Why doesn’t the Game Commission put facemasks onto Pennsylvania’s deer?

People are wearing facemasks to lessen the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

Shouldn’t deer wear facemasks to lessen the spread of chronic wasting disease?

Well, no. I made that “face masks for deer” suggestion as a joke. I just chuckle at the mental image.

The serious reality is that chronic wasting disease is showing up in deer disturbingly close to hunting grounds in west-central Pennsylvania, including Clearfield and Jefferson counties. The Game Commission is asking for comments, according to a recent news story. My comment is in the form of a question: Should we attack the deer disease as we are attacking the coronavirus pandemic?

The COVID-19 virus is spread in people through close contact with our breath, sneezes, coughs or fecal material and other bodily fluids. Though COVID-19 has killed an awful number of people, nearly 250,000 worldwide, nearly everybody who gets sick does recover, though some have lasting damage to lungs and other body parts.

The federal Centers for Disease Control says scientists believe that chronic wasting disease is spread in deer and elk through bits of sort-of-alive protein fragments (prions) transmitted through feces, saliva, blood, or urine, either through direct contact or indirectly through environmental contamination of soil, food or water.

But they don’t know for sure.

What scientists, the Game Commission and hunters do know is that, unlike the COVID-19 disease in humans, chronic wasting disease is always fatal in deer and elk. There is no cure. Worse, there does not seem to be any good way of killing the prions. They have been known to survive being burned at high temperatures, being doused in bleach, being dissolved in acid, or so we are told.

CWD and COVID-19 are being contained by much the same approach: quarantine.

Today, we are told — but usually not forced — to stay in our homes unless trips are necessary. Back in the 1940s and 1950s, some people were forcibly removed from their homes, our Constitutional rights notwithstanding, and isolated in “sanitariums,” grouping but segregating some victims of tuberculosis and polio. Before antibiotics whapped TB and the Salk and Sabin vaccines halted polio — today’s anti-vaxxers need to take notice — such draconian measures as quarantines and isolation were about the only weapons we had against those dreaded, often-fatal diseases.

Today, we have dusted off the quarantine strategy. It appears to be working against COVID-19; some quarantine restrictions are being lifted as the pandemic wanes.

But what about the deer herd?

Efforts in Wisconsin and other states seem to have “flattened the curve” of that deer-borne disease.

But nothing has yet stopped its spread. That is ominous.

The good news is that there are no records of chronic wasting disease having been spread from deer or elk to humans.

The bad news is that such a spread could happen and, unlike COVID-19, which rarely kills, CWD always kills, to the best of our knowledge.

So why are we still hunting deer?

I ask the question as a lifelong deer eater and nearly lifelong deer hunter. My success ratio is laughable. I am tolerably accurate with firearms, but I just don’t put much effort into hunting.

I sit. I get bored. I walk around. I sit again. I no longer shoot at running deer, or faraway deer (200 yards or further). If I fire my rifle, I want to cleanly and quickly kill that deer, not wound it.

So the deer I shoot are usually walking or standing still. I rationalize my taste for venison by claiming that I improve the gene pool by removing dumb deer from the breeding population.

All that is nice enough.

But should we be still hunting deer for food and sport, given the ominous likelihood that chronic wasting disease could spread to other species?

The arguments, pro and con, are eerily similar to what we are now debating about COVID-19: Should we reopen our economies? A huge amount of money is at stake.

The livelihoods of many people, from 700 full-time Game Commission employees to perhaps 100,000 Pennsylvanians (that’s just a guesstimate) who derive income from hunting-related sales, deer processing, etc., depend on continuing to hunt deer.

But hunting deer susceptible to chronic wasting disease risks an even worse fate than reopening an economy susceptible to COVID-19.

The coronavirus kills about 1 percent of its victims, more or less. Chronic wasting disease kills 100 percent of its victims.

So should we continue to hunt, protect and maintain herds of deer and elk? Or should we eliminate the carriers of a disease that, given a possibility of mutation, could lead to the extinction of our farm animals — or all of us?

The Game Commission wants to know what we think. Comments can be submitted via the internet at pgc.pa.gov or mailed to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, ATTN: CWD Plan Comments, 2001 Elmerton Ave., Harrisburg, Pa. 17110-9797.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net.