By Billy Arnold
Jackson Hole News&Guide
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

JACKSON — For the first time, an elk has tested positive for chronic wasting disease on a western Wyoming wapiti feedground, areas that wildlife biologists have long seen as a risk for disease transmission.

The elk that tested positive was an adult cow found dead on the Scab Creek Feedground near Pinedale at the end of December, according to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which reported the detection Wednesday. Game and Fish personnel investigated the carcass and removed it at the end of December, officials said.

Scab Creek is part of Hunt Area 98, which is home to the 2,000-animal Pinedale Elk Herd and stretches west from the Fontenelle Reservoir to the foothills of the Wind River Range. Chronic wasting disease has been detected in the hunt area before but never on a feedground — near Pinedale or anywhere else in the state.

The finding is significant because feedgrounds are at the core of the debate about how to manage chronic wasting disease, a 100% fatal neurological condition that has been spreading through western Wyoming’s ungulates — deer, elk and moose — since the late 1980s. The disease can be spread in many ways, including through direct animal-to-animal contact and environmental contamination.

Feedgrounds increase the risk of both by causing elk, which are herd animals and naturally group together, to gather in unnaturally tight quarters. When wapiti are close together, it’s easier for them to come into contact with one another’s saliva and bodily fluids, which can carry the disease-causing agents known as prions. When elk return to the same area winter after winter, like a feedground, those prions can infiltrate the soil and plants and survive for up to 16 years, creating a vector for spreading chronic wasting disease that can last decades.

The detection comes as the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, which operates upwards of 20 feedgrounds in western Wyoming, and the National Elk Refuge are both reevaluating the future of feeding.

After developing a statewide plan for managing elk feedgrounds, the state is now moving toward reevaluating how it manages feedgrounds in the Jackson and Pinedale area.

The Scab Creek Feedground will be included in that review. But any changes to feeding are not expected for months, if not years.

While environmental and some hunting advocacy groups have called for closing feedgrounds as a way to prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease and elk population declines in the long term, Wyoming’s outfitting and ranching lobby has promised to fight feedground closures, concerned about elk dying in the near term and elk leaving feedgrounds to dine on ranchers’ hay. Closing any state-run feedground will require approval from Gov. Mark Gordon.

Scientists estimate that when chronic wasting disease prevalence reaches between 7% and 13%, elk populations will decline. Prevalence in western Wyoming elk is thought to be less than 1%.