friend-of-thunder:
friend-of-thunder:
I wanna say it again for yall: if you see a deer that doesn’t look right and doesn’t act right it’s probably chronic wasting disease
Document it and your location and contact the DNR
I promise you it’s not a “notdeer”. It’s just being destroyed by a prion disease.
Be responsible and help track it. Hell. Contact animal control and see if they would like to cull it.
CWD does NOT kill humans. In fact it cannot even spread to us currently.
The closest link they’ve been able to infect is a monkey. They injected its SPINE with it.
You don’t want to handle the meat to accidentally infect the area around you as it can spread in the water. You also want to minimize human contact with it bc we don’t want it to develop to infect humans.
We barely understand prion diseases to begin with. We just want to minimize contact even tho it literally can’t infect humans as of now.
If you are a hunter minimize damage to the spine and brain when field dressing and even send in a sample to be tested for CWD.
Even if you pick up a roadkill deer you should send in a sample.
My warning is mainly because they are DANGEROUS PHYSICALLY. They are not well and stop acting like prey animals. They are more willing to lash out. They don’t have the reflex to run away the further it goes. Don’t get mauled.
OH BOY IT’S PRION INFO TIME
Prions are nearly impossible to destroy (they can’t be “killed” since they’re not…you know, alive). Standard sterilization practices don’t destroy them: only extremely high temperatures for a long time do (I think over an hour? Don’t really remember). If a prion-infected animal is buried (or just dies in the forest), the prions pass into the soil and grass/plants, and animals that eat that plant can get infected.
Humans may not get chronic wasting, but we can get other prion diseases; kuru and “mad cow” being the most widely known. Interestingly, both of these came from cannibalism of the dead: Kuru from eating the bodies of the recently deceased (the funeral rites of a remote tribe in Papua New Guinea) and mad cow came from high-concentration feed lots grinding up dead cows and feeding them back to living cows, a very, very cool practice that nobody saw a fucking problem with apparently because it saved some money.
The time between infection and displaying symptoms can be decades. Decades of a renegade protein just…unraveling you. Turning your brain into Swiss cheese. There’s an entire generation of British people (and anyone who ate British beef!) that are essentially one big question mark because of mad cow. I think the danger period (the time people should start showing symptoms) has passed now but prions are also a big question mark so we really don’t know.
And the best part? Decades of unfettered agribusiness, specifically high-density animal operations and the difficulty in destroying them means that prions are increasing and accumulating in the soil (and possibly our food! 👍) and prion-related illnesses are on the rise and will likely be a much bigger part of our future!
Isn’t that neat?