Here & Now

Wisconsin Hunters on Chronic Wasting Disease

Frederica Freyberg:

Again, the full interview can be found on PBSwisconsin.org.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, declining numbers of people think President Trump should be impeached. The latest Marquette Law School poll conducted in the midst of impeachment hearings shows 40% of registered voters think Trump should be impeached. That’s down from 44% last month. 53% do not think so, and 6% say they don’t know. Those numbers were 51 and 4% last month. In addition, President Trump holds small leads over each of the top four Democratic primary candidates. Three of the Democrats held small leads in the previous poll.

Now to a closer look at Marquette poll numbers on the spread of CWD in the state. Tomorrow marks the kickoff of the gun deer season, the 18th opening day since the discovery of chronic wasting disease in Wisconsin’s herd. The Marquette Law School poll shows of those people who have heard about CWD, 64% feel it represents a threat to the future of deer hunting in Wisconsin. Over the next week, thousands of hunters will harvest a deer, but most will not get it tested for CWD. In the first of two reports on the topic tonight, “Here & Now” reporter Zac Schultz spoke with four hunters to find out the differing reasons why some get their deer tested and the overwhelming reason why most do not.

Steve Raynier:

These are loin chops from Nolan’s crossbow buck, the 10-year-old shot that.

Zac Schultz:

Earlier this fall, Steve Raynier’s son Nolan shot a buck with a crossbow. Steve was in the stand with him and coached him through the shot.

Steve Raynier:

Keep him calm with a calm voice, which is easier for me to do for him than it is for myself when I’m shooting the deer.

Nolan Raynier:

Just saw it come out of the brush over there.

Zac Schultz:

Nolan is 10 years old. The same age Steve was when he got interested in hunting.

Steve Raynier:

Nice job, Nolan!

When I was 10, I went to the library. I had to pick a book and I just randomly grabbed a book on hunting. And that is what sparked it in me, I guess.

Zac Schultz:

When he was young, hunting was about being with the group.

Steve Raynier:

You’d get together in a camper and play cards and tell jokes and share food and all that stuff. At some point, it became about the food. And today it’s a little bit of food and it’s a little bit of just enjoying the hunt.

Zac Schultz:

But today, venison comes with a side dish of concern about chronic wasting disease, or CWD. Steve says the first thing they did with Nolan’s buck is to get it tested.

Steve Raynier:

That deer did come back negative.

Zac Schultz:

If it had come back positive for CWD, this meal never would have happened.

Steve Raynier:

I would definitely throw the deer away.

Zac Schultz:

Chronic wasting disease is a fatal neurological disease found in deer, moose and elk. There is a human version of CWD called Creutzfeldt-Jakob’s disease, but it’s rare, and there’s no evidence CWD can infect humans. But the prions that cause CWD can be found in venison, so hunters are recommended to toss infected meat.

Tom Berg:

It’s a little frustrating that I spend the money to get it processed and then I have to let it sit before I’m willing to eat it.

Zac Schultz:

Tom Berg gets every deer he shoots tested for CWD.

Tom Berg:

I’m looking at possibly throwing away $100 worth of meat if it were to come back positive, but that’s exactly what I would do.

Zac Schultz:

Tom has hunted big game around the world.

Tom Berg:

The southern impala was taken in Namibia in 2009.

Zac Schultz:

But today, he does most of his hunting on a small piece of property in Waupaca County.

Tom Berg:

This is one of my favorite spots. Because it’s like just sitting here and listen to the birds, watch the deer.

Zac Schultz:

CWD has been found in deer on a private hunting ranch just a few miles from his ground blind.

Tom Berg:

Well, it hasn’t changed how I feel about hunting so much, other than extreme frustration with the management of the situation.

Zac Schultz:

After CWD was found in Wisconsin in 2002, the state and the DNR were very aggressive in trying to eradicate or at least limit the spread of the disease. But the strategies were unpopular with many hunters, and they were rolled back by Governor Scott Walker.

Tom Berg:

Changed how I voted, because I felt that the administration was in some ways actively working against us on this.

Zac Schultz:

Tom says even if it looks like the state doesn’t care, hunters should.

Tom Berg:

It’s not all the administration’s fault. It’s not all the DNR’s fault. It’s also a lack of b-y in from the public on reducing the number of deer.

Zac Schultz:

The number of deer killed by hunters each year has actually gone down since the discovery of CWD, but that coincides with a drop in the number of hunters. But CWD has also spread. From the first three positives in 2002, it has expanded to cover most of southwest Wisconsin. And now 56 counties either have a deer that has tested positive or are within 10 miles of a positive case.

Kathryn White:

I was concerned because I’m part of the whole thing.

Zac Schultz:

When Kathryn White bought this piece of property in Juneau County, she didn’t build a cabin. She put up a tree stand. But CWD-positive deer have been found just a few miles away.

Kathryn White:

I didn’t know that it spread. I didn’t know the torture the deer must go through.

Zac Schultz:

She first started hunting back when deer numbers were low and it wasn’t common to see a woman in blaze orange.

Kathryn White:

This is a picture of my first buck. I got into it because my husband at that time went with the boys hunting, and I had to stay home. And I didn’t like that. For some reason, I thought I’d like hunting.

Zac Schultz:

CWD hasn’t changed how she feels about her time in the woods.

Kathryn White:

I can feel. I feel alive out here. It’s a passion. It brings something to me.

Zac Schultz:

But it has made her test her deer, and wonder why more people don’t.

Kathryn White:

I’m more aware. I don’t want the spread of it. I think I have to do my part, and it would be nice for other people to do their part.

Zac Schultz:

In 2018, hunters killed 336,000 deer, but only 17,000, just 5%, were tested for CWD. The tests are free and the DNR has tried to make it more convenient by setting up CWD kiosks where hunters can drop off a deer head and get the results emailed to them. But the wait can range from days in bow season to a month or more after the gun season. And that can be enough to convince some hunters that testing isn’t worth it.

Vong Vang:

Yeah, it’s time frame, and it’s not really convenient too. You gotta — there’s only certain locations. And yeah, mainly the wait.

I’m good too.

Woman:

You good?

Vong Vang:

Yeah.

Zac Schultz:

Vong Vang and this friends spend their weekends in the fall camping at Yellowstone Lake State Park in southwest Wisconsin.

Vong Vang:

Just — hey, you want to go out and shoot some deers? Let’s go.

Zac Schultz:

The campground is right next to public hunting land. Opening day in September, they got a doe and cut it up back at camp.

Vong Vang:

Oh, we split every deer ever time so everybody gets probably like a leg, you know.

Zac Schultz:

They didn’t bother testing for CWD because just a few weeks later, it had already been eaten.

Vong Vang:

Oh, it’s gone already, bro. Well we go in a group, so one deer is not really one deer. One deer is like one-fifth a deer for us, for per person/per family. So yeah, not that long.

Zac Schultz:

Vong’s group can number up to 10 hunters, and between bow and gun season, they might shoot and eat up to 20 deer a year. He says they’ve never seen a deer that looked sick in the wild.

Vong Vang:

I’ve seen pictures online, and they look scary, but yeah, we haven’t encountered it here.

Zac Schultz:

But not every infected deer looks sick and there are definitely infected deer in the area. The prevalence rate for CWD varies around the state, but in the monitored zone of Iowa and Dane Counties, just north of Yellowstone Lake, the DNR estimates 15% of adult does are infected and 35% of bucks. Despite all that, Vong and all the other hunters who don’t test for CWD still have one statistic on their side.

Vong Vang:

I did a little research but as far as I’m aware, they said, you know, it can’t transmit from deer to humans, so should be okay.

Frederica Freyberg:

Zac Schultz joins us now with more. First, Zac, why does the DNR encourage testing?

Zac Schultz:

Well, there’s a couple reasons for that. They want to make sure that hunters are being knowledgeable about what they’re consuming, but also they want to know if this has spread farther than where they originally are tracking it. I mean this started in southwest Wisconsin, and then it kind of spread out from there, but through some movement, it has gone to most counties around the state. And they want to know if it’s gone beyond that. And if hunters aren’t testing in a certain county because it hasn’t been found there, they’re not going to find it unless they do the testing in the first place. So it’s kind of a chicken or the egg. If they aren’t doing testing in certain spots, they’ll never know if it got there in the first place and a lot of hunters who are in those regions say well, it’s not here, I’m not going to bother testing. That’s something in a different part of the state.

Frederica Freyberg:

As to hunters concerns, are efforts being made to make deer testing more convenient for them?

Zac Schultz:

Yeah, the DNR’s got a lot of different things that they’re trying to do. One of the things is making the CWD kiosks available in more places around the state. It used to be when people registered their deer in person at a tavern or a place, then the DNR could just go there. All the hunters came in and brought the deer to them and they could take all the samples they wanted in a certain spot. Now that you do the registration online or over the phone, hunters don’t bring their deer anywhere except to the locker market or wherever they’re going to butcher. So they have to make CWD testing more accessible so there’s kiosks in some of those places where you used to register their deer, they can now drop off a head or do the testing there. So they’re trying to make it broader in that sense, but they’re also trying to do other ways of making it easier for hunters to know about testing in the first place.

Frederica Freyberg:

What about reducing the wait times for these results?

Zac Schultz:

Well, that is one thing that they’re looking at. They’ve tried to increase the capacity to handle more tests, but it’s going to vary throughout the season. In the bow season, starting in September, when there’s not that many deer shot on a daily basis, then you’re going to get test results faster. As we saw the family in that story got their results in just a few days. But in the middle of the gun season, when there’s tens of thousands of deer being shot every day, then it’s going to take longer when all those deer come in for testing at once. We’re talking about up to 20,000 deer in a complete season. The DNR is trying to do more to watch the spread of the disease by testing in different parts of the state, and they think they’ve found the perfect place to do additional research on how to slow the spread of CWD in Wisconsin.

This is prime whitetail habitat. Years ago, this property held some monster bucks. But there are no deer here now, and the DNR wants to keep it that way.

Tami Ryan:

We’re very compelled to protect the local wild deer herd from this property, from this soil that we’re standing on here today.

Zac Schultz:

Tami Ryan is acting director of the DNR’s Wildlife Management Bureau.

Tami Ryan:

We’re currently at what we refer to as the Almond Farm.

Zac Schultz:

It takes its name from the nearby Village of Almond, but in 2002, this was a deer farm called Buckhorn Flats, and the location for the first positive test for chronic wasting disease on a game farm in Wisconsin.

Tami Ryan:

This is where the first captive deer was detected.

Zac Schultz:

The deer farm was depopulated in 2006 by the USDA. In all, 82 deer from this farm tested positive for CWD.

Tami Ryan:

At the time that it was depopulated, there was an 80% prevalence rate from that depopulation.

Zac Schultz:

The DNR bought the property in 2011 and added a second fence. Even though the deer were gone, the soil itself is toxic.

Tami Ryan:

The disease can be transmitted through exposure just to the contaminated soil. So deer that have CWD are shedding prions in their bodily fluid, so their urine, their saliva, their feces.

Zac Schultz:

For the last eight years, the farm has sat unused, but now the DNR has found a way to turn the fences and the soil into a positive. A research project.

Rob Michitsch:

This site is already considered contaminated and quarantined, it made it a perfect site to do the work. If you have any questions about your grade online, let me know.

Zac Schultz:

Rob Michitsch is an associate professor at the nearby University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.

Rob Michitsch:

My background, my Ph.D. work was in composting slaughterhouse wastes.

Tami Ryan:

So what we have here are the four composting bins that are going to be used for the research.

Zac Schultz:

Michitsch built these fully contained composting cells and plans to put two CWD-positive deer in each cell.

Rob Michitsch:

When we build the piles with the carcasses, they get buried. They get covered with a thick layer of sawdust and they basically sit there for three to six months, undisturbed with nothing else getting into it.

Zac Schultz:

The plan is to see if composting will break down and degrade the prions that cause CWD, thereby preventing more contamination. He’ll be testing the soil and any water that filters through the cells. A similar study in Canada showed promise.

Rob Michitsch:

We have seen some good results where the prion has been degraded. We just don’t necessarily know what’s doing it. Is it a certain microbe? Is it a combination of temperature and time in the microbial community?

Zac Schultz:

One reason this study is so important is it’s getting more difficult to dispose of deer carcasses. DNR Secretary-designee Preston Cole says CWD-positive deer are being driven all over the state when a hunter shoots a deer and then takes it home for processing.

Preston Cole:

So they’re flying blind when it comes to if that carcass has it or not. That could be a problem for many places where CWD isn’t.

Zac Schultz:

Especially if the hunter drops the bones in the woods or the trash, because those prions could enter the soil and infect more deer.

Tami Ryan:

We have landfills that are closing down their operations to accepting deer carcass waste. It’s creating challenges for our deer hunters, for our meat processors, taxidermists.

Man:

Let’s try to focus on the positives.

Zac Schultz:

The DNR tried to implement emergency rules last year about moving deer carcasses, but the Legislature overruled them. Cole hopes science will help guide the debate at the capitol.

Preston Cole:

The Carcass Transport Rule is a robust conversation that’s ongoing right now.

Tami Ryan:

Hopefully this research will provide a long-term solution for us in our ever-increasing challenges with the disposal of deer carcass waste.

Zac Schultz:

Michitsch says he expects to get results next year and already has ideas about future research at the Almond Farm.

Rob Michitsch:

There’s lots of room at the location, sort of thing. So there’s all sorts of different ways we can go.

Frederica Freyberg:

Zac, how well-known is this research that you are reporting on?

Zac Schultz:

Not very by most hunters. The people that live immediately around the Almond Farm are kept informed by the DNR as part of an agreement the DNR made when they purchased that, because of contamination there, they would let immediate land owners and the people around there know about any ongoing changes to the facility, including research, but unless you’re digging deep into the DNR website or following what research they’re doing, you’re not going to go about this yet basically because it’s just underway.

Frederica Freyberg:

From your reporting, you get kind of a sense, but is this a partisan thing at all?

Zac Schultz:

It is and it isn’t. It shouldn’t be and most people agree it’s not but there is a history of partisan nature that comes with all of these kind of DNR questions. There’s an element of people as we saw in some of the stories being frustrated with the cuts to science at the DNR and whether those scientists would have worked on CWD-related projects or not. It was still the idea that Governor Scott Walker and Republicans were opposed to doing some of this research and that may have been the reason why it took so long for some of these projects to come online, but the reverse side, Republicans represent the areas where a lot of these hunters live and hunt, so they’re very much in touch with their constituents and a lot of hunters don’t like to see changes to how the season works and how their hunt works. The culture around hunting is very much based on tradition.

Frederica Freyberg:

Absolutely. All right. Well, Zac Schultz, thank you very much for your reporting.

Finally, one more note from the Marquette Law School poll. Of those who have heard about chronic wasting disease, 49% approve of how the DNR is handling the issue.