BRODIE FARQUHAR Star-Tribune correspondent | Posted: Monday, May 8, 2006 12:00 am
LANDER - The first year of a pilot project to test elk for brucellosis and slaughter those found with the disease has been termed a success by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.
Agency officials offered the report on the project at Sublette County's Muddy Creek feedground to members of the Governor's Brucellosis Task Force at a meeting here last week.
"Nothing like this has ever been tried before in North America," said Scott Talbott, assistant chief of wildlife for the department. He said the agency learned a lot running elk through a well-designed corral, and benefited from "lots of good luck."
Talbott gave a PowerPoint presentation to the task force, noting that this was the first year in a five-year experiment to reduce the presence of brucellosis in the elk that winter on the Muddy Creek feedground. By killing infected cows, agency biologists believe there will be less reinfection over time.
The disease is spread as cow elk drop aborted fetuses on or near the feedground, which then infect other elk. A fetus aborted due to brucellosis is "hot" with the brucellosis bacterium, and elk contract the disease by the habit of licking after-birth placentas and fetuses.
Next year, as testing is again conducted at the Muddy Creek feedground, state biologists hope to see a statistical decline in the infection rate.
About 45 Game and Fish staff members participated in the program this past winter, expending 5,000 man-hours at a preliminary cost of $336,000. That's $5,793 for each elk that was removed from the herd, Talbott said.
All told, the department:
* Trapped 413 elk in the portable corral system.
* Tested 171 adult cow elk.
* Determined that 58 had been exposed to brucellosis through a quick blood test (34 percent of those tested).
* Determined that 18 had the disease through cultures taken from tissue samples from the slaughtered animals (31 percent of the 58 found to have been exposed).
* Slaughtered and processed the meat of 54 elk at an Idaho packing house (three others died in the trapping and testing process, and one escaped).
* Donated 8,900 pounds of meat to the Wyoming public.
Talbott said that starting with a trial run on Jan. 8, the Game and Fish staff gained valuable experience and the operation ran smoother and smoother.
For example, the first time staff tried to separate the bulls from the cows and calves, biologists resorted to darting the bulls with a sedative, so adult females could be segregated for testing. An antidote perked the bulls right up, Talbott said, and they left the corral - after an hourlong process. Later, the staff figured how to move the animals around so darting wasn't necessary, in a 15-minute process, Talbott said.
Tested cow elk were held overnight awaiting test results from a temporary lab set up in the Pinedale Game and Fish garage. Talbott said he'll need more lab workers and a bigger lab if the agency wants to trap and test more animals in the future.
Plans have called for the project to continue four more years, with the possibility of expanding it to other feedgrounds nearby.
Failure?
Not everyone is calling the first-year results a success.
Meredith Taylor, wildlife program director for the Wyoming Outdoor Council, said people should be outraged that only 31 percent of the 58 elk found to have been exposed to brucellosis actually had the disease.
"This means that 69 percent of the elk were killed unnecessarily," she said.
Those testing positive in the quick blood test, but not found to have the disease from tissue samples, could still have developed the disease later. But Taylor said the slaughtered animals were still removed from the pool of animals available to hunters - with no proof of infection.
"This nonsense has the potential to be expanded to other hunt units, and those half-priced extra cow tags we've become accustomed to will disappear, as could antlerless elk hunts altogether," she said.
She complained that Game and Fish "manages our elk like a glorified cow-calf operation. Elk are so heavily managed that we have lost the wild in them."
Further, Wyoming is not going to test and slaughter to an acceptable level of brucellosis prevalence - even a significantly reduced transmission rate - as long as there are elk feedgrounds, Taylor said.