America's National Elk Refuge: A ‘Miasmic Zone Of Life-Threatening Diseases'
As Chronic Wasting Disease Looms Over Greater Yellowstone, The Epicenter Of A Deadly Outbreak Could Be Western Wyoming. Part 2 of Mountain Journal's in-depth look at a coming wildlife plague.
A bull elk on the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
PART TWO
To nature-adoring onlookers,
the sea of elk gathered every winter on the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming appears to be an enchanting vision of wapiti nirvana.
Across generations, countless people have
taken refuge sleigh rides, watching thousands of pastured wild elk being fed
dry hay and alfalfa pellets. Indeed, the town
of Jackson, Wyoming’s four rustic elk antler archways in its central public
square are built from antlers shed by bull elk on the refuge.
Many readers here might
reasonably wonder what could possibly be wrong with this tranquil picture? (see below). How could
anyone question the magnanimous gestures of local folk and U.S. taxpayers offering
these majestic creatures nutritional charity to get them through the snow season?
After all, many Americans put
out corn and other grains for deer in winter on the sly, defying state laws against feeding yet believing they, too, are doing
the animals a favor. In an age of Chronic Wasting Disease, looks can be perilously deceiving, scientists say.
As CWD rapidly expands its geographical reach in North America, those seemingly benign practices of feeding, experts warn, could be hastening disastrous consequences. And now, with the deadly pathogen already looming on the edges of Greater Yellowstone, the most iconic wildland ecosystem in the Lower
48, what does CWD's arrival portend for the region's unparalleled wildlife
populations? Many epidemiologists see the National Elk Refuge as the place where an unstoppable pandemic would likely begin.
° ° °
Old-timers in Jackson Hole get
emotional, even misty-eyed, when discussing why the sight of so many elk is part of
their culture and sense of place. They see the feeding of elk in heroic
terms, the result of ancestors stepping forward and rescuing a national animal
treasure, similar to what happened when Theodore Roosevelt, William Hornaday and others emerged as saviors against the total annihilation of bison.
Artificial feeding at the Elk Refuge was initiated more than a century ago. Lying adjacent to the town of Jackson's northern boundary and situated between Grand Teton National Park and the
Bridger-Teton National Forest, the refuge, the second of its kind for a large
mammal in history, was itself born of a crisis.
Thousands of elk in winters
leading up to 1912, when the first pieces of today's 25,000-acre Elk Refuge were officially put in place, starved to death on the
flats north of town, causing a public outcry that stretched all the way to
Washington D.C. In response, a campaign to acquire land accompanied by feeding cemented a perception that unless wapiti were given supplemental
forage in Jackson Hole they would die in droves or disappear altogether.
All is not nearly as idyllic as it appears in this scene with tourists enjoying a sleigh ride across the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Scientists say the unnatural feeding of thousands of wintering wapiti has created ripe conditions for a catastrophic outbreak of deadly Chronic Wasting Disease. Photo courtesy National Elk Refuge
There is even an apocryphal
tale about the die-off years, that a human could have walked on the backs of
dead elk in the snow for more than a dozen miles and never had one’s feet touch
the ground.
The justification for feeding
is based on the following rationale: because so much elk winter range in Jackson Hole
has been covered by human development and because private ranches do not welcome elk, regarding them as unwanted competitors for grass consumed by
cattle, the offering of alfalfa chow lines beyond what nature provides is
essential.
Keeping wild elk reliant and
semi-tamed on unnatural forage in fenceless feedlot conditions draws many—but
not all of them—away from private property. This same rationale applies to 22
other state-run feedlots dotting the federal Bridger-Teton Forest, tracts
administered by the Bureau of Land Management and state lands scattered across
western Wyoming.
What the controversial feeding
program stands in contradiction to, however, is the conclusion of virtually
every major professional wildlife management organization which warns that
bunching up animals fosters conditions that are ripe for deadly disease
outbreaks.
Wyoming’s rationale for feeding
stands in contrast to other valleys across the West, including Greater
Yellowstone’s Madison Valley in Montana, where wild elk persist in abundance and
are not given boosts of alfalfa pellets to keep them alive.
As of fall 2017, a CWD positive
animal has not been detected on the Elk Refuge nor on any of Wyoming’s widely
ridiculed complex of feedgrounds, but CWD positive deer have been found nearby (see map below),
and the clock is ticking.
At the Elk Refuge, another
ecological consequence of feeding elk is wapiti no longer migrate out of
Jackson Hole to lower elevations in winter as they did for thousands of years. Artificial
winter feeding has suppressed that ancient instinct among many of the elk in
western Wyoming; and yet, ironically, Wyoming celebrates elk migrations and
makes them an object of scientific study and conservation priority through the
Wyoming Migration Initiative.
It turns out that there are
many aspects of how Wyoming manages wild elk— including the state’s hostile
attitude toward predators, which some experts consider an important line of
defense in slowing CWD’s spread— that are fraught with contradiction and hypocrisy,
critics say. One of the herds, the Jackson Herd that winters on the Elk Refuge,
has also been extolled as “America’s Elk Herd” and is the most famous for the
species in the world.
The abundance of public elk in
Jackson Hole has represented meal tickets for generations of commercial hunting
outfitters and guides and provided sustenance for local citizens putting wild
meat in their freezers. Why change something that has worked well for them?
Elk start arriving on the
National Elk Refuge and the state’s unfenced feedlots in droves in November,
pushed out of the mountains by deepening snows. Remaining until April, they
disperse again to distant summer calving and autumn breeding grounds in the
high country following green up. Many different herds from Wyoming converge
upon the remote meadowlands in Yellowstone National Park located in the
geographic heart of the ecosystem and mix with other elk herds migrating in
from Idaho and Montana.
Map of Greater Yellowstone elk migrations created by the Wyoming Migration Initiative. Note how the Jackson Elk Herd shares summer range with other herds in Yellowstone National Park which, in turn, come in contact with other herds fanning out across the northern, western and eastern tiers of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. This is one way scientists say CWD might quickly spread.
This massive consolidation of wintering elk in and around Jackson Hole and then the animals' subsequent summer intermixing has been likened by ecologists to
the circulatory and pulmonary systems in a human body. Like breathing in and breathing out; like blood moving through veins and arteries. It occurs nowhere else in the Lower 48 on the scale as it still does in Greater Yellowstone with large mammals. And, like an infection that may start
modestly as merely a cut to an outer appendage, CWD has the potential to bring
virulence to herds far away from the Elk Refuge and feedgrounds.
° ° °
As a result of unnatural
feeding, elk numbers on the refuge and Wyoming feedgrounds have swelled far
beyond their normal carrying capacity because normal winter mortality is
lessened and because natural predators, namely wolves, had been
eradicated. Wolves were restored to Greater Yellowstone in 1995 and there
remains resentment toward lobos from outfitters who say any elk a lobo takes is
one less for clients to possibly shoot.
A major concern expressed by
ecologists, and a topic of fierce debate, is that by keeping elk on a
nutritional dole and by eliminating predators that often target the sick and
weak, it has actually eroded the hardiness of animals by allowing the frail and
vulnerable to better persist; in other words, leaving herds even more
susceptible to disease.
Declarations that wolves have
had a devastating impact on elk in Wyoming are contradicted by three salient
data points: first, by surveys from Wyoming Game and Fish that show most
hunting units are at or above elk population objectives; second, by Elk Refuge managers
who say the winter herd needs to be reduced by thousands of animals in order to
prevent damage caused by overgrazing, and third, ironically, by outfitters who,
on their own websites, boast of tremendous hunter success in selling guided
hunts for thousands of dollars apiece, often to out of state clients.
An interesting footnote, which
will be explored in depth later, is that some ranchers in Montana welcome
wolves as allies on their property to scatter large numbers of wild elk
converging on their pastures. In
Wyoming, wolves are officially treated as vermin in over 85 percent of the state,
with no more regard given to them than coyotes and rats, allowed to be killed for any reason,
any time of day, even when they represent no conflict.
° ° °
Lloyd Dorsey, conservation
director for the state chapter of the Sierra Club, passes by the Elk Refuge
regularly. In fact, when I spoke to him recently, he was on his way to hunt big
game in the Gros Ventre Mountains, passing by both the Elk Refuge and a state-run
feedground on the Bridger-Teton National Forest called Alkali Creek. “I enjoy
the challenge of fair chase. I like to eat wild game, and I look forward every
fall to getting out there in the mountains,” he says.
The National Elk Refuge is considered one of the flagships of America's national wildlife refuge system. Dorsey says the founding of the
Elk Refuge was based, in part, on a creation myth, “a semi-fairy tale” about a
rationale for feeding animals that doesn’t hold up when subjected to scrutiny
and well-established scientific truths.
Feeding elk made perfect sense
at the dawn of the 20th century when no one knew what the
ramifications were for disease and ecology. “I maintain the Elk Refuge was
started, and state-run feedgrounds subsequently added during a time when our
frontier society was far less enlightened in dealing with conflicts between
wildlife, settlements, ranches and farms,” he explains.
“One of the prevailing
frontier-mentality options was killing off wildlife that was regarded as a
competitor or threat to livestock; another was putting wildlife figuratively
into boxes and, in this case, feeding elk like you would cattle in a pasture,
semi-domesticating them. I get why it was done. Feeding elk in the early 20th
century made sense because it mitigated conflicts and kept more elk alive to
hunt, eat, and make money from.”
Originally, elk were nourished with supplemental feed at the beginning of the 20th century with the noble intent of saving herds from starvation. More than a 100 years later, scientists say such practices of bunching up animals creates ripe conditions for outbreaks of disease like brucellosis, deadly Chronic Wasting Disease and bovine tuberculosis
But Dorsey and many others say
it should have been a short term solution, phased out when the science became
clear decades ago. Recently, an official with the Wyoming Game and Fish
Department admitted as much in a meeting with conservationists from Montana.
Still, due to political
resistance, feeding has continued. Some rural Wyomingites today insist their
“way of life” and financial livelihoods depends on state and federal
governments spending millions annually to feed elk.
“In modern times, other states
have figured how to co-exist with wild deer and elk on natural habitat, but,
ironically, not three large public land counties in western Wyoming—[Teton,
Sublette, and Lincoln]. Not yet, anyway,” Dorsey said, noting that one of
the real lingering justifications for feeding is to placate livestock
producers, many of whom also graze their cattle on public lands at rates far
below fair market value. Those same ranchers, while wanting their livestock to
enjoy public grass, don’t want to share their pastures with public wildlife.”
“Intolerance toward
free-ranging elk became official policy, and still is,” Dorsey notes. He and
others say there is still plenty of natural habitat on public land to sustain
elk in western Wyoming without artificial feeding.
Big game hunters, especially
Wyoming outfitters and guides who profit by giving clients higher hunter
success achieved through inflated numbers of animals to harvest, have
vigorously defended feeding at the same time denying that CWD is a serious
issue.
Some vocal pro-feeding
activists in Jackson Hole, like those arrayed around a group called Concerned
Citizens for the Elk, have asserted, using Manichean logic, that it is better
to keep feeding elk to prevent them from dying than stop feeding elk even
though feeding leaves them highly vulnerable to catching a deadly
non-eradicable disease. A local Jackson Hole veterinarian has even accused the
Elk Refuge of deliberately starving elk whenever federal managers have made an
attempt to reduce the amount of artificial feeding.
° ° °
Harold Turner is patriarch of a
family that sells outfitting services and guided hunts on the Bridger-Teton
National Forest. The Turner operation is based out of the Triangle X Guest
Ranch in Grand Teton National Park, a tourist concession operation owned by the
federal government. The Turner family sold
the ranch to the federal government more than half a century ago, though it is a common misperception among Jackson Hole residents that the Turners still hold
the deed.
Screenshot of Jackson Hole outfitter and guide Harold Turner giving interview to filmmaker Danny Schmidt in his documentary Feeding The Problem. Mr. Turner vigorously opposes shutting down artificial feeding of elk.
Mr. Turner has long opposed
cessation of feeding elk. “If the elk feeding grounds were shut down, we would
not only lose our base, our economic base, but we will lose our heritage,” he
claimed on camera in filmmaker Danny Schmidt’s acclaimed documentary Feeding
the Problem that examines the feedground dilemma.
Wyoming’s ongoing motivation
for doing all it can to halt the proposed elimination of feedgrounds is no
mystery. Elk and deer hunting generates tens of millions of dollars for the
economy of gateway communities in Greater Yellowstone.
By the numbers, the amount of
money generated annually by selling guided elk hunts in Greater Yellowstone is
a small fraction within the overall pie of income generated through
non-consumptive nature tourism in northwest Wyoming. Meanwhile, the number of
big game hunters continues to dramatically decline nationwide in America,
exacerbating the sense of desperation among outfitters and guides that their
tradition is fading away with changing times. And it does not bode well for the
Wyoming Game and Fish Department that gets operating revenue from the sale of
hunting licenses.
One hunting outfitter and guide
in Jackson Hole, without offering any scientific data to substantiate his
contention, claimed CWD is merely a “bogeyman” disease. That same individual
has also claimed that wolves would devastate wildlife, an assertion proved by
facts to be false.
Concerned Citizens for the Elk
has taken out full-page ads in the Jackson Hole News & Guide trying to call
into question the science of infectious disease.
Harold Turner suggested on film
that the most prudent strategy for dealing with CWD is to wait until it arrives
rather than taking preventative action such as closing down the feedgrounds.
Fellow rancher and hunting outfitter/guide Glenn Taylor, also interviewed for
Schmidt’s documentary, chose to deny the science of wildlife epidemiology.
“I’ve been asked about Chronic
Wasting Disease before and I don’t think it’s as serious as they try to make
you think,” Taylor told Schmidt. “Maybe today there’s too much scientific
demand [reliance on science]. Maybe we need to manage from the seat of our
pants is a good term, I think. Let the animals kind of do their thing. We may
be better off than trying to initiate or use too much science to manage maybe
what science shouldn’t be doing that.”
“Maybe today there’s too much scientific demand [reliance on science]. Maybe we need to manage from the seat of our pants is a good term, I think." Jackson Hole rancher, hunting outfitter and guide Glenn Taylor, saying science shouldn't be the prevailing factor in determining how to manage elk.
In fact, Wyoming and the Elk
Refuge stand accused by scientific experts as managing wildlife by the seat of
its pants and critics assert that if wildlife were left to do its own thing, as
Taylor suggests, feedgrounds would be shut down for the good of the public
herds.
° ° °
To willfully ignore 21st
century, peer-reviewed research, conservationists like Dorsey note, is to
embrace ignorance, the kind of thinking that prevailed during the era of
bloodletting in the Dark Ages.
CWD is not the only example of
science—which does not comport with politics, culture and the agenda of special
interests—being rejected in Wyoming. From members of Congress to state
legislators and the governor on down to local school boards and chambers of
commerce, many of Wyoming’s elected officials also deny human-caused climate
change is real and that carbon emissions being sent into the atmosphere by the
burning of Wyoming coal is a problem.
They deny the clear body of
evidence showing that domestic sheep spread deadly diseases to wild mountain
sheep (bighorns); they deny data showing both the ecological and economic value
of predators (wolves, grizzlies and other species, even bobcats) in the
ecosystem; they deny data showing the severe impacts of energy industry
disturbance on sage-grouse habitat; and they deny the profound role that
conserving federal public lands, by keeping them in an undeveloped condition,
plays as a positive sustainable engine
of prosperity and enhanced quality of human life.
In his book, Pushed Off The
Mountain, Sold Down The River: Wyoming’s Search For Its Soul, writer Samuel
Western takes note of a prevailing cultural belief among Wyoming citizens. They
are convinced that Wyoming exists as an exception to laws of nature which apply
to every other place in the world. That mentality is known as “the Wyoming way”
and it holds the conviction that by denying truth, one can alter reality.
Except, as Dorsey notes, it
doesn’t. It certainly doesn’t apply to
Wyoming’s defiance of prevailing scientific conclusions related to feedgrounds
and CWD. Glenn Hockett, a lifelong
sportsman and volunteer leader of the Gallatin Wildlife Association in
southwest Montana, claims that Wyoming’s incalcitrant stand toward feeding
threatens not only the health of wild ungulates in Greater Yellowstone but all of the
northern Rockies.
° ° °
On January 20, 2017, Eric Cole,
a longtime Elk Refuge senior biologist, delivered a corroborating shot across
the bow. Cole circulated information via email to wildlife colleagues and
interested citizens that left many shocked. Cole’s informal report stated
that CWD “infection in the Jackson elk herd is inevitable and possible at any
time.”
Verbatim, his written
assessment: “Population
modeling predicts a wide range of CWD prevalence and effects on Jackson
elk herd population growth rates in the short term (within 5 years) following
introduction of the disease, but in the long term the effects of CWD on the
health of the Jackson elk herd and recreational opportunities dependent on the
Jackson elk herd will likely be significant and negative. For example
at any level of CWD prevalence, current levels of cow elk harvest could not be
sustained. The current supplemental feeding regime will exacerbate the
effects of CWD on the Jackson Elk Herd because elk density at NER far
exceeds elk density reported at Rocky Mountain National Park, which was
the source of the annual infection rate used in the model.
“Elk
are fed on the same 5,000 acres of [the National Elk Refuge] each year, and
given the persistence of CWD prions in the environment, these areas will likely
become heavily contaminated with the CWD prion over time if status quo
management continues. 60-80% of the Jackson elk herd use NER
feedgrounds each winter, which will regularly expose these elk to CWD prions at
these sites. Various elk migration studies and research on another
disease prevalent on [the National 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 throughout the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem.”
Cole’s blunt acknowledgment,
contradicting Wyoming’s sanguine stance, repeated warnings made by a number of
his predecessors who spent careers in Fish and Wildlife Service uniforms.
Former Elk Refuge chief
managers Mike Hedrick and Barry Reiswig noted as far back as the 1990s that
CWD’s arrival in Greater Yellowstone was certain and that its spread would be exacerbated
by the feeding of elk.
Reiswig was roundly attacked by
Wyoming outfitters, guides and politicians as being alarmist. His opinion,
however, was backed up by veterinarian Thomas Roffe who presided over wildlife
health issues for every national wildlife refuge in the country. It was
highlighted, too, in an acclaimed book by Cole’s predecessor, former senior Elk
Refuge biologist Bruce Smith, titled “Where Elk Roam: Conservation and
Biopolitics of Our National Elk Herd.”
“I know the national and regional
offices of the Fish and Wildlife Service were well aware of the concerns
because in the 1990s I helped Mike Hedrick draft a letter informing them,”
Smith told me.
A 30-year top-level official
with the Fish and Wildlife Service, now retired and who asked not to be
identified, added this, “I recall briefings by Roffe when we met as Regional Refuge Chiefs. Also a meeting in Jackson Hole at the Elk
Refuge where we heard about the feeding program-seems like a bad idea that
should have been stopped long ago. But, long-standing feeding programs
like these can be incredibly difficult to dislodge,” he said. “I’ve wondered about the impact on hunting in the region but
the ecological impacts are even more concerning.”
Trepidation about disease and
ecological impacts of having too many elk were brought to the attention of
Jackson Hole’s own John Turner, who served as national director of the Fish and
Wildlife Service and is the brother of Harold Turner and who grew up on the
Triangle X Ranch. “John Turner knew. He knows today [of the dangers of feeding
elk] but he’s never spoken up,” Smith said.
Both Roffe and Smith live today
in Montana while Reiswig is a retired civil servant and backcountry horseman in
Cody, Wyoming. All three, in varying ways, took their own agency to task,
saying the Elk Refuge was wintering far too many wapiti, not only setting the
stage for disease outbreaks but causing ecological damage that was negatively
affecting habitat for other species because of elk overgrazing and over browsing
vegetation.
Dr. Thomas Roffe, left, is the former national chief of wildlife health for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bruce Smith, right, spent more than half of his career as a senior researcher and wildlife biologist at the National Elk Refuge. Both Roffe and Smith warn that CWD and feeding elk have all the makings of zoonotic disaster. Photos courtesy "Feeding the Problem"
As Reiswig once told me, there
is profound irony: if ranchers’ domestic
cows were causing the same kind of negative ecological impacts on their public
land allotments as elk on the National Elk Refuge were, ranchers would be
reprimanded and possibly lose their grazing permits.
John Turner did nothing to
press his agency, at least publicly, to reduce feeding. He was Fish and Wildlife Service director under President George H. W. Bush. Later, he served as the assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs for President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. Intriguingly, during the latter tenure, some of Turner's areas of involvement on behalf of the U.S. government were dealing with science, climate change, biodiversity and infectious diseases, including zoonotic threats, i.e. diseases shared between humans and animals.
After leaving civil
service, Turner became a trustee for Peabody Energy, the largest coal producer in
the U.S., which has been part of efforts to cast doubt on the science of
climate change. He also was a board member of Ashland
Energy, a global chemical and oil and gas conglomerate, leaving some to
question his conservation values and espoused belief in wildlife management
being driven by science, a fundamental pilar of the North
American Model of Wildlife Conservation.
It is described by The Wildlife Society this way: "The North American Model recognizes science as a basis for informed management and decision-making processes. This tenet draws from the writings of Aldo Leopold who in the 1930s called for a wildlife conservation movement facilitated by trained wildlife biologists that made decisions based on facts, professional experience, and commitment to shared underlying principles, rather than strictly interests of hunting, stocking, or culling of predators. Science in wildlife policy includes studies of population dynamics, behavior, habitat adaptive management,and national surveys of hunting and fishing."
Smith said there is no federal
law that orders the Fish and Wildlife Service to feed elk at the Elk Refuge.
Efforts to curtail feeding could be initiated by the agency’s national and
regional directors or by the Interior Secretary who presently is Ryan Zinke, a
Montanan, who insists he is devoted to wildlife conservation.
Ostensibly, no Fish and
Wildlife Service director in history had a more intimate grasp of the issue than John Turner. In his defense
related to his failure to intervene, which he could have pushed to do, no
action was taken during a succession of Fish and Wildlife Service directors
serving both Republican and Democrat presidential administrations.
Bruce Smith says he gave
Turner’s successor, Jamie Rappaport Clark, today president of the national
conservation group Defenders of Wildlife and an appointee of Bill Clinton, a tour
of the Elk Refuge when she was Fish and Wildlife director in the 1990s and she
understood the wildlife health issues in play. “She went back to Washington
with a small elk antler that she found during her visit and I hoped it would be
a reminder,” Smith said.
Clark told me in an interview a
few years later that she tried to bring reforms. The refrain has always been
that as long as Wyoming is opposed, the ending of feeding will never happen.
Even a stinging rebuke in court to the Fish and Wildlife Service, a lawsuit
brought by Defenders and other conservation groups, and supported by Clark
against her former federal employer, has not broken the inertia.
In 2008, the environmental law
firm EarthJustice and its lead attorney Tim Preso sued the Fish and Wildlife
Service on behalf of Defenders, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Jackson
Hole Conservation Alliance, Wyoming Outdoor Council and the National Wildlife
Refuge Association over management plans for elk and bison on the refuge.
The Fish and Wildlife Service, instead of
heeding the expert opinions of its own senior staff, opted instead to
essentially maintain the status quo. The plaintiffs charged that the Fish and
Wildlife Service, in an environmental impact statement addressing the
consequences of feeding, failed to both adhere to federal law or try to
mitigate the jeopardy it was causing to wildlife under its care.
During those proceedings the
groups highlighted irrefutable damning evidence pointing to a real and imminent
threat to elk and the fact that the Fish and Wildlife Service was managing the
refuge in violation of two laws. Even though staff made the dangers clear,
senior agency administrators overruled them.
“In its final
decision… the Service reversed itself, elevating the political preferences of
Wyoming over the biological needs of the Refuge and its wildlife populations.
In so doing, the Service acted arbitrarily and unlawfully,” Earthjustice
wrote.
"The whole point of a National Elk Refuge is to provide a sanctuary in which populations of healthy, reproducing elk can be sustained. The Refuge can hardly provide such a sanctuary if, every winter, elk and bison are drawn by the siren song of human-provided food to what becomes, through the act of gathering, a miasmic zone of life-threatening diseases.” —opinion of DC Circuit Court in noting how the Fish and Wildlife Service violates its own laws
The DC Circuit Court
delivered this stinging assessment of facts to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar
in President Barack Obama’s cabinet: “The whole point of a
National Elk Refuge is to provide a sanctuary in which populations of healthy,
reproducing elk can be sustained. See 16 U.S.C. § 673a (creating a “refuge” for
the elk). The Refuge can hardly provide such a sanctuary if, every winter, elk
and bison are drawn by the siren song of human-provided food to what becomes,
through the act of gathering, a miasmic zone of life-threatening diseases.”
° ° °
Lloyd Dorsey works during the
day as a professional conservationist. During his time off, he loves to hunt.
Dorsey is a headstrong individual
and arguably no professional non-governmental conservationist has been more focused on CWD in the ecosystem
than him. Prior to working for the Sierra Club, he was on the staff of the
Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an organization that has been virtually—and
oddly— silent on CWD since Dorsey’s departure.
Mike Clark, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition's former executive director, said he admires Dorsey and gave him latitude to tackle CWD because
wildlife diseases rank among the paramount issues threatening the ecological
integrity of Greater Yellowstone, he said. Dorsey left the Greater Yellowstone Coalition after Clark retired.
Conservationist Lloyd Dorsey, interviewed in Danny Schmidt's Feeding the Problem
“Lloyd has been doggedly
persistent. He can be a burr in the side of people who would rather just look
the other way. He won’t quit because he knows there’s just too much at stake
and it’s one of those situations where the more you know, the more that you
can’t let it go,” Clark explains. “In Greater Yellowstone we’ve got one of the
largest concentrations of migratory
wildlife left in the world. When you have a state like Wyoming knowingly
destroying a public resource in order to provide commercial gain for a
relatively few number of people, that’s a travesty.” [Editor’s note: Clark, also a former
journalist, serves on the board of Mountain Journal].
CWD was first detected in
Wyoming mule deer in 1985 and it was confirmed in elk a year later. Using
data compiled by Wyoming Game and Fish, maps created by the Sierra Club and
Wyoming Wildlife Advocates have tracked the steady progression of CWD. The maps
show a growth in the number of CWD endemic zones and an advance of
disease-positive deer, which are the flag species.
CWD was first diagnosed in southeastern Wyoming (marked in yellow) and over the last three decades has expanded in deer herds. The disease is now bearing down on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in the northwest corner of the state and pressing up against the states of both Montana and Idaho. The location of Wyoming's 22 elk feedgrounds are marked by red triangles. The National Elk Refuge is located just south of Yellowstone National Park and east of Grand Teton National Park. Map courtesy Wyoming Chapter of the Sierra Club and Wyoming Wildlife Advocates
Until the year 2000, CWD was
present in 15 Game and Fish hunt areas in the southeast quadrant of the state
encompassing about 8.4 million miles. In the next seven years it was in
32 additional hunt areas covering more than 15 million acres on a westward path.
Between 2008 and 2014, it added another 25 hunt areas and 10 million acres or
about 1.39 million acres annually pushing into the middle of Wyoming.
From November 2015 to November
2016—just a single year—the CWD endemic zone grew 3.31 million acres and is now
on the verge of reaching Yellowstone, Grand Teton, the Elk Refuge and the state
feedgrounds.
The addition of Deer Hunt Area
17 (mentioned in part 1 of this series) made nine new areas in Wyoming in 2016 whereas the annual average between
2001 and 2015 was four new areas. An emerging hotspot is a hunt area
south of Pinedale, Wyoming, on the flanks of the Wind River Mountains and a
short jaunt away for a mule deer to the feedgrounds.
Something else worth noting:
mule deer numbers in the southern end of Greater Yellowstone are
already in serious decline, caused not by CWD or wolves but the impacts of
energy development pushing them out of optimal habitat, leaving them more
weakened and with less reproduction success. What extra burden does CWD
represent to these herds? For Dorsey, a bigger unknown is how it will manifest in
elk.
“If CWD takes hold in
these elk populations of western Wyoming on the two dozen feedgrounds and then
starts to spread as those animals, in turn, disperse more widely in the spring,
mixing with other herds scattered across the tri-state area [Wyoming, Montana
and Idaho], I don’t think anyone knows what will happen, but it can’t be good,”
Dorsey says.
° ° °
More than 10 years have passed
since the Elk Refuge's initial 2007 EIS decision, and it still lacks a firm plan to meet its requirement of managing for healthy wildlife and habitat. If anything, attempts to address feedgrounds
have gone in reverse and at the worst time, with CWD endemic zones creeping inside
Greater Yellowstone. The Fish and
Wildlife Service isn’t the only agency being criticized as an accomplice to
disaster.
In June of 2017, the Forest
Service was sued by the Sierra Club, Western Watersheds Project, Wyoming
Wildlife Advocates and Gallatin Wildlife Association after it issued a permit
allowing Wyoming to continue operating the Alkali Creek Feedground on the
Bridger-Teton Forest east of the Elk Refuge near the Gros Ventre Wilderness and
Gros Ventre River.
Forest Service biologists have
admitted that the Gros Ventre Valley, a side dell to Jackson Hole, can, during
mild to average winters, support 3,000 elk on natural forage without human
nutritional assistance. That’s on top of the thousands of elk that similarly
could be wintered at the Elk Refuge. Poignantly, Bridger-Teton officials
acknowledged the Alkali Creek Feedground “could become a reservoir for CWD
infection.”
Readers who are not students of
the federal-state relationship involving public land management might not
realize that while federal lands provide large expanses of habitat for
wildlife, much of the management of the animals themselves fall under state
purview. One exception is wildlife protected under the Endangered Species Act.
However, federal agencies are required to
assess the impacts of activities occurring inside their boundaries, whether
those activities are proposed by private interests or other government entities.
Wyoming’s feedgrounds, given number of sites and animal numbers involved, could
be categorized as an industrial strength operation.
By federal law, the Forest
Service is legally mandated to manage for wildlife health. When the Forest
Service conducts environmental analyses on, say, a proposed logging or energy
development, the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Forest
Management Act require that individual forests weigh the impacts on wildlife.
When the Bridger-Teton was
deciding whether to greenlight a new permit for the Alkali Creek Feedground,
Dorsey and others submitted multi-page written comments highlighting scientific
documents and expert opinions of researchers to Bridger-Teton Forest Supervisor
Tricia O’Connor and her staff. O’Connor acknowledged in her decision of record
in December 2015 that one of the main reasons she approved feeding was basically to
keep elk addicted to artificial feed so they wouldn’t end up migrating across
private ranchlands and potentially exposing cattle to disease. She used the
same rationale that was invoked when the Bridger-Teton granted permits to
continue five other state-run feedgrounds on Forest Service lands in 2008. CWD
is much closer to the feedgrounds now than it was in 2008.
Why does the Forest Service
continue to issue permits to Wyoming Game and Fish for feeding elk when the
science outlining the dangers of feedgrounds compounding a dire disease threat
to wildlife is clear, conservationists ask.
Preso points out identical
contradictions in the lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service. Federal
judges agreed with him. Such guidance is
especially clear in the National Wildlife Refuge System Improvement Act passed
by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton in 1997. It is essentially
an “Organic Act” for the Fish and Wildlife Service and instructs the agency to
manage for the optimal welfare of the species on refuge lands.
The Bridger-Teton also appeared
to ignore the fact that the D.C. Circuit agreed with conservationists that its
federal neighbor, the Elk Refuge, had violated federal laws by not taking
action to address the looming disease risk.
So, here is a question that
could be logically posed: How is the menace of CWD possibly polluting Greater
Yellowstone’s wildlife with a fatal pathogen, capable of causing toxic contamination
in the environment, any different from, say, a private company’s proposed hard
rock mine if such a project has the potential to damage a public waterway with
harmful tailings?
So, here is a question that could be logically posed: How is the menace of CWD possibly polluting Greater Yellowstone’s wildlife with a fatal pathogen, capable of causing toxic contamination in the environment, any different from, say, a private company’s proposed hard rock mine if such a project has the potential to damage a public waterway with harmful tailings?
If a mine were shown to have a
high probability of fouling a trout stream or drinking water supply, there is
no doubt the permit would be denied.
Except, in the case with Wyoming feedgrounds, these are government
agencies legitimizing their own known violation of federal laws specially
enacted to protect wildlife health; moreover, they abrogate the very tenets of
the public trust doctrine pertaining to wildlife as spelled out in the North
American Model of Wildlife Conservation, Preso says.
° ° °
Does Wyoming know better? The unequivocal answer is yes.
During
the late 1980s, Wyoming rancher Thomas Dorrance, best known for being an heir to the
family that created Campbell’s Soups, pressed to open a game ranch for exotic
wildlife near Sundance, Wyoming.
Dorrance wanted to create a Texas-style fenced-in compound
on about 4200 acres inside his 17,000-acre ranch. Among the possible species
were non-native Russian boar, red, roe, sika, axis and fallow deer, ibex,
chamois, Barbary, mouflon and Marco Polo sheep. Native animals such as elk,
moose, pronghorn and bighorn sheep would also have been part of Dorrance’s
menagerie and featured in a drive-through wildlife park, harvested for meat
production, traded and sold as breeding stock, and some made available to
hunters.
As
a young policy analyst in Canada, Darrel Rowledge came under the tutelage of
Dr. Valerius Geist and others who initially welcomed game farming but quickly
changed their views in the wake of several disease outbreaks including
brucellosis, bovine tuberculosis and in recent years CWD. (We will explore what
happened there later in this series).
Rowledge,
today director of the Alliance for Public Wildlife in Calgary, is intimately
familiar with the controversy that ensued over Dorrance’s proposal. “When
Dorrance submitted his application, Tom Thorne and Beth Williams responded by
saying ‘You’re going to do what? Put wildlife in confinement, create a massive
disease factory? Not in Wyoming, you’re not.’”
How does Rowledge know this? He was invited down to Cheyenne from Canada
to provide briefings to Wyoming wildlife officials and lawmakers on the dangers
of game farms, this following outbreaks of disease in Alberta and
Saskatchewan.
For many years Dr. Thorne served as Wyoming’s chief wildlife veterinarian
and his wife, Dr. Beth Williams, was a widely respected CWD researcher who
worked with Dr. Mike Miller, a nationally-renowned researcher in Colorado. Their concerns were shared by Robert Lanka of Wyoming Game and Fish who was lead author of a report titled "Analysis and Recommendations on the Application by Mr. John T. Dorrance III to Import and Possess Native and Exotic Species."
Wyoming officials, their decision based largely on the findings of Lanka, Thorne, Williams and world-class consulting colleagues, turned down Dorrance’s permit application.
"We've got three or four options. We can
accept it, we can take it into the court system, attack it legislatively to
seek some changes in the Wyoming statutes or a combination of the last two,” Dorrance,
angered by the decision, told a reporter. "If we pursue it [a court
challenge] and win we are still faced with the Wyoming Game and Fish
Department. They might be very bitter and vindictive. They could make our life
impossible."
Ultimately, Dorrance sued the state—and lost. “Wyoming’s justification withstood every
single challenge. It was the only government that ever did a comprehensive
cost-benefit analysis on the dangers of game farming and congregating wildlife,”
Rowledge told me. "It was the overwhelming conclusion, based on the best of the best scientific minds, that it would be a disaster."
Wyoming Game and Fish
Commission President Don Scott said at the time, defending the state’s
position: "We have wild and free-ranging herds that
are truly a national treasure and we just don't believe that that treasure
should be placed in jeopardy, even a remote jeopardy. We don't want to turn
Wyoming into Texas."
Thorne and Williams, members of the Wildlife Disease Association, died tragically in a traffic accident in 2004.
Rowledge argues that Wyoming over the past 25 years has lost its
way. “It’s kind of crazy what the state
position is today on keeping feedgrounds open. In terms of what they do,
there’s really no difference between them and game farms, except the
feedgrounds involves larger numbers of animals and public wildlife that is
free-ranging,” he said.
Still, he remembers Drs. Thorne and Williams with fondness. “I have tremendous
respect for them. They were willing to alter their perspective in accordance
with new scientific discoveries,” he said. “Had they lived, and were they to
know what we do today about CWD, I have no doubt they would conclude that
operating the feedgrounds is a terribly bad idea.”
More than a quarter century ago, around the same time that the Dorrance case was playing out, another one hit the courts. This one involved a trial and the Parker Land & Cattle Company near Dubois. It had filed suit for damages after its domestic cows became infected with brucellosis and were ordered destroyed. The plaintiff's lawyer was former Wyoming Governor and Interior Secretary Stan Hathaway who foreshadowed the opinion of the D.C. Circuit Court two decades later. Hathaway referred to management practices at the Elk Refuge and, by association, the state feedgrounds as "a cesspool of disease."
° ° °
Where is Wyoming Gov. Matt
Mead, who has been in office since 2011 and is serving out the remainder of his
last term? By his record, he has dodged action just like many of his
predecessors along with the Game and Fish Department under his command. He says elk would perish in vast number if feedgrounds were abruptly shuttered but former Elk Refuge biologist Smith notes that no one has proposed closing them cold turkey. Instead, he and others have proposed reducing feeding incrementally over a span of years until elk numbers reach carrying capacity in accordance with available natural habitat.
Dinners around the
Thanksgiving table in Jackson Hole must be
interesting ones for the Mead family when the topic of CWD comes up. Just as the conversations must be colorful between John
Turner, who holds a master’s degree in wildlife biology, and his brother,
Harold.
Gov. Mead grew up in Jackson
Hole and is the grandson of former governor and U.S. senator Cliff Hansen. At the start of Danny
Schmidt’s documentary Feeding the Problem, Mead’s older brother, Jackson Hole rancher and
attorney Brad Mead, was interviewed. He caught flack from some in the
community for being forthright about his views on CWD. Over the years whenever I've interviewed him, I've found him to be smart, articulate and well-read. An amateur astronomer, he believes in science.
“From what I’ve heard about
Chronic Wasting Disease, it’s not a pretty thing to watch,” Brad Mead told Schmidt on camera. “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.”
“From what I’ve heard about Chronic Wasting Disease, it’s not a pretty thing to watch. 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.” —Jackson Hole rancher Brad Mead, older brother of Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead
Brad Mead at the end of Feeding the Problem says the compelling science persuaded him that feedgrounds need to be
phased out, admitting it will be far better for elk and the ecological health
of the region over the long run.
“I
don’t have a huge issue with brucellosis as a disease. I don’t think most
cattle producers are that panicky about brucellosis and I don’t think most
outfitters are panicky about brucellosis but Chronic Wasting Disease, that’s a
whole ‘nother deal,” Mead said. If CWD turns up in the Elk Refuge, he believes
it could be “a biological crisis of the first order.”
Picture this hypothetical
scenario playing out in Jackson Hole along U.S. Highways 89/191, a possibility
imagined by both Bruce Smith in his book and by Brad Mead in Schmidt’s documentary:
sharpshooters on the Elk Refuge enlisted to basically destroy a significant
percentage of the most iconic elk population in America to contain a pathogen.
Wapiti would have to be mowed down and removed in order to prevent the refuge
from turning into a massive contamination zone.
° ° °
Greater Yellowstone is supposed
to be an American beacon for smart custodianship of America’s public lands, and
it’s fair to say many Americans believe it to be true. But the feedground
controversy has numerous negative ripple effects and is laden with epic levels
of hypocrisy, Preso notes.
For example, the Elk Refuge
continues to feed elk that during some winters are in numbers 50 percent over
its own management objectives. Right next door across an artificial boundary in
Grand Teton Park, park officials sanction a controversial elk hunt inside the
national park boundaries (the only one of its kind in a U.S. national park) to
reduce the number of elk.
That, in turn, causes dangerous
encounters between hunters and grizzly bears. In fact, the Fish and Wildlife
Service, which oversees management of the Elk Refuge and until recently was in
charge of managing imperiled grizzly bears, said it fully expects that bears
will die in run-ins with elk hunters inside Grand Teton.
Ironically, Wyoming Game and
Fish assembled a CWD action plan in 2016 and put it out for public review. The state offered only vague
generalities for how it will respond when disease strikes the feedgrounds yet the plan included these acknowledgments:
“Disease transmission can be
related to density of animals in a given area as well as the frequency of
contact between animals. Artificially concentrating elk on feedgrounds may result
in more rapid spread of CWD and contribute to increased persistence of prions
in the soil and uptake by vegetation. Based on WGFD hunter-harvested CWD
surveillance data, CWD prevalence levels in non-fed elk populations remain
significantly lower than those of sympatric mule deer and white-tailed deer
populations in the core endemic area of Wyoming.”
The report added that “recent modeling
based on a combination of captive and free-ranging elk data suggested that
feedground elk may survive in the face of CWD at significantly reduced numbers
through a combination of genetic selection and elimination of antlerless elk
harvest.”
Moreover, the department stated
that “even though [CWD] eradication is not feasible at this time, the WGFD will
consider management actions to slow the spread and/or reduce the prevalence of
the disease statewide, especially west of the Continental Divide, based on
accepted scientific information and wildlife management practices.”
“I don’t know that anything else exists with management policy in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem so blatantly contrary to the science, the law and common sense and involves a state that is so resistant to change." —Tim Preso, attorney with environmental law firm EarthJustice
Like the Fish and Wildlife
Service and Forest Service, Dorsey notes that Wyoming cites the science and
then willfully disregards it.
In a career of practicing
environmental law, Preso says that seldom has he encountered more egregious
mismanagement from government land and wildlife agencies—state and federal working together. “I don’t know that
anything else exists with management policy in the Greater Yellowstone
Ecosystem so blatantly contrary to the science, the law and common sense
and involves a state that is so resistant to change,” he said.
What is the truth no one is
willing to publicly admit? Politicians in Wyoming fear that if they support
closing the feedgrounds, they won’t get elected. It's no different from being a politician in a coal-producing state and denying human-caused climate change or coming from a tobacco-growing state and refusing to publicly acknowledge that smoking cigarettes causes cancer.
But it’s more than that: many don’t want to
say anything that challenges the beliefs of culture, whether based on
fact or not. There is huge pressure in
local communities to conform to the status quo or face shunning and being socially ostracized.
Eventually, Preso says, truth
prevails and with CWD he fears it will only emerge from a preventable crisis.
For now, he wants to know why federal civil servants working for the
Fish and Wildlife Service and Forest Service would knowingly break the law.
Further, why would Wyoming knowingly shirk science?
Another profound irony that will
be explored later in this series is that Wyoming’s state wildlife research
facility at Sybille Canyon along the foot of the Laramie Mountains was
renamed the Tom Thorne/Beth Williams Research Center. There, an experiment
involving CWD and elk confirmed just how lethal the disease risk is but a Wyoming veterinarian minimized its dire implications.
Darrel Rowledge recalls having
conversations with Thorne and Williams about the public trust doctrine and the
precautionary principle, the latter being a governing tenet to err on the side
of caution when dealing with consequences of possible actions that could prove catastrophic.
Nameless, faceless bureaucrats
don’t make decisions, he says. Individual people do. Rowledge points to recent criminal charges involving public officials and an outbreak of Legionnaires' Disease, a bacterial disease, in and around Flint, Michigan. The assertion is that the disease outbreak can be traced to known problems with the city’s water supply that those in charge of public health agencies ignored.
“Governments and individual
people that dare to ignore the precautionary principle and public trust
doctrine can face criminal charges,” Rowledge said. “Could it happen with those who look after
the welfare of public wildlife? Could it
happen if one day people come down with a prion disease caused by eating a
CWD-infected deer or elk? Who will be
called to answer when injury comes to the public good and those in charge are
shown to have either ignored the truth or looked the other way?”
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Just a few days after Part One of Mountain Journal's series on Chronic Wasting Disease appeared, titled "Greater Yellowstone's Coming Plague," the Montana Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks issued a public statement announcing that it was bolstering its surveillance for disease in wildlife, particularly along the state's southern border with Wyoming. In coming installments of Mountain Journal's series, the impacts of CWD on wildlife in other areas, its possible implications for Greater Yellowstone, and threats to livestock and human health will be examined.
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).
