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CWD positive animals a disappointment for hunters

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Via the Wyoming News Exchange

BUFFALO (WNE) — When local hunter McKay Fleck shot three white-tailed deer in Johnson County, she anticipated that her freezer would be stocked for a while.
 
For the past five years, she's purchased three deer tags and an elk tag to feed herself and friends and family. This year, though, she was surprised when she received results from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department a week after her Thanksgiving weekend hunt, which indicated that all three of the animals had tested positive for chronic wasting disease.
 
“The first doe I harvested, and the buck, they both looked incredibly healthy,” Fleck said. “They had great fat layers, the blood was really vibrant looking, and it was on snow, so it stands out, but I had no indication that they were sick.”
 
Commonly known as CWD, the disease is transmitted from cervid to cervid through direct contact or soil contaminated with excretions or carcass parts of an infected animal. It attacks an infected animal's nervous system and is always fatal, though it could take two years to show symptoms.
 
Fleck's three positive CWD tests account for 20% of her 15 deer tags over the past five years, which is in line with the 29% CWD prevalence rate in adult male white-tailed deer and 16% in adult females throughout the Sheridan region, according to Game and Fish data collected between 2020 and 2022.
 
The department's CWD map also shows that prevalence rates among cervids in the region are on par with other areas in Wyoming. The region doesn't have the highest rates in the state, nor the lowest, but Buffalo Game and Fish biologist Zach Turnbull said case counts in some areas of the county may be trending upward. And he cautions that it takes a lot of hunter-harvested samples – at least 200 – to come up with statistically significant data on individual herd units.
 
This story was published on January 25, 2024.

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