Game & Fish working to control chronic wasting disease in deer

Since chronic wasting disease was discovered in Arkansas, the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission has exhaustively worked to see how far the disease has spread.

Presently, the bulk of the cases have been found in Newton County, and testing of samples is ongoing.

“Right now, we’re entering stage three of our CWD sampling,” said AGFC Assistant Chief of Communications Randy Zellers. “We will be continuing to monitor throughout the state through sampling road kills and deer that are reported as sick or people that have a high suspicion that they have CWD.”

Although no positive cases have been found in the southern part of the state, the AGFC is investigating a positive case in Pope County.

“The one deer that is the furthest south is in Pope County,” Zellers said. “He is an outlier. He’s about 40 miles from where all the rest of the CWD positive cases have occurred.”

But what makes this case interesting is that the deer that tested positive for the disease was found in an area that is off limits to hunters.

“The reason we’re doing that active sampling is because where that deer was found, most of the land around there is where people simply cannot hunt,” Zellers said. “Entergy owns the Nuclear One power plant, and we have state park land there, so they’re safety issues where they can’t allow hunters to hunt the property. They are allowing us to go in and sample those areas that we normally wouldn’t be able to get a sample from.”

Zellers said the AGFC got samples from the area and are waiting on test results. He added that more samples will be taken during Russellville’s Urban Hunt.

The AGFC has a 10-county zone (Boone, Carroll, Johnson, Logan, Madison, Marion, Newton, Pope, Searcy and Yell) where samples are being taken, and Zellers added that monitoring stations would open in the zone during hunting season.

“This hunting season, we will be opening 25 monitoring stations in the 10-county CWD management zone,” Zellers said. “Those will be available on opening weekend of modern gun season.

“Hunters can voluntarily bring their deer and submit biological samples of those deer to help us test for CWD to the extent of where it’s at in that CWD management zone. Anywhere else in the state, we are working with veterinarians trying to get a list that will cooperate with us to be able to take samples and coordinate with us to submit them. Those hunters will have to pay for those tests. The strong part of our efforts has to be with the management zone.”

Zellers added that hunters have been very helpful in helping the AGFC in their efforts.

“For the most part, our hunters are very receptive to helping us,” Zellers said. “Most hunters really do want to help us

with this, it’s a matter of them wanting to know what they can do to help and then wanting to know if the meat is safe to eat, are we going to continue to have deer hunting, those sorts of questions. Deer hunting will change. We’ll still have deer hunting in Arkansas. We’ll still have great deer hunting in Arkansas for a long, long time. But we may have to make a few regulations changes to slow the spread as much as possible.”

Zellers said that the AGFC has been looking at a few things to curb the disease’s progress.

“We may have to do a few things,” Zellers said. “The feeding outside of the season in that CWD management zone is one step that we have taken to minimize deer-to-deer contact, nose-to-nose contact and having deer feeding on top of each other. During the season, it’s not as much of a big deal because we’re putting those deer out there to harvest at that point.

“That feeding can actually help keep those deer in one area when your younger bucks are going to be more likely to try to roam. In that case, feeding actually may be a benefit. Outside of hunting season, there’s really no benefit biologically. Those deer get a lot more nutrients and what they need from what’s out there already than anything that we can put out there. As a matter of fact, you can hurt a deer by feeding corn in the middle of the summer. Somebody that may think they’re doing a good thing by putting corn in a feeder right now, but that deer can fill its belly and get a sour stomach and not get the nutrients it needs from the vegetation that’s out there.”

Zellers indicated that the AGFC is in the infant stages of speaking with veterinarians on getting samples.

“We’re in the very beginning stages of that part of it,” Zellers said. “We’ve been having our hands full just wrapping our hands around the monitoring sites that our own biologists will be at. We have a list of veterinarians. We’re also talking to processors about best management practices for carcass disposal.”

If there is one thing Zellers made clear, it’s that good deer hunting in Arkansas will continue.

“The number one message to really take away from this is that deer hunting is going to continue,” Zellers said. “We’re still going to have great deer hunting in Arkansas. This is something we’re going to have to manage for, and our management strategies that we’ve had in the past to grow bigger bucks and quality deer may change a little bit because of disease.

“We may have to change some of our management strategies because of that, but we’ll still continue to have great deer hunting. This is something that’s going to be with us for a long time. This isn’t something that goes away. We occasionally have an outbreak of bluetongue or another disease that pops up, and then it dies down the next year. Unfortunately, CWD does not work like that. “Our biologists have said that working with CWD is a marathon and not a sprint, and we are in the first stages of this. It’s going to take a lot of time and monitoring, and there may be changes we have to make along the way, but we’re trying our best to make sure that we continue to have great deer hunting in Arkansas.”