CWD brings close to state’s deer hunting heyday
In January, Jacob Ayecock of Tillar registered a typical rack from a Drew County whitetail with the Boone and Crockett Club that scored 195 2/8 net.
It was the biggest typical rack ever killed in the South and in the top 60 all-time. It was a reason to celebrate.
One month later, Arkan- sas’ deer and elk herd got the equivalent of a cancer diagnosis. Chronic wasting disease was found in an elk that a hunter killed in October in the vicinity of the Buffalo River near Pruitt.
CWD affects only cervids such as deer, elk and moose, but it’s not treatable, not preventable and 100-percent fatal to any cervid that gets it.
It’s Stage I CWD at this point, but further testing is required for a full evaluation that will probably get worse.
That’s how it goes. You’re on top of the world one day, and the next day your world comes crashing down.
Starting March 7, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission will kill about 40 elk and about 300 whitetailed deer within a five-mile radius (10-mile diameter) of where the infected elk was killed. That’s like a narrow-beam radiation treatment for cancer.
If CWD has spread, then the AGFC will prescribe its version of chemotherapy. It will expand beyond the original CWD core zone and kill as many deer and elk for sampling as are necessary until no more animals test positive.
It is unrealistic to believe or even hope that one elk was the sole carrier of CWD in Newton County. Brad Carner, chief of the AGFC’s wildlife management division, and Cory Gray, the deer program coordinator, say so. The best scenario is that no more than 1-2 percent of the animals killed in the core zone will test positive.
If it turns out to be 10 percent or more, then CWD might be prevalent to a degree that could force the AGFC to eradicate the entire elk herd. Even if the Buffalo River elk endure, this episode quashes any hope that elk can ever be restored to the Ouachita National Forest.
Worse, it could devastate the deer herd in that part of the Ozarks.
Many years ago, the AGFC brought deer back from near extinction. It’s one of the main reasons voters approved Amendment 35 to the Arkansas Constitution in 1944, and it’s one of conservation’s greatest success stories.
Our deer are in big trouble again, not from unregulated market and subsistence hunting, but because of a protein that corrupts other proteins.
Or so they say. Some credible authorities, most notably Dr. Frank Bastian of LSU and Tulane, insist that disorders like CWD are bacterial, and that the prion theory is false.
We do know that CWD is a variant in a family of disorders that destroy the central nervous systems of certain mammals. There’s a bovine
variant called mad cow disease and a human variant called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Another variant called scrapie affects sheep and goats. Collectively, they are called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
TSEs are not known to cross species, but pathologists stop short of saying they can’t or won’t.
There is no known risk of eating the striated muscle tissue of deer and elk, like the backstraps, tenderloins, hams,
shoulders and brisket. However, venison should never come in contact with brain tissue, spinal tissue or spinal fluid.
Bone out your deer and elk on a pole and have it safely stashed away in a cooler or other container before you remove the head. The clear spinal fluid that drains from the spine might contain whatever infectious agents comprise CWD from an infected animal.
Field & Stream recently published an article titled, “State of the Deer Union: The Whitetail Boom is Over, But It’s Not All Bad News.”
In some Midwestern states, buck kills have fallen by as much as 40 percent in less than a decade, and the number of trophies submitted to the Boone and Crockett and Pope & Young clubs has fallen by more than 50 percent in the nation’s top trophy deer states.
That’s all CWD country, and that now includes Arkansas.
Even if our CWD crisis turns out to be minimal, I sense that deer hunting in our state will never be the same.