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Investigating Chronic Wasting Disease
windows writes "The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch has an article in today's newspaper on efforts by many states to test for chronic wasting disease. The disease affects deer and elk, and is similar to Mad Cow Disease in how it destroys brain tissue giving it a spony appearance under a microscope. Due to the rapid spread of the disease recently, most states are enlisting the assistance of hunters to provide brain stems of deer, to test for the disease. The purpose of this study is just to determine how far geographically the disease has spread. It is not yet understood how the disease is spread or if it is a threat to cattle or humans."
They don't know how it's spread or if it will hurt me, but I shouldn't worry about handling items possibly contaminated with the disease? Makes sense...
--It's Pimptastic!--
In Wisconsin we sure as hell care about deer. Not "deers" you bonehead. Deer hunting is a vital part of the economy of many states and important to the culture of the people in these states. Maybe if you lived there you'd understand, so don't go saying nobody cares about deer.
We are too effectively battling disease nowdays, so it's targeting animals instead. Good, let the bastards rot. Besides that the deer population is actually higher than it's ever been. They can afford to lose a few.
Yet there is a story about disease in deer.
Good job, Slashdot. Good job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So instead of trying to provide some insightful comment built on reason, i'll just go imaginitive and see what I come up with...
/end joke
I'm guessing that the problem occurs first in domestic livestock then moves it's way down to the wild population. This is a great agurment for natural selection VS. controlled breeding, gene manipulation and cloning.
For whatever reason, us humans have the gall to think we can master in 20 years what took nature millions of years to perfect. Despite natural selection being cruel in both the animal world and human (small geeks get beat up/eat up by jocks) just the fact that it has worked over eons is proof alone that it is far better than any technology we as humans can develop.
I used to tell this story when I got drunk to people, it's funny so laugh..
Why alchohol makes you smarter.
Your brain is like a herd of buffalo. The process of natural selection makes the herd healthier because the wolves will kill the slower buffalo trailing the herd first. By killing off the sick and weak buffalo the herd is left with healthy stock to breed, thus introducing healthier buffalo's into the herd.
Your brain is like that hurd of buffalo when you drink. The alchahol kills off the slow and weak brain cells leaving only the healthy ones to reproduce, thereby making your brain a faster more efficient machine. This is why everybody feels a little stronger when drinking!
That little joke does have grounding in reality in that the domesticated animals were not bred for diesease resistance or agressiveness, but rather for docileness and meat. This in turn has made them more susceptable to dieseases that their wild cousins would normally laugh off.
Add to that equation the use of antibiotics and steroids in domestic livestock. It's been proven with humans that over time a diesease will mutate where it is no longer killed by an antibody. We then change it a bit, and the diesease mutates yet again. Steroids inhibit the production of white blood cells while strengthening muscles. Steroids don't kill the germ, they just make you feel like you have none. So germs can keep on breeding inside an organism all jacked up on steroids and it wouldn't even know it.
The hugely scarey thing is humans are now *considering* tweaking with our own genes, and despite that 3lb's of grey stuff we got on top of our heads, unless we irraditate the earth (in which case we ruin it) there is no way we are going to be able to stop the googleplex of 1 celled organisms that inhabit this earth from overthrowing us.
I guess the moral i'd like to make to all this is we need to "re-teach" ourselves to live in harmony with nature. Just because you destroy a forest, pave it, and put pavement over it doesn't mean you "conquered" nature. If it's not there how can you say it was conquered??
Just my 2cents.
Maybe you have plenty of resources.
I suggest you take some of your resources down to the local food bank and feed some hungry people.
It is not ineffecient at all to kill a deer and butcher it and eat it. If the deer didn't exist and I had to feed it a ton of food for 2 years before I could slaughter it, then maybe.
On the other hand, I don't eat grass. Deer are very plentiful (very overcrowded), eat grass, and taste great. Venison provides nutrition for humans.
I realize you just have some aversion to killing animals for food, and that is fine. Good for you. But don't spread FUD about eating meat. In moderation (like any food product) it is good for you.
To think, just a few years ago, that sentence would have stopped at "shot it". Now after shooting it, we send it's head to Galesburg. Civilization has come a long way.
Sex - Find It
Considering what we spend every year to go hunting versus the amount of meat we actually bring back, it would be a lot cheaper to stay home and buy the finest steak for diner once a week. See my previous post for more details.
My family hunts for more reasons that just the meat. But the meat is part of the culture too. Venison (deer meat) comes in different flavors and textures which depend mostly on if the deer is healthy and eating properly. We make most of our venison into jerky and sausage, but we save the steaks and tenderloins which we eat on special occasions.
Savages such as myself can still take a certain pride in knowing that we have brought food in from out of the wilderness. And that meat we're eating... well, some reason, the deer I shot, tracked, field dressed, dragged out of the woods, and brought home, my venison, tastes better than any steak I've ever had.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Hunting is an inexpensive way to feed a family
I'm a hunter, and I think that hunting is both a worthwhile sport and the best mechanism we have for stabilizing herd sizes and preventing massive winter kills, but I take issue with the statement that hunting is an inexpensive way to feed a family.
Add up everything you spend on gas, food, clothing, hunting and camping equipment. Then figure out how much time you spend hunting and how much money you could have made in that time by working overtime or working a part-time job or a small consulting contract. Then divide that by the pounds of usable meat from an average animal and multiply by the odds of actually taking an animal and you'll almost certainly find that your deer meat is much more expensive than the best steak you can buy at the local grocery store.
Do the same analysis for an elk or moose hunter and the numbers come out a bit better, mainly because the average elk or moose is so much larger than the average deer (and I'm thinking mule deer, not those dog-sized whitetails), but it's still about sport, not food.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Unfortuanately humans don't hunt in the same way most predators do.
Natural predators intentionally single out the elderly, the sick or the young. They thin out the herd in the right way, taking out the weakest link which actually makes the population stronger as a whole. Humans on the other hand tend to go for the strongest, healthiest bucks first. They want trophies, and the tastiest meat. Most hunters wouldn't waste a bullet on a sickly deer, much less want to eat it.
Hunting might keep the nuisance deer out of our yards and off our highways, but it sure as hell isn't helping the deer as much as a healthy wolf or cougar population would.
*Splort*