Remember this: Sometimes where you get that itchy twitch of intuition that something is not right-you have to go with it.
I am on a research bender one night at a job I was experiencing. This job was an eight hour stint of watching Barneys in the woods, phone calls, coloring, and a lot of free time looking at all things wildlife. The nature of the rabbit hole I am free-diving into is rabies. After swimming around that paddling pool, I decided I had a bad case of the lets-go-look-sees.
I began to read about Chronic Wasting Disease. It was a thing during another job I worked over a season at a wildlife processing facility and brain samples were being turned in to local wildlife agencies for their biologists to examine and study on the hunter time-dime.
Much like any other online Nancy Drew, I started the old keyboard up and pulled up more tabs with different reseach and ideas that my screen started to look like a dating application. Read-click the X-goodbye info.
I began to follow the trail. This began my reading into the Adventures of the Suspicious Researchers of 1967's Colorado Division of Wildlife's Foothills Wildlife Research Facility a.k.a. The National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC). All I can say is vague. There is no real definitive paper on this burp in time.
Let me set the scene. 1967 Fort Collins, Colorado is the origin story or legend of where this went down. Some captive Mule Deer were taken from the wild in Northeastern Colorado to a specific facility as part of a winter survival and nutrition research study. The deer appeared in good health per researchers. They get put in with some sheep and disaster ensues.
It took an act of Congress to find the human suspects: Mike, Terry and I. Mind you, when I look for these three people in other research you can't find them. It is like they are part of some secret military operation where whatever happened has been buried somewhere, never to be seen again. Infect, Deflect, and Deny.
I perused an article entitled, "Chronic Wasting linked to Fort Collins for 50 years", by Miles Blumhardt on The Coloradoan website. The person Blumhardt initial fingers as the guy is Gene Schooveld. Schooveld is a retired Colorado Division of Wildlife Senior Wildlife biologist who lived in Fort Collins.
On this website you can hear Mike Miller, Colorado Parks and Wildlife senior wildlife veterinarian is informing the reporter about the goings on. It does appear he isn't so clear on the retelling of historical events, probably due to the absence of info. He does go on to say that the deer dying kept ruining good research experiments. This made me think that they must have re-upped with a couple more clutches of deer before hair pulling and gnashing of teeth ensued from the frustration. If you watch the video provided you see that it is an area with grass set against hills and some protection from the elements. The area appears to be unproblematic as shown. We don't know what the conditions were at the time of the research.
My understanding there were twelve deer in with unnumbered sheep. You don't know how long these deer were alive but if it takes 1.5 to 2-2.5 years for Chronic Wasting to bring an animal to its end, how is it that these deer died so fast. Mike Miller states they appeared healthy. That would mean that those deer were infected in 1965-66 because this is noted as an event in 1967. The research was suppose to be on nutrition over wintering and natural deer history. Upon closer inspection, it reads like an ill-handled scientific inquiry where the ball was fumbled for lack of a better word.
What areas specifically did these sample deer come from? How did they bring them to the facility? Were they in a cattle trailer that wasn't sanitary? Was there no physical exam? Why were they not quarantined from other species due to their designation as a sample group? What were the researchers feeding those animals that was suppose to help them over winter? What exactly was the structure of the research? What happened to the sheep that was being used by CSU to conduct Scrapie research? What was really going on there? Why is it that in 2025 you can look at a map and it still a hotbed of eyestrain? What is everyone missing like the nose on their face?
Here look at this (click on it to make it bigger):
I sat back and thought there is someone out there doing the dissection and sample collecting for sampling but what about the other factors that go into solving this mystery? There is no location except Fort Collins. If they are stating the deer came from different areas of northeastern Colorado then one of the deer had CWD. Their exposure comingling with the sheep, human hand, or some other unknown could have caused the exposure. Were the deer there long enough to indicate the CWD gobbled them up after they were put together in the pen with the sheep. Information lost to history or in the annals of the NWRC.
These are marsh or shore birds and require to some degree a water body.
The birds that are around Fort Collins as an example are Common goldeneye, American tree sparrow, and lesser scaup.
 |
| Lesser Scaup |
 |
| Common Goldeneye |
 |
| American tree Sparrow |
My first untested hypothesis is that somewhere in these birds migratory plans, something might be contributing to the CWD. Stopover locations that give migratory birds a pitstop are subject to scrutiny. There is the idea of migratory birds that practice fecal sac business. My research on this is there is not a lot of testing done. The birds either gobble it or dispose of it outside of the nest at some location. The reason I state this is, "For example, the widely held belief that all CWD occurrences can be traced back to a single Colorado research facility has precluded wildlife and animal health professionals from considering that some outbreaks may be arising from unrecognized exposure events that occur repeatedly over time." (e.g., Williams & Miller 2003, Greenlee et al. 2015)
My second untested hypothesis is during the 1967 research shenanigans something was done or not done that elicited a situation where the twelve mule deer met with a moment of destiny that has changed the course of cervids history either through poor research practices or secret research practices of the military and biological warfare plot twist. Trust me that crazy rabbit hole exists to the Nth power.
Because the word transmit is used for the mobility of the prion, something within or outside of the life of the ungulate is making it susceptible for infection even though this is a sub-viral protein. Sub-viral meaning agent are pathogenic, can cause disease but lack viral properties. Subviral agents are satellites, viroids, prions, defective interfering particles, viriforms, and obelisk.
I most likely will revisit this because I am still researching on the topic. Strange things are definitely happening at Fort Collins. If its not the deer, it is the rabbits. What is next?
If you can learn anything from this it is building a sound research study with plenty of documentation and observations no matter how futile or stupid it might appear and communicating forward in time if the problem at hand becomes a persistent ghost in the future. If an exposure begins all it will do is spread. If you can't stop the spread, therein lies the problem because if Nature can't stop it on its own, then who or what will?
Citations:
Miller, M. W., and J. R. Fischer. 2016. The First Five (or More) Decades of Chronic Wasting Disease: Lessons for the Five Decades to Come. Transactions of the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference 81: in press.
Chronic Wasting linked to Fort Collins for 50 years. 2018 August 30.The Coloradoan.https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2018/08/23/cdc-tse-mad-cow-chronic-wasting-disease-linked-fort-collins/878097002/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2680674/#ref-list1
https://www.defenceiq.com/air-land-and-sea-defence-services/articles/prions-as-bioweapons
https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/occasional/cswmd/CSWMD_OccasionalPaper-12.pdf
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27449/chapter/3
