Ted Nugent Has Waged A Years-Long Standoff Over CWD With Texas Officials
"I am the fuckin' Alamo," Nugent told Public Domain.
Rightwing rocker Ted Nugent has defied Texas rules to contain chronic wasting disease, a contagious neurological disorder in deer, since his property outside Waco was flagged for exposure in the midst of a widespread outbreak in the state's deer breeding pens, Public Domain has learned.
The standoff between Texas wildlife officials and Nugent, a prominent CWD skeptic, is among the most brazen challenges to the state’s authority over deer management since the disease started popping up without a clear explanation in a string of far-flung deer breeder pens in 2021.
Nugent has referenced his dispute with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department on his podcast, Spirit Campfire, but TPWD had not addressed the conflict publicly. Public Domain asked about it after obtaining documents detailing the conflict through an open records request.
TPWD declined an interview request to discuss the issue, but a spokesperson acknowledged the conflict in a statement. A game warden ticketed Nugent for a low-level misdemeanor last year.
But Nugent told Public Domain he still refuses to submit harvest logs or CWD tests to the state and has no intention of backing down.
"I don't know if there are free Texans anymore, but I am," Nugent said. "I am the fuckin' Alamo."
The rift comes amidst a broad effort from state wildlife officials to keep the CWD outbreak in breeder pens from infecting wild deer. Texas is home to a sizable deer-breeding industry that pen-raises animals for release on high-fenced game ranches for paying hunters to shoot.
Wildlife biologists widely view CWD as the single-greatest threat to the country's deer herds. Like mad cow in cattle or Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, CWD causes brain proteins called "prions" to misfold in deer, leading to a prolonged death by neurodegeneration. Once it gets into a wild herd, state wildlife managers have not been able to remove it.
Texas officials have systematically killed several captive herds after infection in recent years to contain the disease. Under Texas law, captive deer are still considered wildlife, which is owned by the public and managed by the state. Texas wildlife officials have the legal authority to enter breeding pens on private property to destroy infected herds.
Nugent is not a breeder himself. He owns high-fenced land outside Waco, which contains both exotic game and whitetail deer. He said he received deer from a breeder friend named Chuck Frazier, whose operation, Lone Wolf Whitetails, later tested positive for CWD. The state killed the herd to prevent further spread.
The outbreak at Frazier’s operation led TPWD to flag Nugent's property as a "trace facility" as early as 2023. Texas wildlife officials issued Nugent a herd plan that required him to submit CWD tests for all hunter-killed deer, according to a TPWD spokesperson. Authorities planned to release his property from the herd plan if tests did not detect CWD from 60 consecutive deer.
Nugent responded by refusing to submit the required lymph node samples for CWD testing or harvest logs for the deer he killed on his property. He told Public Domain that he continued to hunt there, donating the excess meat.
“I’m like Mother Teresa with a bow and arrow,” Nugent said. “Texas Parks and Wildlife wants to put a stop to that.”
When the hunting season closed in 2023, TPWD issued him a written warning. When Nugent still refused to submit the tests and logs the following year, a game warden issued him a ticket.
State Rep. Pat Curry (R-Waco) interceded on Nugent's behalf over the ticket, records obtained by Public Domain show. (Curry attracted national attention a few months later by filing a bill that would have abolished TPWD. Nugent said he supported the idea and that he was among several people he knew who had urged Curry to pursue it.)
Nugent said he hired an attorney and eventually paid $300 for the ticket, but would continue to flout the rules, challenging state officials to compel him.
“I dared the motherfuckers to come on to my property,” Nugent said.
He criticized the state’s depopulation policies as cruel to animals. And he questioned the accuracy of the state’s testing, noting that Texas officials swiftly killed a research herd at Kerr Wildlife Management Area over a suspect positive from a young buck that was not confirmed by later tests.
The state does not typically depopulate release sites like it does breeder pens, lowering the stakes for Nugent. But the conflict highlights a lack of teeth in regulations that has frustrated conservation groups concerned about the spread of CWD.
Jenny Sanders, an East Texas landowner who has pushed for stricter regulation of the deer breeding industry, shared documents obtained through open records showing that dozens of trace sites that received exposed deer had not complied with testing requirements as of 2023.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that Ted Nugent isn’t doing it — nobody’s doing it,” Sanders said. “We probably know about a very small amount of the actual CWD that's out there, when you look at how many deer have been sent to release sites from positive facilities. There's no way to know, and there’s no recourse.”
Former TPWD Big Game Program Director Mitch Lockwood, who oversaw CWD containment for years, acknowledged widespread noncompliance with testing requirements at trace-out release sites. He was unaware of the dispute with Nugent, but said wildlife officials had the authority to remove exposed deer to contain the disease.
“Quite frankly, when they know trace-out deer have been released on that place, they should make an effort to go recover those deer,” Lockwood said.
Nugent, a lifelong bowhunter, has a long history of publicly challenging the scientific consensus on CWD, dismissing the possibility that it could jump to humans and contending that the disease has yet to cause major population declines since it was discovered at a Colorado research facility in 1967.
"Every state agency is lying," Nugent said. "It's not a concern. It's never hurt a herd and no one's ever got it.”
“We eat the venison and we're fine,” he added. “There's no other test.”
James Kroll, a wildlife biologist who once served as Wisconsin’s deer czar and is friends with Nugent, said he agreed that concerns about CWD were overblown, and worried that unfounded fears of the disease could present an existential threat to hunting. He said research scientists and wildlife professionals feel justified in targeting the deer breeding industry because as a group they already oppose many of its practices, like high-fencing property, baiting deer or feeding them to boost antler size.
“The sad thing is it’s evolved away from a scientific, biological issue,” Kroll told Public Domain. “It’s really a political issue.”
Kroll felt confident that genetic research developed by Texas A&M scientist Chris Seabury may help breeders control CWD spread in their pens. But Kroll also favored measures to reduce the spread, like controlling carcass movement across state lines.
“My position is pure and simple skepticism,” Kroll said. “I don’t want people overreacting. By overreacting it causes things like fights between Parks and Wildlife and Ted Nugent. That just stirs up trouble between people when we ought to be supporting our agency. We’re all in this together.”
Both men's views stand well outside the scientific consensus on CWD, according to Kip Adams, the National Deer Association’s chief conservation officer.
"There's very few people in that camp," Adams said. "The vast majority of wildlife professionals are in agreement on the severity of the disease."
More than a dozen conservation groups — including the Texas Wildlife Association, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, and the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association — signed a letter this month urging Texas lawmakers to “support reasonable oversight of the captive deer-breeding industry in Texas” in light of the sustained outbreak of CWD, calling the disease a “serious threat to Texas private lands, rural economies, and our hunting heritage.”
A growing body of research on high-prevalence herds indicates that CWD leads to higher death rates for older bucks and significant population declines as infection rates rise, with CWD-infected deer becoming more likely to die from predation than healthy ones.