Burdizzo said:
I don't know that the "ban high fences" crowd are saying it is a cure for the disease. I think the point is that banning high fences would let the disease run its natural course through the population faster than segregating certain populations who will probably get it anyway and just drag put the inevitable. Let nature work out the solution, and in the end the deer population survives.
It is like when some of us older folks got chicken pox as kids. If one kid got it, our parents would make us all play together so we all got it at once. That way this thing wouldn't linger in the community for a long time.
I am not a wildlife biologist. This is just what I took away from the argument.
This isn't like chicken pox, though, where you get sick and then recover most of the time and then you're immune for life. Also, maybe 1 kid in 1000 dies. Not a big deal.
There is no cure for CWD, no vaccine, no way to avoid death. That's a pretty big deal.
There are probably deer with resistant genomes but it would take decades at best for CWD to "run its course".
If I had the authority and all the money in the world I'd honestly be working on finding resistant deer, elk, and other cervids and breeding them post haste while eradicating as many wild deer as possible.
Once non-resistant wild deer are gone, resistant deer are reintroduced to the wild.
Sorta like what has been done with sheep and goats and scrapie.