bank towards the upper end of the eddy where the current feeds it will hold the smallmouth, but the lower sections of a big deep hole, on the opposite bank where there might be logs and limbs, are where you will find river largemouth, and they can’t pass up a jitterbug either.

       If a nearby eddy is good and deep and has a bluff, chances are there’s a big flathead catfish there, or several, maybe up to 25 or 35 pounds.  I have caught a few catfish from small Ozark rivers that exceeded 40 pounds. Flatheads can be caught on trotlines set deep, across the eddy and baited with LIVE bait, like chubs or sunfish, or even small suckers. There are channel catfish in many streams too, and they will take nightcrawlers or dead bait, minnows or even chicken livers. 

       It takes a lot of work to set and bait a trotline, and it involves some danger, as you can get entangled or hooked and pulled under by a weighted line.  Have two sheathed knives on your belt to cut yourself free if you need to.  If you set trotlines and run them in that deep water, DO NOT DO IT FROM A KAYAK OR SMALL CANOE.  I would never ever trotline from a seventeen-foot double end canoe!  Actually, I wouldn’t even float the river in one.

       I know it is hot, but I am tired of staying inside.  I have fishing to do, and I have missed it. I don’t know that it was as hot when I was a youngster, fishing up and down the Big Piney River in July and August.  There was no reason to hole up in the house, because we didn’t have air conditioning, and maybe everyone could stand the heat better because of that fact. 

Maybe air conditioning has us in a destructive grip as much as anything else.  None of us would choose to live without it, but I know that another generation of men who lived without it stayed outside more and could take the summer much, much better.  Of course our ancestors were tougher… they had to be.  Thank goodness they were when the world war came along.

       I have fished all through July and August with good  results and as a teen-ager guiding float fishermen on the Big Piney and Gasconade, I never let a 95-degree day never stop a daylong fishing trip.  My clients would show up and we would start very early in the morning, when it was cooler.  But we would float the river all day at times, always catching fish, even in the middle of the day.   Of course, the river was more shaded then, because landowners hadn’t started clearing the banks of shade trees as much back then.  There were a lot fewer cattle too.  The river had much more water in those times, and it was much cleaner.  Shady gravel bars offered great places to stop and relax, and swim in a cool river current for a little while. Then it was back to fishing, casting to whatever shaded bank there was, where the water had a little current and a little depth.

       I am dreaming now, as this may be the first summer ever that I have not camped on a gravel bar.  I can’t hardly walk right now, as a surgeon who was suppose to fix a torn meniscus botched the operation and made my knee worse than it was before.  But I have hopes that a new operation soon will get me capable of taking to the river by duck season.

       

       My website is www.larrydablemont.com, and you can e-mail me at lightninridge47@gmail.com.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, MO. 65613 and if you want to get a copy of my new book or my summer magazine, just call me at 417 777 5227.

 

North Arkansas Visit

 

       

Still more to do, but we are getting there

       I spent a couple of days last week down in Arkansas White River country, ending up all the way down in Mt. View, restocking some my outdoor books. While at Mt View I stopped in a woodcarvers shop and I haven’t seen anything like it since I first saw Peter  Engler’s carvings at Silver Dollar City in 1968. The woodcarvers name is Randall Head, and all around the grounds where is shop is found, there are huge carvings, many life-sized and spectacular.  Eagles and wildlife carvings are everywhere, from songbirds to mountain lions.  He is one of the most unusual people you will ever talk to and one of the most talented.  

       Many carvers do great work but few do great carvings so quickly and so many of them. It took me an hour to look at all of them.  I am going to display some of his work in my Big Piney nature center-museum but if you get close to Mt View Arkansas, where they have the big state park-folk center and are known as the folk music, blue-grass center of the Ozarks, you have got to see the work he does.  I would have driven down to Mt. view just to see him and his work.  Call him to find out when he is in his shop.  I started to write ‘call ahead’!  Randall Head’s number is 309-413-8025. 

 

On your way to Mt. View stop at a place on the main highway about a mile or so east of Mt. Home called Rivertown gallery, to see the work of one of the most talented wildlife and outdoor artists I have ever met, a long standing friend of mine who is a river guide, stream ecologist and an artist whose work is beyond description. He is Ozark native Duane Hada. On his walls are painting of the Buffalo, the White and Ozark wilderness, plus smallmouth bass, trout and elk that seem to be alive as you look at them.  See his work on his website (Duane Hada) and you will be in awe of what you see.  Fantastic!

What is even more amazing than his work is the kind of man Duane is, a great conservationist!  When I go there and meet with him it is difficult to tear myself away.  I am going to try to get him to paint a river mural on the inside wall of the Big Piney nature center.  I want to get him up there to float the Big Piney this fall, and if he accepts, readers can go along, to meet and talk with a legendary wildlife artist.

 

       There is a third place you ought to see if you visit North Arkansas, a place on the White River that trout fishermen all over the country know about… Gaston’s resort.  Jim Gaston, who made the resort something special, passed away a few years ago and it is now continued as one of the finest Ozark attractions by his grandson, Clint.  I think it began sometime before the Bull Shoals dam was built by Jim’s father and has been there now for several decades.  There are some of the best fishing guides working there that you will ever meet, and a restaurant second to none.  Actually the restaurant is something of a grand museum with old White River and Ozark antiques from bicycles to boat paddles. And though the meals are expensive, they are fantastic, with several different kinds of trout prepared.  You eat from a dining room extending out over the river. You can catch your limit of trout on the river and have them prepared by restaurant chefs.  In that restaurant you can find what is referred to as a salad boat, a big display of many kinds of salads.  And if you are there early you will find a breakfast buffet unequaled in the Ozarks. I knew Jim Gaston well, and I, like all who knew him, respected him tremendously.  In earlier times, when I was the 22 year-old, chief naturalist for the Arkansas State Park System, Jim was a young Commissioner, and I never thought we would have much in common, but I was wrong.  The preservationist and the developer, he opened my eyes to some things and helped me to learn much about Arkansas and the people I was working with.  Jim and I shared a love of nature photography and I used many of his photos in my magazines over the years. If you are in North Arkansas don’t miss visiting Gaston’s resort, just a few miles out of Lakeview Arkansas, below Bull Shoals dam.  If you want to catch trout from the White, where there are monstrous brown trout in those cold waters, go there first.

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      My Big Piney Nature Center and Museum is coming down to painting the walls and putting the floor in.  Hopefully we can open it to the public as a finished project in September.  My family is going to help with the painting on Saturday, August the 17^th. 

       I would love to have readers come by and see what we are doing, so remember that date and come visit with me and my family if you would like. It is located one mile south of Houston, Mo on the east side of Highway 63. The address is 6410 highway 63.  I will likely brew up a batch of sassafras tea (iced or hot) for visitors to try a taste of the old-time Ozarks of my boyhood.  We are already moving in some interesting artifacts and on that day you can see an authentic Ozark johnboat my dad and I built years ago.

My email address is lightninridge47@gmail.com, and my office phone number is 417 777 5227