Biologists euthanize fearless deer Officials seek to check chronic wasting disease

The state has killed a beloved tame deer that appeared near Coburn Gore earlier this summer, in hopes of protecting the state’s wild deer herd from chronic wasting disease, a deadly neurological disorder that is ravaging deer and elk herds in the West.

State biologists euthanized the deer just over a week ago, and samples of its brain stem were sent away for testing. Results are expected by mid-September.

Chronic wasting disease, which is closely related to bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, cannot be verified with a live test, explained Gerry Lavigne, Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife deer biologist.

This particular deer did not exhibit the typical physical symptoms of CWD, extreme thinness, drooling and shaking, but it had lost its fear of people, which can be an early sign of the disease.

“In this era of CWD, when a deer of unknown origin appears and starts acting strangely, the protocol is to kill it and test it,” Lavigne said.

Over the past two months, the deer often visited campers near Coburn Gore and a crew working on Route 27 near the Quebec border. The deer ate potato chips from people’s hands, seemed to enjoy wearing hats and let a person sit astride its back for a photograph. The construction crew named the animal “Mikey,” after a character in a television commercial, when the deer developed a taste for cereal.

The deer’s habit of drinking from soda bottles as though sucking on a baby bottle gave Lavigne a clue to its origin. Only a deer that had been raised in captivity as a fawn, with its diet supplemented by bottles of milk would know how to feed that way, he said.

The 3-year-old buck was very tall and had an unusually large rack, still covered in velvet, so observers early on believed it to be a red deer, a European species closely related to elk that is found on most of Maine’s 110 deer farms.

About a half-dozen escaped farm deer already have been reported to the department this year, Lavigne said.

Biologists ultimately determined the deer to be a whitetail of the same species that makes up Maine’s wild herd. It was unusually well-developed for its age, however, perhaps a sign of the selective breeding that often occurs at deer farms and hunt parks, he said.

Maine does not permit white-tailed deer to be raised in captivity, so Lavigne believes the deer probably escaped from a farm in Quebec, where 138 deer farms raise white-tailed deer alongside exotic species such as the red deer. But because the deer had no identifying marks, such as ear tags or tattoos, it’s impossible to say where exactly it came from.

The confusion over the deer’s species required that both DIF&W and the Maine Department of Agriculture, which oversees deer farms, be involved in deciding the deer’s fate.

Local people fought to save the deer, one even trying to load it onto a horse trailer and take it to a private facility before state biologists could capture it. Success could have been dangerous, Lavigne said.

Whether a state wildlife rehabilitation center or a private deer farm, the facility would have been quarantined and likely shut down – permanently – if it had housed a CWD-infected deer.

“The last thing we want to do would be to allow this deer, with an uncertain disease status, to go to a captive facility,” he said.

People called their state legislators. Maine Speaker of the House Patrick Colwell, D-Gardiner, spoke with state wildlife officials, but upon hearing the facts, deferred to the department’s disease control policy. The deer was killed Aug. 15.

Lavigne kept several samples of the deer’s flesh and its head, which are stored in the department’s Bangor lab. The rest of the carcass was incinerated.

The chance the deer was infected with CWD is quite low because of the lack of symptoms and the explanation for its tame behavior. But perfectly healthy-looking deer can be infected and can pass CWD on to other animals through its blood and saliva for as long as three years before symptoms emerge.

Farmed deer are often traded among breeders and thus have more potential to be exposed to a CWD-infected animal than do deer in the wild.

Maine farms have to comply with a ban on the transport of animals across state borders, a move that farmers supported when it was put in place last year. But Quebec’s rules, and its farmers’ compliance with any precautionary policies, are not known.

The Coburn Gore location was particularly troublesome to biologists because of its proximity to a large wintering area for wild deer.

Lavigne has previously said a CWD infection would decimate Maine’s $240 million fall deer hunt, and that vigilance is essential.

Last November, samples from the brains of about 700 deer killed by hunters in Maine were tested for CWD and none showed infection. An effort to test 750 deer is planned for the 2003 hunt, Lavigne said.