Yeah.

The, the, the '50s and early '60s were a, were a, a, a s- a big artificial swelling or boom o- of mule deer, and part of that came from y- you know, back into the late 1800s and early n- 1900s, w- we didn't have any, any laws, any restrictions.

Um, people were just killing whatever they needed for meat and leather.

And so those populations, everybody knows that story, was way down.

And then through the, through the '30s we sort of had the Pittman–Robertson Act in 1937.

Whole bunch of other things in the 1930s happened along with the development of, um, game and fish departments and, and s- then started having shortened seasons, male only, don't kill the does, all these restrictions on harvests.

And that restriction and protection of those populations at the same time that we've had a whole bunch of logging, and so some of these forests were being opened up, sunlight reaching the forest floor, forbs and, and brows and shrubs that deer need to, to, to be healthy growing all over the, the forest because of that disturbance and it opened up.

Yeah

Yeah, yeah.

And everybody started thinking about, hey...

A- and they're just making bold statements about not only, like, mountain lions are gonna control CWD in mule deer, but carnivores are gonna control CWD in all the whole, the whole deer family.

And so that chugged along, and then people started, people started doing some research on that to look into it a little further, 'cause that was a number of years ago.

And there was some modeling that was done, and if you build a population model and you say, "Okay, we're gonna keep everything consistent, except we're gonna have mountain lions kill CWD positive mule deer at a higher rate," well, guess what happens? It- they're gonna control CWD.

It's just a mathematical certainty if you just build a simple model.

There's some people that build a, built a, a, a real complex model and took a lot of things into consideration.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Um, and, and so part of it is this complaint that you've got different elk here.

Mm-hmm.

And, and that remains to be seen because if you, uh, if you notice on that map, Northern and Central Arizona and New Mexico butts right up against Southern Colorado- Yeah.

... um, and Southern Utah.

And there's ...

In Arizona, there's a thing we call the Grand Canyon which is a really big ditch that runs- Mm-hmm.

Yup.