A lawsuit filed Thursday accuses top Texas Parks and Wildlife Department officials of overstepping their authority, violating the state’s open meetings law and discriminating against deer breeders when they took emergency measures this summer to curb the spread of chronic wasting disease in whitetails.

“We feel that captive-bred deer have been unfairly targeted and that this is not about chronic wasting disease, this is about trying to shut down the captive-bred deer industry,” said Jennifer Riggs, attorney for plaintiffs Ken Bailey and Bradly Peterson, deer breeders from the Houston area.

Her petition filed in state District Court in Travis County claims that the roughly 1,300 breeders in Texas have been “railroaded” by rules enacted by TPWD Executive Director Carter Smith that established increased testing requirements for the disease among the estimated 160,000 captive-bred deer in Texas and sharply limited their movement.

Five whitetails have tested positive for CWD since June, when the first such case in Texas was discovered at Texas Mountain Ranch in Medina County.

On Wednesday, state officials say, the remaining 177 deer in Robert Patterson’s herd there, which he said had numbered 238 when the state response began, were put down so that they can be tested.

State officials use post-mortem testing on the brain stem and thyroid glands to detect the disease but hope to switch next year to live-testing technology on tonsils and rectal tissue in order to reduce the number of euthanized deer.

A fatal form of spongiform encephalopathy similar to mad cow disease, CWD can be transmitted through blood, saliva, urine and feces.

Breeders aren’t compensated for stock they are required to euthanize for CWD testing, the lawsuit notes, but the state does plan to cover testing costs on hunter-harvested deer, which is voluntary under the emergency rules.

While not responding directly to the lawsuit’s allegations, TPWD spokesman Josh Havens said, “Texas has chosen a path of reasonable and prudent measures” to manage a disease that “has the potential to impact Texas’ 700,000 licensed deer hunters, their families and the thousands of people in rural communities across the state who rely on deer hunting for their livelihoods.”

Besides seeking a court order to void the emergency rules, the lawsuit also seeks to resolve the issue of whether captive-bred deer are wild animals that belong to Texas, as the state claims, or are the private property of those who raise them.

That issue also was raised in a lawsuit filed against TPWD officials in July by Patterson, but he dropped his lawsuit and agreed to a plan to screen his deer for CWD.

“Total depopulation of (Patterson’s) herd had always been a possibility, but we agreed to a phased approach, including more testing, with the understanding that more CWD-positive tests would necessitate euthanizing the entire herd in order to mitigate any further spread,” Havens said.

Four Medina County deer have been found with CWD, and another deer tested positive at a Lavaca County ranch that did business with Patterson’s ranch, officials say.

Although CWD has been found in 23 states and two Canadian provinces since it was first identified in Colorado in 1967, it was previously only found in Texas among mule deer in isolated herds near El Paso.

The discovery of infected whitetails sent state officials scrambling to develop a response plan and exacerbated a rift between deer breeders and wildlife advocates concerned about the state’s estimated 3.9 million wild deer.

Deer breeders decried the state rules as overkill. Others saw them as prudent, given the $2 billion economic value of Texas deer hunting. That divide was apparent in statements issued Friday on Wednesday’s lawsuit.

“Texas Parks and Wildlife must be held accountable for their unreasonable and heavy-handed response to the CWD situation,” said Patrick Tarlton, executive director of the Texas Deer Association.

But Jenny Sanders, executive director for Texans for Saving Our Hunting Heritage, said the lawsuit “highlights deer breeders’ unwillingness to be accountable for their actions in regard to risks posed to wild populations through the concentration, widespread movement and subsequent liberation of pen-raised breeder deer.”

The lawsuit names as defendants the TPWD; executive director Smith; the agency’s wildlife division director, Clayton Wolf; and its big-game program director, Mitch Lockwood.

It claims that an advisory task force developed the emergency rules behind closed doors and that Smith conferred with individual TPWD commissioners in a process “steeped in secrecy.”

The lawsuit also asserts that no true emergency exists and that TWPD officials overstepped their authority by enacting rules that conflict with pre-existing regulations.

“At best, there is no rational basis for the emergency rules,” the lawsuit says. “At worst, the defendants are simply using the documentation of CWD to target the deer-breeding industry for destruction.”