In an effort to make themselves look good, the DNR will be donating deer they kill that test negative for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), to food pantries. Still other governmental bodies donate wild canadian geese they kill. In both cases, the kills are for a greater good — in the former, controlling CWD, and in the latter, reclaiming green space for recreational use rather than as an e-coli infested goose grazing field.

Hearing that you donated to a food pantry usually gives people that warm and fuzzy feeling that they did something good. But let’s consider what they’re donating.

The canadian geese that are culled are usually the urban park giants that can regularly be seen grazing on lawns and large green swaths of grass that has been heavily fertilized and seeded with pesticides. It keeps the grass green and growing thick, but that grass is nothing you would want to put in your own body. Yet the geese grow on it and apparently thrive. The downside is that what they’re really eating is a toxic stew. The fat on these birds is laden with PCB’s — the same PCB’s that make it so that you’re not supposed to eat Lake Michigan fish more than once a week.

Deer, which after testing, are found to be CWD negative show another case where the poor are not being well served by the donations. Yes, the brains of these animals are tested but what if there are prions in the other parts of the animal? What if they were infected with prions that were in another deer and may have not yet traveled up to the brain?

This is another reason, besides the cold, that I stopped hunting deer a few years back.

The question everyone needs to ask themselves is, would you feed this to your own children? If the answer is no, then you should throw it away. This includes canned goods that are old and past their expiration date. Regardless of the common misconception that canned goods are good forever, they do actually perish. They just last longer.

One of the things that governments have been doing is donating the carcasses of the animals they kill to food pantries and food banks.

Jon Janowski, Director of Advocacy for Hunger Task Force (HTF), Wisconsin’s largest food bank to offer free food to the hungry, says “we don’t take deer — period.” He recollects when CWD was first found and HTF turned away donations. “Some people said to me, you’ve got to be kidding — a couple of deer found up north is going to worry you guys?” Janowski’s concerns now appear to be well founded as CWD infected deer were recently found as far south as the edge of Waukesha County.

When pressed as to why they don’t accept deer, Janowski said, “because all it takes is one infected piece of meat that we would distribute to an emergency food program and if someone eats it and gets sick, and it’s our responsibility because we donated the product to them. It’s not worth the risk.”

Karen Tredwell, of the Waukesha Food Pantry, says her pantry does accept deer. Tredwell said, “we haven’t had any major concerns because the places that do the processing don’t accept deer from areas infected with CWD … We don’t want to accept something that’s dangerous. We don’t have any venison right now so we don’t have to make a decision on anything we have but I’ll going to have to refer this back to our board to make a decision to whether to accept or not to accept future donations. We’re certainly not going to provide something that provides risk to a vulnerable population.”

When asked for her reaction on CWD affected deer being found at the edge of Waukesha County, Tredwell said, “I was very sad to hear it. We provide food to about 5000 people per month. We once stopped providing venison but information we received from the DNR told us it would be safe so we started offering it again. Our clients do ask for it and we have donors who want to give it.”

While Tredwell was careful to point out that the decision to offer or not offer venison was up to her board, she questioned, “if it’s on the edge of Waukesha county now, what’ the effect here?”