Our friend Norm Bishop shedding a spotlight on how wrong it is to artificially feed wild animals like deer and elk..........Feeding Stations like the kind at play on The National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming congregate Elk in finite areas............Like in crowded human cities where illnesses can spread rapidly because of proximity of people, so does chronic wasting disease(CWD) and Brucellosis explode exponentially in Bison, Deer, Elk and other browsers in artificial feeding areas............Norm shares portions of biologist Bruce L. Smith's excellent peer reviewed paper, WHERE ELK ROAM-CONSERVATION AND BIOPOLITICS OF OUR NATIONAL ELK HERD which reinforces how aberrant and harmful artificial feeding stations are to both wild and domestic animals and uses it as a "point/counterpoint" to suggest how off-base Idaho Senator Monty Pearce is in calling for perpetual winter feeding of Elk in Jackson Hole

From: Norman Bishop <nabishop@q.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 2:37 PM
Subject: Re: Urgent Idaho Legislative update! Feeding elk - a recipe for disaster
To: Jim & Barb Hagedorn <jhag1@frontier.com>

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.    

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.

But, "ranchers seem to prefer feed grounds 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 Smith writes, "better a smaller elk herd than an overgrazed range riddled with disease."
Lions Press, 2012. 266 pages, 37 photographs, 2 appendices, 226 references cited.



Norman A. Bishop
On Jan 19, 2012, at 1:55 PM, Jim & Barb Hagedorn wrote:

  Idaho Senator Monty Pearce is requesting a special hearing with both the house and the senate regarding the administration of Idaho's winter feeding program for our ailing big game herds. He is proposing legislation that will ensure winter feeding dollars are solely used for preserving our big game and cannot be funneled back to the general fund.·        

The hearing date has been set for Friday, February 3rd at 1:00 PM in Boise. We need every Idaho concerned Sportsman, hunter, huntress, rancher, Outfitter and concerned citizens to attend this hearing.
More details to follow but please make every attempt to attend this hearing!