Wyoming’s famous elk herd and the attempt to catch death before it strikes.
KHOL, in Jackson, Wyoming, did a good long piece examining the issue of how our treating our wildlife like livestock has led to the inflection point of a crisis.
The crisis is the spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) caused by the concentration of elk on massive feedlots every winter. CWD, a prion-based disease, is 100% fatal, highly transmissible and the prions remain infective in the environment for at least decades.
Right now animals are dying across the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, sowing the deadly seeds of the spread of this disease.
You can listen to the show here or by clicking the Jackson Unpacked image above.
The program is very well done with the exception of the usual journalistic flaw of treating all points of view as equally true. This can be obviously seen in the unchallenged assertions of the outfitter who is in the business of killing elk.
Some of the false assertions are:
- there is not enough winter range left
- that the elk can never relearn their former migration routes which were destroyed by the feedlot operations
A significant portion of the Jackson herd wintered in the Gros Ventre valley. Over the last 35 years, nearly all the livestock have been removed from the allotments in the valley and there is abundant winter range, but the feedlots continue.
A simple path has been laid out in the famous maxim:
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.
It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Aldo Leopold
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