by Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile
A fourth elk has tested positive for chronic wasting disease near where elk closely congregate around hay provided to supplement their winter diets.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department sent word on Dec. 26 that a cow elk tested positive for the always-lethal neurological disease, which is caused by misfolded proteins called prions. The animal was found in elk hunt area 92, which includes portions of the Hoback River basin, Wyoming Range and Upper Green River basin.
“The cow elk appeared to be in good body condition and based on examination of the carcass it is likely the elk was wounded by a hunter and succumbed to its injuries,” Game and Fish spokeswoman Breanna Ball wrote in an email.
CWD, a similar affliction to mad cow disease, has spread throughout the country and slowly westward across Wyoming since the 1990s. There’s no vaccine or means of treating the disease, which is considered a major threat to ungulate populations in North America.
According to Ball, the suspected hunter-shot cow that recently tested positive for CWD was found in the Fisherman Creek drainage, a tributary of the Hoback River that’s located in the same general area as Game and Fish’s Dell Creek and McNeel Feedgrounds.
Much attention has been paid to the spread of CWD into Wyoming’s elk-feeding region, partly because biologists anticipate grave consequences for herds that have become dependent on hay distributed daily during most winters. The U.S. Geological Survey recently projected that CWD will infect 42% of elk in the feedground herds of western Wyoming within 20 years of the disease’s arrival. Populations and hunter opportunity, in turn, would crater, falling from roughly 16,000 elk today to 8,300 animals over the same period in the Afton, Fall Creek, Piney, Pinedale and Upper Green River elk herds.
To date there have been four CWD-positive elk found within the feedground herd units, Ball said.
The first detection, in the Jackson Elk Herd, was of a cow killed by a hunter in Grand Teton National Park (elk hunt area 75) late in 2020. There have been detections in the feedground region farther south every year since, including positive tests from elk in hunt area 98 south of Pinedale in both 2021 and 2022.
This article was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here with permission. WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
