Chronic Wasting Disease Strikes Montana And Continues Its March On Yellowstone
As Wyoming Continues To Deny The Threat Posed By Feedgrounds, Critics Say Federal And State Agencies Demonstrate Epic Dysfunction For Their Lack Of A Coordinated Plan
At the Wyoming Game and Fish
Department, officials there have made it abundantly clear they frown upon
“the celebritization” of wildlife. Over the years, field personnel have been
dismissive whenever members of the general public have given individual animals
nicknames, such as the case with famous grizzly bears in Jackson Hole.
Game and Fish managers insist
that naming wildlife causes humans to anthropomorphize animals, and it puts too
much emphasis on individuals when the department, they say, is devoted to
stewarding species at the population level.
Not long ago, Game and Fish
researchers broke their own rule when they bestowed a moniker on a wild wapiti
mother kept in captivity. She wore ear tag No. 12 and they dubbed her “Lucky”.
Lucky was born a wild cow elk
who initially survived a close brush with doom. For those studying Chronic
Wasting Disease, she represents either a cryptic symbol of hope for the
persistence of elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, or, in the eyes of
scientists thinking about zoonotic diseases, a frightening potential harbinger.
In 2002, 39 healthy elk calves
were captured at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming and
transported across the state to a research facility at Sybille Canyon near the
town of Wheatland. There, the young ungulates were placed in pens.
Over the course of a decade,
every single one contracted CWD and perished—all except for Lucky.
The rate of CWD’s lethality,
involving wapiti guinea pigs like these, speaks to the disease’s virulent
progression especially among deer family members grouped in tight quarters and
exposed to disease. Similar outcomes have been mirrored in game farm settings
involving captive privately-owned deer and elk.
While mortifying, the high
casualty rate at Sybille was not the most disconcerting aspect of the
experiment overseen by wildlife veterinarian and researcher Dr. Brant
Schumaker.
"Lucky" the cow elk, pictured here at the state-run Thomas Thorne/Elizabeth Williams Wildlife Research Center at Sybille, Wyoming. Lucky then, in 2015, was a CWD survivor, 13 years old and weighing 600 pounds. Photo: Wyoming Game and Fish Department
Sybille is a facility named
in honor of two of Wyoming’s best-known modern wildlife researchers, the late
husband and wife team of Drs. Thomas Thorne and Beth Williams. Ironically, the
late Dr. Thorne, who served as Wyoming’s state wildlife veterinarian, once
chastised conservationists, branding them alarmists for raising concerns about
CWD and calling for Wyoming’s feedgrounds to be mothballed. He asserted the
disease would spread slowly across the state of Wyoming and likely would have
modest impacts on elk compared to deer.
Time, however, has already
proved some of those sanguine predictions made by Thorne and others to be
wrong. CWD is actually spreading more rapidly across North America than many
thought possible and it is leaving behind a lethal trail.
So concerning is CWD among
hunters and others in America that this fall there’s been a national shortage
of test kits available for hunters to collect samples from game animals they have harvested and send them into labs
for analysis. The federal Centers for Disease Control recommends that all
ungulates killed in CWD-endemic areas first be tested before meat is eaten and
states say that any sick animals should be discarded.
In Montana, for the first time
ever, concern about the disease was elevated to high alert. Early in November
2017, a test confirmed Montana’s first-ever case of CWD in a wild cervid. The
diagnosis was based on tissue samples taken from a dead mule deer buck
harvested near Bridger just north of the Montana-Wyoming state line.
Confirmation came ironically on the same day the Montana Fish Wildlife and
Parks Department began circulating a draft CWD action plan for public review.
On Nov. 14, 2017, a second dead
mule deer buck was confirmed to be CWD-positive. This animal was shot a few
miles south of Bridger near Belfry—a tiny town near Red Lodge on the
northeastern corner of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
On November 15, 2017, the
Wyoming Game and Fish Department announced that yet another CWD-positive
hunt area had been added to its map of CWD-endemic areas that now blanket most of the
state. A white-taiedl deer buck had turned up positive near Meeteetse on the eastern tier of Greater Yellowstone. “That hunt area and three others recently added are proof that this
disease, in terms of landscape it is reaching, continues to expand millions of
acres each year,” says Lloyd Dorsey, conservation director for the Wyoming
state chapter of the Sierra Club. Dorsey, an elk and deer hunter, added this,
referencing a map (see it below) showing the progression of the disease in
Wyoming that was prepared by the Sierra Club and Wyoming Wildlife Advocates. “I
see no reason to believe that CWD will not advance through Montana as
quickly it has through Wyoming.”
To see the map, and what it
portends, should be a chastening moment for Montana hunters, notes Glenn
Hockett of Bozeman, president of the Gallatin Wildlife Association that has
joined other groups in Wyoming in suing to have the Wyoming feedgrounds closed.
Foreshadowing the spread across Montana? CWD was first diagnosed in southeastern Wyoming (marked in yellow) and over the last three decades has expanded in deer herds. The disease, in November 2017, was diagnosed for the first time ever in Montana wildlife just north of the state border with Wyoming and is now racing toward the heart of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Imagine this map flipped sideways to indicate a possible progression northward into Montana. “I see no reason not to believe that CWD will not advance through Montana as quickly it has through Wyoming,” says Lloyd Dorsey, hunter and conservation director for the Wyoming state chapter of the Sierra Club.
Lucky the elk was two years old
when Thorne and Williams died tragically in an auto wreck in 2004. Along with
colleagues, Thorne and Williams were key proponents of the elk experiment at
Sybille, intended to provide insights into how animals catch CWD, how it is
spread and what prospects, if any, there might be for carriers surviving
it.
Before proceeding further here,
let us again state an important fact that is still true as of November 2017: there has not been a single documented case of a human coming down with CWD or
a prion-related disease after eating a CWD-infected deer or elk.
Several experts I interviewed
are not optimistic that will always be the case. Given the ability of prion
diseases to manifest themselves in different kinds of strains in different
mammals, it is likely that eventually the species barrier, currently keeping
CWD a deer-family-only disease, will be breached. The rationale behind their
thinking will be explored later.
° ° °
So what is the most disturbing
aspect of the Wyoming study involving Lucky the elk that CWD experts find so
unsettling?
Lucky’s wapiti cohort group
contracted CWD naturally—simply by being placed in an environment where
diseased animals previously had been. Researchers didn’t have to do anything to
overtly expose the elk to CWD through feed or injection; they merely kept them
in pens where CWD had been present and yet its disease-causing prions persisted
after sickened animals were removed.
Prions, microscopic misshapen
CWD proteins, had entered the soil at Sybille, shed through urine, feces,
saliva, possibly in tissue decomposition of dead animals, and likely also
became bound to surfaces in Sybille’s captive settings. Even modest attempts at
decontamination, paralleling what’s happened at other sites in other states,
did not kill them off. Prions are notoriously difficult to destroy.
Today, this is the question—the
big one—looming over the heads of public land managers, wildlife officials,
private landowners, public health officials, hunters and the general public
dealing with the specter of CWD. It has implications for the northern
Rockies and every other corner of North America where CWD has become endemic or
will be.
If environmental
contamination could happen at Sybille with such devastating results, what could
CWD’s arrival on the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole and Wyoming’s 22
feedgrounds mean?
These are landscapes where,
every year, roughly 22,000 elk arrive and bunch up in high unnatural densities
around artificial human-created forage lines. Elk, in fact, are heading to
feedgrounds right now.
At the feedgrounds, wapiti
hordes will come in close physical contact with each other; they will urinate
and defecate onto the artificial feed and available natural grass they are
ingesting; in turn, their wastes will seep into the soil.
Not a single elk or deer has
turned up to be CWD positive in these wild feedlot settings yet. However, just
as Montana knew that CWD’s confirmation in the state was imminent, so, too, do those in charge of the feedground complexes in western Wyoming.
If and when just a single
CWD-infected animal arrives, the animal is likely to be asymptomatic as the
disease can have long incubation times lasting between months and years in a host.
A doomed elk may appear healthy yet its wastes will get deposited into
the ground and linger—for how long no one knows.
With more animals getting
exposed and then sickened, prion contamination would, ostensibly,
bio-accumulate, becoming established in the land, carried potentially in
surface water and, as studies have also demonstrated, possibly taken up in
living rangeland plants. (Laboratory research has shown that prions can exist in
plants, including tomatoes, alfalfa
and corn—one of the most universally-used grains in food production.)
Think of this happening winter after winter, year after year: contamination at the Elk Refuge and feedgrounds would start modestly with one animal that creates a tiny toxic hot spot to which hundreds or thousands of other elk and deer would be possibly exposed over time.
Infected CWD animals don’t even
need to come in direct contact with other elk, deer or moose, because they can
shed and leave behind infectious prions in the environment. Stricken ungulates
only need to have been there.
Think of this happening winter
after winter, year after year: contamination at the Elk Refuge and feedgrounds
would start modestly with one animal that creates a tiny toxic hot spot to
which hundreds or thousands of other elk and deer would be possibly exposed
over time.
If infection sets in at the
feedgrounds, CWD would also be transported through living animals to distant
summer ranges across lines humans draw on maps, seeding prions shed via feces,
urine, saliva and death into other landscapes, creating new environmental zones
of infection and exposure.
Some Wyoming Game and Fish
officials have claimed that, in the wild, under ordinary lower ungulate
densities, CWD exists as a low-grade, slow-moving menace. But the Elk Refuge
and feedgrounds are anything but normal, experts say, and for those who have
studied CWD, managed ungulates and are worried about the disease’s progression,
they see the feedgrounds as both a CWD gateway and a disease
accelerator. As you read these words, CWD infection is rising rapidly in
mule deer in southeastern Wyoming and there is concern herds will be decimated
if not rendered extinct.
“We’ve been courteous to Wyoming
and respectful of the argument that states don’t interfere with the way other
states do business, but when another state does things that affect the quality
of life and resources that citizens in Montana value and hold dear, there comes
a time when you run out of patience." —Dan Vermillion, chairman
of the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission
Dan Vermillion, chairman of the
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission, whose members are appointed by
Gov. Steve Bullock, said there is growing indignation toward Wyoming over its
operation of feedgrounds. “We’ve been so focused in this state on brucellosis
and trying to do spatial and temporal separation to keep elk and bison away
from ag producers. CWD was kind of placed on the backburner of worries. Now we
have cases and it’s time to confront it head-on,” he said.
Brucellosis, Vermillion noted,
is not a population-limiting disease; CWD as it settles in can be devastating
and the best strategy is to stop any activities that would make it worse.
“To me, the arrival of CWD is
terrifying and it’s heartbreaking the more I learn about the science and the
potential it has to harm our game herds which have contributed to the state’s
reputation for being the last, best place. Common sense, in the face of a
disease event, points to getting rid of the feedgrounds. It’s clear that they
[feedgrounds] increase the probability of making CWD’s impact a lot worse and
affecting the progression of disease so that it moves into deer and elk a lot
faster.”
Vermillion compares CWD to a
massive outbreak of exotic weeds originating on one landowner’s property and
bearing down on adjacent ranches, threatening to overtake their rangeland.
“We’ve been courteous to Wyoming
and respectful of the argument that states don’t interfere with the way other
states do business, but when another state does things that affect the quality
of life and resources that citizens in Montana value and hold dear, there comes
a time when you run out of patience,” he said.
° ° °
Before we progress further, a journalist’s acknowledgment is in order. One challenge in writing about CWD is
balancing the significant fears being expressed by those involved with tracking
the disease against those who claim that because CWD isn’t an ecological or
human health problem, it never will be.
The topic that wildlife managers
are wary about discussing publicly is this: If hunters worry in mass
about the potential risks of exposing themselves and their families to disease,
they may stop hunting and buying licenses, the fees of which fund their
agencies. They also note that hunters are a key tool—human harvest of
animals—that adds an option managers have for reducing ungulate herds.
Another area of controversy is
the reluctance of state wildlife agencies to acknowledge the important role
wildlife predators and scavengers—wolves, grizzlies, cougars and coyotes
play—in slowing infectious disease progression by killing weak and sickened
prey species. This will be addressed in a coming standalone story.
° ° °
As Eric Cole, senior biologist
with the Elk Refuge noted in a startling memo circulated in early 2017, CWD’s
arrival in western Wyoming is imminent. And his warning about its advance was corroborated by
the disease’s recent diagnosis in mule deer east of Red Lodge, in the
Shoshone National Forest between Cody and Yellowstone National Park, and in Wyoming
near the towns of Pinedale, Lander, Dubois, and Thayne.
A few years ago, a moose
afflicted with CWD was found dead south of Jackson Hole in the southern reaches
of Greater Yellowstone, thus giving Wyoming, along with Colorado and Alberta,
the dubious distinction of having CWD present in all four of its wild deer
family members.
Wyoming, like Montana, has
increased the intensity and scope of its surveillance, particularly in areas
described as “the western front,” meaning the mountains along the Continental
Divide and in wildlife corridors leading into Greater Yellowstone.
Like Montana and Idaho, Wyoming
and the Elk Refuge tests animals killed by hunters, roadkills, “sick-looking”
animals, and they target individuals that represent different age classes in
the herds. Wyoming has collected over 56,000 samples, the vast majority from
mule deer. Testing, however, is a useful metric not for stating definitely where
CWD is, but where it has been. By the time an animal tests positive for
disease, CWD very likely, experts say, has been there awhile.
Now with CWD in Montana and two
mule deer coming up positive, there is wide speculation about how the state
will respond. Will Montana move to “depopulate”—i.e. destroy all animals within a
given locale of where the disease is found?
If 38 elk out of 39 at Sybille
became stricken and died, how might that rate of infection be extrapolated to
wild settings? The elk calves removed from the Elk Refuge and raised at
Sybille have a genetic make-up—an MM genotype— that is widespread and the most
common in western Wyoming elk herds. Lucky had different genotype—LL—that
exists in two percent of a normal population. Some elk also carry a third
genotype (ML) that, for some reason, has a resistance characteristic that
delays infection but still is 100 percent lethal.
° ° °
For even better reading away from the screen, print off this MoJo story and give a copy to your friends.
Montana has its own checkered past
involving hypocrisy with the way it confronts wildlife
diseases, says the Gallatin Wildlife Association’s Glenn Hockett.
Montana’s strategy toward
confronting another disease, brucellosis, was focused for decades almost
exclusively on wandering Yellowstone bison known to be carriers of the Brucella abortus bacteria. However, a panel of scientific experts recently noted that the state
has been focusing on the wrong animal. Elk represent the greatest possible
threat for wildlife transmitting disease to cattle.
Some argue that CWD should not
be discussed as a human health risk because there has never been a documented
case of the disease sickening and killing a person. There also has never been a
single documented case of a wild Yellowstone bison transmitting brucellosis to
a domestic beef cow, yet 10,300 bison, members of the most iconic bison
herd in the world, have been felled since 1985—and more will be this winter—based on the
mere possibility transmission could happen.
Tens of millions of public tax
dollars have been spent targeting and slaughtering wandering park bison based
on that premise, but it’s a premise that has been scientifically disproved.
Every case in which brucellosis
has been transmitted from wildlife to cattle has involved elk, not bison. As
the findings of a major fact-finding study, released in 2017 by the National
Academies of Sciences revealed, the greatest threat of possible brucellosis
transmission from wildlife to cattle comes from infected elk. The National
Academy is the most respected scientific body in the world.
Montana has its own checkered involving hypocrisy with the way it confronts wildlife
diseases, says the Gallatin Wildlife Association’s Glenn Hockett.
The Elk Refuge and the Wyoming
feedgrounds, its report noted, are also the largest concentrated reservoirs for
brucellosis-infected wildlife in the ecosystem.
Within the ranks of professional
wildlife managers, there’s no disagreement that feedgrounds have made the
amplification of brucellosis in wild elk herds worse. And there is little
disagreement that CWD infection is likely to follow the same pattern.
The coup de grace of Eric Cole’s
frank remarks was this, for it has direct implications for Montana and Idaho,
whose elk herds mix with those emanating from Jackson Hole: “Various elk
migration studies and research on another disease prevalent on the Elk
Refuge—brucellosis—suggest that the current feeding regime and its associated
high concentrations of elk could be a source of CWD infection for cervids
through[out] the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.”
Along with the National Academy,
the most reputable professional wildlife management organizations in the U.S.
say that supplemental feeding of wildlife goes against the best management
practices of maintaining health in big game herds.
° ° °
The Greater Yellowstone
Coordinating Committee is comprised of senior managers from all of the federal
agencies overseeing public lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and it
interfaces with representatives from the states. The organization is supposed
to serve as a nexus, touting itself as being at the forefront of bioregional
thinking and planning. Yet critics say its discombobulated approach to addressing
wildlife diseases reveals major flaws, causing some to wonder why it even
exists.
The GYCC, as of yet, has no
coordinated strategy for confronting climate change, or dealing with
private-land growth issues threatening the environmental health of public
lands, or for assessing the swelling impacts of outdoor recreation on wildlife. In addition, it is doing little to reconcile profound contradictions that exist in management philosophy
between government agencies whose public lands exist side by side.
What are its goals for the region?
Never has it generated a clear vision. And different agencies on many issues
remain entrenched in their own bureaucratic silos. In some cases, agencies are
working at direct cross-purposes, meaning one agency uses public tax dollars to
stake out a management agenda that undermines the conservation missions of
other agencies.
When I phoned the GYCC,
headquartered in Bozeman, and asked if there was a strategy for confronting
CWD, I was referred to Brian Glaspell, the new chief manager at the National
Elk Refuge.
“The general vibe coming from
that organization [GYCC] is we both strive to coordinate conservation
objectives aimed at the ecosystem scale and support one another in meeting our
individual objectives,” Glaspell explained.
So is there an integrated plan
of attack for addressing CWD, I asked Glaspell. No, there is not, he said.
Leaders of GYCC, even though
they are well aware of the potential severe consequences of CWD striking
ecosystem ungulate herds, have been reluctant to pressure the Elk Refuge and
the state of Wyoming to close the feedgrounds.
Wyoming’s state management plan,
Glaspell says, doesn’t clearly spell out what aggressive actions will be
implemented, only vaguely referencing that changes might be warranted when and
if CWD arrives. The same criticism is being leveled by conservationists against
Montana’s recently proposed CWD strategy. Only Idaho, as yet CWD-free, will discuss
the third-rail issue in their Action Plan, which is depopulating all cervids in
an infected area. If CWD clusters begin to be revealed through
post-mortem testing, will states move in to kill all of the elk and deer in
given locales?
Back in 1996, Beth Williams,
Thorne’s wife, responded to reports that CWD was present in a game farm in
Saskatchewan. She was asked what she would do if the disease turned up in wild
deer. Her recommendation: aggressive, thorough depopulation of deer.
“You’ll have to be aggressive; remove all sources and all potential
movement. Cut wider and deeper than you ever think necessary,” she said. “The
deer will come back; but you’ll get one chance. If CWD gets widely established,
you’ll have it for a very long time.” Blow the opportunity to contain it
and there is no turning back.
Such a strategy of “killing the
herd in order to save it” is as preposterous to some as feeding elk in order to
keep them healthy but actually fostering conditions that could lead to their
destruction.
When the National Academy
released its report on brucellosis, this was one of its highlighted findings:
“Evidence suggests that incremental closure of feedgrounds could reduce the
prevalence of the disease in the broader elk population and could benefit
overall elk health in the long term. The committee recommended that state
and federal land managers take a strategic, stepwise, science-based approach to
analyzing and evaluating how the closure of feedgrounds would affect elk
health, risk of transmission to cattle, and brucellosis prevalence.”
A scientist on the National
Academy review team said it also applies to CWD.
The government entity well
positioned to help coordinate and encourage that charge may be the GYCC. How
disorganized is the GYCC on the monumentally-important issue of CWD?
Who is in charge of confronting
CWD throughout the Greater Yellowstone region? Answer: no one is.
Consider this: Yellowstone
National Park Supt. Dan Wenk and his staff—one member of GYCC— are direly
afraid of the consequences the disease will have on wildlife in the most famous
nature preserve in the world. However, the future of Yellowstone depends on the
attitudes and actions taken by her neighbors.
Another GYCC member, Grand Teton
National Park, has the same world-class wildlife values in play and it shares a
fenceline with both Yellowstone and the Elk Refuge, yet it has been
conspicuously silent about CWD’s threat to wildlife.
Meanwhile, another GYCC member,
the Elk Refuge, is administered by a sister agency to the Park Service in the Interior Department, the Fish and Wildlife Service. It is carrying out
management practices that its own scientists have acknowledged are violating
federal law pertaining to wildlife health by keeping the feedgrounds open.
Former refuge managers and scientists have, for years, pleaded with their
bureaucratic superiors to phase-out feeding, only to be overruled, in large
part owed to opposition from Wyoming politicians.
Still another federal agency and
GYCC member, the Bridger-Teton National Forest, which reports to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, has been complicit with the state of Wyoming in
ignoring the science and keeping the feedgrounds open. As has the Bureau of
Land Management, another GYCC member, under the Department of the Interior.
On top of it all, Wyoming,
Montana and Idaho each have separate CWD action plans that are vague and
theoretical when it comes to dealing with CWD. Who is in charge of confronting
CWD throughout the Greater Yellowstone region? Answer: no one is.
° ° °
Piecemeal approaches to managing
big landscapes like Greater Yellowstone are costly, inefficient and
ineffective, especially with wildlife issues. The legacy of management
approaches to logging, mining, and oil and gas development on national forests
and BLM lands, and livestock grazing inside Grand Teton Park are evidence of
that.
In the defense of Elk Refuge
manager Brian Glaspell, who recently arrived at the refuge, he didn’t create the
problem; he inherited it. The people who have been calling the shots are way,
way above his pay grade.
Montana State Senator Mike
Phillips says there is a person who could break the logjam of inaction: it’s
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Zinke, a Montanan, holds ultimate sway
over the Park Service, BLM, and pivotally, the Fish and Wildlife Service. He
could issue an executive order, and he could request that Agriculture Secretary
Sonny Purdue, who has jurisdiction over the Forest Service, mandate change.
“Secretary Zinke could make it
clear to the National Elk Refuge that feeding must be stopped and his Interior
Department could lead the charge into a new era of enlightened wildlife
management.” Phillips said. “The Secretary has said he cares about the
environment and wants to be a man of action. Here’s the perfect obvious place
for him to demonstrate it, to do something that’s vitally important to the
interests of sportsmen and all wildlife-loving Americans.”
Phillips, a nationally noted
wildlife biologist whose day job is leading the Turner Endangered Species Fund,
formerly worked as a canid specialist for both the Fish and Wildlife Service
and Park Service. He co-authored a joint resolution in the state
legislature that condemned Wyoming for its continuation of artificial feeding.
On February 24, 2017 in a rare display of bi-partisanship, the Montana Senate
passed the resolution 50-0, calling upon Wyoming to stop its elk feeding
programs.
The impacts of CWD will reach
into every corner of Greater Yellowstone, across state, county and community
lines, affecting quality of life for the region’s 450,000 residents who share a
common love for wildlife values. It will affect hunters and wildlife watchers,
safari company operators, and the experience known to millions of visitors each
year.
“With CWD upon us in Montana
now, the number one goal should be to end the largest wildlife feeding program
on the planet; it’s a ticking time bomb and its destructive aspects are well
known,” said Nick Gevock, conservation director at the Montana Wildlife
Federation and former environmental journalist.
° ° °
Behind closed doors, local
depopulation scenarios have been discussed as options not just to swiftly
remove CWD-infected animals but to prevent perpetual CWD contamination zones
from being created in the environment.
During the 1990s when Montana voters
outlawed private game farms due to zoonotic disease concerns, Idaho too started
to worry about CWD; in fact, one aspect of Idaho’s CWD action plan lists
aggressive deposition within a radius of where CWD turns up.
Montana prohibits the feeding of
wild elk. Idaho still permits it during harsh winters and has sent signals it
may end the practice. The outlawing of feeding is based on concerns,
expressed by both states’ Department of Livestock, that feeding wildlife
increases the incidence of brucellosis and puts game animals at risk to
catching other virulent diseases, including CWD and bovine tuberculosis.
In an article written for The
Wildlife Society, retired Elk Refuge biologist Bruce Smith noted that
“Colorado tried to reduce CWD in wild mule deer through experimental herd
reductions. Wisconsin went a step further: After finding CWD in deer in 2002,
the state’s Department of Natural Resources sought complete eradication by
killing thousands of white-tailed deer with special hunts and culling programs
designed to reduce deer densities. Unfortunately, those states’ efforts have
met with limited success.”
In states like Wisconsin,
wildlife officials have, at times, resorted to depopulating local white-tail
deer herds and incinerating the carcasses to kill prions but the geographic
area where CWD is found in Wisconsin continues to expand. Why? Most experts say
because of environmental contamination, exacerbated too by the fact that
property owners feeding deer still happens prolifically in Wisconsin.
Montana State Senator Mike
Phillips says there is a person who could break the logjam of inaction: it’s
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. "Secretary Zinke could make it clear to the
National Elk Refuge that feeding must be stopped and his Interior Department
could lead the charge into a new era of enlightened wildlife management.”
Smith added that “in Illinois,
on the other hand, 10 years of government culling of white-tailed deer in areas
of new CWD infections has limited disease prevalence to 1 percent. By
comparison, prevalence climbed to 5 percent after localized culling in
Wisconsin ceased in 2007. A prescription to similarly limit CWD infections
of elk crowded on feedgrounds would compel the culling of very large numbers of
animals.”
Picture this scenario playing
out in Jackson Hole along U.S. Highway 191: sharpshooters enlisted to basically
destroy a significant percentage of the most iconic elk herd in America,
carried out on the National Elk Refuge. Wapiti would have to be mowed
down and removed in order to prevent the refuge from turning into a massive
contamination zone.
In evidence submitted during a
lawsuit brought by EarthJustice attorney Tim Preso against the Fish and
Wildlife Service and National Elk Refuge, he introduced a document in which a
regional refuge chief for the Fish and Wildlife Service admitted that even
reduced feeding operation would, with CWD present, threaten to “create a Super
Fund Disease Toxic Site on the [National Elk] refuge that would remain
contaminate for a very long time.”
When former Elk Refuge Manager
Barry Reiswig was asked by superiors in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s
regional office if he had a plan after the first CWD case was confirmed, he
said, “(1) Dig a big hole with a bulldozer or obtain an incinerator. (2) You
round up and shoot all suspect [diseased] animals. (3) You cover the hole
with dirt or incinerate all killed animals.”
Wyoming, in its recent CWD
action plan, does not prioritize de-population but what is its strategy for
attempted containment? The state already is carrying out two things that contrary to what most experts say is responsible wildlife management: it is running feedgrounds
and shooting predators, namely wolves, allowing open season on lobos across 85
percent of the state, for any reason, at any time of day, by any means. The state knows what is coming.
Two years ago, Game and Fish
representatives reached out to managers of the Teton County trash transfer
station, inquiring about the possibility of operating an incinerator there to
process the carcasses of CWD-infected elk and deer. Incineration is the only
sure way of destroying prions; however, what good is it to incinerate carcasses
if those same animals, over the course of their abbreviated living lives, were
shedding prions via urine, feces and saliva across the landscape?
In Danny Schmidt’s documentary
Feeding the Problem, Jackson Hole rancher Brad Mead, brother of Wyoming Gov.
Matt Mead, said, “From what I’ve heard about Chronic Wasting Disease, it’s not
a pretty thing to watch. And I have to believe that tourism would suffer, a
lot, if people driving by on the highway past the Elk Refuge saw animals dying
from Chronic Wasting Disease in the hundreds or the thousands.”
To prevent that scene from
materializing, which would be a public relations disaster for a valley that
promotes itself to the world as a mecca for wildlife watching, how will
agencies respond?
° ° °
Steve Kallin, Brian Glaspell’s
recent predecessor at the Elk Refuge who retired from his post in January 2017,
validated an assessment from the Sierra Club’s Dorsey in saying the
consequences of CWD’s arrival could be devastating. It isn’t like there will be
one epic dying event; herds will winnow over time and giving animals more feed
will not mitigate the mortality; in fact, experts say it could intensify the
impact of CWD’s arrival. And as Dorsey says, the first animal bringing disease
to the feedgrounds isn’t likely to be an elk but a deer.
“We have to remember this is an
always fatal disease for cervids,” Kallin told me. “It’s slow moving but it’s a
serious disease. We have to look at it honestly and pragmatically and address
it head on. This is not a manufactured scare tactic to promote a political
agenda.”
The impacts of CWD will reach
into every corner of Greater Yellowstone, across state, county and community
lines, affecting quality of life for the region’s 450,000 residents who share a
common love for wildlife values. It will affect hunters and wildlife watchers,
safari company operators, and the experience known to millions of visitors each
year.
Wyoming wildlife filmmaker Shane
Moore, whose Emmy-award-winning cinematic work is known around the world, and
who has made tracking the science of CWD a personal passion, says the general
public isn’t aware of how “game-changing” CWD’s arrival in Greater Yellowstone
could be.
The impacts will register in
wildlife and for people, from tourists to hunters, who travel from far away to
experience the ecosystem’s charismatic deer-family species and the things that
eat them.
Moore and Dorsey have been
outspoken in their reproach of the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Their
concerns are shared by Reiswig, Smith and Dr. Thomas Roffe, former national
chief of wildlife health for the Fish and Wildlife Service. In
Yellowstone, managers have no plans for how they will deal with haggard-looking
elk and mule deer in the spring that might be thin from enduring a winter in
Yellowstone or potentially stricken with CWD.
Will they shoot the animal? Will
they test all winterkilled animals? Will they remove carcasses on the
ground that serve as valuable food sources for predators and scavengers?
Will they start marking the place where CWD-positive elk have fallen and test
the soil for prions? If CWD strikes the Lamar Valley and the northern
range, which has been compared to a mini-American version of the Serengeti, how
will it disrupt the food chain? Park officials don’t know what they’ll
do.
At a wildlife disease symposium
on brucellosis hosted by the National Academies of Science in the summer of
2015, P.J. White, Yellowstone’s chief of wildlife and aquatic resources, made
reference to CWD: “Brucellosis isn't the only disease issue in town. We
have CWD about 40 miles from [Yellowstone] in mule deer. Which means it's
probably already in the park, we haven't detected it yet."
Just a few months later, a mule
deer infected with CWD was shot by a hunter about a dozen linear miles from
Yellowstone’s eastern border. A mule deer can easily cover that distance
between in a couple of hours. Another CWD mule deer was identified in Star
Valley, Wyoming near the Idaho state line. CWD is bearing down on the
heart of Greater Yellowstone from three directions.
° ° °
Dr. Don Davis, a former
researcher in veterinary medicine at Texas A & M and a defender of captive
game farming of wildlife, believes fears surrounding CWD are overblown. He sent
out a number of op-ed pieces to newspapers this fall.Among the points Davis emphasizes are
these:“First, CWD does not
affect people. It affects deer, elk, and moose, but there are no documented
cases in people. This isn't unusual; there are lots of things that affect cats,
dogs, horses, and wildlife that don't affect us, and vice versa,” he writes.
“Second, CWD has been around for decades. It was first detected in the wild 30
years ago in Colorado. Not only is the deer population still strong in the
Centennial State, but so is the hunting culture.”
Actually, the reality of the
portrait Davis paints is not nearly as sanguine in Colorado for deer and elk.
For years, Davis worked on various advisory panels making recommendations for
how wandering Yellowstone bison should be managed in Montana. Ironically, some
of those panels helped elevate an atmosphere of fear, exploited by Montana’s
Department of Livestock and the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service, that resulted in the slaughter of thousands of park
bison.
Where Dr. Davis downplays the
risk of CWD, citing lack of evidence, others say that waiting for an outbreak
of CWD to strike wildlife or the disease to reach people is naïve and
irresponsible.
° ° °
In early 2017, Dr. Valerius
Geist, David Clausen, former chair of the Wisconsin Natural Resources Board,
Vince Crichton, former co-chair of Canada’s National Wildlife Disease
Strategy, and Darrel Rowledge, director of Alliance for Public Wildlife,
published a white paper titled "The Challenge of CWD: Insidious and
Dire". You can read the full report here and read their executive
summary, published at Mountain Journal, by clicking here.
“Left unchecked, the prospects
for wildlife are bleak. CWD has clear population impacts; some models suggest
extinction. Disproportionate impact on mature males carries implications for
hunters and wildlife economies let alone populations. Still more bad news:
Efforts for vaccines have failed, and evolutionary or adaptive salvation is
unlikely and would be too late in any case,” they write. “CWD is now deemed to
be the largest-ever mass of infectious prions in global history, and experts
sum up the threat (to wildlife, agriculture, our economies, and potentially to
human health) in two words: ‘insidious and dire.’”
They estimate that hunting
families in North America are presently consuming between 7,000 and 15,000
CWD-infected animals annually. The number is growing exponentially. Many are
probably unaware their harvested animals are CWD carriers.
If readers aren’t concerned
about CWD yet, they will be after digesting what’s in the report—a distillation of
both comments from experts and articles published in the scientific literature. One
cause for concern, off the radar screen of ranchers and even food consumers, is the ability of prions to bind with plants, such as alfalfa (hay). Therefore, it means not only could exposure increase via plant material being consumed by livestock (which people eat) but also products that show up in
restaurants and the grocery store. And what about the widespread practice of moving hay around the landscape? Would hay produced in a CWD area need to be tested?
The report features excerpts
from Dr. Christopher Johnson, a scientist with the US. Geological Survey:
“Vegetation is ubiquitous in CWD-contaminated environments and plants are known
to absorb a variety of substances from soil, ranging from nutrients to
contaminants. The uptake of proteins from soil into plants has been documented
for many years and we have been investigating the uptake of prions into plants
in vitro. Using laser scanning confocal microscopy, we observed root uptake of
fluorescently-tagged, abnormal prion protein in the model plant Arabidopsis
thaliana, as well as the crop plants alfalfa (Medicago sativa), barley (Hordeum
vulgare) and tomato (Solanum lycopersicum).”
Studies showed that prion uptake
occurred in roots and was transferred to stems and leaves of those plants as
well as corn. “Both stems and leaves of A. thaliana grown in culture media
containing prions are infectious when injected into mice, and oral bioassays
are underway for A. thaliana and other plants,” Johnson wrote. “Our results
suggest that prions are taken up by plants and that contaminated plants may
represent a previously unrecognized risk of human, domestic species and
wildlife exposure to CWD and scrapie agents.”
How will farmers and ranchers
respond to elk and deer in their pastures if they suspect the wild animals could
be infecting the soil where their livestock eats grass and alfalfa and other crops
grow? What kind of a backlash could there be against public wildlife?
Having examined what the authors describe as a sloppy and lackaidaisical approach to containing CWD, they call
for urgency by government agencies in applying the precautionary
principle. Both public wildlife and human health are at risk, they say.
(Note to readers: the Alberta Environment
and Parks Department has one of the best databases
for tracking the progression of CWD in wild ungulate herds).
How will farmers and ranchers
respond to elk and deer in their pastures if they suspect the wild animals
could be infecting the soil where their livestock eats grass, and alfalfa and other
crops grow?
“Where there is a potential for
severe or irreversible harm, especially to public wellbeing and interest, an
absence of scientific consensus or proof of harm cannot be used to allow or
maintain policies or actions underlying the risk. In such cases, the burden to
‘prove safety’ falls on those advocating the potentially harmful policy or
action,” they write, referring to both game farms and feeding of wildlife.
“The standard of ‘severe or
irreversible harm’ is a very high bar; yet [a bar] CWD has long surpassed
regarding public wildlife. It is only against that backdrop that the potential
transference of CWD to people can be reasonably considered. We must consider risk,
consequences, and even worst case scenarios. The fact is that prion diseases
are described by physicians and victim’s families as aggressive, horrific, and
dreadful.”
° ° °
Conspicuously missing in action
on the feedground issue is, ironically, the largest elk conservation group in
the world, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation headquartered in Missoula.
A few years ago, I attended a
symposium on brucellosis in Billings, Montana sponsored by the Elk Foundation.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s top national wildlife veterinarian Tom Roffe
was there, so were senior natural resource managers from the Forest Service,
Park Service, BLM and the tri-states, including Scott Talbott, today director
of Wyoming Game and Fish. CWD was a red-button issue.
The overwhelming consensus from
scientists at the meeting was that artificial feeding had to stop in Wyoming, a
position that for Talbott was considered politically untenable. David
Allen, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s president and CEO, refused to back
shuttering the feedgrounds because of pushback from outfitters and guides in
Wyoming, even though scientists who condemn the practice. It was recently announced that Allen will be leaving the Elk Foundation in 2018.
Despite the Elk Foundation
refusing to challenge Wyoming into staking out the true elk conservation
position—closing the feedgrounds—the hunting community is concerned. A
coalition called The CWD Alliance was created by the Boone and Crockett Club,
Mule Deer Foundation and Elk Foundation in 2002, a decade and a half ago.
An advisory circulated by the
Alliance says this, “Implications for free-ranging populations of deer and elk
may be even more significant. Agencies do not translocate deer and elk from CWD
endemic areas. Ongoing surveillance programs are expensive and draw resources
from other wildlife management needs. Perhaps most important, impacts of CWD on
population dynamics of deer and elk are presently unknown. Modeling suggests
that CWD could substantially harm infected cervid populations by lowering adult
survival rates and destabilizing long-term population dynamics.”
The advisory added, “Ultimately,
public and agency concerns and perceptions about human health risks associated
with all TSEs may erode participation in sport hunting in the endemic area, and
also may have dramatic influence on management of free-ranging cervid herds
where CWD is endemic. It follows that responsible wildlife management and
animal health agencies should continue working to understand and limit
distribution and occurrence of CWD in free-ranging and farmed cervids.”
Former Elk Refuge biologist
Bruce Smith brings attention to another issue, that U.S. taxpayers through the
feeding program are unknowingly subsidizing elk outfitters and
guides. “Feedgrounds boost elk numbers but at extraordinarily high costs,”
he wrote in his article for The Wildlife Society.
“Just wait, when CWD takes hold
in those herds, that’s when the blame game is going to be begin. That’s when
you see people who were in charge start to dive for cover, but it will be too
late.” —the late Jack Ward Thomas, former chief of U.S. Forest Service, elk
biologist and adviser to the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation
“The state of Wyoming, for
example, spends more than $2 million annually to feed elk and to study and
manage feedground disease. This typically produces an annual deficit above
revenues derived from the sale of licenses to hunt elk west of the Continental
Divide, where the state’s feedgrounds are located,” he said. “The total runs
far higher because U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for most management costs at
the National Elk Refuge. As a wildlife professional, I find the ecological
costs of this agricultural model of managing public resources most disturbing.”
Dr. Tom Roffe, the former national chief of wildlife health for America's most prominent public wildlife agency, is not the kind of person
who derives satisfaction from having his fears proved right. Not long after
that meeting in Billings, after years of pressuring the Fish and Wildlife Service to stop
feeding on the Elk Refuge, he retired to a little horse ranch in Montana. He
told me he wasn’t bitter about having his warnings fall upon deaf ears, but
that once upon a time in his career he had believed that speaking the truth
would prevail.
Over the years I’ve spoken with
a number of prominent sportsmen, including people closely associated with the
Elk Foundation such as the late elk biologist Jack Ward Thomas, who was also a
onetime chief of the Forest Service. Thomas attended the meeting in
Billings mentioned above along with Roffe.
In his own off-color way, Thomas
told me that Wyoming’s pushback “was the epitome of short-sightedness” and he
predicted: “Just wait, when CWD takes hold in those herds, that’s when the
blame game is going to be begin. That’s when you see people who were in charge
start to dive for cover, but it will be too late.”
° ° °
When Rowledge and I spoke recently
he had just harvested a game animal in the Canadian Rockies. He and Geist
spent a lot of time during the 1990s talking with Thorne, Williams and Robert
Lanka. Lanka today is statewide wildlife and habitat management supervisor for
the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Rowledge says Lanka played a
seminal role in amassing a report on the threat that zoonotic diseases, which
become rife in game farms, pose to wildlife populations. And it was on the
strength of that report that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department voted to deny
Tom Dorrance’s permit to open a game ranch in Wyoming where hunters could shoot exotic species and animals could be sold for their wildlife parts. The
data was used too by wildlife officials in Montana to make the case for closing
down game farms.
Thorne could become cantankerous
and short in dealing with conservationists and people like Smith and Roffe who
were saying Wyoming needed to shutter its feedgrounds. And he argued that CWD
would not seriously impact deer and elk at the population level.
In July 2002, Williams, Thorne,
Dr. Terry Kreeger and two others published a peer-reviewed paper titled Chronic
Wasting Disease of Deer and Elk: A Review With Recommendations for Management
in The Journal of Wildlife Management. One of the co-authors was Dr. Mike
Miller, a senior wildlife veterinarian with the Colorado Division of Wildlife and a noted CWD authority mentioned in the first part of this series.
“CWD could have a dramatic
influence on management of free-ranging cervid herds where it is present. It
follows that responsible wildlife management and animal health agencies must
act to limit distribution and occurrence of CWD in free-ranging and farmed
cervids, and should continue working to better understand the biology and
potential methods for control of CWD,” they wrote.
Later, Kreeger, who succeed
Thorne after he died in 2004, was lead author on another paper in which the
authors observed, “Chronic wasting disease will probably be one of the
significant wildlife management challenges in the 21st century. The disease not
only has serious wildlife ramifications, but economic, political, and social
impacts as well. Although the ‘need’ to blame someone for a problem seems to be
inherent in humans, accusations and finger pointing do little to effect a
solution. Nobody intentionally caused or spread CWD. But now that it is
spreading throughout North America, we must all work together to minimize its
impact on our natural resources.”
For Dorsey of the Sierra Club,
he is baffled. Williams, Thorne and
Kreeger spelled out the problems. They knew that elk feedgrounds were, and
are, problematic where disease is concerned. Yet time and again they resisted any push to abolish feedgrounds. As for
blame, Dorsey asks who—what individual or individuals—will take responsibility for knowing
what the right thing to do was, yet deliberately did the opposite? Should responsibility, accountability and potential liability fall with state wildlife vets, with public land managers, or governors?
“Tom Thorne died before the most
recent data emerged, showing that CWD in fact is a serious threat to elk to
Rocky Mountain National Park, and that is hitting mule deer in southeastern
Wyoming,” Rowledge said. “He was a thinker who would adapt this opinion to new
scientific information as it emerged.”
A study in Rocky
Mountain National Park showed that CWD has
a prevalence rate of 12.9 percent in elk there and concluded CWD-caused
mortality can exceed natural rates of mortality, reduce survival of adult
females, and decrease population growth of elk herds. The infection rate there
was one percent in park elk in the early 1990s and today is the leading cause
of death among adult females.
So desperate is the conversation
about how to contain CWD-related environmental contamination that experiments
are being undertaken by which controlled burns are
being lit to try to kill prions in soils
and vegetation.
I asked Rowledge, a hunter,
about how he responds to state wildlife officials who say one must not sound an
alarm about CWD because it could cause sportsmen and women to stop hunting?
In the 1990s, Rowledge was
labeled a CWD fear monger. “Back then, we heeded the claims from people who
said don’t speak out too loud because it might cause hunters to stop hunting,”
he said, pointing to Wisconsin. There, in early 2002, CWD was discovered in
three white-tailed deer. Nine months later, the number of hunting licenses fell
by 90,000, resulting in a revenue drop of $3 million and loss of economic
impact of $50 million attributed to hunters not going afield and making
equipment expenditures with local business. He cited responses from a
study that examined hunter attitudes. Some 64 percent said they would quit
hunting altogether if there’s ever a confirmed case of CWD being transmitted
from cervids to humans.
“I think we made mistakes and
one of the mistakes is we weren’t vocal enough. We were too cautious. If we
want to maintain hunting, we need to maintain healthy wildlife populations and
that means responsible, science-driven wildlife management. We need to
understand what these diseases mean, not only for wildlife but human
health." —Darrel Rowledge, hunter and CWD policy expert from Alberta
What he next said is surprising.
“I think we made mistakes and one of the mistakes is we weren’t vocal enough.
We were too cautious. If we want to maintain hunting, we need to maintain
healthy wildlife populations and that means responsible, science-driven
wildlife management. We need to understand what these diseases mean, not
only for wildlife but human health. But one thing we are not talking about with
prion diseases is how they affect public perception and how that affects
markets. When and if CWD reaches that level, the problems we are dealing with
now will be an order of magnitude greater. We need to stop living in denial.”
He and his co-authors in “The
Challenge of CWD: Insidious and Dire” write: “Trustees accept and bear a burden
of responsibility to protect and defend the interests of their constituents,
and those of future generations. Where so-called hard sciences probe the vital
questions of ‘what is’ and ‘what was,’ governance, or political science, must
build from that foundation to confront the equally challenging questions of
‘what if.’ “
Dorsey asks: If science isn’t
driving decisions being made about CWD and wildlife in Wyoming and Greater
Yellowstone, then what and who is? He believes the public deserves to know the
names of the actual people who are overriding the science. Rowledge adds that
people knowingly violating the public trust and the precautionary principle
ought to be held to account and those at the top of the list are elected
officials such as governors and the heads of state wildlife management
agencies.
° ° °
During the past few years, some
Wyoming Game and Fish officials expressed optimism that hope for dealing with
CWD might reside not in shutting down the feedgrounds but in development of a
vaccine. This year, the results of that effort were reported and they are bleak. Not only did the
vaccine not prove to protect cervids from catching CWD but innoculations caused
some cervids to actually get sick and die.
Which leads us back to Lucky. In
that study involving her at Sybille, the wild elk calves taken from
the Elk Refuge were shown to have three different genetic makeups. Most had MM
genotypes and are representative of about 70 percent of wild wapiti in the Elk
Refuge herd. All of those died relatively quickly from CWD when exposed to
environmental contamination.
Then there were elk with ML
genotypes, representing about 28 percent of the herd. They survived longer
before getting infected and succombing but they all died, too.
And then there was Lucky, a
rarity with an LL genotype. Just two percent of elk have a genetic code like
her.
Kreeger tried to put a positive
spin on the results when he still worked for the agency. His is a belief in
“evolutionary adaptation”, i.e. the premise that CWD infected mothers will
produce offspring before they die and CWD-resistant elk will be giving birth to
seed-stock to rebuild populations if they crash.
Lucky and some of the other elk
cows produced offspring and Kreeger speculated it was possible that
reproduction could outpace death caused by CWD. However, the model showed that
over a century, hunting would need to be curtailed if not eliminated and that
elk with genomes MM and ML would likely vanish.
To put that in perspective, what
if in a human community, 3800 out of 3900 people died due to a pandemic like
the Black Plague and the restoration of civilization would rest on the
surviving 100?
Would that be a cause for
optimism or existential gravity? For Rowledge, it’s the latter. As he and his
fellow authors note, healthy wildlife populations are more resilient when they
have more genetic diversity. CWD actually destroys and reduces diversity,
leaving surviving gene pools potentially more vulnerable to other
maladies and possibly less capable to deal with environmental factors.
He says it’s an incredibly risky proposition to bet on one genotype; moreover, it completely evades
the reality that CWD would mean the loss of elk and deer abundance, as we know it today, by the end
of this century.
In fact, some of Kreeger’s associates
have in recent years been mentioning the dreaded “e-word”—extinction—in recent
discussions of what the future may hold for today’s dominant elk herds in
Greater Yellowstone. That will be explored in an upcoming part of this
series.
Can and should the persistence
of some of America’s greatest elk herds, in America’s most iconic ecosystem, be
pinned on the survival of Lucky? How did Lucky’s story end?
Within the last few weeks, I was
in touch with Brant Schumaker, who was involved with the decade-long study of
Lucky and with Dr. Mary Wood, Wyoming’s state wildlife veterinarian and the
successor to Kreeger and Thorne. I asked them about Lucky: was she still alive
or dead? Did she outrace the plague as an animal with hyper-rare, hopeful
immunity and what is the status of her offspring? They were coy and wouldn’t
tell me. They only said that she is part of a new study. I asked for an
updated photograph of Lucky to use in this story. Lucky is, after all, a named
animal and arguably a celebrity. My request went unanswered.
I am still waiting to hang a
picture of Lucky on the wall.
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EDITOR'S NOTE:
Read Part One in Mountain Journal's ongoing series on Chronic Wasting Disease in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem titled Greater Yellowstone's Coming Plague
Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain Journal, is author of the book Ripple Effects: How to Save Yellowstone and American's Most Iconic Wildlife Ecosystem. Wilkinson has been writing about Greater Yellowstone for 35 years and is a correspondent to publications ranging from National Geographic to The Guardian. He is author of several books on topics as diverse as scientific whistleblowers and Ted Turner, and a book about the harrowing story of Jackson Hole grizzly mother 399, the most famous bear in the world which features photographs by Thomas Mangelsen. For more information on Wilkinson, click here. (Photo by David J Swift).
