Yale Daily News

By Timothy Dong

On Aug. 23, Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, or WDFW, released emergency rule changes on big game hunting procedures to curb the spread of chronic wasting disease, or CWD, in Eastern Washington. 

CWD was discovered for the first time in Washington state on August 1st in a slain deer north of Spokane. CWD is a fatal prion disease caused by misfolded proteins that affect cervids in Washington. Transmission is spread between members of the same species through contact with animal bodily fluids.

The WDFW was well prepared to address this discovery because of its 2021 CWD Management Plan and a June 2022 “tabletop exercise” mock agency response.

WDFW is “doing a really fine job at a difficult time,” WDFW commission member Woodrow “Woody” Myers said.

In response to the issue, the WDFW published an updated 2024 CWD Management Plan.  The plan lists new rule changes that apply to hunting in the affected zones GMUs 124, 127, and 130, all in eastern Washington. The new rules ban all deer and elk baiting and illegalize the transport of non-deboned meat outside of the aforementioned areas. The head or retropharyngeal lymph nodes of any harvested or salvaged deer and elk must also be submitted to WDFW for CWD testing.

The management plan also includes prewritten announcements for the first detection of CWD and flow charts to guide policymaking for an incident management team.

“This is an all-hands-on effort to try to identify the expanse of infection and slow the spread [of CWD],” Myers mentioned.

Jeff Miller, a hunting outfitter based in the Pacific Northwest with around 40 years of hunting experience hopes WDFW will “corral enough information to get an understanding of just how far [CWD is] spread.”

Miller feels ambivalent about the news of the detection of CWD in Washington since he isn’t sure of the scale of the disease.

Miller doesn’t believe the new rule changes will affect him much at all, adding that his clients will be taking additional steps in meat processing to abide by the guidelines and stay safe, banking on the best science to pave the way.

“The jury’s still out whether [CWD will] have an impact on the numbers of people that want to harvest big game on a statewide basis,” Miller said. 

Others like Myers feel that this detection of CWD is a cause for worry.

Myers argued that there is a lot unknown about CWD: how it will affect businesses, and how it will change animal populations. He predicts that people may be ”hesitant to harvest an animal for or consumption in the future.”

Myers adds that finding a cure should be a high priority.

The University of Minnesota deployed the first-ever successful field testing in March 2021, making testing more efficient and available. A cure has not been found thus far.

Both Miller and Myers thought well of WDFW’s response, saying the agency has been communicating promptly.

The National Wildlife Health Center lists 35 states in the U.S. with CWD confirmed in animal populations.