When a Hunt is Not a Hunt
The threat of chronic wasting disease challenges the definition of a "hunt."
Text and photography by Greg Breining
As a kid in Benson, Jim Forbord lived for hunting season. He hunted everything–grouse, pheasant, ducks, and especially deer. But he no longer hunts deer with a rifle. The head and antlers of the last one he shot hang on his wall. Now, when he looks at the trophy he feels remorse–not sorrow over the death of a single deer, but for the fact that shooting it with a rifle had been too easy. So now he hunts only with a bow. But for the killing this week, he borrowed a 742 Remington .30-06 semiauto from his daughter-in-law. He sighted it in at a shooting range this morning.
Monday, Sept. 9, they gathered at the Department of Natural Resources office in Aitkin. They were 10 teams–Forbord and nine other conservation officers were "shooters." They were paired with 10 "spotters" from the DNR Division of Wildlife. Reporters and camera operators gathered in the parking lot, held at bay by a sawhorse and sign that said No Unauthorized Personnel. One of the TV reporters wore field clothes, as though he were woods-wise, but his boots gave him away: They were shiny and unscuffed.
The DNR had gathered to shoot deer. Not to hunt, though the word often cropped up in conversations and news reports, but to kill as many adult deer as they could–perhaps as many as 100–in nine square miles that surrounded Clayton Lueck’s elk farm. There, a month earlier, a bull had died from chronic wasting disease. The DNR organized the shooting as a way to determine if the disease infected wild deer in the surrounding countryside. "This is a sampling process," said Dave Schad, DNR wildlife biologist and incident manager, "not an effort to eradicate the deer herd."
Forbord had been assigned to the Lueck place. He and his spotter, Tom Rusch, had met with Lueck that afternoon as they scouted out shooting locations. Lueck had large eyes and white whips of sideburns. He leaned forward as he listened.
"I’m sorry to have to come here," Forbord said. "I believe it’s necessary to be safe. I get no joy out of this."
Lueck owned 49 elk when one of his breeding bulls died. The previous year it had dropped weight during the rut, and in March lost its "buttons," the small knobs that remained after Lueck had harvested its antlers. That was normal. But it never regained weight, and its antlers grew slowly the following spring and summer. Lueck discovered its still-warm body Aug. 8. Because Lueck had volunteered to participate in a testing program for chronic wasting disease, the dead elk’s brain was sampled and tested. The result came back positive. Now the rest of the herd would be killed to be tested for the disease. "But I don’t know when," Lueck said. "I’m retired, so I guess I’ll really be retired."
That evening, after an early dinner, the shooters and spotters gathered at the Aitkin office. They discussed tactics outside the earshot of the media. This was not a squeamish bunch. Nearly without exception, the men were deer hunters. Yet this was something different, and the atmosphere was subdued. Then, at 6:45, Forbord, with the other shooters and spotters, climbed into DNR vehicles–four-wheel-drive pickups with ATVs strapped in the beds–and lumbered en masse out of the parking lot toward the shooting area.
Red brake lights shone along Aitkin County 39 southeast of town like a string of Christmas lights as the DNR and then the media stopped at the various properties where landowners had given permission to shoot. Forbord and Rusch pulled into the Lueck farm, leaving the media cars behind. This evening, Lueck was not there. Instead a younger relative met Forbord. "I don’t want nobody shooting in that area down there or back toward the house," he said.
"No, no, course not," Rusch said. "Whatever you wish."
Forbord and Rusch drove into the big field behind the farm. They were followed by another team, officer Marty Stage and his spotter, Bryan Leuth. The two teams set up on either side of a broad grassy hill. Forbord and Rusch tucked in behind rolled bales of hay and, in the gloaming, watched the line of trees 200 yards distant.
In his late 50s, Forbord still does not wear glasses or contacts. He scanned the woods with his rifle scope, then with his steely eyes, looking for deer to emerge from the woods to feed on the meadow grass. Rusch looked through 10-power binoculars. Lueck’s elk bugled in the pens behind them.
Wind whirled beneath the overcast sky. At 7:50 the first shot echoed from the northwest.
"That was one," Forbord said softly.
Then, 10 minutes later, came another, right behind. Stage!
"He got one."
Three minutes later, another shot, to the northeast.
By 8:15, it was too dark to scan the woods. So Forbord walked back for the truck and drove it to the edge of the trees. He and Rusch waited in the gathering darkness. At 8:30 Rusch scanned the field and edge of the woods with a spotlight. One million candlepower threw everything within 200 yards into sharp relief. But no deer. Then, almost as an afterthought, Rusch scanned the swale behind the truck.
"There’s a deer," he said.
Forbord climbed from the cab and walked to the back of the truck. Unable to get a steady rest, he said, "Keep the light on him while I go up to that tree."
"Hurry up!" Rusch said.
Forbord rested his rifle against the tree. He shot.
"You got him," Rusch said. "He went down."
Back in the truck, Forbord said he tried to gauge the deer’s size by the size of its ears. He could see only a little of its shoulders through the grass. And so he shot down a bit into the grass.
Rusch scribbled notes on a form–location, time of shot. They waited a half-hour and scanned the field again. Then they waded through the grass for the deer. It had fallen nearly where it had stood. But it was a fawn, only about 50 pounds in its newly gray winter coat.
Forbord seemed genuinely disturbed. In the truck, he again described what he saw: large ears, long neck, the body barely visible in the grass. Shooting down into the grass. He thought the deer had been larger.
The teams shot seven deer Monday night. By Wednesday 30 field-dressed carcasses had been piled into the refrigerated semitrailer at the DNR Aitkin office. One by one, technicians extracted the obex from the base of the brain of each carcass. The walnut-sized chunks of tissue, each packed in a vial of formaldehyde and water, were being sent to a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Ames, Iowa, to test for the abnormal prion proteins, which would indicate the animal had chronic wasting disease. Every few days the beheaded bodies were sent off to the local butcher. Meat from animals testing negative for the disease would be offered to landowners and the local food shelf.
Chronic wasting disease is a degenerative brain disease of deer and elk. It is similar to mad cow disease in bovines, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans–all inevitably fatal. All are associated with abnormal prions in the brain, spinal column, and lymph nodes. Do the prions spread the disease? They seem to, since contaminated tissue can cause the formation of prions in healthy tissue. Scientists suspect deer or elk pass the infection from animal to animal, but they don’t know exactly how.
Can humans contract these diseases from animals? Scrapie, with a history of 250 years in sheep and goats, apparently does not cross the species barrier to humans. But eating products from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (also known as mad cow disease) is suspected of causing a similar disease in humans called new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. (Albeit, at a low level. In the United Kingdom, more than 180,000 cattle have been diagnosed with BSE, and an estimated 50 million people exposed; so far 128 Britons have contracted new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.)
Can humans get chronic wasting disease from deer or elk? That isn’t clear. In parts of the western United States where wild deer have carried the disease for more than 30 years, the human population has shown no increase in degenerative brain diseases. But the numbers of contaminated animals and exposed people are so small investigators aren’t confident the disease would show up. "The data are consistent with no risk or a small risk," said Lawrence Schonberger, the medical epidemiologist in charge of prion disease surveillance for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "The only thing we can rule out is a big risk."
In the only completed laboratory experiment on the question, prion proteins from deer with chronic wasting disease were mixed with normal prions of deer, sheep, cows, and humans in a test tube. Human prion proteins changed to abnormal prion proteins at a very low rate. "The results demonstrate a barrier at the molecular level that should limit the susceptibility" of humans, the study concluded.
So is it safe to eat diseased tissue? "Our test-tube evidence is a hint, but only a hint," said Byron Caughey, senior investigator for the National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Laboratories and study co-author. "It’s really a stretch to make a firm interpretation." The NIH is undertaking additional studies to determine if humans are vulnerable. For now public health agencies hedge their bets, recommending no one eat an obviously ill animal or the tissues where prions accumulate.
Since the disease was first identified in a mule deer held in a northern Colorado wildlife research facility in 1967, states have responded differently to its appearance. In the West, few were alarmed at first. Chronic wasting disease was simply another of many diseases in deer. But in the 1990s came the outbreak of mad cow disease in Britain. Later, many scientists began to suspect a link between that disease and new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Suddenly, chronic wasting disease seemed more serious, even though a link to humans has never been proved.
In spring 2002, when chronic wasting disease appeared in a new area northwest of Denver, the Colorado Division of Wildlife killed more than 1,000 deer and elk to stop its spread. "It may be possible to stop the disease in its tracks," said Todd Malmsbury, Colorado Wildlife’s chief of information. "Our goal is to get the disease to wink out in that area."
In Wisconsin last spring and summer, that state’s DNR organized the killing of nearly 2,000 deer as part of a plan to first determine the extent of chronic wasting disease in the local deer herd and then to eradicate deer and the disease in a 389-square-mile area near Madison. Thousands more deer were killed during a long hunting season with liberal bag limits.
In addition to the deer shot near Aitkin, the Minnesota DNR will be testing 5,000 to 6,000 deer killed by hunters at various locations throughout the state. If positive results come from a small geographic area, "I think we’d try to eliminate it," Schad said. "We’d take the Wisconsin approach, basically." The aim would be to kill so many deer, to drive the population to such a low level, that infected animals would have little chance of interaction with healthy animals and would themselves die before spreading the disease.
But if the disease appears over a large area? "I don’t know then," said Schad. "I don’t think it’s practical to reduce deer across a very broad area."
By the end of the first week, the reporters were gone, and the teams were left to their task. Grim determination had given way to a lighter mood–not a joy in killing, but a sense of camaraderie and dedication to a task. As the teams gathered in Aitkin Friday morning, Frank Swendsen, a deer hunter and one of the spotters, said, "It’s not really hunting. It’s just shooting." Then, before quitting for the weekend, the teams drove the woods on the properties near the Lueck farm. A single deer was killed.
And so it continued. After a month of shooting, the DNR teams left the woods. They had killed 80 deer in the nine-square-mile area. Archery hunters and road kills accounted for 11 more.
"We’re pretty confident we’re going to have enough deer by all sources to say pretty confidently whether it’s out there," Schad said. It, of course, was chronic wasting disease.
Despite the association in the public mind between this hunt and disease, landowners remained remarkably clear-minded and practical, eagerly accepting meat from animals that had tested negative. Still, even though the meat was put to good use, this was a hunt unlike any other. Fundamentally, it was the antithesis of hunting, as unnatural as hunting is natural.
In his essay "A Few Thoughts on Adam’s Curse," Dan Gerber quotes a passage from The Upanishads–"I am food. . . . I am an eater of food"–and notes, "We are life feeding on life, the most fundamental fact of our existence, and if we are not aware of and grateful to the various spirits who give up their lives to sustain us, mere existence, not life, is our portion."
A hunt affirms life through our connection with death–both that of the animal and our own. Instead, the killing in Aitkin, though necessary, was conducted against the backdrop of fear that somehow the tie between hunter and hunted, the oldest and most profound connection between humans and other animals, might be broken and that the killing would be in vain and somehow shameful–that it would just be shooting.
By late fall, Clayton Lueck’s 48 remaining elk had been killed and tested. All proved negative. Tests on 69 deer brain samples had been completed. So far, all were negative. Sixty-nine and counting.
Greg Breining is managing editor of the Volunteer and a free-lance writer.