Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards
Joe Rogan (host), Doug Duren (guest), Bryan Richards (guest), Doug Duren (guest), Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Joe Rogan and Doug Duren, Joe Rogan Experience #1154 - Doug Duren & Bryan Richards explores experts Warn Chronic Wasting Disease Threatens Deer, Food, And Humans Joe Rogan speaks with landowner/hunter Doug Duren and wildlife biologist Bryan Richards about chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal prion disease affecting deer, elk, moose, and reindeer. Richards explains how CWD works, why it is uniquely persistent and contagious among prion diseases, and how it is rapidly spreading across North America and into Europe.
Experts Warn Chronic Wasting Disease Threatens Deer, Food, And Humans
Joe Rogan speaks with landowner/hunter Doug Duren and wildlife biologist Bryan Richards about chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal prion disease affecting deer, elk, moose, and reindeer. Richards explains how CWD works, why it is uniquely persistent and contagious among prion diseases, and how it is rapidly spreading across North America and into Europe.
They contrast CWD with other wildlife diseases like EHD and mad cow (BSE), highlighting CWD’s long incubation, environmental persistence, and lack of any natural “off switch.” The conversation addresses the potential—though currently unproven—risk to humans and livestock, including via plants and agricultural products contaminated with prions.
The guests also dissect how captive deer farms, carcass movement, baiting/feeding, and political resistance to science-based management have accelerated the spread. They argue that hunters, landowners, and policymakers must accept bitter “medicine” now—more testing, carcass controls, and targeted harvest—if they want viable wild deer populations and hunting traditions in the future.
Key Takeaways
CWD is a 100% fatal, contagious brain disease that spreads silently for years.
CWD is caused by misfolded prion proteins that convert normal prions in the brain, leading to sponge-like damage, neurological decline, and certain death—after an incubation period of roughly two years during which animals look healthy but shed infectious material.
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Prions persist in the environment and can bind to soil and plants for years.
Disease-associated prions are highly resistant to heat, UV, and degradation, can remain infectious in soil for years to decades, and can both adhere to plant surfaces and be taken up into plant tissues, creating long-lived environmental reservoirs of infection.
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The disease is expanding geographically and in prevalence, with no natural stop.
Once thought confined to a small area in Colorado/Wyoming, CWD is now detected in at least 25 U. ...
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Human-assisted movement of deer and carcasses is a major accelerant.
Captive cervid farms, interstate movement of live deer and elk, improperly discarded carcasses, and possibly contaminated hay and feed all help leapfrog CWD far beyond what natural deer movements alone would achieve, making regulation and education around movement critical.
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Human infection risk appears low but not zero—and exposure is rising.
Epidemiological data have not yet shown increased human prion disease where CWD occurs, but lab models demonstrate that some CWD strains can overcome species barriers in principle; as more hunters and consumers are exposed to infected meat or environments, the odds of a rare crossover event climb.
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Current management tools are politically unpopular but biologically necessary.
Measures like aggressive antlerless harvest, targeting adult bucks (high-prevalence cohort), banning baiting/feeding, restricting movement of live deer and carcasses, and rapid “stamping out” of new hotspots can reduce spread—but they face strong resistance from hunters, landowners, and industry.
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Prevention, time-buying, and funding research are the only realistic paths forward.
There is no cure or proven vaccine; scientists are exploring vaccines and genetic resistance, but even “resistant” deer still get and likely spread CWD. ...
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Notable Quotes
“If you wanted to stack the deck for a disease, you couldn't come up with a better set of characteristics.”
— Bryan Richards
“Can you name any other disease of humans, fish, livestock, dogs, wildlife, anything else that has that set of characteristics and that degree of penetrance into the population and you go, 'Yeah, that's no big deal'?”
— Bryan Richards
“Buy time, pay for science.”
— Doug Duren
“This seems like a ticking time bomb.”
— Joe Rogan
“Ethical behavior is doing the right thing even when no one's watching and the wrong thing is legal.”
— Doug Duren (quoting Aldo Leopold)
Questions Answered in This Episode
Given what’s known now, at what prevalence or spread threshold should states trigger the most aggressive CWD control measures, even if they’re deeply unpopular?
Joe Rogan speaks with landowner/hunter Doug Duren and wildlife biologist Bryan Richards about chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal prion disease affecting deer, elk, moose, and reindeer. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should hunting culture and trophy-focused management (e.g., antler restrictions, passing younger bucks) adapt in CWD zones to balance tradition with disease control?
They contrast CWD with other wildlife diseases like EHD and mad cow (BSE), highlighting CWD’s long incubation, environmental persistence, and lack of any natural “off switch. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What specific policies could realistically reduce anthropogenic spread—such as carcass disposal mandates, live-animal movement bans, or agricultural testing—without collapsing rural economies?
The guests also dissect how captive deer farms, carcass movement, baiting/feeding, and political resistance to science-based management have accelerated the spread. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How should agencies communicate low-but-nonzero human risk so that people take CWD seriously without creating undue panic or collapsing venison consumption?
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If promising vaccines or genetic resistance tools emerge, who should decide how they’re deployed—wildlife agencies, private landowners, or industry—and how would we guard against unintended ecological consequences?
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Transcript Preview
Five, four, three, two, one. Yee-haw, and we're live. My good friend, Doug Duren. Hello, Douglas.
Hello, Joe Rogan.
Good to see you as always.
Oh, man, it is good to be here.
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?
Boy, you just started on about an hour's worth of conversation.
(laughs)
(laughs)
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.
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.
That we're aware of.
That we're aware of.
Correct.
But it is a possibility, a very real possibility.
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.
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