CWD response an ongoing case
News last week of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission detecting chronic wasting disease in a deer killed in Felsenthal National Wildlife Refuge prompted a variety of responses.
The most interesting response was from the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. On Dec. 2, the Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Commission voted to ban feeding and baiting in Morehouse and Union parishes, beginning Monday. The LDWF also implemented its CWD Response Plan and will increase ongoing CWD surveillance in Morehouse and Union parishes due to their proximity to Felsenthal NWR.
The CWD-positive deer was a 2.5-year old doe killed in a controlled hunt about 7.5 miles north of the Louisiana border. The LDWF’s response is the most it can do to protect the health of its deer herd and to protect public safety, upon which the effect of chronic wasting disease is unknown. Consumers are advised not to eat venison from CWD-positive deer because of it’s relationship to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a human variant.
Banning baiting and feeding deer is an attempt to prevent deer from concentrating and ingesting prions, CWD-active proteins, that infected deer shed through saliva, urine, feces and through physical contact. This of course, does not prevent deer from concentrating on an oak flat rife with acorns, in soybean fields or in other agricultural crops that are not intended to feed deer.
Logic aside, the LDWF is probably about 20 years too late. South Arkansas was believed to be CWD-free until last week, and it’s unreasonably optimistic to believe the Felsenthal deer was the only CWD-infected deer in Arkansas Deer Management Zone 12.
Likewise, it’s reasonable to believe that CWD is in Louisiana, even though CWD has not been detected there yet.
In a previous column, we lamented the lack of CWD testing data for deer not only in Zone 12, but statewide. Since 2016, Arkansas hunters have submitted only about 38,000 deer for CWD testing. That is a very small database over a six-year period for a state that covers 53,179 square miles.
Louisiana’s database is infinitessimally smaller. Louisiana has tested only 12,000 whitetailed deer since 2002. That averages to only 631 deer per year spread over 52,378 square miles. That is less than 10% of the annual deer harvest in Union County alone. Louisiana’s total number of deer tested since 2002 does not even equal a two-year deer harvest in Union County.
On the other hand, deer hunters killed about 89,000 deer in Louisiana in the 202021 deer seasons, compared to more than 212,000 in Arkansas in 2020-21. Nevertheless, Union Parish had Louisiana’s largest deer harvest, with 4,074 deer reported killed. Louisiana’s entire CWD testing database does not equal three year’s deer harvest in Union Parish. Morehouse Parish contributed 1,950 deer to Louisiana’s reported harvest in 2020-21.
Our point is that Louisiana hunters have not submitted enough deer for CWD testing to provide an accurate assessment. That is not the fault of the LDWF or Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. They have tested what hunters have given them, plus roadkills and targeted killings.
Meanwhile, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency last week reported a CWD-positive deer from Weakley County, bringing the number of CWD-positive counties to 12. The Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency also enacted bans on baiting and feeding deer in that area.
Surprisingly, the response among Zone 12 deer hunters to the presence of CWD in their area has been mild. It’s nothing like the shock and despair that occurred when the first CWD-positive deer and elk were reported in North Arkansas in February 2016. Hunters pretty much assume CWD is coming to a thicket near them eventually.
Perhaps tempering potential negativity is the fact that CWD hasn’t seemed to depress deer numbers significantly in areas where the disease is highly prevalent. It does appear that the disease has drastically cropped the number of old deer, especially mature bucks. Otherwise, they’ve bounced back everywhere CWD has appeared. In Newton County, Ground Zero for CWD in Arkansas, hunters have checked 1,345 deer so far this season.
CWD probably does alter deer herd age composition dynamics, and it probably alters hunters’ trust in eating venison, but so far, it does not appear to be an existential threat to deer as a whole.