Chronic wasting disease prions that bind with soil and grass are accumulating in Wyoming-run feedgrounds, contaminating sites that have provided refuge for slews of close-packed elk each winter for generations.
“We knew it was an eventuality, but it’s absolutely concerning,” said Justin Binfet, deputy chief of wildlife for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. “With every positive [elk] that’s out there, they’re starting to contaminate those feedgrounds more and more.”
In January, Game and Fish reported its unwelcome first case of the infectious disease inside an elk feedground — the Scab Creek unit southeast of Pinedale. Then late last week, the agency sent word of its second and third cases, both detected in cow elk carcasses at the Dell Creek Feedground in the Hoback River basin. As the nearly indestructible prions pile up, they have the potential to inflame CWD’s spread, collapsing western Wyoming’s six feedground-dependent elk herds in the process.
A recent U.S. Geological Survey study, in fact, anticipates that very outcome.
Although there’s a propensity to “crystal ball it,” Binfet said, nobody knows exactly what’s about to happen. Game and Fish has a good feel for CWD transmission dynamics and prevalence in elk herds in the eastern part of the state, where it’s existed since 1986 and where elk also gather in large numbers. There, where there’s no feeding, the disease hasn’t had a devastating effect on elk, unlike what’s happened in some Wyoming mule deer herds.
But there are many questions, Binfet said, about how the disease will behave and propagate in western Wyoming where elk are being fed and concentrated, year-in and year-out, on the same relatively small plots of land.
“Having these 22 state-run feedgrounds and then the National Elk Refuge, that’s going to certainly put the transmission potential at an unprecedented [level],” he said.
For decades, scientists and game managers have discussed the risks of what could come only in the hypothetical: CWD hadn’t yet reached the feedgrounds and their super-concentrated elk, which are generally more prone to infecting each other with an array of diseases. The first case within Northwest Wyoming’s feedground region was logged in the Jackson Herd in 2020, and the disease subsequently showed up in the Pinedale, Piney and Fall Creek herds. The two infected animals found dead at the Dell Creek Feedground mark the malady’s first known occurrence in the Upper Green River Elk Herd, meaning that five of the six feedground-dependent elk herds now harbor the disease. Only the Afton Elk Herd is yet to have its first case of CWD discovered. Altogether, the region is home to a combined 20,000-plus elk.
State biologists and wardens aren’t being caught entirely on their heels by the arrival of a disease that threatens to reshape western Wyoming’s elk herds. Last March, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission signed off on the state agency’s first-ever elk feedground management plan. That plan, however, does not authorize wildlife managers to adapt feeding as they see fit without consensus from ranchers, outfitters and the highest levels of state government. Feedground closures, in fact, even require gubernatorial support because of intervention from the Wyoming Legislature.
Under the feeding plan, elk herds will be reviewed two at a time for the next three years. First up in 2025 are the Pinedale and Jackson Herds, out of which will come herd-specific “feedground management action plans.”
Review of feeding operations at the Dell Creek Feedground, where CWD recently killed two cows, could still be years away, but that doesn’t altogether negate any type of immediate management response.
“Especially now, we’re going to renew conversations with feeders to keep an extra-vigilant eye out,” Binfet said.
Sick-looking elk, he said, can and will be killed and tested as a precaution. Wyoming’s elk feeding management plan calls for developing a “carcass removal and disposal” protocol at each feedground.
The carcasses of the two CWD-stricken cows from the Dell Creek Feedground were taken to the dump, Binfet said.
“We are also exploring the possibility of getting some large dumpsters,” Binfet said. “But, depending on where these feedgrounds are [located], logistically it’s quite a challenge to get these elk out.”
On the National Elk Refuge, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is also planning for CWD’s arrival, managers dispose of animals via a diesel-fueled incinerator.
The Dell Creek Feedground in recent winters has attracted an average of 571 elk, significantly more than the 400-animal quota, according to the state’s management plan. The 32.5-acre site is located on the Bridger-Teton National Forest and feeding operations occur there under a permit, but not without controversy.
Four years ago, the Sierra Club, Western Watersheds Project, Wyoming Wildlife Advocates and Gallatin Wildlife Association sued the U.S. Forest Service, and won, after challenging how the federal agency was authorizing elk feeding on the site near Bondurant. Operations have depended on temporary single-year permits ever since, though the Forest Service has started preparing an environmental impact statement that could OK continued feeding for the next two decades.
The draft of that plan considered four scenarios: continuing to feed elk per the status quo, denying the permit immediately, allowing a three-year phase-out, and allowing feeding only on an emergency basis in severe winters. Additional options might be included in the final EIS, which the state is still awaiting, Binfet said.
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