Another chronic wasting disease “scare” — not threat

The Pennsylvania Game Commission issued another chronic wasting disease-related news release on July 26. A buck and a doe were dispatched in Ridgeway Township, Elk County, after a citizen reported seeing two free-ranging deer wearing colored ear tags. The tags indicated to the Commission that the deer had escaped or had been released from a captive deer farm.

Many deer have escaped from deer-raising facilities over the past decade. Ten years ago, two deer with ear tags would not have caused any excitement, and I doubt that the deer would have been quickly killed by a wildlife conservation officer. However, times have changed.

Chronic wasting disease is on the landscape. CWD is an always-fatal prion-caused disease that occurs in deer and elk. In Pennsylvania, the disease was first discovered in captive deer in Adams County in 2012. In 2014, it was found in two captive deer farms in Jefferson County. CWD has since been detected in captive deer in Franklin, Fulton and Bedford county deer farms.

Unfortunately, the disease has not been confined to deer farms alone. Chronic wasting disease has been confirmed in wild deer in Bedford, Blair, Cambria and Fulton counties. Just last month, Clearfield County was added to the list after a sickly-looking buck was euthanized and tested positive for CWD. That deer was just eight miles from the captive deer farm where CWD was discovered in 2014.

Each time that a new case of CWD is detected, the Game Commission creates a “containment zone” with special regulations surrounding the area. These are referred to as Disease Management Areas or DMAs. DMA 1, created to surround the Adams County cases in 2012, has been eliminated, but DMA 2 in southcentral Pennsylvania has been expanded in each of the past two years as new cases of CWD were confirmed. DMA 3 surrounds the Clearfield and Jefferson County cases.

With that as background, let us return to those tagged deer in Elk County. Both were wearing colored ear tags — the type that anyone could purchase at a farm supply store. According to acting Director of the PGC Bureau of Wildlife Management Robert Boyd, neither deer was wearing the specific and uniquely numbered “tags” required by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture. These can be metal tags, radio frequency identification nano tags or microchips that are inserted under the hide.

According to Boyd, the doe and the buck (a 19-pointer) were both in good condition, and test results returned from the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, on August 3, did not detect the presence of CWD in either animal. The two tagged deer did not pose a risk. Fortunately, the incident was a scare as opposed to a threat.

While this is good news for the elk and deer herds — and for deer farmers — the alarmist tone of the agency’s news release did not sit well with Glenn Dice, president of the Pennsylvania Deer Farmers Association. Dice owns a deer farm near Chambersburg. He sells breeding stock, trophy bucks for “high-fence” lodges and deer antlers.

“The Game Commission appears to be developing a blame narrative as depicted in their July 26 news release titled, ‘Suspicious Deer Discovered in Elk County,’” Dice said in a phone interview. “What is suspicious to me was the news release and the way that they dealt with the situation.”

The alleged escaped deer — two in this case — represent an economic loss to the owner of the deer. According to Dice, those captive deer do not present a higher risk of chronic wasting disease.

“Both deer appeared healthy and exhibited no signs of illness during the necropsy,” Dice said. “However, the PGC news release attempts to convince the public that this buck and doe had to be killed because they possessed a substantially greater risk of sickness and disease than other wild animals in the same area. This claim is unfounded and incredibly harmful to approximately 1,000 deer and elk farm families across Pennsylvania’s landscape.”

Dice has nearly 200 adult deer on his Franklin County farm. All of his deer wear the required USDA identification tags. His captive herd is a part of the Herd Certified Program, which means that 100 percent of all age-eligible deer deaths that occur on his farm are tested for CWD.

“Many deer farms have been doing this level of testing for more than 15 years. Comparatively, the PGC tests less than one-half of one percent of the wild deer annually,” Dice noted. “In the case of these two deer, the ‘non-detected’ CWD test results highlight a bias within the Commission — a bias that the deer farming community has been concerned about for a long time.”

During the last two years, the Pennsylvania Deer Farmers Association leadership has participated in numerous state interagency meetings, pursuing a collaborative and constructive process to dealing with CWD. Dice wonders if he has been wasting his time.

“The PGC’s recent actions seem to intentionally be unraveling the positive progress made in these five-way interagency meetings,” Dice said. “Incidents like these alleged escaped deer give all deer farmers a bad name. However, the agency’s news release has made it worse. I don’t like being painted with a broad brush of blame.”

This story was originally published August 5, 2017 at 9:06 PM with the headline "Another chronic wasting disease “scare” — not threat."