Government Documents, with a Focus on Chronic Wasting Disease

I'm sorry, but I really just don't find government documents to be that interesting. In fact, I don't know of very many people who do. What I did find interesting this week, however, was some of the information about Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD). A large part of this was because I live/lived in two of the states mentioned as suffering from CWD, Wisconsin and West Virginia. What also interested me was that, after glancing at this week's articles over the weekend, I noticed front-page news in the Wisconsin State Journal on Monday about CWD: Politics, deer hunt tradition undermine fight against CWD, experts say. Some of the points mentioned in the newspaper article agree with Eschenfelder and Miller's article, such as the question of whether the government is supplying enough information for citizens to make informed decisions. At best, the newspaper article would indicate that Wisconsin is falling into the "attentive citizen" model, although the fact that public opinion doesn't figure into policy-making would imply that Wisconsin is more closely following the "private citizen" model. I doubt anyone would argue that Wisconsin is falling into the "deliberative citizen" model, because they clearly have an agenda about controlling the disease, and thus are probably withholding some of the information that they have, such as the debate regarding how dangerous eating the meat of infected animals is or whether one infected deer is likely to infect an entire herd. However, even with this skewed portrayal of the information, hunters are rejecting some of the policies in place, choosing not to hunt instead of dealing with policies that don't make sense to them. That in itself should be enough to suggest that hunters aren't being supplied with enough information. Why do you have to kill a doe before you can kill a buck? Is it because females become infected more easily than males? Or is it because they want to reduce the reproductive viability of the herd? I have a feeling that it's more the latter, but there could be entirely other reasons that I didn't even think of that is influencing the policy decisions. The American populace is a bit smarter than our politicians often believe, and we're not going to be happy when we're not getting the full story. CWD is an excellent case to examine, because it is a scientific problem, not a question of morals, and yet our government is essentially censoring information that it supplies to us. As librarians, we generally take a strong stance against censorship, and government documents are no exception. We should be providing our patrons with as much information as possible, good or bad, although it's important that we try to help them understand what is reliable information and what is just rhetoric. When the government fails to provide us with the information, we need to search it out elsewhere.