Looking for a great progressive job?  John Stauber is the author (Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!, Mad Cow USA, Weapons of Mass Deception) and activist who in 1993 founded the Center for Media and Democracy to expose corporate spin and government propaganda campaigns.  Stauber, a member of OCA's advisory board, is stepping down and moving on to new projects;  CMD has begun a search for his replacement.  Stauber is looking forward to increasing his volunteer work with OCA after his work with CMD. Click here for more info.

Near the end of 2008, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) released its draft plan for managing chronic wasting disease (CWD) over the next 10 years.

The state's Natural Resources Board has already endorsed one feature of the plan, agreeing in January to a statewide ban on deer baiting and feeding, and passing on that recommendation to the Legislature.

But Madison activist John Stauber, who's led the charge to get the state to see CWD as a human health risk, thinks the plan is doomed to fail.

"They don't know how to think out of the box, because they created the box," says Stauber of the DNR. "There's just not a fundamental, rational explanation for the DNR's game plan."

The "box" Stauber refers to is the DNR's Holy Grail of wildlife management: deer hunting. In essence, Stauber says, the DNR wants to keep deer hunting intact and deer hunting license sales high. Thus the DNR wants to show that CWD is under control, when in fact little is being done to contain it.

It's hard to see where Stauber is wrong. At its core, the 34-page plan admits the obvious: CWD is here to stay.

When CWD was first discovered here in 2002, the DNR repeatedly claimed it wanted to "eradicate" the always-fatal brain wasting disease. Thus it encouraged extra hunting, to eradicate the deer herd within infected areas.

But state deer hunters and landowners did not go along. Despite media reports of "intensive" hunting, the deer kill in and around the CWD hotspots in western Dane and eastern Iowa counties has remained pretty much where it was in the days before CWD.

Meanwhile, the disease is clearly making its way to other areas. The current CWD Management Zone is 8,800 square miles - and growing.

"When you look at the distribution of the disease," says Alan Crossley, the DNR's point man on CWD, "there's no disagreement that it has expanded or spread from wherever it was introduced."

Asked what mistakes the DNR made in its attempts to rid the state of CWD, Crossley can't come up with anything. After a while he says, "The social and the political realities are that people don't want to see dramatically fewer deer out there. And people have not believed that this disease is something they should be concerned about."

Likewise, the DNR's draft management report finds no fault with past actions.

"At the time Wisconsin initiated efforts to control CWD in 2002, the goal was to eliminate the disease from the state," the report reads. "This was an ambitious goal, and it was not known at that time whether it was going to be possible to achieve that goal."

"Ambitious"? Maybe "unrealistic" is more accurate. At any rate, the state has spent well over $30 million on CWD testing and management, without doing much of anything to stop its spread.

Maybe it's the wrong approach. 

Click here for the rest of this article.

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