LOOKING BACK Ken Slee
In the mid-1970s, government-funded veterinary laboratories were set up in every state in Australia. They had three major roles: to assist in the eradication of tuberculosis and brucellosis in cattle, to increase knowledge of livestock and wildlife health issues, and to carry out surveillance for exotic diseases such as foot and mouth disease. I gained employment at the Bairnsdale laboratory in 1978.
Around this time a guy by the name of Dr Paul Presidente was working at the Melbourne University Veterinary Precinct at Werribee in Victoria. Paul had a background in wildlife disease research in the United States and when funding for his Werribee role ended, he moved to the laboratory at Bairnsdale as part of the diagnostic and research team.
While at Werribee, Paul’s skills had been recognised by the then fledgling deer farming industry and he had become involved in investigating issues in recently captured rusa, red and fallow deer. For several years he was also involved in studying hog deer on Sunday Island for the Para Park Cooperative, the owners of the island, and this work later led to a similar investigation into hog deer on Snake Island. The Hog Deer, by Geoff Moore and Ron Mayze, includes a section on Paul’s findings on hog deer.
Gippsland in the late-1970s and 1980s was full of young and enthusiastic deer hunters and Bairnsdale was the base of the recently formed East Gippsland Branch of the ADA. Given that the Regional Veterinary Laboratory in Bairnsdale had extensive diagnostic facilities it wasn’t long before Paul and I had a group of ADA people collecting samples from wild-shot deer as part of the lab’s role to investigate wildlife diseases and parasites.
Although ADA’s Dr Matt Draisma had done some preliminary investigations into Victoria’s sambar (see Australian Deer Volume 48, Number 2 in April 2023), this was the first time that they had been subjected to comprehensive laboratory testing.
We examined 30 sambar and published our results in two editions of Australian Deer (Slee and Presidente in Volume 6 Numbers 4 and 5 from August and October 1981). As we had suspected, our Victorian sambar were found to be a pretty healthy lot.
No external parasites such as lice or mites were found. However, many deer carried a small number of tiny worms (the thickness of a hair and less than a centimetre in length) in their abomasum (fourth stomach), numbers that were insignificant so far as the health of these animals was concerned. Of the three species found, one was specific to deer while the other two were also found in livestock.
One sambar stag was found to have a golf ball-sized area of inflamed tissue in its liver due to a migrating liver fluke. The source of the infestation was obvious as there were feral cattle in the area where it had been shot and cattle are a known host of this parasite.
Since the 1980s only one other parasite has been found in a sambar to my knowledge: sheep bot fly larvae in the nasal cavity of a sambar stag shot in bush adjoining farmland. Again, this was a situation where sheep on the nearby farmland were the source.
Blood samples that were tested for leptospirosis and brucellosis returned negative results. Samples were also tested for evidence of viruses that infect cattle and humans. Nothing of any significance was found, although a few results indicated that deer occasionally picked up virus infections that probably originated from cattle.
Hog deer on Blond Bay State Game Reserve and on Boole Poole Peninsula, like the sambar tested, were free of external parasites but generally carried small numbers of internal parasites that were of little or no relevance so far as their health was concerned.
One disease diagnosis made at Blond Bay among hog deer was malignant catarrhal fever (MCF), a uniformly fatal disease in this species (and in other ruminants such as rusa, Père David’s deer, banteng and bison). The virus that causes this disease is carried by sheep and goats as an inapparent infection and is transmitted to vulnerable deer through close contact, by biting insects or by flies. Diseased deer are not infectious to other animals. Again, this is an example of livestock infecting deer, not the other way round and is probably one reason why hog deer are more common on isolated islands and peninsulas rather than on mainland areas.
Whenever deer are mentioned by lobby groups, in the popular press or on the web, the spectre that these animals are reservoirs for diseases and parasites of livestock is raised. Our findings from 40 years ago demonstrated that the opposite is true, that our sambar and hog deer are very heathy and virtually free of parasites and diseases. Nothing has changed since that time!
If anyone tries to tell you that Australia’s wild deer are a disease threat set them straight. Any finger pointing in that regard is totally unwarranted.
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