In short there was a deer breeding facility in Cerro Gordo county with CWD, animals from there ended up in Davis and Pottawattamie counties at high fence shooting facilities.
The breeding facility is under Dept. of Ag jurisdiction and the shooting facilities are under DNR jurisdiction.
all 3 were depopulated of deer
The Brakke's own the Davis county high fence and have been fighting to take the fence down.
They even cut the fences once already and a couple wild deer got in who knows if any got back out but DNR got the fences back up by court order and killed the new deer inside.
Now a judge has ruled the DNR doesn't have the power to quarantine the area.
DNR was deciding if they would go ahead with another appeal today, I haven't heard what was decided.
the problem is there really isn't enough in Iowa code to allow a DNR quarantine, a problem hunting groups tried to remedy several years ago but the legislature never acted.
There is a senate study bill 1103 but the deer breeders and captive hunt industries are well organized to lobby against it and Iowa deer hunters don't seem to know or care enough to get something done.
CWD is caused by a malformed protein. It doesn't go away, these captive sites are like toxic waste dumps for deer. Let wild deer in there and they will very likely get CWD.
The endemic area in Wisconsin is testing at around 35% infection rate, what happens to deer hunting when 1 in 3 deer is infected with a fatal disease? It's not good.
Meanwhile instead of doing all it can to control a disease that could wipeout their industry the deer breeders just circle the wagons to protect their own and try to get people to believe they aren't the source of all the CWD hotspots across the Midwest conspicuously centered around captive deer facilities.
Edit to add: It looks like Rhonda Brakke confirmed on the linked post that DNR did appeal.
Also, since this is one of the few sites I don't use my actual name on, I am Jeremy Rosonke VP of the Iowa Conservation Alliance, an alliance of most of the hunting and fishing groups in the state including IBA and Whitetails Unlimited.
