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CWD may prey on hunt season
Elk-deer malady could undercut $599 million industry, officials say
By Steve Raabe, Denver Post Business Writer
Sunday, May 05, 2002 - Chronic wasting disease could pose a significant threat this fall to Colorado's $599 million elk- and deer-hunting industry.
Hunters and the economic boost they bring could be driven away by the infectious wildlife disease, said government officials and business owners across Colorado.
"It's a big concern," said Sharon Day, town manager in Meeker, where hunting is the community's major economic generator. "This could impact a lot of people here."
Even as Colorado officials work INSIDE: Breaking down the economic impact.26A to limit outbreaks of chronic wasting disease, rural communities in northwestern Colorado are girding for a possible downturn in hunting this fall.
A reduction in hunting could devastate some areas where spending by hunters accounts for the bulk of sales-tax revenues.
"I'd say the economic impact in Colorado will be huge," said Bruce Wilson, a former hunting outfitter and current economic-development consultant to the town of Walden in northern Colorado. "I'm painting a pretty bleak picture of it, but that's the reality as I see it."
The Colorado Division of Wildlife estimates that the hunting of wild deer and elk pumped $599 million into Colorado's economy last year. Elk and deer ranching - which has been hit particularly hard by chronic wasting disease - adds another $19 million in economic impact.
Northwestern Colorado is highly susceptible to disruptions in hunting because the area's other major industry - oil and gas production - is volatile and an undependable source of income and taxes.
An estimated 63 percent of sales tax collected in Rio Blanco County is generated by hunter spending. In northern Colorado's Jackson County, hunting accounts for 59 percent of sales-tax collections.
"A lot of people around here really live and die off the hunting business," Rio Blanco County Commissioner Kim Cook said. "It's a concern because there are just too many unanswered questions."
Much of the potential economic fallout depends on how far the disease may spread by the fall hunting season, what steps regulators take to control the outbreak, and the extent to which carcass-testing requirements are imposed on hunters.
Chronic wasting disease makes infected deer and elk grow thin and die as it eats microscopic holes in the animals' brains. The disease is incurable and always fatal.
CWD is related to mad cow disease, which decimated the British beef industry during a major outbreak last year. A human variant of mad cow disease has been blamed for the deaths of 120 Europeans.
There is no evidence that chronic wasting disease can be transmitted to humans, either through direct contact or by eating meat from infected animals.
Yet officials worry that underlying fears about the disease's contagious nature may drive away hunters and tourists from Colorado.
"Confusion - that's the word I use to sum it up," said Steve Hein, a big-game meat processor and owner of Steve's Meat Market Inc. in Arvada.
"It's not what we know about CWD," he said. "It's what we don't know that's scaring everybody, because we don't know very much."
Game processing is a $9.8 million industry in Colorado, with taxidermy accounting for an additional $18.5 million in sales.
Hein said that last year he stopped accepting deer and elk from northeastern Colorado, where chronic wasting disease has existed in wild game for decades. The Colorado Division of Wildlife has declared the northeastern quadrant of Colorado an "endemic" area for the disease.
Hein said he recently thought about retiring and selling the processing business, perhaps to his children. But he scuttled the plan after reports of the disease's spread.
"I've groomed this for 18 seasons into a very good business," he said. "But I don't want to sell it to anyone if the entire state becomes an endemic area."
State wildlife officials have slaughtered hundreds of deer and elk on the Western Slope in an attempt to slow the disease's spread and to determine the number of infected animals. The only effective diagnostic test requires that the game be killed.
So far, eight wild mule deer in western Colorado - all near an elk ranch where the first cases were found - have been discovered with the disease. Six elk from captive ranch operations in North Park and the San Luis Valley also have been infected.
Melinda Parker, a Meeker motel and restaurant owner, said hunting revenues were disappointing last year after the terrorist attacks, and because Colorado increased the cost of hunting licenses.
This year, Colorado has reduced the cost of cow elk licenses in an effort to attract hunters and reduce large elk populations.
"I was expecting a good season this fall, but now I just don't know," Parker said. "If the hunters don't come back, it's going to be devastating to our economy."
Malady menaces elk's bucolic call
An imperial bull elk bugling in the frosty fall air. A herd of mule deer grazing placidly in a green field.
Images like these are as Colorado as the snow-capped Rockies towering over the rolling plains.
"Wildlife is the heartbeat of the land," said Bob Hernbrode, the Colorado Division of Wildlife's chief of education. "It makes the mountains even more beautiful."
And it's a love affair that reaches from coast to coast.
"There's a kind of deeply ingrained connection with wildlife that's built into the American psyche," Hernbrode said. "It's been that way ever since the first Europeans began to arrive in this country. It used to be "the King's deer.' Now it belongs to all of us."
Enter chronic wasting disease.
The mysterious, incurable brain disease has infected wild deer and a few elk along the eastern borderlands between Colorado and Wyoming for decades. In recent years, epidemics in 60 captive elk herds from Colorado to Canada and beyond have resulted in the slaughter of almost 10,000 elk.
But its appearance in a handful of mule deer on the Western Slope and a dozen white-tails in Wisconsin has vaulted this quirky killer to national prominence.
No one has ever stopped an outbreak of CWD. Sick animals infect the very soil they walk on. The precise mechanics of its spread have defied 20 years of research. It's always fatal.
One computer model developed for the DOW showed that in 80 simulations out of 100, the disease took deer populations down to zero within a few decades of infection.
That's one reason that many worry unless chronic wasting disease is stopped - now - it could sweep across the continent, upending one of America's most significant conservation success stories.
"The restoration of big-game herds is on the very short list of the best things to happen to wildlife in the last century," said the Sierra Club's Mike Smith.
"Deer and elk herds represent one part of the planet that we haven't screwed up," added Naomi Rachel, the head of Residents Against Inappropriate Development. "So, in a way, they represent what's left of our innocence."
Perhaps no part of the state is as closely linked to elk than Rocky Mountain National Park.
"We have evidence of game drives along Trail Ridge Road that native Americans used thousands of years ago," said Kyle Patterson, a spokesman for the park.
Extirpated in the late 1800s, elk were reintroduced in 1913 to the stunning peaks and high mountain valleys that would become the park two years later. Strict management kept the herds to about 500 until 1969, when the park adopted a "natural regulation" policy. Since then, the population has bloomed to 3,000, much to the delight of visitors and residents of Estes Park, who thrill to the timeless competition of the rut.
"It's a huge aspect of the local economy," said Patterson. "It used to be autumn was when things started slowing down for them. But not anymore."
The park is also on the edge of CWD's "endemic area," and the first elk ever diagnosed with the disease was found there in 1981. About 5 percent of deer herds in the park have tested positive.
But most of the town remained unaware of it until recently.
"We have wildlife walk through town just like the people do," said Sue Doylen, one of the town's elected trustees. "I think if we start having elk dying in our front yard, so to speak, it would have a huge impact."
For wildlife advocates and professionals, the potential that the popular perception of game herds could shift from cherished asset to disease vector is a troubling possibility.
Health officials say there's never been a confirmed case of CWD infecting humans. But its close relationship to mad cow disease, which decimated the British beef industry, and a mad-cow variant which has killed 120 Europeans, has many worried.
"Deer have been regarded, even pre-Bambi, as gentle, friendly, fuzzy inhabitants of forests - things we'd almost like to have as a pet," said Smith, the Sierra Club's wildlife chairman. "If all of a sudden they perceive that these animals have a fatal disease and it might possibly be transmissible to humans, that's a radical change.
"Humans have screwy attitudes with respect to rihe added. "We'll go nuts about plutonium at Rocky Flats, while the chances of being hit and killed by oncoming SUVs are hundreds of thousands of times greater. It's the fear of the unknown - plutonium, ebola or strange and mysterious chronic wasting disease - that gets people really really worried.
"That could erode a lot of support for wildlife."
But Estes Park trustee Doylen worries that a lack of knowledge about the disease's long-term impact - or denial - may create resistance to control programs that would involve hunting or shooting large numbers of animals.
"Everybody's walking around this dead elephant in the room and nobody is addressing it," she said. "We could have been proactive years ago and maybe nipped this thing in the bud.
"We have loved these animals so much, maybe we've loved them to death."
Illness source unknown, but some point to DOW
One of the enduring mysteries about chronic wasting disease is where it came from.
Thirty-five years after it was first identified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, researchers say they may never know.
But there are two main theories.
CWD may have arisen on its own. The infectious protein thought to cause the disease is natural, and a sporadic mutation may have taken hold somewhere in northeastern Colorado or southern Wyoming 40 years ago. But why here and nowhere else?
Of all the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, CWD is most similar to sheep scrapie, which was known to infect flocks along the foothills of Colorado and Wyoming. Perhaps, researchers speculate, scrapie jumped to deer somewhere in that area. But scrapie has been widely distributed throughout the country, so why here and nowhere else?
Researchers believe that feeding cattle scrapie-infected sheep bits caused mad cow disease. Some speculate that deer involved in a nutritional study at a Colorado State University research station in Fort Collins - where CWD was first recognized in 1967 - were either fed rendered sheep or lived on scrapie-contaminated ground.
But so far, no one has found records of scrapie at the station, which has been owned since 1977 by the Colorado Division of Wildlife. And the research protocol didn't involve feeding protein supplements to sheep.
In addition, the endemic area extends all the way to Casper, but just a little ways south of Fort Collins. So if it did start in Colorado, why would it move so far north and not spread south to Denver?
Despite the lack of evidence, the theory that the wildlife agency was responsible for the spread of CWD is accepted as a bedrock truth among many elk ranchers.
Elk-deer malady could undercut $599 million industry, officials say
By Steve Raabe, Denver Post Business Writer
Sunday, May 05, 2002 - Chronic wasting disease could pose a significant threat this fall to Colorado's $599 million elk- and deer-hunting industry.
Hunters and the economic boost they bring could be driven away by the infectious wildlife disease, said government officials and business owners across Colorado.
"It's a big concern," said Sharon Day, town manager in Meeker, where hunting is the community's major economic generator. "This could impact a lot of people here."
Even as Colorado officials work INSIDE: Breaking down the economic impact.26A to limit outbreaks of chronic wasting disease, rural communities in northwestern Colorado are girding for a possible downturn in hunting this fall.
A reduction in hunting could devastate some areas where spending by hunters accounts for the bulk of sales-tax revenues.
"I'd say the economic impact in Colorado will be huge," said Bruce Wilson, a former hunting outfitter and current economic-development consultant to the town of Walden in northern Colorado. "I'm painting a pretty bleak picture of it, but that's the reality as I see it."
The Colorado Division of Wildlife estimates that the hunting of wild deer and elk pumped $599 million into Colorado's economy last year. Elk and deer ranching - which has been hit particularly hard by chronic wasting disease - adds another $19 million in economic impact.
Northwestern Colorado is highly susceptible to disruptions in hunting because the area's other major industry - oil and gas production - is volatile and an undependable source of income and taxes.
An estimated 63 percent of sales tax collected in Rio Blanco County is generated by hunter spending. In northern Colorado's Jackson County, hunting accounts for 59 percent of sales-tax collections.
"A lot of people around here really live and die off the hunting business," Rio Blanco County Commissioner Kim Cook said. "It's a concern because there are just too many unanswered questions."
Much of the potential economic fallout depends on how far the disease may spread by the fall hunting season, what steps regulators take to control the outbreak, and the extent to which carcass-testing requirements are imposed on hunters.
Chronic wasting disease makes infected deer and elk grow thin and die as it eats microscopic holes in the animals' brains. The disease is incurable and always fatal.
CWD is related to mad cow disease, which decimated the British beef industry during a major outbreak last year. A human variant of mad cow disease has been blamed for the deaths of 120 Europeans.
There is no evidence that chronic wasting disease can be transmitted to humans, either through direct contact or by eating meat from infected animals.
Yet officials worry that underlying fears about the disease's contagious nature may drive away hunters and tourists from Colorado.
"Confusion - that's the word I use to sum it up," said Steve Hein, a big-game meat processor and owner of Steve's Meat Market Inc. in Arvada.
"It's not what we know about CWD," he said. "It's what we don't know that's scaring everybody, because we don't know very much."
Game processing is a $9.8 million industry in Colorado, with taxidermy accounting for an additional $18.5 million in sales.
Hein said that last year he stopped accepting deer and elk from northeastern Colorado, where chronic wasting disease has existed in wild game for decades. The Colorado Division of Wildlife has declared the northeastern quadrant of Colorado an "endemic" area for the disease.
Hein said he recently thought about retiring and selling the processing business, perhaps to his children. But he scuttled the plan after reports of the disease's spread.
"I've groomed this for 18 seasons into a very good business," he said. "But I don't want to sell it to anyone if the entire state becomes an endemic area."
State wildlife officials have slaughtered hundreds of deer and elk on the Western Slope in an attempt to slow the disease's spread and to determine the number of infected animals. The only effective diagnostic test requires that the game be killed.
So far, eight wild mule deer in western Colorado - all near an elk ranch where the first cases were found - have been discovered with the disease. Six elk from captive ranch operations in North Park and the San Luis Valley also have been infected.
Melinda Parker, a Meeker motel and restaurant owner, said hunting revenues were disappointing last year after the terrorist attacks, and because Colorado increased the cost of hunting licenses.
This year, Colorado has reduced the cost of cow elk licenses in an effort to attract hunters and reduce large elk populations.
"I was expecting a good season this fall, but now I just don't know," Parker said. "If the hunters don't come back, it's going to be devastating to our economy."
Malady menaces elk's bucolic call
An imperial bull elk bugling in the frosty fall air. A herd of mule deer grazing placidly in a green field.
Images like these are as Colorado as the snow-capped Rockies towering over the rolling plains.
"Wildlife is the heartbeat of the land," said Bob Hernbrode, the Colorado Division of Wildlife's chief of education. "It makes the mountains even more beautiful."
And it's a love affair that reaches from coast to coast.
"There's a kind of deeply ingrained connection with wildlife that's built into the American psyche," Hernbrode said. "It's been that way ever since the first Europeans began to arrive in this country. It used to be "the King's deer.' Now it belongs to all of us."
Enter chronic wasting disease.
The mysterious, incurable brain disease has infected wild deer and a few elk along the eastern borderlands between Colorado and Wyoming for decades. In recent years, epidemics in 60 captive elk herds from Colorado to Canada and beyond have resulted in the slaughter of almost 10,000 elk.
But its appearance in a handful of mule deer on the Western Slope and a dozen white-tails in Wisconsin has vaulted this quirky killer to national prominence.
No one has ever stopped an outbreak of CWD. Sick animals infect the very soil they walk on. The precise mechanics of its spread have defied 20 years of research. It's always fatal.
One computer model developed for the DOW showed that in 80 simulations out of 100, the disease took deer populations down to zero within a few decades of infection.
That's one reason that many worry unless chronic wasting disease is stopped - now - it could sweep across the continent, upending one of America's most significant conservation success stories.
"The restoration of big-game herds is on the very short list of the best things to happen to wildlife in the last century," said the Sierra Club's Mike Smith.
"Deer and elk herds represent one part of the planet that we haven't screwed up," added Naomi Rachel, the head of Residents Against Inappropriate Development. "So, in a way, they represent what's left of our innocence."
Perhaps no part of the state is as closely linked to elk than Rocky Mountain National Park.
"We have evidence of game drives along Trail Ridge Road that native Americans used thousands of years ago," said Kyle Patterson, a spokesman for the park.
Extirpated in the late 1800s, elk were reintroduced in 1913 to the stunning peaks and high mountain valleys that would become the park two years later. Strict management kept the herds to about 500 until 1969, when the park adopted a "natural regulation" policy. Since then, the population has bloomed to 3,000, much to the delight of visitors and residents of Estes Park, who thrill to the timeless competition of the rut.
"It's a huge aspect of the local economy," said Patterson. "It used to be autumn was when things started slowing down for them. But not anymore."
The park is also on the edge of CWD's "endemic area," and the first elk ever diagnosed with the disease was found there in 1981. About 5 percent of deer herds in the park have tested positive.
But most of the town remained unaware of it until recently.
"We have wildlife walk through town just like the people do," said Sue Doylen, one of the town's elected trustees. "I think if we start having elk dying in our front yard, so to speak, it would have a huge impact."
For wildlife advocates and professionals, the potential that the popular perception of game herds could shift from cherished asset to disease vector is a troubling possibility.
Health officials say there's never been a confirmed case of CWD infecting humans. But its close relationship to mad cow disease, which decimated the British beef industry, and a mad-cow variant which has killed 120 Europeans, has many worried.
"Deer have been regarded, even pre-Bambi, as gentle, friendly, fuzzy inhabitants of forests - things we'd almost like to have as a pet," said Smith, the Sierra Club's wildlife chairman. "If all of a sudden they perceive that these animals have a fatal disease and it might possibly be transmissible to humans, that's a radical change.
"Humans have screwy attitudes with respect to rihe added. "We'll go nuts about plutonium at Rocky Flats, while the chances of being hit and killed by oncoming SUVs are hundreds of thousands of times greater. It's the fear of the unknown - plutonium, ebola or strange and mysterious chronic wasting disease - that gets people really really worried.
"That could erode a lot of support for wildlife."
But Estes Park trustee Doylen worries that a lack of knowledge about the disease's long-term impact - or denial - may create resistance to control programs that would involve hunting or shooting large numbers of animals.
"Everybody's walking around this dead elephant in the room and nobody is addressing it," she said. "We could have been proactive years ago and maybe nipped this thing in the bud.
"We have loved these animals so much, maybe we've loved them to death."
Illness source unknown, but some point to DOW
One of the enduring mysteries about chronic wasting disease is where it came from.
Thirty-five years after it was first identified as a transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, researchers say they may never know.
But there are two main theories.
CWD may have arisen on its own. The infectious protein thought to cause the disease is natural, and a sporadic mutation may have taken hold somewhere in northeastern Colorado or southern Wyoming 40 years ago. But why here and nowhere else?
Of all the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, CWD is most similar to sheep scrapie, which was known to infect flocks along the foothills of Colorado and Wyoming. Perhaps, researchers speculate, scrapie jumped to deer somewhere in that area. But scrapie has been widely distributed throughout the country, so why here and nowhere else?
Researchers believe that feeding cattle scrapie-infected sheep bits caused mad cow disease. Some speculate that deer involved in a nutritional study at a Colorado State University research station in Fort Collins - where CWD was first recognized in 1967 - were either fed rendered sheep or lived on scrapie-contaminated ground.
But so far, no one has found records of scrapie at the station, which has been owned since 1977 by the Colorado Division of Wildlife. And the research protocol didn't involve feeding protein supplements to sheep.
In addition, the endemic area extends all the way to Casper, but just a little ways south of Fort Collins. So if it did start in Colorado, why would it move so far north and not spread south to Denver?
Despite the lack of evidence, the theory that the wildlife agency was responsible for the spread of CWD is accepted as a bedrock truth among many elk ranchers.
