Texas Slaughters Hundreds Of Diseased Deer Over 85-Year-Old Rancher’s Protests

Texas wildlife officials killed 249 captive deer on a private ranch this week, ending the longest-running challenge in recent years to the state’s policy of euthanizing breeder-cultivated deer herds infected with chronic wasting disease, or CWD.

The slaughter ends a three-year standoff with game rancher Robert Williams, 85. His tenacious legal challenges had raised the prospect that the deer breeders who supply the state’s high-fenced game ranches with big-antlered bucks might impede a strict euthanasia policy aimed at shielding wild deer from new CWD infections.

Like mad cow disease in cattle or scrapie in sheep, CWD causes brain proteins known as prions to misfold, leading to a prolonged death by neurodegeneration. Biologists widely view the spreading disease as the single greatest threat facing North America’s herds of wild cervids, a family that includes deer, elk, moose and caribou. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends against eating CWD-contaminated meat due to concerns that the disease could jump to humans, like mad cow did.

Texas wildlife officials generally kill all captive deer at sites where any deer tests positive for CWD, then require extensive sterilization procedures that include removing a layer of topsoil from deer pens and burying it six feet deep. CWD-contaminated sites cannot host captive deer for at least five years.

Williams, a CWD skeptic who eats infected venison without concern, waged a three-year legal battle to keep the state from killing the deer on his ranch southeast of Dallas, enlisting the support of Republican Texas state legislator Bob Hall and right-wing rocker Ted Nugent. Williams encouraged other breeders to follow suit. He implored Texas officials to let him