Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Five, four, three, two,…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      Five, four, three, two, one. Yee-haw, and we're live. My good friend, Doug Duren. Hello, Douglas.

   2. DDDoug Duren0:10

      Hello, Joe Rogan.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:11

      Good to see you as always.

   4. DDDoug Duren0:12

      Oh, man, it is good to be here.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      And, uh, Brian Richards, your friend, a wildlife biologist, and, um... Well, we're gonna talk about a bunch of things. But one of the things that I wanted to talk about is this scary disease that, uh... Well, when Ted Nugent was on the podcast, uh, he downplayed the, uh, consequences and effects of something called CWD, or chronic wasting disease, which has made it onto your farm. And you live in Wisconsin, and you have this beautiful place that we visited when we did the Meat Eater television show. And, um, this is a new thing, that this chronic wasting disease was just... It just, it decimates the deer's health and, and kills them. And the suspicion is that some of this, at least, comes from these high-fence operations where people grow deer, um, and treat them, like... Instead of, like, a wild animal, they treat them like a domesticated animal and have them all feeding off of the same pile of food and they share this disease. Is this all correct and accurate, Brian?

   6. BRBryan Richards1:16

      Boy, you just started on about an hour's worth of conversation.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:19

      (laughs)

   8. DDDoug Duren1:19

      (laughs)

   9. BRBryan Richards1:21

      Um, so yeah, just a little bit. I'm a, I'm a wildlife biologist with the National Wildlife Health Center, US Geological Survey up in Madison, Wisconsin. And so, uh, one of the things that I spend a lot of time on is chronic wasting disease. I wouldn't say that makes me necessarily an expert, but I've gotten to know a lot of people that I would call experts over the years, so I've gained a little bit of knowledge. So, I don't even... Where... Your, your statement there, we could start a number of different places.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:47

       Yeah. This disease, um, it essentially d- just... Well, just describe what it does to these animals and why it's such a major concern. It hasn't jumped to humans yet.

   11. BRBryan Richards1:59

       That we're aware of.

   12. JRJoe Rogan2:00

       That we're aware of.

   13. BRBryan Richards2:01

       Correct.

   14. JRJoe Rogan2:01

       But it is a possibility, a very real possibility.

   15. BRBryan Richards2:04

       We can't rule it out at this point in time. Science is unable to rule it out. So, okay, that's a great place to start. Why would we care about this thing called chronic wasting disease? And I, I would argue, and, and some other scientists have argued, there's two major reasons. Number one is the impacts of this disease on members of the deer family themselves, and the other is that we cannot rule out the possibility that CWD could become a human health issue at some point down the road. Okay? So you kind of nailed those two. With regard to deer or members of the deer family, white-tailed deer, mule deer, elk, moose, and most recently it was picked up in, in reindeer in Norway, of all places, um, we, we could articulate some reasons, some rationale why w- you know, this disease might be thought of as being important. The first we look at is, would be geographic spread. So, you know, CWD 20 years ago was thought to be this really novel thing in a very restricted geographic range in southeastern Wyoming, adjacent northeastern Colorado, and maybe a little spillover into Nebraska. Uh, wildlife biologists, wildlife disease specialists looked at this disease. It was interesting. Uh, we didn't know much about it at that point in time, but it seemed to be very isolated there.

   16. JRJoe Rogan3:21

       What does it do to the deer?

   17. BRBryan Richards3:22

       It kills deer, right?

   18. JRJoe Rogan3:24

       Right, but how does it kill them?

   19. BRBryan Richards3:25

       All right, so this is a member of a family of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. So big long words. Transmissible means it can go from animal A to animal B. Spongiform means looks like a sponge, and encephalopathy means disease of the brain. So you put it together, and so this disease results in holes in the brain resulting in progressive neurological degeneration followed by death. Okay? It's a, it's a death sentence for deer.

   20. JRJoe Rogan3:57

       And there's no cure for it? It's not like you can capture the deer and give them some sort of medication?

   21. BRBryan Richards4:02

       No cure, um, for these diseases. The suite of diseases ca-... You know, there's, uh, there's, uh, members of this TSE group of diseases in humans. Most familiar is, is one called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

   22. JRJoe Rogan4:15

       Mm-hmm. Right. So it's very similar to mad cow disease.

   23. BRBryan Richards4:18

       They're in the same family. So that's one that's in-

   24. JRJoe Rogan4:20

       So it comes from prions?

   25. BRBryan Richards4:21

       Well, I'd say prions. You could-

   26. JRJoe Rogan4:23

       Something... Prions? Sorry.

   27. BRBryan Richards4:23

       ... say prions.

   28. JRJoe Rogan4:23

       I don't know how to say it. I'll just read it.

   29. BRBryan Richards4:24

       Oh, no worries.

   30. DDDoug Duren4:25

       (laughs)
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Whoa. …

   1. BRBryan Richards15:00

      in sheep. It's actually the first one that was described, scrapie, we've known about since the early 1700s. Uh, disease in domestic sheep, and it's called scrapie because of the behavior these animals, once they enter the clinical phase of disease, display, and they, they seem like they itch bad. And so they'll go up to fence posts and other objects and they will literally rub their hide off of their body, so that's the name scrapie.

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:26

      Whoa.

   3. BRBryan Richards15:26

      And it's the same progressive neurological disorder followed by death. Now, you think about it, so as this disease creates vacuoles in the brain, it's killing off neurons. And so without those neurons firing, you fall into that progressive degeneration, and yet, at some point, your body can no longer survive. And that's what's really spooky about how this thing kills. So anyway, go back to Norway. When they detected CWD-

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:53

      Brian, try to keep this a little bit closer to your sorry.

   5. BRBryan Richards15:54

      Oh, right.

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:54

      You're very soft-spoken.

   7. BRBryan Richards15:56

      Oh, no worries. I'll talk... I can hear myself plenty well. How about that one?

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:58

      Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just the problem is the recording.

   9. BRBryan Richards16:00

      Mm-hmm.

   10. JRJoe Rogan16:00

       Sorry.

   11. BRBryan Richards16:00

       Okay. No worries. So when they picked up CWD in reindeer in Norway, um, the researchers over there had witnessed what we... Uh, our lack of success on this side of the pond over the course of the last 20 years. They took it very, very seriously. Um, so they took kind of some harsh medicine. Uh, they announced their plans, that they were going to eliminate a herd unit. They were gonna kill every reindeer in an entire herd unit-

   12. JRJoe Rogan16:28

       Wow.

   13. BRBryan Richards16:28

       ... in Norway. The idea is to eliminate the host population. It's called stamping out, and it works in a pen. This is the first time it'd been done realistically in a free-ranging population. Whole idea is we don't have effective tools for management of this disease. They were very fearful of what would happen if this spread throughout that reindeer population and throughout other reindeer herds.

   14. DDDoug Duren16:52

       And like Alaska, they have multiple herds. Like last year, I hunted caribou with, with Steve up in the, uh, uh-

   15. BRBryan Richards16:59

       Perch.

   16. DDDoug Duren16:59

       ... 40 Mile River area, and, but there were, you know... And, and so they're very, uh, well, localized is, is probably not... But at least they have a range that they move through. So-

   17. BRBryan Richards17:08

       Yep.

   18. DDDoug Duren17:08

       And in, in, uh, Norway, they have two or three different herds.

   19. BRBryan Richards17:12

       Many more than that.

   20. DDDoug Duren17:13

       So-

   21. BRBryan Richards17:13

       So I don't know exactly how many herd units they have.

   22. DDDoug Duren17:14

       But the point was, is that you could isolate one of the herds.

   23. BRBryan Richards17:17

       Yep. So the idea is, before this gets to be any worse, before it gets any farther, let's take it out. So they had a hunting season. They allowed, uh, hunters to take as many as they could, which was a little over 1,000 reindeer, and then they came in with government agents, sharpshooters.

   24. JRJoe Rogan17:32

       But isn't there a concern that the hunters could eat something with CWD and then catch it?

   25. BRBryan Richards17:38

       Well, that's always a concern. But w- we can talk about human health.

   26. JRJoe Rogan17:41

       Yeah.

   27. BRBryan Richards17:42

       Let me finish this one up though.

   28. DDDoug Duren17:43

       Okay, please do.

   29. BRBryan Richards17:43

       With, with Norway, in that, see, they took... literally took the bull by the horns. They decided to do what was very unpopular, what we have not been able to do in North America. They... And so after the hunting season, government agent sharpshooters took an additional 1400 reindeer. So they killed every reindeer in this herd unit, and they're gonna keep it fallow, allow no reindeer in there for a minimum of five years. So this has every bit of promise of being the first large-scale success with dealing with this disease in a free-ranging herd. Pretty different than what we've been able to accomplish over here.

   30. DDDoug Duren18:18

       Five years, is that, uh... I mean, with it, with it being in the soil and dirt and, from what I was reading, wood and everything else, is that, um... So at some point, there becomes a- the, the prions, um, diminish in population or they die out or whatever the pr- proper word. I mean, they're not living, so they don't die, but-
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   I read the paper…

   1. BRBryan Richards30:00

      actual, the architecture of this disease-associated prion protein and there's a, there's a portion of it that's referred to as a loop structure. And it's just kind of, you know, if you take a rubber band and, or a piece of yarn or something and ball it up into a three-dimensional shape, there's a little loop hanging off the side of this disease-associated prion protein. And in deer, in CWD, that loop is very, very rigid. Okay? It's very, um, inflexible, shall we say. In humans, it is more of a flexible loop as opposed to the rigid loop and it's thought that this difference in that architecture is par- is partially, you know, controls that species barrier. Okay? So I was telling Doug that-

   2. DDDoug Duren30:46

      I read the paper yesterday on the plane about this.

   3. BRBryan Richards30:48

      ... it's, it's pretty, it's pretty neat stuff. Okay?

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:51

      Yeah, it was really... Actually, it was-

   5. BRBryan Richards30:52

      All right.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:52

      ... really interesting.

   7. BRBryan Richards30:53

      So, so now it turns out mice, experimental l- laboratory mice, their prion protein has the same structure as the human prion does. Okay? So you cannot give CWD to a normal laboratory mouse. They just don't get it. And it's likely this difference, some of this difference in their prion structure, this one cannot convert that one to a different form. So some researchers in, uh, Alberta-... um, identified a strain of CWD which came from wild deer. So it's not something they engineered in the laboratory. They have a strain from wild deer that does give mice CWD.

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:34

      Oh, fuck.

   9. BRBryan Richards31:34

      So most of the strains out there, mice can't get. But they discovered one that mice do get. So researchers from a few years ago, and, and lately I've seen it in the, in the popular media, that, hey, this difference in this loop structure is gonna keep people from getting CWD. Well, the, all the, the, all the assumptions that people can't get CWD are based that, on this idea that CWD is CWD and it will always be exactly the same thing. But our experience with scrapie strongly suggests that even though there's no, um, there's no DNA in these things, that they do change over time. They morph over time into slightly different, uh, disease characteristics and etiologic agents.

   10. JRJoe Rogan32:19

       Now in the hunting community, is there skepticism about this? Is Ted Nugent's ideas, are these unique or is this a, a common thought that... Or is it a convenient thought for them because they don't want it to be real?

   11. BRBryan Richards32:34

       It's, it's a challenge. Um-

   12. JRJoe Rogan32:37

       Of education?

   13. BRBryan Richards32:38

       Yeah. Um, we as-

   14. DDDoug Duren32:39

       Obviously, just in the whatever period of time that we talked here, it's, you know, it's really complicated and it, it, it-

   15. JRJoe Rogan32:45

       Right.

   16. DDDoug Duren32:46

       And, and to get to the ... Y- you almost wanna stick your head in the sand and just-

   17. JRJoe Rogan32:50

       Mm-hmm.

   18. DDDoug Duren32:50

       ... forget about it. And, you know, besides the sort of things that, you know, your friend that we were talking about before, like I was doing on the farm, of, you know, managing deer in a particular way for a particular kind of deer, um, which might be contrary to the, to the spread of the disease. Well, geez, nobody wants to hear that I can't do what I want to-

   19. JRJoe Rogan33:09

       Yeah.

   20. DDDoug Duren33:09

       ... do management-wise.

   21. JRJoe Rogan33:09

       And, and when we're, we're talking about management-wise and we're talking about my friend John Dudley's, uh, farm in, uh, Iowa, is that he only shoots the big mature males. And he lets all the other deer grow to a very large size so he has a really healthy population of big deer on his farm.

   22. DDDoug Duren33:25

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JRJoe Rogan33:26

       Now what are you doing in your place? I understand you're just on a mass cull.

   24. DDDoug Duren33:31

       Well, I feel like I'm on the front edge of ... Well, I don't feel like it, I am on the front edge of the spread of this disease. And there's some b-

   25. JRJoe Rogan33:40

       In Wisconsin?

   26. DDDoug Duren33:40

       In Wisconsin, in Southwest Wisconsin. So 15 years ago when, uh, or 16 years ago, when CWD was discovered, there were a lot of changes in, in, uh, hunting structure. And there was an effort, uh, by the Department of Natural Resources to, uh, eradicate the disease, um, in, in the, the core area south of the Wisconsin River, about 70 miles from us. Um, in 15 years, the disease has moved 70 miles north. Um, that effort that the DNR started was, um, became political, uh, and, you know, and, and quite honestly, that many years ago, um, I would've likely been a little skeptic. Well, I know I would've been skeptical. You want me to do what? They wanted to kill all the deer in a particular area. You know, that many years ago, had they come to my farm and said, "We're gonna kill all the deer here and all the ne- you know, the, the neighboring deer," I would've had some real hard questions. I have no idea how I would've reacted to it. I continued to do like buck management and, you know, you were there when we were still doing that. Um, and, uh, and there's ... We can talk about, you know, how, how bucks contribute to the spread of the disease and, and that sort of thing.

   27. JRJoe Rogan34:56

       Uniquely versus doe?

   28. DDDoug Duren34:58

       Um ...

   29. BRBryan Richards35:01

       We see different prevalence or curves depending on the demographic faction of deer. Adult males, the ones with the big antlers, um, with deers on the wall over there, tend to have higher prevalence, sometimes maybe two, three, four times as high as other segments of the population. So highest prevalence in adult males, followed by adult females, and then by juvenile animals. So, um, so it's likely behavioral reasons why we see that in adult males. So adult male deer, uh, during the rut or breeding season, they greatly expand their home range. They contact multiple, you know, uh, female or family groups of females. Earlier in the fall, especially with the white-tailed deer, adult males tend to gather in these bachelor groups so there's a lot of social contact, um, grooming, things like that. So because of their behavior, they contact more animals at different times of the year. And this number of contacts, it's believed, is likely responsible for them, uh, becoming infected at a higher rate than other members out in the herd. So now if you are an adult male, then you're in the, in this group. You also have a higher likelihood of being able to transmit disease to other animals because you're out there during breeding season, right?

   30. JRJoe Rogan36:23

       Mm-hmm. Is there any evidence that we- that any of these deer have transferred this to livestock or that it's gone into, uh, agriculture, into food sources, corn and what have you, that could, could be consumed by people even that are vegetarians?
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   It di- ... It…

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      that have somehow or another managed to transmit diseases that have morphed and mutated to become dangerous and deadly to human beings. This, to me, seems like a ticking time bomb. Like, it-

   2. BRBryan Richards45:11

      It di- ... It has the potential, yep.

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:12

      We need one switch, one way or the other, like you've observed or they've observed, rather, with mice, and this could potentially infect human beings and spread across-

   4. DDDoug Duren45:23

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan45:23

      ... I mean, the entire country like wildfire.

   6. BRBryan Richards45:26

      Well, we're seeing that spread right now in deer. You know, so in deer we're seeing, you know, clear geographic spread. We're seeing clear increases in prevalence and in areas where the disease has been present the longest. We are seeing population level impacts. There's locations in Wyoming where we've demonstrated, where we've proven that CWD is driving population decline in deer, so that's a ... That encapsulates why we should be concerned about deer.

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:53

      And is this in mule deer?

   8. BRBryan Richards45:54

      That's in mule deer and in white-tailed deer.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:56

      And the mule deer have, uh, an extended range in terms of, like, their migration. The m- ... That's one of the things that we've realized, I believe over the last decade, right, is that mule deer travel far more, far longer and far longer distances-

   10. BRBryan Richards46:10

       On average.

   11. JRJoe Rogan46:11

       ... than, than we ever thought before.

   12. BRBryan Richards46:12

       On average, yes, they do. Mm-hmm. Uh, even white-tails can. There's interesting, uh, research tidbit, the State of Minnesota, um, you know, they've got, uh, uh, what appears to be a fairly recent CWD outbreak in the southeastern part of the state. So their researchers are really trying to get ahead of this and figure out what could move this around. So they went in and captured deer in an adjacent area, put radio telemetry collars on these to see, well, just how far do they go. Um, this was in a ... in an article just about a week ago, pop- popular media article, so it's not published yet. But they had a doe, single doe, collared, that went 80 miles.

   13. JRJoe Rogan46:48

       Wow.

   14. BRBryan Richards46:48

       Pretty long distance.

   15. JRJoe Rogan46:49

       Now, 80 miles circular or 80 miles point to point?

   16. BRBryan Richards46:52

       80 miles as the crow flies from point to one direction.

   17. JRJoe Rogan46:55

       Oh, Jesus Christ.

   18. DDDoug Duren46:55

       Easy.

   19. JRJoe Rogan46:55

       So in that 80 miles, could potentially be spreading CWD if it was an infected deer.

   20. BRBryan Richards47:00

       Sure.

   21. JRJoe Rogan47:01

       Throughout crops, throughout ... I mean, and this is ...

   22. DDDoug Duren47:04

       And then there's that exponential growth, so it's-

   23. JRJoe Rogan47:06

       Yes.

   24. DDDoug Duren47:06

       Once it's there, sure, it takes a long time for it to become a, you know, a, a, a large problem. And we're seeing that in ... We're seeing that in Richland County. Um, it crossed the river. Testing has been g- ... You know, surveillance testing has been going on. It crossed the river, and it just keeps moving up.

   25. JRJoe Rogan47:28

       And it could be in, again, all these different plants, all these different berries. People could be eating these berries, eating these plants, fruits, vegetables, all these different things, and they could be potentially consuming these prions.

   26. BRBryan Richards47:43

       Well, they're being ... I d- ... I think it's very clear that there's exposure. Um, and, and I talk with Doug quite a bit about the difference between exposure and disease transmission. Okay? Um, so i- it is certain that lots of humans are exposed to disease-associated prion protein from CWD and likely from plant materials as well. Whether that will result in transmission of disease across that species barrier is an open question. We absolutely cannot say it will. We absolutely cannot say it will not. It's an open question, and one thing we can, though, uh, identify very clearly is that the rate of exposure is increasing exponentially. As disease has a larger geographic footprint and prevalence goes up, more and more hunters are, just by simple math, being exposed to that positive material. So we're rolling the dice, and when you do biological experiments, I mean, there's a certain likelihood that you'll see outcome A or outcome B. So if you keep rolling the dice enough times, you might see an alternative outcome. We cannot rule that out, so ...

   27. DDDoug Duren48:54

       When, when we talked about this when you were on with, uh, uh, with, with Renella and I at, at the farm, uh, The Meat Eater podcast number 70, um, (laughs) uh, you ... Brian, you put it as the chances are very small at this point that it can ... Um, and this is what the CDC and the World Health Organization s- (laughs) ... uh, says as well, the chances are very small, minuscule even, but they're not zero. And, uh, I'm assuming that we continue to ... that that continues to be the, you know, the concern. And I know you're talking a lot, Joe, about, about ... and I get it because after all, humans. Um, but I've actually bea-... begun to focus more on the effect on the, on the resource, on the, on the, on the deer. I mean, I, tested positive animals. Uh, and, uh, we, we properly disposed of the meat, um, which is a whole nother, you know, line of discussion. Um, I'm still eating venison, but I'm not eating-

   28. JRJoe Rogan49:59

       Are you testing the animals that you eat?

   29. BRBryan Richards50:00

       Yeah.

   30. DDDoug Duren50:01

       Every one of them. We test every deer killed on the farm.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Yeah. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

   2. DDDoug Duren1:00:00

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      You know, like what, what is that?

   4. DDDoug Duren1:00:02

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:02

      That's not even a wild animal. That's some weird science project.

   6. DDDoug Duren1:00:07

      Well, and genetics play a role in-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:00:10

      Sure.

   8. DDDoug Duren1:00:10

      ... Brian will correct me when I start to-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:00:12

      Yeah.

   10. DDDoug Duren1:00:12

       ... veer off the science thing here.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:00:13

       (laughs) .

   12. DDDoug Duren1:00:14

       But, um, but, uh, genetics play a role in, uh, in, in, in bigger deer.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:00:19

       Yes.

   14. DDDoug Duren1:00:20

       And, and your, your friend, uh, John Dudley would say the number... He's, he's doing it. The number one way to get big antler deer is, it's not-

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:00:27

       Let them grow.

   16. DDDoug Duren1:00:28

       ... let them get old.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:00:28

       Let them get old and give them plenty of food.

   18. DDDoug Duren1:00:30

       Yep.

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:00:31

       Yeah.

   20. DDDoug Duren1:00:32

       But genetics have a role in it too.

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:00:33

       Yes.

   22. BRBryan Richards1:00:33

       There are three factors in production of antlers. It's genetics, age, and nutrition, are really the, the key three there. But now, you know, a lot of places will identify these as genetically superior. That's kind of a misnomer. When you get back to the definition of fitness, genetic fitness, there's only one measure of genetic fitness and that's how well represented you are in the next generation. Okay? So let's take an example where we took one of these, you know, 80 point whatever and let's re- release it out into the wild and during breeding season it comes across a prime three and a half or four and a half year old eight-pointer. You know, this physical specimen that you've witnessed them, they're unbelievable. So now if you put those up against each other in a mortal battle, I know who I'm putting my, my money on. Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:01:30

       The wild animal.

   24. BRBryan Richards1:01:31

       Absolutely.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:01:31

       Yeah, for sure.

   26. BRBryan Richards1:01:32

       Every time. And this is... So, so these animals while they're bred...... very much like livestock for very specific characteristics, big antlers. These don't necessarily translate into something that would be more fit out in the wild.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:01:48

       Well, let's also point out that w- the reason why you're bringing this up is these animals actually do fight to the death and it happens all the time. They kill each other in, in combat. That's the reason why they have those antlers in the first place. They don't have them to protect themselves against wolves like caribou do, they, they literally have them to fight with. You know, female caribou have antlers as well and they have these antlers so that they could try to fend off animals-

   28. BRBryan Richards1:02:09

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:02:09

       ... that are trying to eat them. There's a big difference between that and elk and deer. They have them for combat. That's why once the breeding season is over, they shed them, um, and then they start all over again.

   30. BRBryan Richards1:02:18

       Yeah. There's an interesting example if you look to, to history. Um, it's an animal called the Irish elk, okay?
6. 1:15:00 – 1:23:36

   And it, and it's,…

   1. BRBryan Richards1:15:00

      this one, I mean, that's, that's ridiculous.

   2. DDDoug Duren1:15:02

      And it, and it's, it's e- it's, it's easy. It seems easy to me. I mean, it's just a matter of will and money and then, and education obviously, um, that we're, we're providing opportunity for this. I'm, I'm, I've been working with the DNR a little bit on, on this, and we're in some discussions about, um, two things. One is, uh, self-service kiosks, so to make getting, uh, getting your deer tested easier, where you can-

   3. BRBryan Richards1:15:28

      That's good.

   4. DDDoug Duren1:15:28

      ... essentially cut the head off the deer and leave it in a kiosk, um, with some information about where it was. And it, you know, they're fairly simple. They've been doing this for a couple of years on an experimental basis. Um, but again, it becomes a, uh, a budget issue. So we're hoping that what we're gonna be able to do is start something called adopt-a-kiosk, essentially, that hunters and, and people, or sportsmen's groups will, um, uh, gather those heads and then take them into the testing facility, and therefore, you know, keep the budget money targeted at doing the actual testing. Right next to that, that, uh, self-service kiosk really should be a dumpster that, um, (laughs) that you can throw your deer bones into, whether you know whether it's positive or not. Otherwise, you are holding it. The other thing that the DNR suggests that we do is if you kill the deer on your farm, leave the bones on your farm. Makes sense to me.

   5. BRBryan Richards1:16:22

      So that way, if it is positive, disease is already there and so you're not taking as great a chance of moving it. Now it's not an optimal solution to leave that stuff on the, on the ground surface. Uh, an optimal solution is dig a hole, but, you know, it's pretty hard to dig sometimes in December in Wisconsin. So ...

   6. DDDoug Duren1:16:41

      Well, if, if I, if, if the dumpsters thing doesn't end up working out with me, there will be a hole. I mean, last year, we, I just kept the bones separate and the, and the ones that we, uh, I actually took the, the, the, from the one deer was, it, they went into the, the dumpster at the locker. Um-

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:16:58

      This all seems to me d- uh, sorry to interrupt, but this all seems to me like Band-Aids on, uh, massive gunshot wounds.

   8. DDDoug Duren1:17:04

      It is. But go back to the, uh, what I was saying before. Let's buy time-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:17:08

      Right.

   10. DDDoug Duren1:17:09

       ... 'cause this shit's spreading, man.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:17:11

       Yeah.

   12. DDDoug Duren1:17:11

       Let's buy time and pay for science, not, "Oh, there's nothing we can do about it," or the other one, that it's always been here, which I-

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:17:18

       Yeah.

   14. DDDoug Duren1:17:18

       ... think the guitar player talked about.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:17:20

       Yep. Is there any consideration whatsoever that there could potentially be a cure?

   16. BRBryan Richards1:17:25

       Absolutely. Absolutely. See, we hit on a couple things, and I think it's important to talk just very briefly about some very generic disease management practices. Number one, and this would be wildlife disease, human disease, livestock disease. Prevention, number one. If you don't have it, don't get it. Do everything you can. That's why we get vaccinated, okay, for various diseases. If you do get disease, do everything you can to keep from moving it artificially. So that's why we don't wanna move the carcasses around. That's why, you know, we don't wanna move captive deer around. That's why when we w- when we had an Ebola outbreak in 2015 in, uh, Liberia and Ivory Coast, we stopped commercial airline flights. We didn't want people inadvertently moving it out. So prevent, don't move it around, conduct surveillance around areas where it is to see what's going on. And, and states are doing that very well, largely. The next one is a tough one. Do something about disease. Manage disease to try and knock down prevalence incidents and get rid of the disease. So, that's challenging, but two other things. Number one is support research, because if we don't have a cure today, we won't have one tomorrow either. Right?

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:18:37

       How is research funded right now?

   18. BRBryan Richards1:18:40

       Either by states or by the federal government, and there's not a ton of money. The last one is being transparent with your stakeholders, being open and communicative with them. So is, with many diseases, we have good therapeutics, okay? We can treat some diseases. CWD and other prion diseases, we have no therapeutics. We have no treatments right now, but people are certainly working towards them. Now it's likely it's gonna be very challenging to create a therapeutic, something that treats a prion disease, because treatment would then mean you would have to get past the blood-brain barrier. And once you start this cascading interaction of normal prions to disease-associated prions in the central nervous system, it's gonna be really, really challenging to stop that. I mean, it's a, it's a rollercoaster gone awry by the time it gets up into the brain. So then you're looking at preventative measures. The idea of vaccines is number one, and number two is looking at animals that, through their genetic profile, are resistant to disease. And there's some advances on each front. So-We can talk about vaccines for a moment. Um, so people, individual scientists, research outfits have been trying to develop vaccines for TSEs, for prion diseases, for a long time, okay? None have been successful. There's no, there's no human prion disease vaccines. There's nothing for BSE. There's nothing for scrapie. But there's research ongoing and there have been some advances. (inhales sharply) There is a Canadian research group that had a vaccine candidate for CWD. They thought it looked very promising so it went to a field, uh, production stage and they actually tried deploying this vaccine in a captive facility in Wyoming, okay, a research facility. It turned out that this vaccine was not ready for prime time and actually after, after, uh, um, giving this vaccine to some elk, giving a placego- placebo to other elk and then leaving 'em i- in a CWD-contaminated facility, actually the vaccinated animals got CWD faster and at higher rate than the non-vaccinated animals. So it turned-

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:20:49

       Hmm.

   20. BRBryan Richards1:20:49

       ... out to be almost an anti-vaccine, okay? So it didn't work. But-

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:20:53

       So instead of being inert, there was some sort of active CWD in the vaccine? Is that what it is?

   22. BRBryan Richards1:20:58

       No. I- i- it just, for whatever reason, it predisposed-

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:21:01

       It accelerated?

   24. BRBryan Richards1:21:02

       It predisposed the animals. So it, it, it was a massive failure, but even from failures you learn, okay? So they, they're working now and based, you know, they learned a lot in that experiment. There's another research group centered out of the University of New York who published a, a paper, I think in 2015 was their most recent work, and they've got a vaccine candidate that provides some degree of protection, quote-unquote protection from disease. Now, n- all but one of the animals that they gave this vaccine to and then challenged with CWD got CWD, okay? So that's not good news, but the average incubation time was extended something like 300 days. Okay? So they're on the right track. They have a mechanism that is somehow interfering with the conversion from normal host prion protein to the disease-associated form. It's very valuable. Now will they get there? We don't know. So, but think about it. Even if we do create a vaccine that works, that prevents CWD, and prevent as opposed to slowing, there's a very big distinction. So if you have a vaccine that makes the average course of disease three years instead of two years or four years instead of two years, they still have CWD.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:22:21

       Are there-

   26. BRBryan Richards1:22:21

       They're not good.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:22:21

       ... any deer farms that have 100% negative CWD deer in them? Like none of them test positive? Like-

   28. BRBryan Richards1:22:30

       The va- the vast majority of deer farms have never had CWD.

   29. JRJoe Rogan1:22:33

       The vast majority?

   30. BRBryan Richards1:22:34

       Absolutely.

Episode duration: 2:17:02