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.

A Scientific Approach

 

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.   

                                                                                        

Fairfield Bay Resort, Clinton AR, Speaking Engagement, Jan 20, '25

 

 

The Greatest Man I Ever Knew

 

 

 

 

My dad, Farrel Dablemont

      

      

      My Dad’s birthday was this week.  He died at the age of 84 in 2011. I miss him most when I am on the river, where we spent so much time together.  Dad was several inches taller than me at 6’ 3”.  He was strong and quiet, hard working and dedicated to his church and community.  He was too young to fight in World War II, but when he was just barely 17 he joined the merchant marines and wound up on the high seas in liberty ships, which took a tremendous beating during the war. High numbers of them were sunk by German U-boats, and thousands of merchant marine sailors were lost at sea.

      Actually, it was my dad who taught me to fish and run the river when I was just a little tyke. I was floating the river with Dad when I was only 6 or 7, learning how to cast an old open-faced Shakespeare casting reel. 

      One of my best selling books is an account of my dad’s experiences he was just a kid on the Piney I the 1930’s.  It is entitled “Little Home on the Piney”. If you would like a copy, contact me. 

      The following is just part of a magazine article he wrote years ago and it is his memories of long ago days on the river….

 

 

      ----What fishing there was in those days!  The Big Piney River was full of bass and goggle-eye and black perch. It was nothing to catch 30 or 40 perch and goggle-eye in a single day, and a dozen or so nice smallmouth bass.

       I missed a lot of school in the spring and fall so I could guide fishermen, but it couldn’t be helped, the family needed the money. I made good grades because I studied hard and read a lot.  The schools understood in those days when boys were needed at home.

       My customers were mostly nice people and I enjoyed working for them.  I had one man who insisted on standing on the front seat to fish.  I warned him if we hit a submerged rock or stump he would fall out.  He told me he was a gymnast and an expert on balance.  So being a dumb kid like I was, I decided to see how good he was.  Going down a deep riffle, I saw a small stump just underwater and I built up a little steam and hit it head on.  I can’t describe how he looked flailing in mid-air with both arms and legs while he fought to keep his feet on that boat seat.  But he wasn’t the expert on balance he declared himself to be.  He went in with a big splash.  For some reason he never used my guiding services again, even though he caught a good mess of fish that day after he dried out.

       Then there was a man from St. Louis who wanted to photograph the Big Piney River.  He was to come early on a Saturday morning but on Friday we had a heavy rain.  He showed up the next morning with his wife and sister-in-law after the river had risen 15 feet.  I told him I was sorry but it was just too high to float.

       “I thought you were a riverman?” he said.  “I just want to take pictures. Couldn’t we make it?”

       So the four of us set out in a 16-foot wooden johnboat.  I knew the river and all the dangerous bluffs and crooked places.  So when the river was straight I stayed in the middle and in the main current, and where it was crooked I took to the edges and paddled through the fields where the water wasn’t as fast.  Boy, what a ride we had!  There were some tense moments when my passengers were hanging on for dear life, but we made it in four hours…a distance of 20 miles.  We even stopped twice to climb hills and take pictures.

       The gentleman paid me well but now that I’m older and wiser, I would never do it again, and shouldn’t have done it then.  We were all risking our lives.

       As a fishing guide I have seen strange things on river floats.  I took two lawyers from Springfield on a few trips.  I remember one trip in particular when they had done well in the morning but by noon they had downed most of a whole bottle of Jim Beam.  One threw a wild lure and caught the other one in the lobe of his ear.  I’m not much of a surgeon but I offered to cut the hooks and take it out.  The fisherman declined.  He wore that lure in his ear for the rest of the trip, taking a drink of his antiseptic every so often.  After that, I asked that fishermen take no alcohol on float trips.  It was one of the smartest moves I ever made.

       I have seen grown men cry when they lost a big fish.  One got so mad he broke his rod over his knee and threw it in the river. 

       I am so than thankful l that I lived the life I had as a kid, in a time when the rivers were clean and clear and God gave me the privilege of watching so many people catch fish while floating through those beautiful unmarred hills and valleys, which were then still much as He created them.  And I’m thankful he let me be a part of a vanishing breed…an Ozark riverman.  Only those of us who remember it the way it was then, know how bad it is now…and what God-given treasures we have lost forever.