On a Wednesday morning at the Louisiana State Capitol, Rep. Danny McCormick, a Republican from Oil City, played a video for his fellow lawmakers on a House committee. On the screen was a wispy-haired Ted Nugent, the ‘70s rock star turned conservative activist.

The topic? A sickness called chronic wasting disease that turns deer into “zombies” — and the controversial efforts by the state to slow its spread.

Nugent, a spokesperson for libertarian hunting rights group Hunter Nation, was voicing support for a measure proposed by McCormick to suspend bans on hunters spreading bait to make it easier to bag deer.

“I’ve had enough of CWD and the one-size-fits-all rules that come with it,” the Motor City Madman said in the prerecorded video. “The left and the misinformed have used scare tactics for far too long to purposely destroy our hunting lifestyle and heritage.”

CWD is an infectious neurodegenerative disease that is always fatal. It has spread like a slow but inextinguishable wildfire among deer and elk across North America. In recent years, some hunters have grown skeptical of efforts to combat a disease that often isn’t noticeable. 

Louisiana has recorded 55 cases since CWD was first detected in 2022, all in the northern part of the state. In response, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has banned the use of bait to hunt deer in areas surrounding the detections — a widely accepted protocol used by state conservation agencies across the country. 

But each time the LDWF announces a new ban on Facebook, hundreds of angry hunters flock to the comment section. Many, like Nugent and McCormick, argue that the restrictions lack sufficient evidence, undermine hunting traditions and hurt rural businesses.

“The state’s cure is worse than the disease,” McCormick said.

The outcry partially mirrors the backlash over quarantine precautions during the COVID pandemic — which Nugent has also criticized — that has fueled mistrust in the scientific community ever since.

“COVID didn’t help this,” Johnathan Bordelon, the state’s deer program manager said in a recent interview.

He acknowledged the restrictions can harm business but maintained bans are the only obvious tool to stop the mysterious disease.

“It’s contentious; these are not things we want to do,” Bordelon said.

CWD has led to significant population declines in some areas. In 2019, the last year with available data, deer hunting had a near $900 million economic impact in Louisiana. LDWF’s stated goal is to protect that resource for the long term.

“If you let the disease run its course, there’s gonna be economic impact years down the road,” Bordelon said.

The science

No one knows the exact origins of chronic wasting disease, but it was first observed in captive deer at a Colorado research facility in 1967.

“Animals were moved to other facilities, the disease moved with them, and it spilled into the wild at some point,” Bordelon said.

Since then, the disease has been found in deer, elk and some moose and reindeer in 36 states, Canada, Scandinavia, and South Korea.

“Was it always there? It’s hard to say,” Bordelon said. “If it’s always been there, why has it increased?”

CWD belongs to a family of neurodegenerative diseases known as “transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” which include mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

All are caused by the same underlying mechanism: a misfolded protein known as a prion. Its altered structure serves as a template that recruits normally healthy proteins to misfold, causing a chain reaction that ends up killing neurons. 

“Sometimes they are spontaneous changes, sometimes inherited, sometimes infectious,” said Mariano Carrossino, a pathologist at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, referring to the origin of misfolds. “It eventually leads to cellular death because they were (previously) supporting cellular health.”

For a period of up to two years before the animal dies, as holes, or “vacuoles,” grow larger in its brain, the deer slowly loses its motor functions and spatial awareness, and struggles to swallow — the latter causing rapid weight loss and excessive salivation. All the while, the “zombie” deer, as they are sometimes called, shed the infectious particles into the environment, mainly through saliva, urine and feces. 

While no known cures exist for any transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, there is no evidence CWD can transmit to humans. But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control still recommends against eating meat from deer infected with the disease.

Carossino leads a team of researchers at LSU’s Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. Between September and March, his lab tested samples from more than 3,500 deer for CWD. Most were shot by hunters who voluntarily gave the animal heads to LDWF, which then sent them to the lab.

In a jar filled with formaldehyde, lab technician Aneta Staszkiewicz uses tweezers to pull out two strawberry-sized beige globules. One is a small section of a deer’s brainstem, the other a lymph node from its neck. 

Later, the samples are dehydrated, sliced micrometer thin, and placed in a machine that deploys antibodies to bind to the prions, then applies a staining reagent to make them visible.

On his computer screen, Carossino pulled up the result: clusters of pink dots scattered against a purple field of healthy tissue.

During hunting season, the lab processes over 100 samples a day, and sends positive results to a USDA lab for confirmation.

“We’re constantly looking for these diseases,” he said.

Precautions provoking the people

Perhaps the scariest part of CWD is the prions’ remarkable durability. They are rich in beta-sheets that allow the particles to bind to soil and plants, withstand temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and last in the environment for decades. 

To mitigate their spread, the LDWF bans hunters from baiting and feeding — usually done with corn, protein pellets, or rice bran — in areas where the disease has been detected, which include large parts of Tensas, Catahoula, Caldwell, Franklin and LaSalle parishes. 

The idea is to prevent deer that would otherwise not come in contact with each other from unnecessarily congregating.

“You’re creating environmental reservoirs on the landscape, concentrated footprints where deer are coming week after week, year after year,” Bordelon said. 

In January and March, restrictions were expanded to Ouachita, Concordia and parts of neighboring parishes. Hunters face fines for initial violations and are prohibited from transporting deer heads out of the infection zones.

Derek Calk, a 43-year-old hunter from Jena, in LaSalle Parish, has hunted deer since he was 11. He has the know-how to track deer without bait, and enjoys trekking for miles, climbing 30 feet up a pine tree, then waiting for hours to shoot a deer.

But he also has two young daughters and doesn’t think that is a feasible way to introduce them to the sport. Nor does he think it is possible for many older hunters, who have used the same baiting techniques for decades, to track deer.

“They’re out of the picture on being able to kill a deer,” he said.

Bait bans took effect across roughly a third of LaSalle Parish last hunting season, with another third subject to restrictions on how feed could be dispersed.

Brad Stephens, owner of Cousin’s Feed and Seed Barn in Jena, felt the impact. He says his sales for corn, rice bran and feeders were down by over $68,000 this season compared to the last. That is not accounting for all of the food and drink sales from would-be customers who now go elsewhere to hunt, he said. 

“It was a drastic difference, because we had a lot of out-of-town customers that quit coming,” Stephens said.

“CWD is the biggest hoax that’s been pulled on the American hunter,” he added. 

Hunter Nation and others point to the state of Wisconsin, where deer populations have soared despite around 10% testing positive for CWD statewide. 

“This has been around for decades,” McCormick said. “It’s not that harmful to the deer in the long run.”

At the same time, opponents of the bans argue that because deer are social herd animals that often communicate through licking the same tree branches, attempts at stopping the disease from spreading are futile. 

“If CWD is such a big threat, it’s gonna be there regardless,” Calk said. 

McCormick has proposed a resolution to suspend baiting and feeding restrictions for 18 months, giving Hunter Nation time to work with LDWF on new CWD legislation. The group has a history of challenging wildlife regulations, previously suing Wisconsin officials to allow wolf hunting and pushing to legalize the shooting of Sandhill cranes. 

A separate resolution in the Senate would also increase the number of infected deer needed to ban the practice. Currently, one positive deer is enough to enact a 15-mile bait-ban radius.

Neither resolution has gone to a full vote in either chamber yet.

The data

At less than 1% prevalence, CWD in Louisiana is far below estimated infection levels that could significantly affect deer populations.

But after it reaches about 5% to 10% of deer in a population, Bordelon said, infections rise exponentially. At that point, the spread is virtually impossible to stop, he added. In some counties of the hardest-hit states — Wisconsin, Colorado, Wyoming — over half of wild deer are now infected. 

In areas where the disease was detected early and baiting and feeding restrictions are employed, prevalence has remained low, Bordelon said. 

“There are only examples of low staying low,” he said. “It’s hard to say if it’s solely because of the baiting and feeding provisions, but the one known is that greatly increases contact rates.”

Meanwhile, statewide mule deer populations in Wyoming and Colorado — the epicenters of CWD — have fallen dramatically, though isolating the disease’s role in this decline is difficult.

Bordelon points to a recent five-year study that used camera traps and GPS collars attached to hundreds of deer in high CWD-affected areas in nearby Arkansas. It found white-tailed deer populations declined an average of 17% annually.

The highest cause of mortality for those tracked deer, Bordelon told the committee, was directly from the disease. That doesn’t count the number of infected deer killed by hunters, natural predators or vehicles — CWD makes the animals more vulnerable to those results.

Still, like any well-trained scientist, Bordelon rarely talks in absolutes. That makes it hard to communicate the real threat of a slow-moving disease that scientists are still studying.

“It’s just very difficult to get folks to understand that you can have record number of deer, record number of harvest in a state, and still have CWD,” he said. “It takes time, and the impacts are so focal.”