GC Video - CWD Press Conference From March 4th

Forestman3 said:

Your looking for someone to blame.It doesn`t matter anymore where past that.We have CWD in the wild herd.What is monitering going to do but tell you what we allready know?I`m asking what you would do to stop it as much as possible.

Click to expand...

You are correct that CWD is now here in our wild herd but that still doesn’t negate the fact that the FIRST step still needs to be to make Department of Ag. accountable and to start taking responsibility for getting their cervid farmers under control and into reasonable compliance with the law or at least some level of common sense.

We presently have CWD in a who knows how many cervid farms and in a couple areas of the wild herd. At this point I still highly suspect the CWD in the wild herd is the result of the DPA failure to regulate their cervid farmers and not knowing or even caring when one of their deer farmers lost of released their stinking tame and possibly diseased deer.

I know for a fact that one of the local deer people got a couple deer from a deer farm that is within the CWD area. I also know for a fact that at least one of these deer got released into the wild. I know for a fact that DPA was notified of it and elected to do absolutely nothing to correct the problem of to force the guy to correct his problems since he no longer had the deer.

Is it any wander that we have CWD when these people were allowed to get deer, move them all over the state, have them escape or even release them into the wild and then have DPA do NOTHING to hold them accountable.

The FIRST thing DPA needs to do at this point, in order to prevent wide spread CWD cases, is get control of their cervid farmers, find out exactly how many deer they have, where everyone of them came from and then monitor exactly what happens with each of those deer in the future. Any cervid farmer who can’t account for the whereabouts of every one of their deer in the future should be shut down and fined for each missing deer.

I highly suspect we are going to learn that a lot more of these deer farmers had their deer escape into the wild and that as a result we are going to see CWD showing up in a lot more those areas where suddenly the cervid farmers can’t account for where their deer went.

Dick Bodenhorn

letumgrow said:

Since the DPA has been involved with the deer industry i have had more contact and paperwork to fill out then i ever had with the GC. I no longer raise whitetails but am involved with tranqing whitetails for other farms.
17 years ago when i first got involved with the indusrty the GC was my contact. It was a joke. The GC never stepped foot onto my property even to inspect my fencing before i was permited to have deer. They simply signed off and the permit was aquired. Never once had a WCO on my property. When the DPA got involved i had a local vet signing off of my herd every year and was out 2-3 times a year to inspect the herd. Also a large packet of paperwork was delivered with papers such as CWD herd Certification Program, Herd Inventory, Leaving The Herd, Adding To The Herd, CWD Submission Form. Non of which was required by the GC.
Every deer that died from my herd was submitted to the DPA for CWD Submittal.
The GC is disgruntaled that they no longer control there valuable resource.
Whether the GC or the DPA are in control of the cervid farms CWD would have still been found.

Click to expand...

I can tell you that if you had a propagation permit with the Game Commission and no WCO ever inspected your facility, inventoried your deer and did paperwork on them then that WCO was not only not doing their job but likely was also submitting false reports.

We were REQUIRED to do annual inspections and fill out reports on EVERY propagator within our district. I know in our region if we didn’t have those reports in on time there was a Supervisor calling to find out why and letting you know that you needed to get it done ASAP.

I also know that in my district any cervid propagators that didn’t have their fences, paperwork or inventory up to snuff they didn’t get passed and their permitted renewed until they were re-inspected, with a re-inspection fee attached, and that they could also expect some unannounced visits in the future just to see that they stayed in compliance.

I can also tell you that in the relatively few years since the Department of Ag. took over I learned of way more escaped cervids in the area that was my district then had occurred in the previous twenty plus years. Once the Game Commission was no longer doing inspections many of those fences were no longer being maintained and when I talked to the propagators they would tell me that they were never inspected and only asked via paper work about how many deer they had or where they went. What was even worse is that the Department of Ag. took no steps to correct those problems or to even notify the local WCO when a farm had their deer escape. We usually didn’t learn of the escapes until some citizen started questioning us about the deer running around with tags in their ears. Then when we would contact DPA about it they were totally unconcerned and didn’t care if someone deer were out in the wild and instead defended their permittee. That in my opinion was total irresponsible and one of the large reasons we have CWD in this state today.

Dick Bodenhorn