SwaggyD
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That’s a wall hanger for your Washington Facebook bros!!
Montana Mule Deer Mismanagement
- Thread starter rogerthat
- Start date
You must have had a sip of the kool-aid. I would put the knowledge shared on this thread up against any of the fwp staff.
FREAK
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I think Ontarios post beautifully highlights the fact that shooting a 130” buck during peak rut is probably one of the easiest achievements of western hunting. Therefore, with an increase in hunting pressure, wolves, grizzlies and more and more houses being built in winter ranges, FWP may need to think about changing something up. I think it was a profound post.
Montana needs an influencer specific forkie only tag. Advertise it on a billboard in Spokane. Or maybe a voucher for when you buy a Christiansen 6.5 Creed, you get a free MT forkie tag. Want something to test your skill on? MT FWP has you covered
While supplies last #bloodlust
While supplies last #bloodlust
Irrelevant
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#godblessmontana
-Every Washingtonian
Eric Albus
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We are not going to shoot our way out. FWP may try, but it won’t work.
Jason Snavely has an article on CWD (google it, post it on here, it’s beyond my IT capacity). His research shows there are deer resistant to CWD, and living past 4 yrs of age in captivity. As I’ve long suspected, there are deer that will be resistant and eventually immune to the disease. Let nature take its course, the prions are here already. We know they aren’t going away….Let NATURE take its course.
antlerradar
Well-known member
That strategy would require that some bucks live past the age of four. No way in hell are we going to let that happen in a state that prides itself on opportunity.
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I agree with your point, but this line of thinking puts a gigantic golden goose directly in the crosshairs.
Schaaf
Well-known member
Checked the BetMGM app this morning on the line of that massive whitetail. They’ve got the over/under set at 115”.
$50 on the under.
$50 on the under.
brocksw
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This isn't new, they've known about this for a while. It's not as straight forward as one might think, though. Deer with the less susceptible phenotypes still get the disease, still shed infectious material, and still die of the disease. Living longer with the disease equates to shedding infectious material on the landscape longer. Plus, deer with those particular genes aren't all that common in the wild.
Some folks (another conversation) think it's as easy as just releasing a bunch of the less susceptible genes out in the wild and "helping" nature along. There might be some benefit to that if done correctly. But the folks working in genetics that I've talked to, have all shared the same concerns with that (and kind of laughed at the feasability side of the discussion).
For instance, there are different strains or mutations of prions. So even if there is a less susceptible gene out there right now, there's nothing to say that a new strain or mutation won't come along and get that one too. If we've converted all deer to a fairly homogeneous gene pool (a tall order) and they become susceptible too, we might be worse off than when we started with less genetic diversity to boot. Not to mention the tremendous and monumental logistical challenges and financial costs for humans trying to artificially help this process along. I'm sure the deer farmers would love that idea though.
We've bread livestock for certain traits, whether that's increased milk production, disease resistance, etc. Those have all come at a cost. It's give and take with genetics. Some of those issues don't materialize until a decade later. With domestic livestock, if the cost of disease resistance is bad hooves in low numbers or something, that's manageable, they're domestic, they have all the luxuries that come with being domestic and tasting good. Sometimes we breed one disease out but then others become more of an issue and we have to fight them off with stronger antibiotics.
But how is that gonna work with wild animals who need to be at the top of their game 24/7 365? Even if only 10% of the wild population developed bad hooves, that equates to additional mortality. Essentially, like adding another predator on the landscape. Mountain lions might take 15-20%, coyotes might take 10% (made up numbers), but now this new hypothetical hoof problem comes along as an artifact of our intentional breeding strategies that adds another 7-8% mortality, maybe more. That might be better than CWD, if there is complete resistance out there. But again, this is just an example of a possible situation. In reality, there's any number of things that could come from this that may not be that much of an improvement over CWD. Impossible to know and it's a can of worms that you can't close after a certain point.
I'm not sure how "natural" CWD is for deer. Scrapie has been documented for almost 250-300 years or something. But it came to the US from europe in 1947 and it's unlikely it was here before then. So to me, CWD is a human caused disease. We brought the disease to a new landscape (the US) and we gave it to deer, likely by studying deer in scrapie infected facilities. So without human intervention, I'd say it's possible that Scrapie never would've made it to the US, and therefore never made it to North American cervids.
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OntarioHunter
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Due to very mild weather (end of November and I'm still hunting birds in shirt sleeves), I think the rut had only just started. The first day hunting I saw no bucks with the does and fawns, more than twenty total. Even the little 2x1 was by himself. All three bucks I saw the second day were alone. However, my brother said the big one that walked by the vehicle had his nose in the air. Correction: the big whitetail buck spotted at daybreak of day one was bedded with a doe.
OntarioHunter
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What I don't understand is if there's a CWD epidemic, why aren't my bird dogs finding bone piles everywhere like the blue tongue a couple years ago?
YukonGold
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Because CWD is a very slow-acting disease. it takes years for an infected deer to show symptoms. We're harvesting the deer before they can die of it. Bluetongue/EHD outbreaks occur in late summer and you see massive, sudden die-offs.
T
tjones
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Sometimes the answer to the question is really simple. Like, maybe there are not many bucks left?
That would make more sense than the silly notion of the rut being late because the weather was warm.
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brocksw
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If I were to hypothetically infect 100 deer with EHD within a small window of time, say a week. The ones that would die (since some have immunity) would all die in about a week Post infection. In 1 weeks time they're not going to get very far and most will come to a water source since they'll be feverish. This would make it relatively easy to find where these deer died.
Conversely, if I infected 100 deer with CWD throughout the course of a year (since they aren't limited to short windows of time where they can get the disease) and the disease itself took 1.5-2.5 years to kills them all, and none of them would be drawn to a specific landscape feature before death (because there is no fever). This would make it signifcantly more difficult to track down their carcassses, both time and geographic distance would spread out those deaths across the landscape.
As a side note(seems relevant to the questions though) I've seen a wounded bull elk be reduced to antlers, skull, spine within 4 weeks. Literally, nothing but white bones in 4 weeks.
Bambistew
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There are people that believe the world is flat. Some of those same people also think shooting a "nice" 2.5yo buck in the peak of the rut means the deer hunting is just fine.
but let's not solely conflate people who think shooting a 2.5 year old is fine with people who think the deer hunting is fine. it is inevitably is a part of the tangle in eastern montana issues, i understand that.
but there are people who are genuinely happy with shooting any deer and I believe that is and should be fine. whether or not the deer hunting is fine should be a separate issue tackled without villifying people who are generally unconcerned with primarily finding trophy deer.
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12 Year olds, I get it. Adults, every year? If that's the case, something is wrong with what we're teaching people about hunting in my opinion.
can't possibly disagree more
