Tom Morang
04-16-2002, 10:39 AM
Wasting disease poses threat to state's economy
By Charlie Meyers
Denver Post Outdoor Editor
Tuesday, April 16, 2002 - The conversation between two men lounging, fishing poles stuck in the sand, last week on the bank at Antero Reservoir, provided an oddly prophetic glimpse at what might be the frightening future of Colorado wildlife.
Above the tinkling of wind-tossed chandelier ice, the men spoke idly of fish they had caught, deer and elk they had hunted, of big ones that got away. One mentioned a trophy bull elk he encountered along the northwest rim of the Flat Tops south of Craig.
"I won't be going back there, will I?" he concluded, a chilling harbinger of what could become a standard reaction to the growing concerns over the spread of chronic wasting disease.
The trouble with CWD, other than the fact that it kills a minor percentage of deer and elk that contract it, is that it belongs to that broad family of encephalopathies that includes the so-called mad cow disease, fatal to a number of humans in Europe. Although no one has become stricken from eating animals infected with CWD, nor have laboratory tests indicated such a propensity, the link is too close for many to stomach.
This area along the Flat Tops is where state officials last week found the first evidence that the disease had spread to wild deer in another part of the state. Previously, a pathology that attacks the brains of animals that wither and die had been confined to an area in northeast Colorado generally centered in Larimer County and extending along the South Platte Valley. This regional pattern also broadens into southeast Wyoming and southwest Nebraska. Recently, a particularly high level of infection was discovered among animals in northwestern Boulder County, suggesting a further spread.
Generally, the disease infects 5 percent of deer and 1 percent of elk in the greater zone, but certain hot spots may contain three times that many. Since the 1967 discovery of CWD at a Division of Wildlife research facility in Fort Collins, officials had carried the hope, irrational as it now seems, that the disease might be confined to a relatively small area east of the mountains. For decades, even as the density of contagion increased and the malady drifted east along the Platte, that conviction somehow lingered.
Now, with the discovery of infected deer in a part of northwest Colorado that ranks as the best big-game habitat in the state, a place wildly popular with residents and nonresidents alike, the disease clearly is out of the bag.
Just as officials feared, the vehicle for the spread appears to be a captive animal ranch, one of several in prime big-game country where infected elk have been imported from other commercial ranches that harbored the disease. Difference is, this is the first time, in a series of operations by Colorado Division of Wildlife officials to kill and test free-ranging animals, that any have turned up positive.
Now, only the most Pollyannaish observer could conclude that CWD won't spread farther on the game-rich Western Slope. The CWD controversy has been muddled by accusations volleyed among wildlife managers and elk ranchers over the origins of the disease. Whatever the genesis, it seems likely a Colorado Agriculture Department typically over-friendly to livestock interests proved lax in its inspections and controls over exchanges among these captive herds.
A separate ethical issue swirling with the storm involves the prevalence of commercial hunting inside these fenced elk compounds, a fish-in-a-barrel practice by which pseudo-hunters pay tens of thousands of dollars to execute a "trophy" animal for the mantle.
These gnarly nuances aside, the greater concern is one that echoes from two obscure hunters along the icy banks of a reservoir deep into the very heart of Colorado wildlife management. What happens - probably when, not if - CWD becomes widespread around Colorado and even all of the Rocky Mountain West?
A national media geared toward the sensational likely will trumpet scare stories about sick animals and mad cows. Wildlife agencies - Colorado's chief among them - that depend upon nonresident hunters and big-game hunting in general for the revenue that supports all of its programs, from fishing to pheasants to bird-watching, tremble at the prospect. In Colorado, we find a pound-foolish situation in which a piddling million-dollar elk ranching industry threatens a $2 billion wildlife enterprise that touches nearly everyone in the state - including a lot of landowners and outfitters whose livelihood depends upon visiting hunters who might stay home in droves.
Gov. Bill Owens recently appointed a high-powered task force to deal with the matter, even as agriculture officials begin dismantling many of the elk farms through high-priced buyouts.
The overwhelming worry is that it may be too little, too late.
By Charlie Meyers
Denver Post Outdoor Editor
Tuesday, April 16, 2002 - The conversation between two men lounging, fishing poles stuck in the sand, last week on the bank at Antero Reservoir, provided an oddly prophetic glimpse at what might be the frightening future of Colorado wildlife.
Above the tinkling of wind-tossed chandelier ice, the men spoke idly of fish they had caught, deer and elk they had hunted, of big ones that got away. One mentioned a trophy bull elk he encountered along the northwest rim of the Flat Tops south of Craig.
"I won't be going back there, will I?" he concluded, a chilling harbinger of what could become a standard reaction to the growing concerns over the spread of chronic wasting disease.
The trouble with CWD, other than the fact that it kills a minor percentage of deer and elk that contract it, is that it belongs to that broad family of encephalopathies that includes the so-called mad cow disease, fatal to a number of humans in Europe. Although no one has become stricken from eating animals infected with CWD, nor have laboratory tests indicated such a propensity, the link is too close for many to stomach.
This area along the Flat Tops is where state officials last week found the first evidence that the disease had spread to wild deer in another part of the state. Previously, a pathology that attacks the brains of animals that wither and die had been confined to an area in northeast Colorado generally centered in Larimer County and extending along the South Platte Valley. This regional pattern also broadens into southeast Wyoming and southwest Nebraska. Recently, a particularly high level of infection was discovered among animals in northwestern Boulder County, suggesting a further spread.
Generally, the disease infects 5 percent of deer and 1 percent of elk in the greater zone, but certain hot spots may contain three times that many. Since the 1967 discovery of CWD at a Division of Wildlife research facility in Fort Collins, officials had carried the hope, irrational as it now seems, that the disease might be confined to a relatively small area east of the mountains. For decades, even as the density of contagion increased and the malady drifted east along the Platte, that conviction somehow lingered.
Now, with the discovery of infected deer in a part of northwest Colorado that ranks as the best big-game habitat in the state, a place wildly popular with residents and nonresidents alike, the disease clearly is out of the bag.
Just as officials feared, the vehicle for the spread appears to be a captive animal ranch, one of several in prime big-game country where infected elk have been imported from other commercial ranches that harbored the disease. Difference is, this is the first time, in a series of operations by Colorado Division of Wildlife officials to kill and test free-ranging animals, that any have turned up positive.
Now, only the most Pollyannaish observer could conclude that CWD won't spread farther on the game-rich Western Slope. The CWD controversy has been muddled by accusations volleyed among wildlife managers and elk ranchers over the origins of the disease. Whatever the genesis, it seems likely a Colorado Agriculture Department typically over-friendly to livestock interests proved lax in its inspections and controls over exchanges among these captive herds.
A separate ethical issue swirling with the storm involves the prevalence of commercial hunting inside these fenced elk compounds, a fish-in-a-barrel practice by which pseudo-hunters pay tens of thousands of dollars to execute a "trophy" animal for the mantle.
These gnarly nuances aside, the greater concern is one that echoes from two obscure hunters along the icy banks of a reservoir deep into the very heart of Colorado wildlife management. What happens - probably when, not if - CWD becomes widespread around Colorado and even all of the Rocky Mountain West?
A national media geared toward the sensational likely will trumpet scare stories about sick animals and mad cows. Wildlife agencies - Colorado's chief among them - that depend upon nonresident hunters and big-game hunting in general for the revenue that supports all of its programs, from fishing to pheasants to bird-watching, tremble at the prospect. In Colorado, we find a pound-foolish situation in which a piddling million-dollar elk ranching industry threatens a $2 billion wildlife enterprise that touches nearly everyone in the state - including a lot of landowners and outfitters whose livelihood depends upon visiting hunters who might stay home in droves.
Gov. Bill Owens recently appointed a high-powered task force to deal with the matter, even as agriculture officials begin dismantling many of the elk farms through high-priced buyouts.
The overwhelming worry is that it may be too little, too late.