A different kind of Iowa livestock farmer’s reacting to the DNR’s four-month moratorium on bringing any deer into Iowa. Chronic wasting disease, also called C-W-D, has turned up in deer in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — but not Iowa. Larry Bryan of Stuart is one of the state’s more than 175 deer farmers, and understands the concerns over what’s described as a deer equivalent to mad cow disease.They have to buy a 15-dollar annual permit and can be inspected by the DNR or game wardens. Bryan says there are probably 18-hundred penned deer in Iowa, most kept for breeding and sale.If you sell them at over 6 months of age, most states require they be tested for cow Tuberculosis and brucellosis but there’s no test for CWD except to kill the deer. The DNR’s going to test a thousand wild deer a year for the next three years, but he says with 200-thousand wild deer, chances are any that die of CWD will be eaten by predators. The ban in bringing deer into the state will affect breeders and deer farmers for the next four months, and tests will be done on the brains of wild road-kill deer to see if CWD turns up.
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