Texas wildlife officials killed 249 captive deer on a private ranch this week, ending the longest-running challenge in recent years to the state’s policy of euthanizing farmed deer herds infected with chronic wasting disease, or CWD.
The massacre ends a three-year impasse with game rancher Robert Williams, 85. His stubborn legal challenges had raised the prospect that deer breeders who supply the state’s highly fenced game ranches with large-antlered deer could prevent a strict euthanasia policy aimed at protecting wild deer from further infections with the MDC.
Like mad cow disease in cattle or scrapie in sheep, CWD causes misfolding of brain proteins called prions, leading to prolonged death from neurodegeneration. Biologists widely view the spread of disease as the greatest threat facing North America’s wild deer herds, a family that includes deer, elk, moose and caribou. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends not eating meat contaminated with CWD, fearing that the disease could spread to humans, as mad cow disease has done.
Texas wildlife officials typically kill all captive deer on sites where all deer test positive for CWD, then require extensive sterilization procedures that include removing a layer of topsoil from the deer enclosures and burial six feet deep. Sites contaminated with CWD cannot accommodate deer in captivity for at least five years.
Williams, a CWD skeptic who eats infected game without concern, waged a three-year legal battle to stop the state from killing deer on his ranch southeast of Dallas, winning the support of Republican state lawmakers. State of Texas Bob Hall and right-wing rocker Ted. Nugent. Williams encouraged other breeders to follow suit. He implored Texas officials to let him release his money so wounded veterans could hunt for free.
The state’s ability to enter private breeding enclosures to euthanize sick deer is well established in Texas law, which considers deer to be wild animals and, therefore, public property. But a Kaufman County judge repeatedly granted restraining orders to prevent the massacre and ordered a trial to determine whether Williams had a land interest that could prevent depopulation.
After months of legal wrangling, the Texas Supreme Court ruled last month that depopulation could proceed, although the dispute with the Kaufman County court was not resolved until May 24.
“This is a task we never take lightly and is always a last resort, but has proven to be the most prudent and standard practice for managing prion diseases in wildlife,” he said. writes the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in a press release.
The legal battle ultimately proved financially disastrous for Williams, who absorbed the cost of feeding about 500 captive deer that he could neither sell nor release to paying hunters. The value of the land, linked to its attractiveness for deer hunting, plummeted.
“I won some battles, but I lost the war,” Williams said. “They just ruined me.”
He and his daughter, Maree Lou, shot three deer themselves – including a tame doe they considered a pet and allowed into the house – to avoid wildlife authorities shooting them.
Texas wildlife officials barred the Williams family from entering the breeding enclosures because the deer were euthanized Tuesday, according to Williams. But he said they could hear the dull sound of what he believed to be subsonic gunfire being fired repeatedly.
Texas wildlife officials removed most of the deer using centerfire rifles, according to an agency spokesperson. In three cases, they used guns to eliminate individual deer.
“When I walked past and looked at these empty pens where these bucks were, I just cried,” Williams said. “I couldn’t help it.”
Wildlife advocates, however, applauded the euthanasia of Williams’ herd, seeing it as a necessary measure to protect native wildlife.
“Euthanizing these deer is very beneficial to wild deer,” said Kip Adams, communications director for the National Deer Association. “We know CWD was present in that location…The longer these deer are allowed to live, the more opportunity they have to affect other deer.”
The state of Texas has struggled over the past three years to contain an outbreak of CWD in deer breeding facilities. Deer generally spread the disease through bodily fluids such as saliva.
Williams’ ranch is one of the first in a series of unexplained cases to appear in breeding pens since spring 2021. Williams’ RW Trophy ranch was located in a CWD-free county and had neither sent nor received new deer for several years before the epidemic.
Captive deer represent a small but lucrative sector of the Texas hunting industry. Federal law generally classifies wildlife as a public resource administered by the states. Texas is one of about a dozen states that allows private citizens to raise deer, while classifying the animals as wildlife rather than livestock.
Breeders like Williams use selective breeding and high-protein foods to breed bucks with much larger antlers than deer typically grow in the wild. Ranchers then sell these bucks to highly fenced game ranches that charge prices of up to tens of thousands of dollars to shoot one.
The small size of breeding enclosures unusually concentrates deer, which can facilitate the spread of CWD once the disease appears. During the period that Williams avoided depopulation, some 254 of the deer he raised tested positive for the disease, with a prevalence rate of 72 percent, according to Texas Parks and Wildlife.
The ranch’s enclosures contained 637 deer at the time the first case of CWD was discovered in March 2021. The herd declined by more than half in the three years since, a rate of 2% per week, according to the state officials.
The state is still waiting for test results showing how many of the 249 deer euthanized at RW Trophy Ranch this week had been infected with CWD, but wildlife officials expected many of them to test positive.
“During a deer inspection at the ranch on May 14, 2024, TPWD staff observed a number of deer exhibiting general signs of clinical CWD, including drooping ears and disorientation,” Texas Parks and Wildlife wrote in a statement. “One deer was visibly shaking and having tremors. »
Twelve other deer tested positive at release sites at or associated with RW Trophy Ranch, including at least one wild doe.
“Mortality surveillance results at the RW Trophy Ranch show the devastating effect of an uncontrolled CWD outbreak in a breeding facility,” the TPWD release said.
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