Is CWD a Hazard or a Hoax?
By RICK STORY
I don't know about you, but I've stopped losing sleep over the so-called scourge of Chronic Wasting Disease.
In the late '90s, when the disease turned up in what was believed to be a wild population of whitetailed deer in Colorado (more on that later), the wildlife management community went through the roof, warning of dire consequences to wild herds everywhere and pointing the finger at the operators of high-fence game farms. The hunting preserve operators were supposedly harboring the disease among captive herds, which represented a ticking time bomb sure to lead to the decimation of the wild white-tailed deer population throughout North America.
A decade later, sportsmen are asking, "So what's the big deal?"
Over the past decade, there has been a grand total of one massive die-off of white-tails as a result of CWD. Actually it would be better termed a kill-off, since the only deer that died en masse came as a result of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources ordering the extermination of deer in a several-county area in southern Wisconsin when CWD was reported to have turned up among wild deer.
As a result, license sales plummeted and agency funding went in the dumper. Soon after, the Wisconsin DNR called an abrupt halt to the extermination program amid a flurry of public relations and urged hunters to resume taking whitetails again. Supposedly the hunters had taken all the deer in the counties that carried CWD. I seriously doubt it, and so does anyone who understands that it would be virtually impossible to exterminate every single deer, even those carrying CWD.
I hate to use words like "hoax" and "collusion." I really do, but as my south St. Louis-born-and- raised dad used to say, "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. "
In fact, the above-cited example of the alleged wild Colorado deer herd that turned up a high incidence of CWD was at least hoax-like and perhaps more than a little suspicious. When the then newly appointed director of the state wildlife agency, the former head of wildlife management in Illinois, Jeff Verstighe, performed an internal investigation of the agency's actions relative to the outbreak, he decided to make a clean breast of the matter and announced that the infected wild deer "herd" was in fact not a wild herd at all, but a gaggle of deer that had got loose from a nearby high fence game farm!
If the agencies haven't been able to point to CWD as an agent of death and destruction of deer populations to date anywhere in the country, what's the motivation for all the agencies' gloom and doom predictions? Panic has gripped sportsmen and sportswomen who care about the future of deer and deer hunting.
It would seem that the agencies' real purpose in all the fear mongering is to put out of business all the high fence deer and other wild ungulate hunting operations. Face it, the agencies see these businesses as mild competition for their product, certainly, but even more of a pain in the neck to regulate. They resent the game farms' very existence and would like to see them go away. One state, Montana, has gone so far as to outlaw all new game farms and establish that existing game farm licenses will not be renewed upon the deaths of the current owners!
I don't operate a high fence game farm; I don't have any friends or relatives in that business and have never even hunted on a commercial hunting property other than a couple of pheasant and game bird hunting preserves. I have no love for high fence commercial hunting and can't foresee ever hunting deer or other mammals on one.
It just rankles me that agencies might well be hiding behind false science to achieve a political goal.
But, maybe I'm missing something. Maybe someone can illustrate the dangers of CWD by pointing out an outbreak that has infected and killed large numbers of whitetails. I don't pretend to know everything about everything. It's not like this is a new threat — we've been being warned and frightened by the agencies for the past decade.
But, until someone can step forward and give me graphic proof, after all this time, I have one simple request of our friends in wildlife management: Please, stop trying to play me for a chump.
Rick Story is the former executive director of the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, dedicated to protecting the heritage of the American sportsman to hunt, fish and trap and to protecting scientific wildlife management. For nearly 30 years, he represented sportsmen in battles to defend and advance sportsmen's rights in the state legislatures, in the courts and congress and before the voters.
Story, now retired, today does freelance writing, photography, public affairs and political consulting. He is a member of the board of directors of the Association of Great LAkes Outdoor Writers and recently left the board of the national outdoor communicators' group, The Professional Outdoor Media Association.
No sportsman's advocate in America has Story's experience and success in combating the forces that threaten the rights of hunters, anglers and trappers. He has been in the thick of literally every fight that challenged our right to pursue outdoor sports and threatened the integrity of wildlife management since the early 1980s.
Story, a native of St. Louis, owns property in his home state and hunts and fishes here frequently. He holds degrees in journalism and public relations from Ohio State University and resides near Columbus, Ohio with his wife and near his children and grandchildren.
Disaster Response Must Go Beyond the Individual Animal
Photo and Text By JIM SPENCER
In addition to killing 11 people, the Deepwater Horizon fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico was a serious environmental event. Its negative effects will be felt for a while in the Louisiana marshes and in the Gulf Coast economy.
There is plenty of blame to go around, including BP, the Obama administration, local, and national politicians. Point a finger in any direction and you'll find folks who helped make a bad situation worse.
There was plenty of ink about the leaking oil itself, but in any big oil-related accident like this, it's the poor, oil-coated critters that get the weepiest news coverage. Some reporter stands on a beach beside some guy in a yellow slicker suit holding a gooey pelican, and gushes on and on about how 600 other birds have been "rescued" and are currently being cleaned and degreased so they can once again be natural, wild and free.
I can't think of a poorer, more pointless way to spend manpower and money.
It is terrible that these birds and turtles and mammals were mired in the oil. The figure I heard most recently was that 30,000 oiled critters had been found, with a vast preponderance being birds (mostly gulls and brown pelicans.) That sounds like a lot of animals, and if you piled them all in one place it would be a lot, but in the overall scheme of nature, it really is small potatoes. The number of gulls, pelicans and other wildlife in the Gulf and surrounding shoreline is staggering. Even if the actual figure is three or four times the 30,000, it's still just a drop in the bucket and the loss can be quickly regained.
What's not a small matter is the damage to the coastal marshes and estuaries. Things are beginning to improve, but that could change at any time, and even if not another drop of oil escapes, plenty has already reached the coastal marshes.
The money and manpower ought to be going to coastline protection and cleanup. It's much more effective to concentrate on keeping habitat healthy, so it can remain productive, than to engage in a heartfelt but woefully misguided effort to clean, rehabilitate and release critters that have been oil-fouled.
I'm not trying to say these oil-beslimed animals ought to be ignored; they ought to be euthanized, and the money and manpower spent where it might do some good. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and the hard, cold truth is that rehabilitating oiled birds, reptiles and mammals does not work. It's throwing good money after bad. Research has shown again and again that this kind of rehab is both expensive and ineffective.
After the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, 357 sea otters were brought in for treatment, and 197 were released – at a cost of $82,000 per otter. Radio-tracking studies found that after eight months, 12 of the 45 otters wearing transmitters were dead. Nine more were missing, for a total of 21 out of 45 – nearly half. That brings the per-living-otter cost up to about $150,000, give or take a few thousand.
Around 1,600 sea birds were captured, de-oiled, and rehabilitated at the same time, and half of them were returned to the sea at a cost of nearly $32,000 per bird. I couldn't find any survival data on the Valdez birds, but other similar rehab studies document a survival rate of less than 10 percent. So all of a sudden we're talking about $320,000 per gull.
That's some pretty expensive wildlife management, but it's the side of the story you won't hear on CNN. The money spent cleaning creatures likely to die soon anyway could be better spent designing safety systems, investing in oil-containment research, or paying for additional emergency personnel to respond to spills. Or, like I've already suggested, to clean up the environment so Mother Nature can replenish the wild stock in the old-fashioned, time-tested, efficient way.
It's not surprising that the well-meaning but uninformed public gets all caught up in this hands-on business of rehabilitating individual animals, but the science of wildlife management cannot afford to concern itself with individuals except in the case of extremely rare species like the whooping crane and the red wolf.
Wildlife management relies on sound habitat management procedures, to maximize the productivity of the land so wildlife populations can take advantage of that productivity. It's the only way it will work, because in the real world, we can't afford $150,000 otters and 3-for-$1 million seagulls.
People who know the basics of wildlife interactions already know this.
I wish the rest of the world would figure it out.
 Wildlife management, whether it's game or nongame animals, can only be done by dealing with entire species and ecosystems rather than individual animals. |