The rapid progression of chronic wasting disease in wild deer and elk in the Northern Rockies means it’s here to stay. There is one instance of the fatal disease being eradicated in the wild, in 2005 in upstate New York, but there’s no realistic hope of that out West with the disease now found in 30 states and four Canadian provinces.
Chronic wasting disease was first identified in Montana in 2017, in mule deer on the state’s southern border with Wyoming south of Billings. It’s been spreading ever since, seemingly from multiple directions. The disease was first detected in Wyoming mule deer in the 1980s.
The disease is caused by malformed proteins called prions. These prions are shed by live and dead deer and elk and persist in the environment for years or even decades. There is no cure for the disease and it is always fatal.
At least the disease hasn’t yet leaped the species barrier between deer and humans the way the related mad cow disease did in Great Britain in the 1980s. For now, hunters are urged to test any deer or elk before they consume animals they’ve killed, and to not eat the meat of animals that test positive.
Wyoming, the state that made running down coyotes and wolves with snow machines a “sport,” seems unable to process the obvious reality that the state’s elk feeding grounds are disease transmission sites. Now elk are dying on the feeding grounds created to boost elk numbers, further spreading the disease.
With chronic-wasting-disease-killed elk showing up on the state’s 22 feeding grounds you’d think the state might take a look at the wisdom of feeding wildlife — which is generally a dumb idea in the first place — but Wyoming’s feeding ground management plan doesn’t allow for significant changes unless area ranchers, outfitters and state government officials all agree first, according to reporting by the Wyofile news website.
Now that sounds like a great way to manage wildlife — give a bunch of stakeholders and politicians veto power over the plans feeding ground managers identify, and surely the result will be flourishing elk, right?
Chronic wasting disease should have been the final nail in the coffin of Wyoming’s elk feeding grounds, which never should have been created in the first place. What part of “wildlife” does the state of Wyoming not understand?
It’s too soon to say what long-term impact chronic wasting disease will have on big game hunting. Maybe the disease will never spread from deer to humans, though I suspect the disease’s presence will always make eating game meat a little more nerve-racking than it’s been in the past.
“Yeah, your elk has a disease that eats away its brain, but a human hasn’t been infected … yet,” doesn’t seem like the sort of seasoning that will make your pals lineup for your famous pan-seared backstraps.
The absolute minimum will be that testing all game for wasting disease is the new norm, everywhere. Maybe, hopefully, we’ll someday come up with a cure to treat infected animals or we’ll prove definitively that the disease can’t make the leap from deer to humans. In the meantime, we can expect fewer elk and deer on the hunting grounds, with an increasing percentage of the animals left to wander about in a stupor as chronic wasting disease ravages their brain.
There at least remains one thing some of us can do to preserve our wild ungulates: tear out the Japanese yew trees we’ve used to landscape the yard of our ranchettes in the middle of elk country. These ornamental evergreens were recently implicated in the death of several elk in the Bitterroot. Food is in short supply in elk country this time of year and the yew trees were apparently tasty, though alas, poisonous browse.
We may not be able to stop toxic prions but maybe toxic shrubbery is in our grasp.