Rules OK'd to contain deer disease

Regulations passed Friday by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to contain chronic wasting disease in the Ozarks will extend to other parts of the state if new cases are detected elsewhere.

CWD regulations

The 12 deer-hunting regulations passed Friday by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission are aimed at slowing the spread of chronic wasting disease:

• Establishmenat of a CWD Management Zone in 10 counties (Boone, Carroll, Johnson, Logan, Madison, Marion, Newton, Pope, Searcy and Yell).

• Prohibit feeding of wildlife within the management zone, except to use bait to hunt deer and elk from Sept. 1-Dec. 31

• Prohibit natural scents and lures that contain natural cervid urine or other cervid biofluids, beginning Jan. 1, 2017

• Prohibit the rehabilitation of wildlife statewide

• Establish a private-land disease-management program to allow landowners to harvest deer in addition to their respective zone bag limits

• Prohibit transporting portions of cervid carcasses from the management zone

• Require harvested elk to be submitted for testing

• Increase the private lands Elk Management Assistance Program antlerless elk quota

• Allow harvested button bucks to be considered antlerless deer in deer management zones 1-2. These antlerless deer will not count toward a hunter's buck bag limit

• Increase the bag limit from four deer to five in zones 1-2. Three antlerless deer may be taken with firearms, or five antlerless deer with archery equipment.

• Remove antler restrictions in deer zones 1-2

• Liberalize deer seasons on Bearcat Hollow, Buffalo National River, Gene Rush, Ozark National Forest, Piney creeks, Sweden Creek Natural Area and White Rock wildlife management areas.

The commission adopted 12 regulations during a special session Friday in Little Rock aimed at slowing the spread of chronic wasting disease, a neurological disorder that affects deer and elk. The disease is unpreventable and always fatal. It threatens Arkansas' estimated 1 million deer and 600 elk. About 308,000 licensed hunters contribute to a hunting economy estimated at more than $1 billion yearly.

The new regulations center on a disease-management zone where the disease has been confirmed in wild deer and elk. The management zone includes any county where a wild or captive cervid has tested positive for the disease or any county that touches a 10-mile radius from where a cervid that has tested positive was found or killed.

The current management zone for the disease includes all of Boone, Carroll, Johnson, Logan, Madison, Marion, Newton, Pope, Searcy and Yell counties.

Regulations approved Friday affect feeding wildlife for hobby and viewing and using bait to attract deer for hunting. They also include specific hunting regulations within the management zone, including deer and elk bag limits, antler restrictions for deer and transporting cervids that hunters kill.

Among other notable changes is a regulation that makes it illegal to feed wildlife in the disease-management zone except from Sept. 1-Dec. 31, when hunters may use bait to attract deer. Recreational feeding during that time will not be allowed.

"A lot more people feed for viewing than you realize," commission member Fred Brown of Corning said. "They just like to look at them [deer]. In 10 counties, all feeding will be prohibited."

The commission also banned rehabilitating injured or orphaned deer statewide.

The regulation that creates the management zone for chronic wasting disease empowers the Game and Fish Commission's director to expand the zone where positive cases are discovered. When a positive sample is discovered, a buffer zone will be established in a 10-mile radius around the "collection site" where the animal was found or taken.

According to the code, the director or his designee may add the entire county to the disease-management zone upon notice to the public through the posting of an updated description of the management zone on the Game and Fish Commission's website, social media or other means reasonably calculated to inform the public.

Such a decision could affect neighboring counties, as well. For example, a hunter could kill a deer in western Pulaski County during archery season in late September. If the deer is confirmed to have the disease in mid-October, a 10-mile buffer zone would go into effect around the site where the deer was killed.

If any part of the buffer zone touches Saline and/or Perry counties, the director could add all three counties in their entirety to the disease-management zone.

That is why Logan and Yell counties are in the current management zone. The 10-mile buffer around an infected deer that was killed by an automobile in southern Pope County extended into those counties.

The director would not make that decision arbitrarily, said commission member Ford Overton of Little Rock.

"If we get a 'hot' sample, we'll put a 10-mile buffer radius around that hot spot, sample and try to figure out the prevalence rate, but nothing immediately becomes a CWD management zone," Overton said. "It is up to the discretion of staff, the director and the commission what happens after that."

It also depends on timing, Overton said. If a positive deer is killed in a corner of a county in September and confirmed in October, finding additional diseased animals in the vicinity could trigger the expansion of the zone as quickly as modern gun deer season in early November.

"It could," Overton said. "I'm not saying it won't. It might. It will all depend on sampling and further evaluation. It could happen quickly."

Brad Carner, chief of the commission's wildlife management division, said the ban on the rehabilitation of deer is a preventive measure.

The 37 facilities in Arkansas rehabilitate about 100 deer annually, Carner said. Current research from Missouri and Connecticut shows that 76 percent-86 percent of rehabilitated deer that are returned to the wild do not survive longer than 100 days.

Fawns in the Ozarks have exhibited unusually high prevalence rates of chronic wasting disease, Carner said, so the risk of relocating a diseased fawn through rehabilitation into an area not known to have the disease is an unacceptable risk.

"Seeing the prevalence rates in fawns, there's a real risk of somebody taking in [an infected] fawn, contaminating their facility and thus contaminating every deer that comes in contact with that facility thereafter," Carner said.

The goal of the regulations are to reduce concentrations of deer to slow the spread of the disease among wild cervids, Carner said, and to reduce the overall deer population density in areas where the disease has been confirmed.

"We will encourage hunters to kill deer and elk that are most likely to disperse," Carner said. "Yearling males are typically going to disperse over greater distances, and that led to us removing antler restrictions."

Commissioner Ken Reeves of Harrison said the commission should be cautious and flexible about adding or deleting counties, like Logan and Yell, from the disease-management zone if they produce no additional cases. If counties affected by a disease-buffer zone do not produce infected animals in a reasonable amount of time, Reeves suggested such counties be removed from the management zone.

"We need to err on the side of caution," he said. "It's at the director's discretion when to implement this provision, but I read it as the director's discretion to include them [additional counties] at all."

Proposed regulations were made May 19 and modified after evaluating comments received from public meetings and online. Overton said the comments were valuable for getting the public's perspective.

"We had 11 public meetings," Overton said. "As a result, we revised the regulations and we delivered a set of regulations to put our arms around this hot zone and manage it the best we can. And, we have a plan moving forward to manage any more cases of CWD that we might find in our continued random samples."

The commission will increase monitoring to determine the effectiveness of the new regulations, Carner said. It tabled a proposal that would have required permitting of noncommercial, fenced hunting properties.

State Desk on 06/25/2016

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