Saskatchewan walks back plan to end CWD testing of hunter-harvested cervids after stiff pushback
Mary Van Beusekom, MSToday at 12:13 p.m.
Chronic Wasting Disease
Rates of chronic wasting disease (CWD) among cervids such as deer and elk in southwestern Saskatchewan, Canada, are the highest in the world, with up to 87% of mule deer bucks infected in certain parts of the province.
So the announcement late last week (midway through the deer-hunting season) that the government of Saskatchewan was ending its CWD surveillance program as of November 1 was met with shock and disappointment by wildlife experts and hunters, who worried about the repercussions for cervids, other wildlife, and people.
“This is crazy,” Ryan Brook, PhD, a professor in the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture and Bioresources, told CIDRAP News after the discontinuation was announced. “There was no consultation done, as far as we can tell, with anyone. None of the hunting groups were consulted. And I certainly wasn't engaged in any discussion.”
Government listens to feedback
CWD is an always-fatal neurodegenerative disease of cervids caused by infectious misfolded proteins called prions, which spread through animal-to-animal contact and environmental contamination. The harvest of fewer cervids means more animals on the landscape, increasing the risk of CWD spread. And while no human cases have been documented, experts fear CWD could cross the species barrier.Returning to the previous testing approach will provide hunters with information to support their decisions and maintain important surveillance information to support wildlife management.
Darlene Rowden
The FAQs accompanying the government’s email to stakeholders acknowledged that provincial hunters had no other testing option and said that hunters who still wanted to hunt cervids could give their untested harvest to a “person who is comfortable consuming untested meat” or to their pets, because it’s illegal to waste it. Saskatchewan also refused to refund hunters who had already bought licenses and tags.
The government, however, listened to the pushback, as it announced last week that it would continue offering CWD testing to hunters, with mandatory testing in endemic areas and voluntary testing elsewhere in the province, as it did last hunting season.
"We heard clearly from hunters that access to CWD testing matters to them and their families," Saskatchewan Environment Minister Darlene Rowden said in a government news release. "Returning to the previous testing approach will provide hunters with information to support their decisions and maintain important surveillance information to support wildlife management."
“The revised approach will allow the ministry to continue collecting information about the prevalence and distribution of CWD, support wildlife health monitoring and provide individual hunters with the status of submitted samples,” the release said.
Numbers of samples submitted for testing had been growing
The original announcement, sent by Iga Stasiak, DVM, DVSc, provincial wildlife health specialist, said the program was closing down for financial reasons. “Government is always looking at efficiencies and since uptake across our hunters has been low, we see this as an opportunity for efficiency,” it said.But the government’s website tells a different story, noting a rise in testing submissions from 2,248 submissions in 2024-25 to 2,900 in 2025-26, a five-year high. “Overall, white-tailed deer and elk submissions increased by 74 per cent and 88 per cent, respectively, while mule deer submissions decreased by 62 per cent and moose submissions decreased by 14 per cent since 2024-25,” the site noted.
Last hunting season, 362 cervids tested positive for CWD, including 195 white-tailed deer, 125 mule deer, 33 elk, and nine moose.
The only way to get anyone to take a zoonotic disease seriously is if it kills people or has a demonstrable economic impact. And of course, by that time—game over.
Russ Mason, PhD
Rather than a financial issue, Russ Mason, PhD, retired from the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, saw it as a reflection of a government throwing up its hands in the face of a rapidly spreading and difficult-to-control disease.
“As I've been saying for quite a while now, agencies have increasingly less interest in knowing much about this disease, because most conservation agencies, whether in Canada or the United States, are primarily there to regulate recreational opportunity,” he said. “The only way to get anyone to take a zoonotic disease seriously is if it kills people or has a demonstrable economic impact. And of course, by that time—game over.”
Kip Adams, MS, chief conservation officer with the National Deer Association in the United States, also viewed the program discontinuation as capitulation. “This message is very different than nearly every other state and wildlife agency,” he said. “The Canadian ministry is essentially saying, ‘We're not doing anything. We're giving up. And oh, by the way, there's no place to have your meat tested. However, you can't waste that meat.’”
Brook said the province hadn’t taken basic steps, such as banning the baiting and feeding of cervids, to slow the spread of CWD. And with the ending of testing, surveillance efforts would have ground to a halt, leaving people with no idea what the disease is doing or where.
“A monitoring program is the most cost-effective way to monitor it,” he said. “It’s the most basic data that you need to make any decisions going forward.”
It also leaves hunters in the dark, with the province referring hunters who want to understand their risk of CWD to the government’s website. “That's very ironic to point and say, ‘well, the only way you can know your risk is to look at our prevalence data, but we're not collecting that anymore,’” Brook said.
‘It makes me anxious’
Mason worried about the northward spread of CWD and its potentially devastating effects on the caribou herds on which indigenous people rely. “Then you have serious food insecurity issues for indigenous people in Canada, because most of the First Nations not only rely on wild foods as a matter of culture; they rely on them because you can't get anything else.”I just don't feel that I want to risk my grandchildren, because there is no definitive proof that CWD can't make a species jump.
Darrell Crabbe
Darrell Crabbe, acting executive director of the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation, said that the decision made no sense from a financial standpoint, either. In the province, 30% of all license fees for hunting, angling, and trapping go into the Fish and Wildlife Development Fund, which for this year accounted for $300,000 of the $440,000 CWD program budget, with the province paying only the remaining $140,000.
Crabbe said he and his sons had already submitted samples from a moose they harvested recently for testing but would stop hunting in the absence of testing. “I just don't feel that I want to risk my grandchildren, because there is no definitive proof that CWD can't make a species jump,” he said.
Another hunter, Stephen Urquhart, PhD, PChem, a professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Saskatchewan, said he has always had his harvest tested, which has resulted in two or three coming back positive for CWD. He said he would continue to hunt this year, but only pull the trigger if it’s a fawn—although he knows that does can pass CWD prions to fawns in utero.
“It makes me anxious, because what if you're wrong?” he said.
Urquhart understands that Saskatchewan, like every CWD-endemic municipality, is in a tough spot trying to control a disease that seems to defy control, but he said that the province hasn’t been proactive enough.
“I realize action is hard because the levers are unpopular: doing culls and sharpshooting or bans on baiting,” he said. “The best time to have addressed this was 20 to 25 years ago,” he said. “The second-best time is now, but I don't know what you do when it's endemic, when it's in the soil.”