Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a serious illness that affects deer, elk, and similar animals. “How do we prevent deer from getting CWD?” is a question a lot of people are asking, and one common answer is through culling. Many people (and regulatory agencies like the DNR) think that killing infected deer can help stop the disease from spreading. Which, on its surface makes a little bit of sense. Kill the infected deer, keep the healthy ones. But it’s not realistic and this idea doesn’t make much sense when we start talking practically.
CWD spreads through contact between infected and healthy animals. The biggest problem is that there’s no reliable visual profile to determine whether a deer is CWD positive or not. So without being able to know which deer are sick and which aren’t, it’s impossible to kill only the infected deer. Healthy-looking deer might already carry the disease without showing any signs, and vice versa. There could be deer with pneumonia or some other ailment that don’t have CWD.
Given this constraint, the next step then is saying we have to kill deer en masse, because we know this is a breakout area. And the only way to ensure we kill the sick ones is to kill them all. So let’s kill all the deer before it has a chance to spread and… kill all the deer. Wait a minute… let’s kill all the deer to prevent them from… dying? That’s our plan?
This made a little more sense back when we thought that CWD was a highly contagious disease that could quickly spread to infect an entire herd. But now that we know more about its spread, this strategy makes little sense.
Instead of focusing on culling, we should:
- Continue to study and research the disease.
- Take care of their habitats to keep them healthy.
- Treat feed with humic acid to eliminate infectious prions
- Teach people, especially hunters and landowners, about CWD so they can help prevent it.
In short, killing deer isn’t the solution to CWD. We need smarter strategies that consider the whole picture to protect our wildlife and nature. Wiping out herds of deer to prevent the herd from being wiped out is pretty silly on its face.
