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Venison hanging
- Thread starter Jim F
- Start date
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- Mar 21, 2018
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Only 40? She must have been very young.
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What is CWD? "Something" Wasting Disease? Down here, it is just DWD, or Deer Wasting Disease. It's not in my area (yet). Hoping that it stays north of me. Way north of me.
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CWD is chronic wasting disease and is very similar to mad cow disease that occurred in the UK in the nineties. The fear was that it could jump species to humans . The human form of the the disease is Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and causes brain disorders and possible death. The disease is caused by a malformed protein fragment called a prion and there is no cure for all three variants.
The Wisconsin DNR unsuccessfully attempted a total eradication program twenty years ago to try to contain the hot spots. It is slowly increasing in the state currently.
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40 lbs would be fairly typical for a fully deboned and trimmed deer here.
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We seemed to have altered the genetics here. Back around forty years ago, we had buck only with a party tag for an antlerless deer for four participants. The tendency was to shoot anything with antlers so bucks seldom made it through that first year with antlers and here were a lot of fruit basket bucks. Then the DNR decided (rightfully so) that there were too many deer and they started issuing antlerless permits, first in lieu of a buck tag but later in addition. The tendency was to pick out the largest deer in the bunch which effectively began culling out the larger deer and promoting smaller deer. Many deer harvested would be yearling at about 2/3rds the size of a mature deer.Sure that wasn't a goat?
With the advent of CWD, the DNR began issuing unlimited antlerless tags in an effort to eradicate the deer in the hot zone. This, along with the disease itself decimated the deer herd. Where we used to have about 20 deer /sq. mi. we are down to maybe 1/10th that. There has been a tendency towards larger and more mature bucks though.
With CWD, we had every deer tested before consumption. I would skin and quarter the carcass and debone it. Then I would wrap the hams, shoulders, and backstraps in cling film, id the packages, and wait for a negative test. I didn't bother with the ribs or neck as they took up too much freezer space. Since we were encouraged to harvest as many deer as possible, we would have four or five in the freezer so there wasn't a drive to pick every last scrap of meat. For the freezer, I would look for smaller deer as they were less likely to be diseased and they are more tender.
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"...Creuztfeldt-Jacob disease..." My father died of that. They knew nothing about it back then and apparently don't know much about it now. We watched what was a brute of a man go in the hospital and waste away to his death.
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I'm truly sorry to hear that.
The disease is so devasting and final in it's outcome. That is the primary reason that we stopped eating venison. Prior to CWD, venison was our primary protein source. Early advice was that the responsible prions couldn't be destroyed by high temperatures and other conditions that killed other organisms. We didn't depend on it for economic reasons as so many do and it really wasn't worth taking the chance.
To date, there has been no verified incident of CWD jumping to humans although some early research managed to cause it to jump species by feeding infected brain tissue to other animals. In my mind, the reason was the probability of ingesting a mutant prion capable of jump species was greatly amplified by this process.