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Paper from University of Wyoming PHd student sheds fresh light on a question that’s vexed biologists for decades. By Christine Peterson, WyoFile.com Wandering through the rolling foothills of the Wind River Range near Dubois, lives a bighorn sheep herd famous for both its abundance and scarcity. A herd that once helped reseed bighorn sheep populations…
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Guest opinion by Melissa Cain, Bighorn Conservation Director for Western Watersheds Project. Last week, wild bighorn sheep herds in Washington and Oregon have been detected with deadly pneumonia, likely caused by a deadly pathogen spread by domestic sheep grazing on public lands. The bighorn are dying slow and painful deaths because they have no natural…
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Wild bighorn sheep once were found throughout the West. Roaming high alpine ridges of the Rockies to the badlands of the Dakotas to the deserts of Arizona and California, bighorns were adapted to a wide variety of climates and terrain and some estimate they numbered in two million or more animals. But these iconic western…
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For immediate release 10/17/17 Media contacts: Scott Lake, Western Watersheds Project (208) 429-1679 Laurie Rule, Advocates for the West (503) 914-6388 Sarah McMillan, WildEarth Guardians (406) 549-3895 Lawsuit Filed Today to Protect Idaho Bighorn Sheep from Deadly Diseases Idaho’s bighorns threatened by government sheep grazing at experiment station Boise, ID – Environmental groups filed a lawsuit today against the Caribou-Targhee…
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Bighorn sheep, named for the large curling horns of rams, are one of the West’s most iconic animals. Once found from North Dakota to Washington and south to California to New Mexico, they were among the most plentiful of the West’s large mammals, numbering more than 2 million animals. Today, in most western states their…
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Last week, Western Watersheds Project and our allies scored one for bighorn sheep on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest of Montana. Bighorn herds in the Greenhorn Mountains were threatened by the agency’s failure to consider the impacts of domestic sheep grazing in the nearby Gravelly Mountains. WWP, Gallatin Wildlife Association, WildEarth Guardians, and Yellowstone Buffalo Foundation…
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Appeals Court Affirms Forest Service Closures that Protect Bighorn from Domestic Livestock Boise, IDAHO – The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today affirmed the Payette National Forest’s decision to close 70 percent of the domestic sheep grazing allotments on the Idaho forest, despite the self-serving protests of the sheep industry. Conservation groups intervened in the proceedings in support of…
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On Sunday and Monday, February 14-15, 2016, USDA Wildlife Services took to the skies and shot the remaining 24 bighorn sheep in the Montana Mountains of northwest Nevada at the request of Nevada Department of Wildlife. These were important sheep because they were once healthy and over 60 had been translocated from there to areas in…
Author
Jonathan Ratner has been in the trenches of public lands conservation for nearly 25 years. He started out doing forest carnivore work for the Forest Service, BLM, and the Inter-agency Grizzly Bear Study Team, with some Wilderness Rangering on the Pinedale Ranger District. That work lead him directly to deal with the gross corruption within the federal agencies’ range program.