Our friend Norm Bishop pens a positive review of Biologist Bruce Smith's comprehensive and insightful: " Where Elk Roam-Conservation and Biopolitics of our National Elk Herd........Smith's .22 years of research on our Jackson Hole,Wyoming Elk herd makes for excellent analysis of the the adverse effects of artificially feeding Elk and thus preventing them from dispersing from the Park on their historical Fall migration.......The diseases caused by unnatural congregations of the animals on the National Elk Refuge in Wyoming threaten domestic cattle............. The fact that Wolves are reducing the Elk herd and helping to minimize Elk diseases like Chronic Wasting and Brucelliosis is overlooked by the Rocky Mtn States in their zeal to kill the "big, bad wolf" at any cost...........I will pick up this book and suggest you consider doing so as well

Where Elk Roam - Conservation and Biopolitics of our National Elk Herd.  

In his Where Elk Roam, biologist Bruce L. Smith, PhD, shares a labor of love and discovery (not to mention a sense of urgency) after 22 years of field research on the  National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. 

 Not since Olaus Murie's 1951 classic book, The Elk of North America, based on Murie's 18 years of research in Jackson Hole that began in 1927, has a single author written so eloquently and extensively on the ecology and management of elk.  As Murie was, Smith is a naturalist who observes the wondrous behavior of animals and records them, but unlike Murie, Smith was armed with guns that shoot tranquilizing darts, and radio collars and microchips, receivers and aircraft that all enabled him to track hundreds of study elk across rugged mountainous terrain at all seasons, and helicopters to vastly accelerate his work in capturing and observing more than 400 elk for seven years. 

If all this sounds highly technical and scientific, it is.  However, applying these technologies demanded hundreds of hands-on contacts with the elk, and Smith was not unaffected by that intimacy.  "I'm still awed by this.  How remarkable to place my hands on this wild beast."  And, to what end, all this manhandling of elk?    

Since its establishment in 1912, the National Elk Refuge has increasingly concentrated wild elk, excluded by human activities from their 200-mile historic migration southward to winter on Wyoming's Red Desert.

  Smith documents the effects of that concentration, that, with twenty-two Wyoming State feedgrounds feeding 23,000 elk, adds up to 31,000 elk in five western states - about 3 percent of North America's million elk.  And what are the effects of this concentration of elk? 

 Brucellosis, a bacterial disease brought from Britain with cattle, was identified in bison in neighboring Yellowstone National Park in 1917, and in Jackson Hole elk in 1930.   Both bison and elk have a higher seroprevalence of Brucella when concentrated than when they are free-ranging (In Jackson Hole, 80 percent of adult female bison were seropositive, as were 39 percent of female elk). 

The disease has minor population effects on wild elk and bison, but when brucellosis infects domestic livestock, it causes unacceptable abortions of calves.  In recent years, livestock in northwest Wyoming and southeast Idaho have been infected with brucellosis from elk.

  Vaccination of elk doesn't work. The obvious solution to lowering the risk of transmission is to quit concentrating elk and bison on feedgrounds.  But habit and tradition die hard, so winter feeding continues, in spite of its devastating effect on the vegetation and biodiversity of the area.

Now, if brucellosis sounds like a ticking time bomb, read Smith's Chapter 7, Train Wreck.  Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is caused by a prion, a protein that attacks brain tissue, as does mad cow disease.  There is no known way to prevent it or cure it, and it persists in soil for decades.  CWD has been marching inexorably northward across Wyoming for 30 years, and was found in a moose near Bedford, Wyoming, in 2008.  Like brucellosis, CWD thrives among concentrated members of the deer family - deer, elk, and moose. 

 On an elk farm in South Dakota, 59 percent tested positive for CWD.  Wyoming's 2005 draft CWD plan stated that prevalence of CWD in free-ranging elk is only 2 to 3 percent (1/10 that of deer), the prevalence of CWD in captive elk can exceed 50 percent.  This level... suggests the possibility of much higher prevalence in feedground elk... 

  A report from a CWD workshop in Wisconsin noted that animals debilitated by CWD would quickly be culled by large carnivores.  Recent modeling suggests wolf predation may suppress CWD emergence in deer, but on the feedgrounds, there may be too few wolves to keep pace with disease epizootics.  Ironically, although wolves so far are taking about 0.3 percent of refuge elk, the State of Wyoming is looking to greatly reduce their numbers the moment their wolf management plan is accepted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The historical aspect of all this is not lost on Smith, nor is the potential for a new conservation direction.  He reminds us that Ira Dodge reported 20,000 elk navigating the Gros Ventre-Green River Divide in the late 1800s, resulting in a pitch in 1898 for a national "winter game preserve" in Wyoming's Red Desert. 

 Current conservation biologist Joel Berger brings us up to date by observing that 58 percent of the elk migratory routes no longer exist.  Yet, restoring that corridor could cost far less than spending three million dollars annually on feeding, vaccinating, and crop depredation.  Smith writes, "The window to re-create this grand procession is closing fast as CWD marches west."  But, "ranchers seem to prefer feedgrounds with brucellosis [not to mention CWD] to no feedgrounds at all as a means of reducing elk competition with livestock on both private and public lands."  Finally, "better a smaller elk herd than an overgrazed range riddled with disease."

Lions Press, 2012. 266 pages, 37 photographs, 2 appendices, 226 references cited.

           

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