07/18/2026
The country’s leading CWD genetics researcher just called CWD “by far the most corrupt area of scientific concern” he has ever experienced in his career. Dr. Christopher Seabury is a tenured professor at Texas A&M who has spent more than two decades studying prion diseases and has worked with USDA on genetic approaches to CWD. In a recent letter, Seabury pointed to Wisconsin as the real-world example nobody wants to talk about. Despite years of aggressive CWD management, including attempts to drastically reduce deer numbers, CWD continued to spread. Yet according to the Wisconsin population data he included, the state’s deer population increased by more than 82% from 2008 to 2024, reaching an estimated 1.825 million deer.
Seabury’s argument is that nature is already be doing what government management has failed to do. Selecting for deer that are more tolerant or resistant to CWD, allowing them to become infected but still survive and reproduce. He wrote that “mother nature has already done the experiment for us, and she won in the battle against CWD,” before saying the entire CWD field is the most corrupt area of science he has encountered and warning states to follow actual evidence instead of “ideological talking points.” That is one hell of a statement coming from a PHD researcher who has spent his career actually studying prion disease.
— Stephen Ziegler
Outdoor writer | Rack Junkies Podcast
