Not in my area, they eat the untouched wetlands where i am. Thankfully i have a lot of gardeners and farmers around here so I’m assuming we all don’t use Roundup and the alike.
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Up here you send the head of the deer, elk, or moose away and they test it for you. When it comes back negative you are safe to eat it. The test is free.
Yes but it is still a threat for sure. Testing is the way to go IMHO.
A threat to who?
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I guess to the humans who eat it.
My grandson just ties his goats out where he wants them to eat, no problems. Deer are a lot more expensive to control. If they are overpopulated in your area they will eat everything including plants that they normally wouldn’t eat.
goat, obviously.
but they also are rarer and more controlled… most don’t randomly have a family of goats go through their yard at night and eat everything.
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Humans have been eating CWD+ venison and elk for decades. Zero proven cases of it crossing the brain barrier. There’s plenty of stuff to be worried about in life. Personally I don’t think CWD is one of them.
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Goats, about all the do is eat everything.
I’ve had goats 40 years, and the answer is it depends. Do you fence your orchard securely? Do you get your goats to like you so they’ll go back into their pen after they get out? Do you rotate their pastures so they’re not on a patch of dirt looking hungrily at your trees? And what kind of goats? I was breeding a specialty 200-300 lb. Boer for a while, but finally gave them up out of respect for the land. It wasn’t that they eat everything- none of my goats have done that, although they sometimes taste things like shoelaces and hats. It’s that if they decide they like something, they can make it disappear incredibly fast! I have 3 blackberry and poison oak filled hillsides I rotate them through, and my now smaller goats actually aren’t eating fast enough.
In all this time (2 different properties ), I have only had one fruit tree damaged by goats, in 2014, and it’s weirdly leaning, but still producing delicious pears. However, the big Boers contributed to erosion and girdled 3 Oregon Ash.
There have been confirmed cases of CJD in people who ate CWD infected deer and who had no known links to infected cattle. There is reason to believe CWD can infect humans. In laboratory settings, humanized mice and some monkeys have contracted the disease. Beyond that, it’s a threat to wildlife. Bison, moose, elk, caribou, etc can all contract the disease.
Sounds like fear mongering to me. Show me scientific evidence, not conjecture, that CWD has caused a case of CJD.
Bison can get CWD? Never heard that. They’re not cervids, so I’m not sure how that would work. Maybe mad cow disease.
Consider the tons and tons and tons of whitetail, mule deer, elk, and moose meat that has been consumed since the “discovery” of CWD in the 60s.
I’ll take my chances.
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Feel free to take your chances. I won’t be tempting fate. Consider too that deer frequently graze pesticide and herbicide laced fields. Their food isn’t controlled like a cow’s food would be. I applaud those who shoot deer (the more dead deer the merrier), but I won’t be eating the dirty, hooved rats.
You must be used to feed lot beef. Beef cattle here are pasture raised spring through fall. The pastures are treated with guess what? Herbicides and pesticides. Without doing so forage is less than ideal. In fall beef cattle are turned loose on temporarily fenced harvested corn and bean fields…where they eat the remaining forage that has been treated with…herbicides and pesticides. Even feedlot beef is fed with crops that have been raised with synthetic fertilizers…and herbicides and pesticides. Same things with hogs.
The diet of whitetail deer on my place (and most everywhere else) is comprised of about 75% native browse and 25% ag crops…and that’s for about 3 months a year. The rest of the year they’re living on all wild/native forage.
Don’t like deer, elk, moose?..no problem. Calling them dirty in comparison to farmed meat? Lol
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I’m used to grass fed, grass finished beef I raise myself.
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Congrats on being blessed with the necessary acreage and abilities to raise your own beef on your own land. Not too many folks out there who can do that. Do you do all your own vaccinations as well? Got a local cow doc who helps you out? Bring in round bales in the winter? Lots of work, thats for sure.
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As someone that grew up eating a lot of deer meat that continues to eat a lot of deer meat, I can say that my family, as well as everyone we fed both to, prefers deer over goat. Goat makes great chili or other strongly seasoned meats I guess, but just on its own is very strong to most people around here. On a side note, our family is growing to dislike deer and prefer beef as we get older. I’ve heard of this happening to other families we know, and I thought they were crazy at the time. I don’t know if our tastes are changing or what. If deer meat wasn’t so cost effective at this point we would switch to beef entirely.
As for growing, deer are bad, but fairly easy to fence out in rural situations. Trying to integrate goats into an orchard system is a larger headache. Just one mistake on one day can wreck years of work if goats get loose. I’ve seen a nanny straddle a 10 foot sapling, bend it over with her body, and strip all the leaves off the tree. I think it’s also noteworthy that Mark Shepherd in Restoration Agriculture has absolutely nothing good to say about goats. The way that most people raise goats degrades the land instead of improving it.
I have deer jerky and it was horrible. Game taste and tough. My cousin told a story where he was servicing a dish satellite in the forest area during work. When he came back down, he hit a deer. Someone stop by and offer to help him load the deer into his truck. The person told him, you kill it you eat it.
I have curry goat at a restaurant. Slightly gamy taste, but there are some fat and tender part of the goat. This is better than the deer jerky. So, I vote for goat over deer.
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It’s actually not that much work for no more than we have. One round bale will last us 2 weeks, and we have them baled small because my hobby tractor won’t lift a full tightly packed round bale. I get vaccines from friends who are real ranchers and buy them in bulk. We buy alfalfa in small squares.
My family is serious about the quality of food we put in our bodies. We read every label and generally avoid foods which contain harmful ingredients. We’re not perfect, but we try. Our orchard is also zero spray. We just picked cherries yesterday, and of course some have bugs. My four year old thought the cherry worms were cute. None of my kids were squeamish about it. Our applesauce has more protein than the stuff from the stores. Our pears have bad spots. We can the best ones in juice pressed from the okay ones. The chickens get the bad ones, and the cattle get the pomace.
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