This year I went on my first elk hunt to an area near Craig, CO known to have Chronic Wasting Disease, CWD.  In fact, the units we were in had a high enough incident of CWD among the deer population that they required all bucks be tested.  Elk testing was optional since the rates were only 1-5% but we chose to test mainly because I’m health paranoid after all I’ve dealt with an no sense risking a fatal disease especially when a recent study shows it can possibly transfer to humans.   A few weeks after the hunt was over I got back my negative result from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and would have immediately eaten some elk had it not been for the fact I already had some other meat thawed that needed to be cooked.  Before I got around the getting elk out my friend called and said his elk came back Suspect for CWD and that he had to wait another 7-10 days for more testing.   On top of that he was pretty sure that we had mixed up the two heads that were dropped off for testing and that it possibly was my cow that was suspect.    Another few weeks went by and we found out that the elk was indeed positive for CWD and now we weren’t 100% sure which elk was the positive one.

Today, five weeks since we got home, we finally got verification for sure as to which elk was positive and it was my friend’s bull and not my cow.   Thank goodness I had a cow tag and not a bull tag since it was the missing skull plate that made the call on which elk it was.   The whole incident has been a huge learning experience and has kind of put me off of hunting in known CWD areas.  The problem is that at the rate it is spreading there may not be any non-CWD areas in the not too distant future as it is now found in 24 states.

The confusion came down to a lower missing jaw.  I had taken the tongue out of my animal and in doing so had removed the lower jaw to get to the whole tongue since rigor mortis had started to set in and I couldn’t get the mouth open.   My friend did not take his tongue and didn’t remember removing the lower jaw at all.  I distinctly remembered seeing his head sans lower jaw thinking he had taken his tongue off and when we removed the skull plate I was certain that the lower jaw was gone since it was flat and low on the table top.   Of course, I never commented on the  fact that the lower jaw was missing.   When I went to take the heads in for testing I couldn’t drop his off because I had his tag and not the top of his license which is what was needed.  I filled out paperwork for my elk, checked the bag to make sure I had the one with an intact skull, dropped it off and took his head back.   The next day as we were processing the other two elk he decided to take the ivories out of his elk but didn’t remove the head fully from the bag so brains didn’t dump out and then noticed no lower jaw which he thought was odd but again didn’t say anything.   Thus the confusion.   We were all tired and it was indeed possible that I had inadvertently mixed up the heads especially since he had no recollection of taking the jaw off his.

Of course by the time we got the positive result back there was no way through CPW to verify which head the samples came from since the heads had been destroyed and no way to DNA test the sample they had to sex the animal.   All we had now for evidence was 6 ivories of which 4 were from cows and negative and 2 were positive and from either a bull or a cow, and a bunch of frozen meat.  We went over what each of us remembered several times and it still wasn’t clear if a mix-up had occurred.  We put in calls to the outfitter to see what they remembered and I started looking at how we could get what evidence we had tested.   One option was to sex the teeth which is theoretically possible but I couldn’t find a lab that could do it after getting bounced around from WSU Veterinary lab to UC-Davis Veterinary Genetics Lab to the Wyoming Forensics lab.  The other option was to test blood from the frozen meat which at least had promise thanks the the fact SAWCorp recently released a blood test for CWD even though it had not been verified on frozen blood, we at least knew one animal  was positive and if both came back negative then we knew their test just didn’t work with frozen blood.

In the end we didn’t have to go that far and once the outfitter got back he said that yes, they had cut the lower jaw off the bull when bringing it back on mules and yes, the head they dropped off for testing had no skull plate and was indeed the bull.  So we resolved it  finally but this whole experience taught me several lessons and I hope they help someone else  from running into the same problem in the future:

• First off, bring WAY more nitrile or latex gloves along than you think you will need.  I brought a small baggie with some gloves in and, of course, ran out midway through the second day of breaking down my elk so was doing some of the work w/o gloves which could lead to contamination.   I had planned but not well enough to safely break down a whole elk and in the end I helped break down several so we should have brought a whole box of gloves along to keep everyone safe.
• Second, if you notice anything out of the ordinary speak up.  We both made that mistake and we would never have had any confusion had either of us mentioned the missing lower jaw.
• Third, double and maybe triple check everything and have someone else check you too.  If I’d have stayed a few minutes longer at the check station I would have seen that the head I dropped off indeed had an intact skull and no antlers.  Luckily the outfitter did have a double check and that is how we were able to verify that the positive head had antlers.
• Fourth, do your own backup test.  From now on I’m carrying the SAWCorp test with me on hunts and will get blood samples as a backup to any testing done by the state.  It can’t hurt and is relatively cheap.

As we found out,  it is way easier to make sure things are correct ahead of time than trying to deal with an after the fact investigation.   Hopefully the SAWCorp test will get validated with blood from frozen liver or meat, that would be a way to test from frozen meat but it is still better to make sure the initial testing is solid.  I would also recommend researching the CWD rates in the area you are hunting and be especially prepared if you at all have a chance of an infected animal, we had a 25% rate among our four elk when the rate in the area was 1-5%.  Like I said, I feel like I will avoid CWD states after this but the list of CWD states is growing and there aren’t too many states that don’t have an issue.  Luckily Washington, Oregon and Idaho are still safe but CWD just entered Montana in the weeks after our hunt so it could make its way to Idaho in time.   I’m going deer hunting tomorrow in Washington and will still carry a blood test kit with me, for $50 for kit and test it is worth just testing every animal and you may help find that first case to enter your area.