• The SH Membership has gone live. Only SH Members have access to post in the classifieds. All members can view the classifieds. Starting in 2020 only SH Members will be admitted to the annual hunting contest. Current members will need to follow these steps to upgrade: 1. Click on your username 2. Click on Account upgrades 3. Choose SH Member and purchase.
  • We've been working hard the past few weeks to come up with some big changes to our vendor policies to meet the changing needs of our community. Please see the new vendor rules here: Vendor Access Area Rules

Who has concerns about feeding wild game to their families?

T

Therm

New Member
Joined
Aug 14, 2021
Messages
13
Hello everyone, first real post here and just sharing some thoughts hoping maybe someone will drop some insight on me.

I'll start by saying I'm 32, been hunting and fishing since I was big enough to go with my dad. Shot my first deer at 11, first one with a bow at 14. Been butchering my own deer since about the time I started bringing them home. No stranger to it. I got a bachelor's degree in wildlife biology, but now I work for a manufacturing company making food for humans that is sold around the world. Part of the job is assessing risk and mitigating risk down to acceptable levels.

Up until we had my daughter, I was aware of wildlife diseases, CWD, Brucellosis, Salmonella, etc. and I was never really bothered. I'd put deer in the freezer and cook steaks medium. Definitely didn't always wear gloves. Still probably no real serious concerns since we're not in a CWD management zone, but it's getting closer year by year. Yes, I know I can have the deer tested, but first you have to trust the test methods and that you're getting results for your sample. Duplicate results would be ideal, and better yet; a rapid DIY test with good specificity and sensitivity. Then there's heavy metals in fish, mercury, PCB's, on and on. And that's nothing to shrug off I mean, industry cranked this stuff out with reckless abandon and now it's just out there. It's likely having an effect on populations and we probably just can attribute it properly.

We also have feral hogs here and I wouldn't mind having some of that in the freezer also, but there's a critter with just about every pathogen known to man... Not to mention the eradication efforts often leave piles of dead ones lying around and you know the live ones are digging in. This I can handle with good, clean butchering practices but it's still just a little...gross.

Lately I've been oscillating between super excited to get back to the woods and despair about the future of hunting as a source of healthy food for my family. I really want the science on CWD to grow to a point we understand why deer seem to be spreading it so much, if it's always been around and we just now are beginning to notice, if people really won't be able to get it, if it's evolving (it's likely changing, there's multiple strains), etc.

Much higher on my risk radar are things like car accidents, skin cancer, heart disease, you know...reasonable things but I still can't stop thinking about these stupid prion diseases and how they're weird, poorly understood, and *always fatal* (even if it's many years later). What's the end game?

I know something else that's always fatal - life! I just want us to have nice long, comfortable ones. There's enough hardship built in.

Anybody else have concerns about wildlife diseases? How do you deal with it?

(PS - being familiar with food manufacturing, I much prefer the idyllic view that eating from nature should be best. But we're way past that now with 7,500,000,000 people)
 
I manage foodservice, serv safe, been in restaurants and college dining my entire adult life. CWD- if you are in an area, get it tested. I field dress, quarter, and throw the quarters and backstraps on ice for 2 or 3 days before I butcher. Dont abuse it, don't let it get too hot, before you cook, if you are worried about parasites start sous vide cooking so it stays moist and tender while well done. With pigs I would certainly cook well done, but with deer if you butcher correctly and safely and no cwd I don't know what you would be worried about.

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk
 
I throw caution to the wind. My wife on the other hands reads that stuff and freaks out. She said no way she would eat a feral pig. But will consume deer.
Lots of walleye in the Detroit river. I don't really want to eat them. Don't catch and keep enough fish to make me worry about them.
The CWD stuff is concerning. Still not sure how to take it. I don't hunt the heavy infested areas.
I wonder at times how good the market stuff is as well to. What kinda stuff they feed those animals that is labeled "safe".
Antibiotics, growth hormones or other mystery so called safe drugs they give them.
 
That's good advice, and practical.

I think to say "no CWD" is where it gets tricky for me. Not a lot of research yet, and nothing that really says it's confined to nervous tissues. Also, not a lot saying that negative means "no CWD", maybe just not enough to trigger a positive result. It's tricky. I'm not smart enough to completely understand but I am intelligent enough to know that no one should speak in absolutes about it.
 
MattMan81 said:
I throw caution to the wind. My wife on the other hands reads that stuff and freaks out. She said no way she would eat a feral pig. But will consume deer.
Lots of walleye in the Detroit river. I don't really want to eat them. Don't catch and keep enough fish to make me worry about them.
The CWD stuff is concerning. Still not sure how to take it. I don't hunt the heavy infested areas.
I wonder at times how good the market stuff is as well to. What kinda stuff they feed those animals that is labeled "safe".
Antibiotics, growth hormones or other mystery so called safe drugs they give them.
Click to expand...

A lot of wild critters out there eating a whole lot of GMO crops (soybeans and corn). I often wonder about that but far as I can tell it gets broken down just like any other food.

Kind of a pick your poison, or at least try to know your poison I guess.

Caution will go to the wind once I let an arrow fly I know it. Same with catching a fish. It's going to have to look messed up or smell weird before I'll turn it away. If it looks fine and smells fine, must be fine. Stupid brains, making me think about things.
 
Therm said:
That's good advice, and practical.

I think to say "no CWD" is where it gets tricky for me. Not a lot of research yet, and nothing that really says it's confined to nervous tissues. Also, not a lot saying that negative means "no CWD", maybe just not enough to trigger a positive result. It's tricky. I'm not smart enough to completely understand but I am intelligent enough to know that no one should speak in absolutes about it.
Click to expand...
I like the Rinella question, people who think cwd isn't a problem would you eat a burger with some spinal fluid from a cwd positive deer in it.

If I see a scrawny deer wasting away, I'm shooting it and calling game commission, supposedly no cwd positives in my main hunting area yet.

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk
 
I also much prefer my butchering process than the minimum wage guy working in the slaughter house, butcher shop, the grocery store guy.

Also, which is worse the the possible concerns you mentioned or the known steroids being fed to the chickens, pigs, cows....I would rather feed wild game to my family everyday than the grocery store stuff.
 
Wyatt_burp said:
I like the Rinella question, people who think cwd isn't a problem would you eat a burger with some spinal fluid from a cwd positive deer in it.

If I see a scrawny deer wasting away, I'm shooting it and calling game commission, supposedly no cwd positives in my main hunting area yet.

Sent from my SM-G965U1 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...

Oh yeah it makes the point.

As with other things these days, I hope all individual precautions are ultimately unwarranted and hindsight shows that they were unnecessary.
 
I'm facing a similar situation that I think will evolve in the next 5-10 years. In my state, CWD has not been detected in wild deer. However, there is plenty in adjacent states so it's just a matter of time.

To my knowledge there is at least one study that indicated that feeding CWD meat and brain tissue to macaques was able to infect them. I will have to see if I can find the study. This did conflict with a prior similar study.

What I do ultimately will depend on prevalence and available testing. If 1/4 deer in my area have it and I can do a quick field test, I would probably still hunt. Too far off on either of those and I would likely stop deer hunting.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk
 
sweats said:
I'm facing a similar situation that I think will evolve in the next 5-10 years. In my state, CWD has not been detected in wild deer. However, there is plenty in adjacent states so it's just a matter of time.

To my knowledge there is at least one study that indicated that feeding CWD meat and brain tissue to macaques was able to infect them. I will have to see if I can find the study. This did conflict with a prior similar study.

What I do ultimately will depend on prevalence and available testing. If 1/4 deer in my area have it and I can do a quick field test, I would probably still hunt. Too far off on either of those and I would likely stop deer hunting.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk
Click to expand...


I've read the macaque study [correction: I’ve read about the macaque study, but I don’t think a study has been published or peer reviewed] and to have any meaningful interpretation one has to have understanding of the methods and molecular biology and I just don't have enough to be able to say either way. I think it has something to do with the sequences of amino acids and individual and species' genetics, but it is very complex.

Here's a good one from 20 years ago

www.pnas.org

Prion protein: Evolution caught en route

The prion protein displays a unique structural ambiguity in that it can adopt multiple stable conformations under physiological conditions. In our view, this puzzling feature resulted from a sudden environmental change in evolution when the prion, previously an integral membrane protein, got...
www.pnas.org www.pnas.org
 
Last edited:
sweats said:
I'm facing a similar situation that I think will evolve in the next 5-10 years. In my state, CWD has not been detected in wild deer. However, there is plenty in adjacent states so it's just a matter of time.

To my knowledge there is at least one study that indicated that feeding CWD meat and brain tissue to macaques was able to infect them. I will have to see if I can find the study. This did conflict with a prior similar study.

What I do ultimately will depend on prevalence and available testing. If 1/4 deer in my area have it and I can do a quick field test, I would probably still hunt. Too far off on either of those and I would likely stop deer hunting.

Sent from my SM-G975U using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
This one was macaques and they apparently did not contract cwd after 9 years? This is the first time I’ve seen this study, and now I’ll have to find out more. I know I read about one that was long term like this (~10 years) and the macaques came down with it after being fed deer meat, but also that it hadn’t been written or published.

Remember, this prion thing is not a true infection, nothing cellular is happening. This is more like a chemical reaction happening when this freak protein runs into a similar functional protein in the susceptible animal and starts a cascade of misfolding. It’s…electrical attractions and chemical bonding. Organic chemistry stuff.


www.researchgate.net

(PDF) Chronic Wasting Disease Agents in Nonhuman Primates

PDF | Chronic wasting disease is a prion disease of cervids. Assessment of its zoonotic potential is critical. To evaluate primate susceptibility, we... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
www.researchgate.net www.researchgate.net
 
#1 and #2 cause of death in the US is heart disease and cancer. I think car crashes are #1 for folks under 21. All the things you're mentioning are super low odds. Basically, in developed countries the food kills you. Less developed countries the water kills you. Wild game by the numbers probably decreases mortality rates vs increase them. A #2 with a large coke is WAY deadlier than venison or wild pork.

Make sure your family eats healthy and teach the kids to drive and you're way offsetting the risks of wild game.

Also, life is always fatal. You'll die, and probably not before you lose somebody or in the way you want. Big whoop.
 
Therm said:
A lot of wild critters out there eating a whole lot of GMO crops (soybeans and corn). I often wonder about that but far as I can tell it gets broken down just like any other food.
Click to expand...
So do your cows, pigs and chickens unless specifically buying from a farm stating raised with non gmo crops.
The CWD thing kind of spooks me a little. I'd just feel really bad if it was something that affected my family. There's plenty of places to send samples off to get tested prior to consuming the meat just fyi!
Nutterbuster said:
Also, life is always fatal. You'll die, and probably not before you lose somebody or in the way you want. Big whoop.
Click to expand...
Yep! There's certain circumstances where quality of life trumps quantity.
 
Last edited:
The feed lots that your beef is raised in is way worse than any deer could be. They have to pump then up to just make them live long enough to slaughter. And GMO feed is about all they eat because its the cheapest. Cows are herbivores. They are designed to eat grass not grains.
 
Fun fact: apparently BSE (mad cow) is only monitored in about 25,000 cattle per year by USDA. They’re watching for any increase in prevalence. Very scientific approach but there’s no guarantees about the meat on the shelf, that’s for sure.

BSE Surveillance Information Center

Introduction USDA conducts surveillance for Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), referred to as "mad cow disease", in cattle to determine if, and at what level, the disease is present in the U.S. cattle population. Our surveillance program allows us to assess any change in the BSE disease...
www.usda.gov www.usda.gov
 
I'm not sure what to do or think about CWD. It's creeping in on my core hunting area, and I have some hunting spots in the zone now. It does concern me. Prion diseases as a whole I suspect there is a whole lot we don't know about them and their potential transmissibility. And that goes for human diseases too. Parkinsons runs pretty heavily in my family and it is such a terrible way to go. I spent years around my grandpap after he was diagnosed, it does concern me a little bit that maybe those prions can be passed along and just lie dormant in your brain for years. I've read where scientists vCJD can lay dormant for decades. I'll probably start testing deer at some point. It just kinda sucks all around and isn't going away. Like you said some kind of rapid field test would be ideal but that seems unlikely anytime soon.

Other than that, when my wife is pregnant we mostly heed the fish consumption guidance but we like our fried walleye a lot. So far our first two kids came out with all their fingers and toes.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top