Disease Kills NE Utah Bighorn. AmmoLand.com
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He has been a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and also its President. For many years he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
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I am thinking the only hope for these populations is that the surviving sheep will have some sort of resistance to the disease in the next generation…Sad to hear about, sad to realize this is the not so pretty side of life in the wild.
I attended the meeting in Salt Lake City a year ago concerning Bighorn diseases. One of the biologists sitting by me indicated that the same company supplied the helicopter and capture equipment like nets etc., including transportation for the captured bighorns in several states. If this is true, someone needs to investigate to see if the capture crews are spreading diseases from herd to herd by using the same un-sanitary equipment. The masks they use over the bighorns eyes looked to me like a possible source of infection. The biologist indicated to me that they didn’t disinfect anything in between captures in various states.