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Several years ago, one of my most influential mentors advised me, "Young man, there are three types of people in the world: those who make things happen; things happen, and those who sit around and wonder what happened … what do you want to be? " At first this evaluation seemed somewhat simplistic.
As I became older and more involved in problems and personal activities, I found myself aligned as much as possible. , with those who do rather than those who look and wonder. I never liked being in a position where I could only watch or wonder what was going to happen. But that's clearly how I feel about the spread of chronic cachexia disease to our wild deer herd in Pennsylvania.
Last month, the Pennsylvania Game Commission released the latest set of statistics on the spread of the MDC. In 2017, 78 wild deer were tested positive for MDC, compared to 25 deer in 2016. It's triple, and these are only the ones we know. Of this total, 75 infected deer were documented in Disease Management Zone 2, which now comprises 4,614 square miles including all or part of Adams, Bedford, Blair, Cambria, Clearfield, Cumberland, Franklin, Fulton, Huntingdon, Juniata, Mifflin and Perry. and the counties of Somerset. The other three CWD infected deer were in WMA 3, which includes 916 square miles in parts of Armstrong, Cambria and Clarion Counties, Clearfield, Indiana and Jefferson. The DMA 4, which includes 364 square miles in parts of Lancaster, Lebanon and Berks counties, was also created earlier this year when CWD was detected on a captive deer farm in Lancaster County. The DMA 1, established in 2012 when CWD was detected in a captive deer farm in Adams County, was eliminated after no other cases of the disease were found in the free deer in this sector.
Current DMAs, about 5,894 square miles of Pennsylvania are now in a DMA. This is almost 13% of the state's total area since the first three wild deer infected with the disease were detected in 2012 in the southern counties of Blair and North Bedford. And despite the PGC's best efforts to control the spread of MDC, this insidious disease continues to expand its range at ever-increasing rates every year. Their response to CWD has been to put in place several widely applicable, even ineffective measures, such as: banning deer feeding in a DMA; prohibit hunters from transporting the head, spine and other high-risk parts of deer harvested in a DMA to the outside of this DMA; the use of urine-based deer attractants in a DMA; and the issuance of special DMAP permits to harvest more antlerless deer in specific areas of each DMA to further reduce the deer herd.
Unfortunately, the answer is probably that there is no answer. I take no pleasure in this dark prediction, but the facts of CWD are even gloomier. The disease was first detected in Colorado in 1967. For decades, the disease was mostly confined to several western states before making the leap to the east of Mississippi in the early 2000s and finally up to 39 in Pennsylvania in 2012. The disease is currently in more than 20 states and Canadian provinces. In more than 50 years of fighting MDC in North America, there is still no way to test the disease and no vaccine to prevent it, and no state has been able to control or control to limit the spread of the disease. And I have little faith that one of the oracles of Elmerton Avenue will soon solve CWD's riddle. I say this because of the quite dark record of the PGC "managing" wildlife of our state.
When I was a young boy, I remember hearing quail quail in the field on the other side of the street. our house. Quails were anything but a memory when I started hunting a few years later. I had the opportunity to hunt some wild pheasants in the southeast in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the twilight years of this great resource. The PGC stayed there and watched the disappearance of wild pheasants in Pennsylvania, telling us well after the end was because of "habitat loss". We lost "some" of our pheasant habitat; we lost "all" of our wild pheasants. Recently, the PGC has admitted that ruffed grouse, our state bird, is also in trouble, something that those of us who actually hunt these big game birds have known for a while. They say that the West Nile virus is the cause. Another good excuse. What about some solutions?
In recent years, the PGC has also been fond of beating its chest to the fact that it manages "all" fauna in Pennsylvania. Awesome. This means that they stood beside and watched as we lost almost all our bats because of the white nose syndrome. Ignorance, most people find bats scary and disgusting, but they are harmless and very beneficial mammals, and their disappearance is an ecological disaster of epic proportions.
Of course, the PGC is only one of the players who dropped ball instead of preserving, protecting and valuing Pennsylvania's natural resources as their mission. The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission observed the world's largest smallmouth bbad fishery, the Susquehanna River, in 2005, and they wonder why ever since. Pennsylvania, of course, means "Penn's Woods," but our forest managers have also watched the disaster fall on our forests for generations.
The American chestnut was wiped out by the burn, and the elms were victims of the Dutch elm disease. More recently, our state tree, Eastern Hemlock, has become prey to the woolly hemlock aphid, while all our ash trees have succumbed to the emerald ash borer.
And these are just a few examples of my case. That's why I have to put all our natural resource agencies in the categories "watch" and "wonder" . Sad but true.
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