The Missouri Department of Conservation is taking proper precautions to protect against the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). Recent events in Iowa prove the new captive cervid regulations proposed by MDC are needed, and are in no way overreaching.
The Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship recently announced 284 of 356 captive deer at a single captive deer farm, or 79.8 percent of the herd, tested positive for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD).
Back in July of 2012, the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service's (APHIS) National Veterinary Services Lab in Ames, IA confirmed a positive CWD case. It was a buck killed on a shooting ranch in southeast Iowa. The buck had been shipped to the facility from a deer farm in north-central Iowa.
The investigation also, very importantly, revealed the buck had just been released into the killing pen. Meaning, the buck was CWD positive when it arrived. This is critical information, because the captive industry likes to claim there is no proof of CWD being spread by way of trailer transportation.
To me, this proves what everyone has known all along; CWD has been spread across this country and into to Canada by shipping infected deer from one farm to the next.
A recent USA Today article about the Iowa CWD outbreak reports at a hearing in August in Indiana, "deer breeders and their sympathetic veterinarians repeatedly downplayed the risk of CWD, saying rigorous testing keeps infection rates low and reduces the risk of massive outbreaks of the always-fatal disease."
Captive deer farms in Iowa have the option of enrolling in a voluntary CWD program. There are 145 deer farms enrolled in the voluntary program, but unfortunately, the farm where these 284 positive CWD deer were found chose not to participate. They simply said no thanks; we don't want to be tested.
And the only people who ever come to the table to fight for deer farms are people making money off the practice of raising mutant sized bucks to be killed in a pen. Sure, their veterinarians are sympathetic; they're paid to be. Try to find a wildlife biologist who doesn't think deer farms are an enormous risk to wild deer.
Industries come and go in this country. Ideas once thought to be good are later proven to be bad. If we are to protect wildlife in this country, the privatized captive cervid industry must comply with regulations stringent enough to drastically minimize any risk of damaging our wild deer herd, or, they simply must go away.
Now all we can do is wonder how many wild deer came in contact with this infected herd and how many of those contracted CWD through the single 8-foot fence. We don't know how many CWD infected deer were shipped from this facility to facilities all across the country, but one was one too many.
The captive industry will surely try to twist this into another of their poor deer farmer stories. They'll want you to sympathize with the deer breeder who chose not to enroll in the voluntary CWD testing and then lost their herd. But don't feel too bad for them, the USDA paid the owners $917,100 as compensation for the 356 captive deer depopulated. Congratulations taxpayers, you just spent nearly a million dollars on diseased captive deer.
See you down the trail ...
Brandon Butler, the executive director of Conservation Federation Missouri, is an outdoors columnist for the News Tribune. Contact him at [email protected].