David Michael Miller
p01frontpage4245.indd
Sandy Thistle spent most of her twenties as a vegetarian. When she decided to start eating meat again in her late 20s, she wanted to kill it herself. This was a natural choice, since she came from a family of hunters.
“It seemed right to me that I should morally and holistically be willing to get my own meat,” Thistle remembers. “Needless to say my dad was thrilled that I joined the family ritual and was very supportive.”
Almost 30 years later, Thistle, who lives in Madison, is still an avid hunter. But she isn’t out for trophies. “I hunt for the meat,” she says. “Which is why I butcher as well. It tastes infinitely better when I do it myself. The meat is clean. I fillet everything off the bone. I make a kick-ass Thai venison/green bean curry.”
But this ancient tradition of hunting food has become, for many of Wisconsin’s 600,000 deer hunters, an increasingly worrisome endeavor. The fear is chronic wasting disease, usually shortened to its acronym CWD. It was first discovered in Wisconsin in 2002. Since then, the illness has been found in both wild deer and captive ones on hunting farms.
CWD is an infectious disease in cervids — the deer family, including white-tailed deer, elk and caribou — caused by twisted proteins known as prions. It slowly causes brain tissue to become sponge-like, and is eventually fatal. It is more prevalent in male deer, and because it can take years to manifest, more common in older trophy bucks.
WI Dept. of Natural Resources
CWD is a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, an illness group that also includes bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “mad cow disease,” Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, and scrapie in sheep. All are fatal.
It’s been unknown whether eating venison with CWD would harm humans. But in May, Canadian researchers released preliminary results of a study showing that macaques can contract CWD from eating meat from CWD-positive deer.
The study results — although neither final (the ongoing research, funded by the Alberta Prion Research Institute at the University of Calgary, began in 2009) nor yet published in a peer-reviewed journal — have heightened concern because they show that CWD can potentially infect a primate orally.
Health Canada’s Health Products and Food Branch updated its advisory in response to the findings: “While extensive disease surveillance in Canada and elsewhere has not provided any direct evidence that CWD has infected humans, the potential for CWD to be transmitted to humans cannot be excluded.”
With hunting season opening Nov. 18, some Wisconsin venison eaters and processors are changing their approach in response to these findings.
Silver Creek Specialty Meats Inc. in Oshkosh told its customers in late August it will no longer process wild venison from hunters: “Consumer safety is our No. 1 concern, and no matter how small the risk (if any) of humans being infected by the disease we are not, and never will be, willing to put profit before the safety and well-being of our customers.”
Thistle — who often hunts near Dodgeville, in the middle of an area where CWD has been found — has routinely tested all of her kills for the illness. So far, all have tested negative.
“I haven’t been in a situation where I’ve had to throw out the meat. But I’m 100 percent certain I would,” she says. “I’m not willing to take risks that seem like no-brainers.”
Thistle notes, however, that not all hunters are as cautious as she is. “I think I’m a slight anomaly because I’m a woman and in a non-traditional field,” says Thistle, who teaches carpentry at Madison College. “I’m thoughtful about risks.”
Sandy Thistle (left) and her father Fritz Thistle (right) with Gary Stone, a family friend (center), after a hunt. Fritz has been hunting on this land in northern Wisconsin since he was a teenager.
Some are dismissive of fears about CWD. Retired veterinary pathology researcher Don Davis of Texas has been arguing in nearly identical op-eds published across the country since mid-September — including in USA Today and the Wisconsin State Journal — that deer hunters have nothing to worry about.
“CWD does not affect people,” he writes. “No evidence shows humans are susceptible to CWD. In other words, we’d be better off worrying about deer-car collisions.”
In an email to Isthmus, Davis says he wrote the op-eds “to try to alleviate any possible concerns that the public might have about the risk of consuming venison that might have been caused by media hysteria not based on scientific facts. More precisely as a result of the unpublished Canadian study on macaques. Sub-human primates are so named because they are not human. Any extrapolation of experimental data from one species to another is often inaccurate, not very helpful, and more often causes unnecessary alarm.”
But local experts counter that caution is prudent in light of the Canadian study. Former Wisconsin Natural Resources Board Chair Dave Clausen, a retired veterinarian from Amery, has studied CWD extensively since it was discovered in Wisconsin.
Clausen explains that the Canadian study does “not mean necessarily that people are going to get it. What it does mean is that hunters should consider the possibility that that could happen and should get their deer tested.”
UW-Madison wildlife ecology professor Michael Samuel’s lab conducts research on CWD in Wisconsin white-tailed deer along with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and USGS National Wildlife Health Research Center.
“[The Canadian study] has certainly made us pay attention to the fact that the risk to humans is probably not zero,” Samuel says.
That non-zero risk is significant because, according to estimates published by the Alliance for Public Wildlife (in a paper co-authored by Clausen) this year, “7,000 to 15,000 CWD-infected animals are being consumed by hunter families every year [in the United States], and this number [is] continuing to rise by as much as 20 percent per year.”
“As the prevalence rate for CWD increases,” the paper continues, “the number of undetected CWD positive deer carcasses entering the food chain is growing exponentially. By one estimate, in Wisconsin alone, this number was over 4,000 such carcasses for 2015 alone. At the current rate of increase, the number of undetected carcasses being consumed will double every three years.”
For now, there have been no known cases of human prion disease linked to consumption of CWD-positive deer.
“We won’t know for sure unless someone comes down with it, because luckily we can’t do those experiments on humans,” Clausen says. “But the problem is that once someone comes down with it, that horse is out of the barn. The precautionary principle is that government should do what it can to mitigate risk. The greater that risk, the more cautious government should be. And we just can’t ignore that possibility.”
The easiest way for hunters to be sure if their deer are safe to eat is to have them tested. DNR offers free testing at over 100 sampling stations.
“Ideally, the samples should be taken as soon as possible after harvest,” the department’s website says. “The samples needed for CWD testing are located near the base of the deer’s skull and first several inches of neck.”
If unable to test within five days, the head and a portion of the neck should be frozen, the site says.
Thistle appreciates the service but wonders how long the state will continue to offer it. “One of my anxieties has been what to do if the state no longer offers testing.”
Hunters can also pay for their own testing, which costs $33 if taken directly to the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory or anywhere from about $68 to $125 if sent by a private veterinarian to a certified lab.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization both recommend against eating an animal that tests positive for any transmissible spongiform encephalopathy.
The DNR did not provide statistics of how many deer killed in the state are tested for CWD. Department spokesperson Erin Larson says in an email, “Since we do not offer sampling locations everywhere in the state and target specific areas certain years, a statewide percentage of harvested deer sampled for CWD would not mean anything.”
Source: WI Dept. of Natural Resources
Cover-CWD-map-11092017
However, the department has done surveys of hunters who have tested their deer and found that in the 2016-17 season, 27 percent of hunters who killed a deer that tested positive for CWD decided to eat the venison. The year before, it was 28 percent. But the DNR’s Eric Lobner adds, “We are aware of hunters that initially indicate they will be consuming the meat that later turn around and dispose of the meat. I suspect the opposite happens as well…. As a result, I think it is safe to say that we don’t really know how many hunters actually eat the venison from deer that test positive for CWD.”
The state Department of Health Services keeps a registry of people known to have eaten infected venison. The registry has not yet been updated to include the 2016 season, but 1,454 names are on the registry for the 2003 through 2015 harvests, according to the department’s Elizabeth Goodsitt.
Former DNR Wildlife Bureau Director Tom Hauge, who hunts deer with his family, wants to see an aggressive campaign encouraging all hunters to test.
“From a practical perspective — a deer hunter’s perspective — we really need to make it as convenient as possible to participate in testing the animals and be able to get test results in a very quick fashion,” he says. “And then it’s still up to the hunter to make a decision, if it tests positive, to consume it or not.”
Many argue the state needs to be more proactive in fighting the disease. Clausen’s paper recommends regulators ban the movement of any potentially infected cervids, alive (such as between deer farms) or dead, and any other potentially infectious materials including equipment and trailers; mandate free, rapid testing of all cervids harvested in CWD-affected areas; ensure proper disposal of CWD-infected material so it doesn’t reach food or feed chains; and invest in “accountable research and science-based policy.”
If Wisconsin enacted these strategies, Clausen and others believe it would slow the spread of CWD.
In 2010, the Natural Resources Board approved the state’s 15-year plan to fight CWD. In 2016, the DNR initiated the first five-year review of the plan and formed a stakeholder advisory group to perform the review.
The “Report on the first review of the Wisconsin CWD Response Plan” was released in early 2017; among its many recommendations was a statewide baiting and feeding ban.
Instead, the Legislature rolled back the baiting and feeding ban in a number of counties in June and Gov. Scott Walker signed the legislation into law in August.
Since about 2006, the DNR has downgraded its efforts from active CWD management strategies (including having sharpshooters aiming to kill deer that look ill, and longer hunting seasons encouraging CWD testing) to just testing and monitoring, in part because such initial efforts were unpopular.
Bryan Richards, USGS National Wildlife Health Center emerging disease coordinator, calls efforts to prevent CWD from becoming well established “a balancing act that Wisconsin did not excel at.”
In 2011, Wisconsin hired “Deer Czar,” James Kroll from Texas. Richards characterizes Kroll’s recommendations as “passive.”
“And passive,” Richards adds, “equates to really no active management whatsoever. We’ve gone back to monitoring.”
Hauge reflected on Wisconsin’s response to CWD when he retired from the DNR last year. “I wish I could have put that genie back into the bottle somehow,” he told columnist Patrick Durkin. “I don’t regret our early actions to try to control CWD, but we probably lost the communications battle with those who want to dismiss its risks before we realized we had lost it.
“I’m very, very aware that low risk is not no risk,” Hauge added. “Each time you pass a CWD-positive animal through a human body, it’s Russian roulette.”
DNR Wildlife Health Section Chief Tami Ryan says the state allowed for bigger harvests in areas where CWD was prevalent in an attempt to reduce the population and the spread of the disease. “Now we’re seeing population growth, and with that, an increasing trend in both distribution and prevalence of disease,” Ryan says. “Illinois is still responding to disease in their state by localized culling, whereas we haven’t been doing that for quite some time. It’s not publicly or politically acceptable in our state.”
Hauge, in an interview, says the state should work with landowners and hunters to provide incentives to remove animals that appear diseased. If more sick animals are removed than infected each year, CWD trends could potentially be reversed.
Hauge also sees pressure growing for the state to take action. “The spread, the increasing prevalence, and then this most recent information with regards to the macaque study adds to that momentum.”
The deer are too important to Wisconsin, he adds. “The white-tailed deer is not only the state wildlife animal, but it’s just fundamentally woven into the culture of our state, and particularly in the fall, it’s just so important to people’s quality of life experience in the state.”
Another area of concern are deer farms. The Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection announced Oct. 20 that CWD-positive white-tailed deer were found at a Waupaca County hunting ranch. CWD has now been detected in captive deer facilities in Eau Claire, Marathon, Marinette, Oconto, Shawano and Waupaca counties, all areas where CWD has not yet been found in wild herds.
Once CWD is found in a facility, the agriculture department allows the facility to continue holding hunts, transfer live deer among properties under the same ownership, and transfer dead deer off the properties, and does not require any change in fencing to decrease the potential for either escape or contact between wild deer and captive through fences.
Some experts say these policies risk infecting more wild deer. And the closer CWD detections — in the wild or on farms — get to the Michigan border in the Upper Peninsula and to other states, the greater that risk becomes.
As Clausen notes, “They can put up signs and say to CWD, ‘Don’t cross this border,’ but a lot of deer don’t read very well.”
Richards with the USGS stresses that CWD-positive captive facilities “without a doubt constitute a risk to free-ranging deer on the other side of the fence.”
Wisconsin state veterinarian Paul McGraw counters that the department of agriculture “has a very strong quarantine in place.”
He adds that there’s “not a lot of nose to nose contact, very little ever, between farms and wild deer…. Pointing a finger at wild versus farmed deer is not helpful.”
McGraw cites a 2007 USDA study completed in Michigan finding only two direct, naso-oral contacts between wild and farmed deer during more than 77,000 hours of camera monitoring.
But USDA’s CWD program standards state, “In areas where CWD is not known to be present in free-ranging wild cervids, a second barrier is recommended that is adequate to prevent fenceline contact of wild cervids with a CWD-exposed herd.”
Clausen asks, “If the risk is so small, why such restrictive regulations?” Nose to nose contact is not the only way deer could be exposed. “CWD prions adhere to soil, especially clay soil. That soil can leave the farm on vehicle tires and by simply being carried out of the fence by stormwater runoff.”
Recent studies have shown that CWD prions can persist in soil and water and bioaccumulate in plants, especially grasses.
Wisconsin’s five-year CWD stakeholder review recommends “enhanced fencing (e.g. double or electric fencing) for facilities with CWD positive cervids… to minimize the risk of disease transmission.”
But a bill to do just that, introduced in June, hasn’t received a hearing.
Hauge is dumbfounded by the lack of a response from DNR and the department of agriculture. “I’m surprised that we’re still waiting and have not seen anything from the two agencies regarding what their plans are for implementing those yet,” he says. “I would have thought they would have tried to put something out in advance of this fall’s deer hunting seasons.”
Jay Settersen’s been hunting about 35 years, since he was 13. Raised by a single mom, he learned the sport in part from his friend, Rob Gottschalk, and Rob’s dad. Jay and Rob got hooked on bow hunting early on.
For Settersen’s family, hunting is a way of life that “reaches way beyond the actual hunt.” Many of his best friends are hunters and “hunting is a big part of our friendship and what keeps us in communication, staying in touch, and rooting for each other,” he says. “There’s so much camaraderie that goes with that. It’s amazing how hunting is factored into so many parts of my life, for sure.”
His children are friends with his friends’ children and the families hunt and eat meals together, sharing recipes. During the winter, they’ll make venison jerky in a smoker while watching the Badgers play football on TV. “The kids understand where the food comes from and why working on the land to improve the land is important so the herd is healthier,” he says.
“We have weekends together at many of the hunting lands we go to, and work together on the land all year, learn about the land,” says Setterson, who owns SetterTech, an erosion control and land restoration company. “Deer hunting is the driving force behind all of it, but so many good activities spawn off of that.”
Nourishment is central to the act of killing. “If I’m not going to eat it, I’m not going to kill it,” he says. “There has to be a reason for me to kill an animal.”
He hunts nowadays in three areas: in Jackson County near Black River Falls south of Eau Claire, in Richland County, and from their deer camp in Marinette County. Of those areas, Richland County is near core CWD and Jackson County until recently had a baiting and feeding ban because CWD had been found nearby.
In October, Settersen’s son killed his first buck with a bow and arrow. When he dropped off the deer to be tested and butchered, Settersen ended up chatting with some local hunters. They were surprised to learn that he had tested the kill for CWD.
“I don’t know if it’s because … they’re concerned they might have more rules to abide by if it’s present and they don’t want anyone telling them what to do,” Settersen speculates. “So I took the chance to say to them, ‘Well, if I’m not feeling well, I’d want to go to the doctor sooner rather than later, before it’s a really big problem.’ And they kinda grumbled.”
Settersen doesn’t know what can be done about the disease, but thinks it’s important for hunters to have as much information as possible.
“In order to get the public to understand and comprehend CWD, they need data and they need to share that with the public, and eventually everyone in the state will have a better understanding of what it is and how it moves, and then with that information, they can get buy-in,” he says. “Without that, everyone throws ideas out there, says what they think, and it’s hard to get folks to assemble and work in a positive direction.”