Of course the story lept from Sports to Page One. This is Arkansas. When somebody says the deer herd is at risk, folks pay attention. Even those who would never bother to go into the woods. When 300,000-plus people buy licenses in the fall--and corn, and ammo, and boots, and breakfast sausage--before going into the deer woods in this small, wonderful state, that's a lot of business happening. And that's at risk, too.
The last time the Game and Fish types discussed this, only a few weeks ago, they told the press they had no good news. In fact, it was exceptionally bad news: Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) had been found in the state, in the hills of Newton and Boone counties. And the commission planned to Aggressively Sample the herd, which is a euphemism for killing a bunch of deer and elk. Which is the only way they can be tested for CWD.
They got updated word this week. It's bad. It's worse.
One of the bosses at the Game and Fish who's the honcho on these things, Brad Carner, said 23 percent of the deer they tested turned out to be positive for the disease. "Those were randomly sampled deer that appeared to be healthy," he said. Which is even more bad news to those of us who thought infected deer were supposed to display odd behavior.
What to do?
The first step is likely to shock deer hunters who are used to filling corn feeders and putting out mineral licks and dumping bags of rice bran into troughs. The director of the Game and Fish commission, Mike Knoedl, has already recommended banning the baiting of deer because corn and mineral blocks can draw deer into an area and the animals can more easily pick up the disease through another animal's saliva.
"Baiting is the pink elephant in the room that you guys are going to have to deal with," Director Knoedl said, not sugar-coating anything, as usual. "I think that's a Band-Aid you need to rip off at once."
And there are going to have to be a lot more animals killed. One biologist suggested killing 20 percent of the state's 1 million or so deer, and testing them at a cost of millions. Folks, this is serious.
But think of what we're dealing with. The thing that causes this disease is called a prion, or a mutant protein. An infected deer could lick a corn feeder, and that prion is there to stay. And for a long time. Years. And sources say prions can't be destroyed even with disinfectants, even if we could bleach all the woods. The only proven way to kill them is incineration, and the paper said some prions have been known to survive temperatures of 1,800 degrees. Even the creatures, aliens and robots in horror movies are taken out at 1,800 degrees.
We wish there were a bit of good news that we could pass on, but there doesn't appear to be much. Maybe the only thing we can trust is that the Game and Fish Commission in this state, after so many successes over the years, has the best people in place to fight this thing. And that other states that have been fighting this battle for years, and there are several, can give Arkansas' experts a game plan.
The rest of us can only wish them well.
Editorial on 04/22/2016