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By Shirley Grenoble
sports@altoonamirror.com
Like scores of other hunters, I returned from last season's deer season quite disappointed.
The gang I hunt with were feeling the same because we hunted hard every day except for a couple of really rainy days. And we barely saw any deer at all, much less bag any.
As usual, every excuse for the shortage of deer was trotted out -- every hunter has his or her own opinions on why the deer season had diminished. The one I didn't hear and did not myself think of is that dreaded word CWD.
The chatter about it had quieted down the last couple of years, and so we tucked that knowledge in the back of our minds and instead blamed everything from moon phases to coyotes. But CWD was still very much there, even though many hunters had been thinking it was no longer a problem.
With all the information we all heard when this topic was first broached -- and which we were reluctant to acknowledge -- is that it was difficult to identify a deer that had CWD just by looking at it in the woods. We thought we would know it if we saw a sick animal in the wild. The truth was that one could not tell unless a deer was in the last stages of the disease. We endured the fact that deer heads had to be tested and taken to certain places for that examination.
Well, I was glad to see the article in the Mirror recently straight from the Game Commission that several new projects will be implemented to study CWD. I also received the news release from the Commission outlining the new approaches. In case you missed this notification, I'll recap the expected projects for you.
First of all, there will be tracking of deer through monitored collars for the next three years. The second project will be the use of trained dogs to detect the droppings of infected deer. Well, dogs have been trained to find bombs, drugs, cancer and a host of other things, so this one could hold promise.
Third, they will be using a new detection method that can find the prions or abnormal agents that spread the disease like feces, fluids or animal tissue.
It all sounds a bit gruesome, but hats off to the effort to find out about this disease. The projects will be carried out in Bedford and Fulton counties since this area has been a hotbed for the disease since it was discovered. No culling of deer will be done during these tests.