What did the WDNR know and when?
08-28-2002, 09:31 PM
#1
Fork Horn
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sussex WI
Posts: 381
What did the WDNR know and when?
Interesting article about CWD from the Capital Times in Madison. A friend pointed it out to me. Sorry about the length, but I did think it was thought-provoking.
<font size=3>WD: REPORT FROM GROUND ZERO</font id=size3>
Capital Times, The (Madison, WI)
Published on July 20, 2002
© 2002- Madison Newspapers, Inc.
Byline: Mike Irwin Special to The Capital Times
One chilly evening in the winter of 1990 a group of local deer hunters -- farmers, neighbors and kin -- gathered for a chili supper at a farmhouse here to brainstorm about how to build a better buck.
Out of the conversation came a pact. They agreed to a long-term plan to refine the white-tailed herd in their area, including 12 square miles in the northwestern part of the town of Vermont, in western Dane County. Beginning that year, they would shoot many does but spare young bucks. They would give the males three to five years to develop the big bodies and splendid antlers that could qualify them as trophy candidates for the Pope and Young and Boone and Crockett record books.
So Part 1 of the pact was selection. Part 2 was nutrition.
"We'd come from dairy farming families, so we took our cues for improving the herd from that background," recalled a woman who took notes after the chili supper.
"We asked: What do the animals need that they might not be getting from the environment?' " Their ground was flinty, she noted, and forest soils were not high in calcium or phosphorus, the stuff that nursing does and fast-growing bucks "in velvet" need.
Deer were ruminants, like sheep or cattle, they reasoned. Why not supplement their diets, as farmers did for livestock, with pasture lots and licks? "Couldn't hurt, might help," one farmer said at the meeting.
So the group agreed to start -- or, since some had already started, continue -- a long-term program of supplemental mineral feeding of wild deer aimed at doe-fawn and buck health and the making of big antlers.
Within a few years, the results began to appear in the trophy books.
Of 152 Dane County bucks earning enough total points for registration between 1980 and 2000 in the Pope and Young Club's "Bowhunting: Big Game Records of North America," 136 were registered between 1990 and 2000.
Of the 136, 84 were killed between 1996 and 1999. Bucks with the highest scores for antlers dominated the years 1996, 1997 and 1998.
Clearly, something was working. Then, this year, something horrible appeared.
Eleven cases of chronic wasting disease -- a devastating brain disease not before seen east of the Mississippi River -- showed up in deer specimens taken by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from land, including one DNR-owned parcel, in the 12 tightly clustered square-mile sections of the town of Vermont. This was the area where the chili supper group was working.
DNR epidemiologist Julie Langenberg said in an interview that the cluster "suggests original cause. We're gathering data and asking questions."
Do the questions include whether the innocently begun nutrition and selection practices of local hunters may have created the conditions for the introduction of the disease and given it the years it needs to develop?
The DNR did collect feed samples in the days immediately after the first cases were reported. Thomas Solin, chief of special operations in the DNR Bureau of Law Enforcement, said Thursday that wardens canvassed the area "to get a snapshot" of conditions. Part of that involved collecting feed blocks from farmers and hunters and also purchasing blocks from local suppliers.
"A lot of people there were actively feeding. Once we captured the information we turned it over to the Department of Agriculture, because they regulate the feed. If they want to test, we have samples available."
But Eric Nelson, feed program manager for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, says there are no procedures to test feed products for the presence of CWD. "With feed microscopy you can tell the difference between mammals and birds and that's about it," he said in an interview Friday.
"We did inspect feed manufacturers and deer feeders and found all products to be in compliance with the federal regulation banning rendered ruminant materials. There were no prohibited materials in any materials we inspected."
*
The science: Thirty-five years of scientific study show that epidemics of the fatal brain diseases of the class known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) have been largely bred by human behavior and spread by animal behavior.
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), like its cousins mad cow disease and sheep wasting disease or scrapie, is caused by a protein fragment called a prion, not a bacterium or a virus but a chain of amino acids that lives in the brain and nervous tissue. As was found in England, it can be introduced from dead animals to living ones through feed containing rendered meats and bones of diseased animals.
To do its full damage to a living animal, it must have years to develop. Studies report the incubation period between first contact and visible symptoms in deer is between one and a half and five years.
As the disease develops, the animals may spread it through many kinds of contact. It may go from deer to fawn. If wild herds are concentrated rather than dispersed - in areas such as Mount Horeb, where urban development narrows their range and feeding intensifies contact - it may be spread through saliva on food blocks, and in areas where deer bed down and leave their droppings. The prions can contaminate the soil where deer congregate.
One study in 1999 showed that feed itself can transmit the disease. In the study, mule deer fawns were fed a preparation of brain tissue taken from a mule deer with CWD. The protein marker, evidence of infection, was found in the lymph tissue of the digestive tract after fawns were sacrificed. At 42 days the first fawn autopsied showed infection. All of the fawns showed infection after 53 days.
Wisconsin's Eric Nelson scoffed at that study Friday. "They were using raw brain material and it wasn't natural feeding," he said. "If it had been rendered, the infectivity would have been greatly reduced."
He adds flatly: "There is no evidence to support the idea that CWD can be spread by feeding."
Researchers have found TSE prions to be nearly indestructible. They can remain viable on sterilized surgical tools. Clinical studies report that heats of 680 degrees Fahrenheit are required to kill these agents. Controlled studies have shown them to live in soils for seven or more years.
Richard Marsh, a renowned UW-Madison researcher, once warned a statewide farming audience that Wisconsin was especially vulnerable to TSE outbreaks because "we have so many animals here and so much rendering of them."
In 1982-83, Marsh asked Blair McMillan, a post-doctoral researcher and Madison-based epidemic microbiologist, for some help. McMillan's mentor then was UW epidemiologist Robert Paul Hanson. The three sought to understand transmission of the TSEs, but also the makeup of their infectious agents.
"I looked at this tiny, tiny fragment of protein - nucleic acid, this prion or virino, from a sheep scrapie-infected brain," McMillan said in an interview. "What I learned above all was that it was so small you couldn't kill it. It took intense heat. Even if you tried to irradiate it, you had to find it first."
McMillan, now a senior microbiologist and epidemiology specialist teaching at Madison Area Technical College, approaches the town of Vermont CWD outbreak with the caution of a scientist.
"You've got a true disease cluster out there. You've got your index (the first case) identified. Maybe the disease was there first, but now science has seen it," he said. "The geographic boundaries and timeline of the outbreak suggests a sole source of infection."
Still, to settle on a single cause for transmission makes McMillan very uncomfortable. Was that source deer feed containing animal byproducts? Or was it animal-to-animal contact? Or prions lurking in the soil at feeding stations where animals also had contact?
"You have science showing soil contact is possible, science that doe and fawn eye-to-mouth or afterbirth contact is possible. Moving across species to a new form, sheep to deer or cattle to deer is possible, but less likely. Next, you show me that deer are eating with infected deer, or eating rendered, infected deer" - and you'll have it."
But until then? He shakes a handful of pepper grains into his palm and tosses them toward the sidewalk just as a breeze comes up. "There are your infectious prions. They're out there. Go find them," he says.
*
The feed bans: As early as 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a voluntary ban on feeding rendered sheep byproducts to cattle.
On Aug. 4, 1997, in the wake of Britain's mad cow epidemic, the federal Food and Drug Administration placed a more extensive ban on ruminant-to-ruminant feeding. Ruminants included cattle, sheep, elk, buffalo, goats, antelope and deer, according to the rule.
But between 1991 and 1997, before the ban and while the deer feeding program was under way in the town of Vermont, Wisconsin deer carcasses and body parts did go to rendering plants. There they were processed into meat meal and bone meal and could legally be fed back to healthy deer.
In the 1994-95 fiscal year alone, just under 26,500 road-killed or seized white-tailed deer were picked up statewide by contractors for disposal at rendering facilities, according to 1995 DNR Bureau of Law Enforcement statistics.
A Wisconsin Meat Trades Association official, who asked not to be identified, recalled that before 1991, all his slaughterhouse offal and body parts went "down the road together" to rendering plants. After that, he said, unused sheep parts were rejected. But until August 1997, deer, cattle and other mammal body parts continued to be collected together for rendering in the same containers, dumpsters and vats.
Processing and rendering industries' common practices help explain how the CWD agent could have ultimately entered animal feeds and mineral supplements.
Larry Meicher, a hunter since 1976 who lives on the eastern side of the town of Vermont, outside the cluster, remembers seeing "deer blocks with animal products" ingredients on the label in 1995 at a suburban feed outlet west of Madison. If deer were accidentally fed contaminated feeds or minerals between, say, 1991 and 1997, the CWD disease symptoms clearly would be showing up now.
Between the mid to late 1980s until Aug. 4, 1997, it was legal and everyday practice in Wisconsin farm co-ops and private feed mills to blend ruminant feeds to include dry, prepared, rendered animal products. These specifically included meat meal, bone meal or both.
They used rendered materials because they were inexpensive compared, for example, to soybean meal. The rendered meat meal contained an average of 50 percent protein. The rendered bone meal contained 8 percent to 12 percent calcium and 4 percent to 6 percent phosphorus.
For deer muscle and antler growth, the bone meal seemed a good supplement. One of the women in the town of Vermont quality-deer group happened to work at a local co-op during the pre-ban years. "I was one of the promoters," she said. "We recommended 4 percent bypass (rendered) protein. We'd put it in dairy rations," she said, and recalled that pasture minerals had bone meal in their recipes as well.
"But even before we came in 1987, they were feeding mineral supplement out here," her husband said. "It's what farmers did. We all were doing it. People out here were putting together their own formulas. The whole community was doing it."
*
DNR investigates: In talking with local residents and hunters, this reporter collected three firsthand, eyewitness "sick deer, skin-and-bones deer" stories going back four to five years.
DNR wardens no doubt heard some of the same stories and acted on them. Well before the 2001 hunting season, through deer brain sampling at the Mount Horeb deer registration station, DNR specialists had formed a working hypothesis that the disease was present - at least in western Dane County.
Last year, they bore down on the Mount Horeb station. Of all deer brain testing done statewide during last fall's gun hunt across Wisconsin, fully a quarter of all samples, 82 out of 345, were from the Mount Horeb station and from Management Unit 70A. Three positives for CWD appeared. They came from Sections 19 and 21 in the northwest part of the town of Vermont. The first positive, what epidemiologists call "the index case," came from Section 21.
This information prompted the March-to-May shoot of this year that added 416 samples from other Dane and Iowa County towns abutting the town of Vermont. It also eventually established a fully identifiable disease cluster, with 11 of 18 total cases, 63 percent, appearing in 12 abutting square-mile sections of the town of Vermont's northwest corner.
With the cluster identified, what would the next logical step be? Harvard University epidemiologist Melissa Perry suggested in an interview: "Your state people might find the mineral feeding sites in the disease cluster and try to correlate them with sites where they found deer testing positive" for the disease.
The DNR did just that.
"I never had thought about feeding as a possible way to spread the disease until a warden came over this spring and asked, 'What's in your mineral supplement?' " one landowner said in an interview. "I never thought about animal byproducts being in our mineral supplements before '97. Maybe mineral feeding was a link."
The DNR responded to what it found with a proposal to ban baiting and feeding in the CWD outbreak study area. On June 25, the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, despite intense opposition, imposed a statewide ban on deer feeding as part of its emergency policy to halt the epidemic.
DNR'S Solin said Thursday: "We do know that feed concentrates the herd, and that's why the ban was put in place. Feed concentrates animals, and if a lateral transmission occurs through saliva, stopping feeding reduces the chance of spreading it. It's going to take research and time to figure out what happened."
*
Scorched earth: Today, the group that met a dozen years ago with dreams of cultivating awesome trophy bucks feels devastated, as the order has gone out to kill the entire wild herd in their area and in an expanded area around them, an estimated 25,000 deer.
"Out here, we are a community that is grieving. We know our lives will never be the same again," one of the hunters said in a phone conversation late in May. "We've loved and respected the deer so much."
But the man, whose wife described him as the kind of sportsman who is "awestruck over the greatest buck or the tiniest fawn," is doing his part to stop the spread of CWD. With his DNR-issued special landowner permit, he has taken up his rifle.
"I shot eight deer for the DNR this past month, and by the eighth I was numb," he said. "I had no feeling at all."
Edited by - TJD on 08/28/2002 22:41:06
<font size=3>WD: REPORT FROM GROUND ZERO</font id=size3>
Capital Times, The (Madison, WI)
Published on July 20, 2002
© 2002- Madison Newspapers, Inc.
Byline: Mike Irwin Special to The Capital Times
One chilly evening in the winter of 1990 a group of local deer hunters -- farmers, neighbors and kin -- gathered for a chili supper at a farmhouse here to brainstorm about how to build a better buck.
Out of the conversation came a pact. They agreed to a long-term plan to refine the white-tailed herd in their area, including 12 square miles in the northwestern part of the town of Vermont, in western Dane County. Beginning that year, they would shoot many does but spare young bucks. They would give the males three to five years to develop the big bodies and splendid antlers that could qualify them as trophy candidates for the Pope and Young and Boone and Crockett record books.
So Part 1 of the pact was selection. Part 2 was nutrition.
"We'd come from dairy farming families, so we took our cues for improving the herd from that background," recalled a woman who took notes after the chili supper.
"We asked: What do the animals need that they might not be getting from the environment?' " Their ground was flinty, she noted, and forest soils were not high in calcium or phosphorus, the stuff that nursing does and fast-growing bucks "in velvet" need.
Deer were ruminants, like sheep or cattle, they reasoned. Why not supplement their diets, as farmers did for livestock, with pasture lots and licks? "Couldn't hurt, might help," one farmer said at the meeting.
So the group agreed to start -- or, since some had already started, continue -- a long-term program of supplemental mineral feeding of wild deer aimed at doe-fawn and buck health and the making of big antlers.
Within a few years, the results began to appear in the trophy books.
Of 152 Dane County bucks earning enough total points for registration between 1980 and 2000 in the Pope and Young Club's "Bowhunting: Big Game Records of North America," 136 were registered between 1990 and 2000.
Of the 136, 84 were killed between 1996 and 1999. Bucks with the highest scores for antlers dominated the years 1996, 1997 and 1998.
Clearly, something was working. Then, this year, something horrible appeared.
Eleven cases of chronic wasting disease -- a devastating brain disease not before seen east of the Mississippi River -- showed up in deer specimens taken by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from land, including one DNR-owned parcel, in the 12 tightly clustered square-mile sections of the town of Vermont. This was the area where the chili supper group was working.
DNR epidemiologist Julie Langenberg said in an interview that the cluster "suggests original cause. We're gathering data and asking questions."
Do the questions include whether the innocently begun nutrition and selection practices of local hunters may have created the conditions for the introduction of the disease and given it the years it needs to develop?
The DNR did collect feed samples in the days immediately after the first cases were reported. Thomas Solin, chief of special operations in the DNR Bureau of Law Enforcement, said Thursday that wardens canvassed the area "to get a snapshot" of conditions. Part of that involved collecting feed blocks from farmers and hunters and also purchasing blocks from local suppliers.
"A lot of people there were actively feeding. Once we captured the information we turned it over to the Department of Agriculture, because they regulate the feed. If they want to test, we have samples available."
But Eric Nelson, feed program manager for the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, says there are no procedures to test feed products for the presence of CWD. "With feed microscopy you can tell the difference between mammals and birds and that's about it," he said in an interview Friday.
"We did inspect feed manufacturers and deer feeders and found all products to be in compliance with the federal regulation banning rendered ruminant materials. There were no prohibited materials in any materials we inspected."
*
The science: Thirty-five years of scientific study show that epidemics of the fatal brain diseases of the class known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) have been largely bred by human behavior and spread by animal behavior.
Chronic wasting disease (CWD), like its cousins mad cow disease and sheep wasting disease or scrapie, is caused by a protein fragment called a prion, not a bacterium or a virus but a chain of amino acids that lives in the brain and nervous tissue. As was found in England, it can be introduced from dead animals to living ones through feed containing rendered meats and bones of diseased animals.
To do its full damage to a living animal, it must have years to develop. Studies report the incubation period between first contact and visible symptoms in deer is between one and a half and five years.
As the disease develops, the animals may spread it through many kinds of contact. It may go from deer to fawn. If wild herds are concentrated rather than dispersed - in areas such as Mount Horeb, where urban development narrows their range and feeding intensifies contact - it may be spread through saliva on food blocks, and in areas where deer bed down and leave their droppings. The prions can contaminate the soil where deer congregate.
One study in 1999 showed that feed itself can transmit the disease. In the study, mule deer fawns were fed a preparation of brain tissue taken from a mule deer with CWD. The protein marker, evidence of infection, was found in the lymph tissue of the digestive tract after fawns were sacrificed. At 42 days the first fawn autopsied showed infection. All of the fawns showed infection after 53 days.
Wisconsin's Eric Nelson scoffed at that study Friday. "They were using raw brain material and it wasn't natural feeding," he said. "If it had been rendered, the infectivity would have been greatly reduced."
He adds flatly: "There is no evidence to support the idea that CWD can be spread by feeding."
Researchers have found TSE prions to be nearly indestructible. They can remain viable on sterilized surgical tools. Clinical studies report that heats of 680 degrees Fahrenheit are required to kill these agents. Controlled studies have shown them to live in soils for seven or more years.
Richard Marsh, a renowned UW-Madison researcher, once warned a statewide farming audience that Wisconsin was especially vulnerable to TSE outbreaks because "we have so many animals here and so much rendering of them."
In 1982-83, Marsh asked Blair McMillan, a post-doctoral researcher and Madison-based epidemic microbiologist, for some help. McMillan's mentor then was UW epidemiologist Robert Paul Hanson. The three sought to understand transmission of the TSEs, but also the makeup of their infectious agents.
"I looked at this tiny, tiny fragment of protein - nucleic acid, this prion or virino, from a sheep scrapie-infected brain," McMillan said in an interview. "What I learned above all was that it was so small you couldn't kill it. It took intense heat. Even if you tried to irradiate it, you had to find it first."
McMillan, now a senior microbiologist and epidemiology specialist teaching at Madison Area Technical College, approaches the town of Vermont CWD outbreak with the caution of a scientist.
"You've got a true disease cluster out there. You've got your index (the first case) identified. Maybe the disease was there first, but now science has seen it," he said. "The geographic boundaries and timeline of the outbreak suggests a sole source of infection."
Still, to settle on a single cause for transmission makes McMillan very uncomfortable. Was that source deer feed containing animal byproducts? Or was it animal-to-animal contact? Or prions lurking in the soil at feeding stations where animals also had contact?
"You have science showing soil contact is possible, science that doe and fawn eye-to-mouth or afterbirth contact is possible. Moving across species to a new form, sheep to deer or cattle to deer is possible, but less likely. Next, you show me that deer are eating with infected deer, or eating rendered, infected deer" - and you'll have it."
But until then? He shakes a handful of pepper grains into his palm and tosses them toward the sidewalk just as a breeze comes up. "There are your infectious prions. They're out there. Go find them," he says.
*
The feed bans: As early as 1991, the U.S. Department of Agriculture created a voluntary ban on feeding rendered sheep byproducts to cattle.
On Aug. 4, 1997, in the wake of Britain's mad cow epidemic, the federal Food and Drug Administration placed a more extensive ban on ruminant-to-ruminant feeding. Ruminants included cattle, sheep, elk, buffalo, goats, antelope and deer, according to the rule.
But between 1991 and 1997, before the ban and while the deer feeding program was under way in the town of Vermont, Wisconsin deer carcasses and body parts did go to rendering plants. There they were processed into meat meal and bone meal and could legally be fed back to healthy deer.
In the 1994-95 fiscal year alone, just under 26,500 road-killed or seized white-tailed deer were picked up statewide by contractors for disposal at rendering facilities, according to 1995 DNR Bureau of Law Enforcement statistics.
A Wisconsin Meat Trades Association official, who asked not to be identified, recalled that before 1991, all his slaughterhouse offal and body parts went "down the road together" to rendering plants. After that, he said, unused sheep parts were rejected. But until August 1997, deer, cattle and other mammal body parts continued to be collected together for rendering in the same containers, dumpsters and vats.
Processing and rendering industries' common practices help explain how the CWD agent could have ultimately entered animal feeds and mineral supplements.
Larry Meicher, a hunter since 1976 who lives on the eastern side of the town of Vermont, outside the cluster, remembers seeing "deer blocks with animal products" ingredients on the label in 1995 at a suburban feed outlet west of Madison. If deer were accidentally fed contaminated feeds or minerals between, say, 1991 and 1997, the CWD disease symptoms clearly would be showing up now.
Between the mid to late 1980s until Aug. 4, 1997, it was legal and everyday practice in Wisconsin farm co-ops and private feed mills to blend ruminant feeds to include dry, prepared, rendered animal products. These specifically included meat meal, bone meal or both.
They used rendered materials because they were inexpensive compared, for example, to soybean meal. The rendered meat meal contained an average of 50 percent protein. The rendered bone meal contained 8 percent to 12 percent calcium and 4 percent to 6 percent phosphorus.
For deer muscle and antler growth, the bone meal seemed a good supplement. One of the women in the town of Vermont quality-deer group happened to work at a local co-op during the pre-ban years. "I was one of the promoters," she said. "We recommended 4 percent bypass (rendered) protein. We'd put it in dairy rations," she said, and recalled that pasture minerals had bone meal in their recipes as well.
"But even before we came in 1987, they were feeding mineral supplement out here," her husband said. "It's what farmers did. We all were doing it. People out here were putting together their own formulas. The whole community was doing it."
*
DNR investigates: In talking with local residents and hunters, this reporter collected three firsthand, eyewitness "sick deer, skin-and-bones deer" stories going back four to five years.
DNR wardens no doubt heard some of the same stories and acted on them. Well before the 2001 hunting season, through deer brain sampling at the Mount Horeb deer registration station, DNR specialists had formed a working hypothesis that the disease was present - at least in western Dane County.
Last year, they bore down on the Mount Horeb station. Of all deer brain testing done statewide during last fall's gun hunt across Wisconsin, fully a quarter of all samples, 82 out of 345, were from the Mount Horeb station and from Management Unit 70A. Three positives for CWD appeared. They came from Sections 19 and 21 in the northwest part of the town of Vermont. The first positive, what epidemiologists call "the index case," came from Section 21.
This information prompted the March-to-May shoot of this year that added 416 samples from other Dane and Iowa County towns abutting the town of Vermont. It also eventually established a fully identifiable disease cluster, with 11 of 18 total cases, 63 percent, appearing in 12 abutting square-mile sections of the town of Vermont's northwest corner.
With the cluster identified, what would the next logical step be? Harvard University epidemiologist Melissa Perry suggested in an interview: "Your state people might find the mineral feeding sites in the disease cluster and try to correlate them with sites where they found deer testing positive" for the disease.
The DNR did just that.
"I never had thought about feeding as a possible way to spread the disease until a warden came over this spring and asked, 'What's in your mineral supplement?' " one landowner said in an interview. "I never thought about animal byproducts being in our mineral supplements before '97. Maybe mineral feeding was a link."
The DNR responded to what it found with a proposal to ban baiting and feeding in the CWD outbreak study area. On June 25, the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board, despite intense opposition, imposed a statewide ban on deer feeding as part of its emergency policy to halt the epidemic.
DNR'S Solin said Thursday: "We do know that feed concentrates the herd, and that's why the ban was put in place. Feed concentrates animals, and if a lateral transmission occurs through saliva, stopping feeding reduces the chance of spreading it. It's going to take research and time to figure out what happened."
*
Scorched earth: Today, the group that met a dozen years ago with dreams of cultivating awesome trophy bucks feels devastated, as the order has gone out to kill the entire wild herd in their area and in an expanded area around them, an estimated 25,000 deer.
"Out here, we are a community that is grieving. We know our lives will never be the same again," one of the hunters said in a phone conversation late in May. "We've loved and respected the deer so much."
But the man, whose wife described him as the kind of sportsman who is "awestruck over the greatest buck or the tiniest fawn," is doing his part to stop the spread of CWD. With his DNR-issued special landowner permit, he has taken up his rifle.
"I shot eight deer for the DNR this past month, and by the eighth I was numb," he said. "I had no feeling at all."
Edited by - TJD on 08/28/2002 22:41:06
08-28-2002, 09:38 PM
#2
Fork Horn
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sussex WI
Posts: 381
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
Here's the part that got me: <BLOCKQUOTE id=quote<font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>In talking with local residents and hunters, this reporter collected three firsthand, eyewitness "sick deer, skin-and-bones deer" stories going back four to five years.
DNR wardens no doubt heard some of the same stories and acted on them. Well before the 2001 hunting season, through deer brain sampling at the Mount Horeb deer registration station, DNR specialists had formed a working hypothesis that the disease was present - at least in western Dane County.
Last year, they bore down on the Mount Horeb station. Of all deer brain testing done statewide during last fall's gun hunt across Wisconsin, fully a quarter of all samples, 82 out of 345, were from the Mount Horeb station and from Management Unit 70A. Three positives for CWD appeared. They came from Sections 19 and 21 in the northwest part of the town of Vermont. The first positive, what epidemiologists call "the index case," came from Section 21.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
So in other words, the DNR suspected something prior to last season, but didn't bother to utter a word about it to the public??? Or was there a reason, maybe to avoid embarrasment at having ignored some evidence...<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>One study in 1999 showed that feed itself can transmit the disease. In the study, mule deer fawns were fed a preparation of brain tissue taken from a mule deer with CWD. The protein marker, evidence of infection, was found in the lymph tissue of the digestive tract after fawns were sacrificed. At 42 days the first fawn autopsied showed infection. All of the fawns showed infection after 53 days.
Wisconsin's Eric Nelson scoffed at that study Friday. "They were using raw brain material and it wasn't natural feeding," he said. "If it had been rendered, the infectivity would have been greatly reduced."<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
Anyone ever been to a rendering plant? I have. They cut up EVERYTHING, including the brains! So I wonder if the DNR just sort of ignored the possibliity...strange since feed is exactly how related diseases like Mad Cow spread.
DNR wardens no doubt heard some of the same stories and acted on them. Well before the 2001 hunting season, through deer brain sampling at the Mount Horeb deer registration station, DNR specialists had formed a working hypothesis that the disease was present - at least in western Dane County.
Last year, they bore down on the Mount Horeb station. Of all deer brain testing done statewide during last fall's gun hunt across Wisconsin, fully a quarter of all samples, 82 out of 345, were from the Mount Horeb station and from Management Unit 70A. Three positives for CWD appeared. They came from Sections 19 and 21 in the northwest part of the town of Vermont. The first positive, what epidemiologists call "the index case," came from Section 21.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
So in other words, the DNR suspected something prior to last season, but didn't bother to utter a word about it to the public??? Or was there a reason, maybe to avoid embarrasment at having ignored some evidence...<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>One study in 1999 showed that feed itself can transmit the disease. In the study, mule deer fawns were fed a preparation of brain tissue taken from a mule deer with CWD. The protein marker, evidence of infection, was found in the lymph tissue of the digestive tract after fawns were sacrificed. At 42 days the first fawn autopsied showed infection. All of the fawns showed infection after 53 days.
Wisconsin's Eric Nelson scoffed at that study Friday. "They were using raw brain material and it wasn't natural feeding," he said. "If it had been rendered, the infectivity would have been greatly reduced."<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
Anyone ever been to a rendering plant? I have. They cut up EVERYTHING, including the brains! So I wonder if the DNR just sort of ignored the possibliity...strange since feed is exactly how related diseases like Mad Cow spread.
08-30-2002, 06:58 PM
#3
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: DeForest WI USA
Posts: 19
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
TJD,
Perhaps they did suspect something in the Mt. Horeb area. Can you fault them for concentrating their testing there then? They got positive results. What more do you want?
If they were indeed hiding something,perhaps it was to avoid the total panic-laden articles that have flooded newpapers and TV newscasts since The Announcement in Feb. Perhaps they were hoping against hope it was really an isolated case? I don't know. And it doesn't really matter.
What I do know it that it really does no good whatsoever to point fingers and blame the DNR for doing this or not doing that.
You seem to be pretty good at doing that.
Where did you get your wildlife biology degree? Moe and Curly's Corner Tap?
Tim
Perhaps they did suspect something in the Mt. Horeb area. Can you fault them for concentrating their testing there then? They got positive results. What more do you want?
If they were indeed hiding something,perhaps it was to avoid the total panic-laden articles that have flooded newpapers and TV newscasts since The Announcement in Feb. Perhaps they were hoping against hope it was really an isolated case? I don't know. And it doesn't really matter.
What I do know it that it really does no good whatsoever to point fingers and blame the DNR for doing this or not doing that.
You seem to be pretty good at doing that.
Where did you get your wildlife biology degree? Moe and Curly's Corner Tap?
Tim
08-31-2002, 10:12 PM
#4
Fork Horn
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sussex WI
Posts: 381
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote<font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Where did you get your wildlife biology degree? Moe and Curly's Corner Tap?<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
No,but where did you get your frontal lobotomy, from Moe himself? Or are you like Homer Simpson with a crayola lodged in the cerebrum? The DNR is a public branch of government, making it accountable to the people who pay for it...<font size=3>US!!</font id=size3> But hey, feel free to switch off that melon of yours and nod yes to their every dictate. BTW, since you seem to be in such agreement with the DNR, and since they say it is the "duty of hunters" to "help out"how many deer have you shot down in the Eradication Zone?
Tim, did you READ the article? On one hand, we have DNR people ignoring the very science they supposedly make decisions by. Since you seemed to miss this, let me post it again:
<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>One study in 1999 showed that feed itself can transmit the disease. In the study, mule deer fawns were fed a preparation of brain tissue taken from a mule deer with CWD. The protein marker, evidence of infection, was found in the lymph tissue of the digestive tract after fawns were sacrificed. At 42 days the first fawn autopsied showed infection. All of the fawns showed infection after 53 days.
Wisconsin's Eric Nelson scoffed at that study Friday. "They were using raw brain material and it wasn't natural feeding," he said. "If it had been rendered, the infectivity would have been greatly reduced."
He adds flatly: "There is no evidence to support the idea that CWD can be spread by feeding."<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
Yep, another moron who has never been to a rendering plant. We know that prions can only be killed by extremely high heat and by very strong disinfectants, both of which are completely absent in feed.
On the other hand, the DNR supposedly had a "working hypothesis" that CWD may have been in the area. Why? People see sick deer from time to time...they do eventually DIE you know...so why the sudden interest in one area? And...<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>If they were indeed hiding something,perhaps it was to avoid the total panic-laden articles that have flooded newpapers and TV newscasts since The Announcement in Feb.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote> So hunters in the area that is infected are told nothing about a disease that, if it spreads to a human is 100% fatal??? Hey, great public policy!! Sorry Tim, in this case what they don't know can not only hurt them, but kill them!
All a lot of us are looking for are answers from the DNR, instead of the usual diet of double-talk and the usual "give us your money and go to he11" approach they are so famous for. If it was suspected of being in Wisconsin a couple of years ago or five years ago, instead of just this past year, we should have been informed.
No,but where did you get your frontal lobotomy, from Moe himself? Or are you like Homer Simpson with a crayola lodged in the cerebrum? The DNR is a public branch of government, making it accountable to the people who pay for it...<font size=3>US!!</font id=size3> But hey, feel free to switch off that melon of yours and nod yes to their every dictate. BTW, since you seem to be in such agreement with the DNR, and since they say it is the "duty of hunters" to "help out"how many deer have you shot down in the Eradication Zone?
Tim, did you READ the article? On one hand, we have DNR people ignoring the very science they supposedly make decisions by. Since you seemed to miss this, let me post it again:
<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>One study in 1999 showed that feed itself can transmit the disease. In the study, mule deer fawns were fed a preparation of brain tissue taken from a mule deer with CWD. The protein marker, evidence of infection, was found in the lymph tissue of the digestive tract after fawns were sacrificed. At 42 days the first fawn autopsied showed infection. All of the fawns showed infection after 53 days.
Wisconsin's Eric Nelson scoffed at that study Friday. "They were using raw brain material and it wasn't natural feeding," he said. "If it had been rendered, the infectivity would have been greatly reduced."
He adds flatly: "There is no evidence to support the idea that CWD can be spread by feeding."<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
Yep, another moron who has never been to a rendering plant. We know that prions can only be killed by extremely high heat and by very strong disinfectants, both of which are completely absent in feed.
On the other hand, the DNR supposedly had a "working hypothesis" that CWD may have been in the area. Why? People see sick deer from time to time...they do eventually DIE you know...so why the sudden interest in one area? And...<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>If they were indeed hiding something,perhaps it was to avoid the total panic-laden articles that have flooded newpapers and TV newscasts since The Announcement in Feb.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote> So hunters in the area that is infected are told nothing about a disease that, if it spreads to a human is 100% fatal??? Hey, great public policy!! Sorry Tim, in this case what they don't know can not only hurt them, but kill them!
All a lot of us are looking for are answers from the DNR, instead of the usual diet of double-talk and the usual "give us your money and go to he11" approach they are so famous for. If it was suspected of being in Wisconsin a couple of years ago or five years ago, instead of just this past year, we should have been informed.
08-31-2002, 11:37 PM
#5
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: DeForest WI USA
Posts: 19
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
TJD,
Since you are one who never gives the DNR credit for anything and will criticize anything they do, it is like arguing with an anti-hunter when discussing a topic with you. What ever I or anyone says you will disagree with it and no amount of persuading will change your mind.
You will always be one who questions decisions of the DNR. Possibly because you or your hunting buddies don't agree with them? I don't agree with everything the DNR does either but I do know not to question things that are decided by professionals in areas I know little or nothing about. I do not have a wildlife biology degree. Those hired by the DNR do. I am secure in the knowledge that they are working with the best knowledge available in this disease.
Nothing they do will be popular with everyone.
Get over it.
Tim,
Tim
Edited by - Tim-WI hunter on 09/01/2002 00:45:15
Since you are one who never gives the DNR credit for anything and will criticize anything they do, it is like arguing with an anti-hunter when discussing a topic with you. What ever I or anyone says you will disagree with it and no amount of persuading will change your mind.
You will always be one who questions decisions of the DNR. Possibly because you or your hunting buddies don't agree with them? I don't agree with everything the DNR does either but I do know not to question things that are decided by professionals in areas I know little or nothing about. I do not have a wildlife biology degree. Those hired by the DNR do. I am secure in the knowledge that they are working with the best knowledge available in this disease.
Nothing they do will be popular with everyone.
Get over it.
Tim,
Tim
Edited by - Tim-WI hunter on 09/01/2002 00:45:15
09-01-2002, 09:30 AM
#6
Fork Horn
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sussex WI
Posts: 381
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
Tim, it's a free country. You want to simply nod your head and agree with everything the DNR spews out, fine.
Heck, it's easier than thinking!
But think about this: if the DNR has such a compelling case, then why have they done such a crappy job of convincing people? For example, from the Milwaukee Journal, August 28th:
<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote<font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Signaling resentment with the Department of Natural Resources' handling of the chronic wasting disease outbreak, landowners in more than a quarter of the eradication zone are refusing to kill deer or allow state sharpshooters on their property.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
...that's one quarter of the eradication zone! The very people directly affected by the CWD outbreak and one-fourth of the area will be off limits to sharpshooters. Why is that, Tim?
You alluded to the DNR wanting to avoid the "panic laden articles" with regard to CWD. So the messages the DNR gives us is:
"Don't panic, but we need to kill every deer in a 371 square mile area."
"Don't worry about catching the disease, but make sure you wear rubber gloves and don't hit the deer in the spleen. Oh, by the way, don't cut too close to the spine when you cut your meat off either."
"The meat is safe to eat, but make sure that your butcher sterilizes his equipment between batches either by heating it to 1,600 degrees farenheit or by soaking it in a 50% mixture of bleach and water for at least three hours."
"We believe the disease spreads from deer to deer, but it's ok to leave your gut pile, complete with the infected spleen and lymph nodes, in the woods."
"We know that hunters have always hated earn-a-buck, but in order to get more hunters in the area to kill as many deer as possible, we want to implement it"
....and on and on...
Tim, what I'm saying is that the DNR is talking out of both sides of their collective mouth. If there was a working hypothesis that this disease was here a couple of years ago, then why was no action taken then, especially if the DNR supposedly knew the necessary steps to take?
Have I agreed with some things the DNR has done? Yep. Also disagreed with a lot as well.
It just seems strange that there have been three things on the DNR wish list for the past 5 years that they now have: 1) ban on baiting, 2) much higher deer kill authorization, and 3) earn-a-buck.
Again, to touch on a point that you made, Tim, about panic laden articles: you're right, they are out there. But they are there due to the DNR's handling of this issue.
And I'm not sure if that is by accident or by design.
Heck, it's easier than thinking!
But think about this: if the DNR has such a compelling case, then why have they done such a crappy job of convincing people? For example, from the Milwaukee Journal, August 28th:
<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote<font size=1 face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>Signaling resentment with the Department of Natural Resources' handling of the chronic wasting disease outbreak, landowners in more than a quarter of the eradication zone are refusing to kill deer or allow state sharpshooters on their property.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face='Verdana, Arial, Helvetica' size=2 id=quote>
...that's one quarter of the eradication zone! The very people directly affected by the CWD outbreak and one-fourth of the area will be off limits to sharpshooters. Why is that, Tim?
You alluded to the DNR wanting to avoid the "panic laden articles" with regard to CWD. So the messages the DNR gives us is:
"Don't panic, but we need to kill every deer in a 371 square mile area."
"Don't worry about catching the disease, but make sure you wear rubber gloves and don't hit the deer in the spleen. Oh, by the way, don't cut too close to the spine when you cut your meat off either."
"The meat is safe to eat, but make sure that your butcher sterilizes his equipment between batches either by heating it to 1,600 degrees farenheit or by soaking it in a 50% mixture of bleach and water for at least three hours."
"We believe the disease spreads from deer to deer, but it's ok to leave your gut pile, complete with the infected spleen and lymph nodes, in the woods."
"We know that hunters have always hated earn-a-buck, but in order to get more hunters in the area to kill as many deer as possible, we want to implement it"
....and on and on...
Tim, what I'm saying is that the DNR is talking out of both sides of their collective mouth. If there was a working hypothesis that this disease was here a couple of years ago, then why was no action taken then, especially if the DNR supposedly knew the necessary steps to take?
Have I agreed with some things the DNR has done? Yep. Also disagreed with a lot as well.
It just seems strange that there have been three things on the DNR wish list for the past 5 years that they now have: 1) ban on baiting, 2) much higher deer kill authorization, and 3) earn-a-buck.
Again, to touch on a point that you made, Tim, about panic laden articles: you're right, they are out there. But they are there due to the DNR's handling of this issue.
And I'm not sure if that is by accident or by design.
09-02-2002, 07:28 AM
#7
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: lyndon station wi USA
Posts: 4
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
TJD... In 100% agreement with the DNR getting their wish list. If the article from Capital Times is accurate..then yes the DNR certainly had to know prior to last year. Doubt it would have made a differnece. Will cwd spread? Yes. Is it outside the cwd zone? Dont know. Will the DNR get the kill they want? NO WAY! Will the deer kill be down statewide? YES. I work outdoors with my business. I'm in contact with landowners everyday with my business. To many of them are either not hunting this year, or will be very selective in what they will shoot. Why selective? Because they are not sure ( or the family will not let them) eat the vension. They were raised to eat what they kill. SO unless they convince the family, or have someone to donate the vension to, they will just be going through the ritual of heading out to the woods for the opener, or not going at all.
If the DNR wants the kill in the CWD zone, their only hope is putting a bounty on the deer.
If the DNR wants the kill in the CWD zone, their only hope is putting a bounty on the deer.
09-02-2002, 05:16 PM
#8
Fork Horn
Thread Starter
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Sussex WI
Posts: 381
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
Lyndon, I'm not trying to jump on any conspiracy bandwagon by any means. The ban on baiting...that debate goes back years before CWD was even a thought here. Earn-a-buck was the consummate spreadsheet answer...an attempt by some goofball in an air-conditioned office in Madison trying to find a way to increase the antlerless kill, without taking into account the real behavior of hunters, not to mention the utter disdain that such an action would generate. Higher deer kill? If you wade thru some of the Deer 2000 materials, you'll even see that it wasn't even increased deer populations in some areas that encouraged the DNR to implement T-zones. In fact, many were the result of the DNR suddenly deciding that the optimal number of deer per square mile should now be lower than what the optimum was previously. Same population, lower goal and ...whooola!...you have an "overpopulated DMU!
Tim, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you or anyone else who disagrees with me here. Heck, I'd just as soon have ten people like you countering my opinion than have you and others not give a hoot at all. My problem with this whole approach is this:
---If the DNR had a strong inkling that CWD may be in the area, why was so little said?
---So far, the DNR is a "one-trick pony" on the CWD issue. True, they got a ban on feeding in as a simple and rather painless way to decrease the chances of spreading CWD, but that is not their focus. This focus on eradication is the problem. First, they don't really have any evidence that it will work. Also, let's say they test later this year and find that CWD exists in three other widely scattered areas around the state. Then what? Kill off all the deer in another 20 or 30 units to try and "save" the herd from a disease that affects a median of 4-5% of wild herds elsewhere? To what end?
Tim, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you or anyone else who disagrees with me here. Heck, I'd just as soon have ten people like you countering my opinion than have you and others not give a hoot at all. My problem with this whole approach is this:
---If the DNR had a strong inkling that CWD may be in the area, why was so little said?
---So far, the DNR is a "one-trick pony" on the CWD issue. True, they got a ban on feeding in as a simple and rather painless way to decrease the chances of spreading CWD, but that is not their focus. This focus on eradication is the problem. First, they don't really have any evidence that it will work. Also, let's say they test later this year and find that CWD exists in three other widely scattered areas around the state. Then what? Kill off all the deer in another 20 or 30 units to try and "save" the herd from a disease that affects a median of 4-5% of wild herds elsewhere? To what end?
09-02-2002, 07:08 PM
#9
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: CWD Central, WI.
Posts: 2,062
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
By the way; The eradication zone grew again after the last bunch of tests showed a positive on the outskirts. I think they added something like another 15 sq. miles. Imagine how large the erad. zone would be if they would have tested the same amount of deer in every section of land as they did in their bogus "Core Area". But I'm sure they will say the area is growing because we're not killin them fast enough. Just wait til after the season tests start to roll in. "The horror, the horror......Kill them all".
09-02-2002, 08:29 PM
#10
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: DeForest WI USA
Posts: 19
RE: What did the WDNR know and when?
One of the things regarding tis issue. yes, the DNR is kind of going into this without much knowledge. They are using all the things learned from other states. The biggest problem is that there have never been any verified cases of CWD with whitetails. It's either been mulies or elk before. Also never in the densities of animals we have near Mt. Horeb.
It's really too bad there are so many people that are not going to hunt this fall. The very least they should do is buy a license. The DNR needs the $$ from these sales to continue it programs everywhere. Not just on CWD. This issue has sapped there budget and allkinds of programs are being raided. No one should complain when the pheasant stocking trucks don't come around to drop their targets off at public lands as much this year. The monies aren't there. State Parks could be hit. Other conservation programs are halted or in limbo.
This should concern anyone who cares about our outdoors and Wisconsin's Heritage.
Tim
It's really too bad there are so many people that are not going to hunt this fall. The very least they should do is buy a license. The DNR needs the $$ from these sales to continue it programs everywhere. Not just on CWD. This issue has sapped there budget and allkinds of programs are being raided. No one should complain when the pheasant stocking trucks don't come around to drop their targets off at public lands as much this year. The monies aren't there. State Parks could be hit. Other conservation programs are halted or in limbo.
This should concern anyone who cares about our outdoors and Wisconsin's Heritage.
Tim