Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials used rifles and pistols to eradicate nearly 250 chronic wasting disease-infected deer on a Texas ranch in Hunt County recently.
“This is a task we never take lightly and that is always a last resort, but that has proven the most prudent and standard practice for managing prion diseases in wildlife,” TPWD said in a statement released to USA TODAY.
RW Trophy Ranch is owned by Robert Williams and his daughter, Maree Lou Williams. Williams has been ranching for over 35 years and currently has a permit to raise whitetail deer on the 1,500-acre ranch.
In 2021, Williams had a deer test positive for CWD, a neurological disease fatal to animals in the deer family and that does not have a treatment or vaccine. It has also been referred to as “zombie deer disease” and is fueled by misfolded proteins, which cause prions to accumulate in the brain and nervous tissues of infected animals. Following protocol, he reported the incident to officials, kicking off a months-long conflict between the rancher and officials about a management plan to contain the outbreak.
In January 2022, Williams sued the state, hoping to prevent the eradication of his deer population. Most of the deer, reports indicate, had “zombie deer disease” as it spread through the ranch.
But by April, the Star-Telegram reports that eight deer had tested positive for CWD at the ranch. By the time the case went through Houston’s 14th Court of Appeals and finally the State Supreme Court, 208 deer had been reported as having CWD.
In February 2024, the Houston 14th Court of Appeals upheld the state’s decision to depopulate the deer.
The depopulated deer have been submitted for testing, to determine how many of the 249 euthanized animals at RW Trophy Ranch were infected with CWD.
Since 2012, TWPD has reported 795 positive, confirmed cases in deer within the state of Texas.
While there’s no conclusive evidence that CWD could be a threat to people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises individuals not to eat meat from CWD-positive animals. Although cattle are also affected by their own prion, dubbed “mad cow disease” or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, transmission rates of CWD to cattle were low (14 percent) in a study completed in 2012.