Sublette County, Wyoming, a massive hole of death for wolves
and a menace to western wildlife

12-16-05

Today the Casper Star Tribune reported that 28 wolves had been legally killed by the U.S. government in Sublette County, Wyoming this year. This is the county where Big Piney, Bondurant, Boulder, Cora, Daniel, Marbleton and Pinedale, and a few other populated places exist at the base of one of the premier wilderness mountain ranges in American, the Wind River Range. "Feds kill more wolves." By Cat Urbigkit. Casper Star-Tribune correspondent. Thursday, December 15, 2005

While most people know the area for its mountains, including the lesser known, Wyoming Range on its west side, it has long been a place of ranching as well as a place where wilderness and backcountry travelers stock up.

There is hardly a better example in Western America how culture and outside economic forces can come together to devastate what was once a great landscape.

The area is important more than for its scenery. Much of the wildlife that summers to the north, including the pronghorn in Jackson Hole, winter in Sublette County and southward, migrating hundreds of miles north in springtime. They all have to pass through a bottleneck -- Trapper's Point just west of Pinedale. It is only a half mile wide with subdivisions and gas rigs closing in fast. A highway runs right in front of it. Studies show the deer are already being displaced from The Mesa, which is the gathering point to approach Trapper's Point. The Mesa is now covered with gas wells, rigs and roads. When Trapper's Point is closed, a thousand-year migration route to Jackson Hole will be ended.

The visitor today will find the formerly clean air polluted by hundreds of natural gas wells being drilled, flared, and hundreds more recently put into production. Thousands of wells are planned. Thousands of trucks rumble though the "oil patch" day and night.

The elk are infected with brucellosis from their livestock-like confinement in the crowded winter feedlots in the county, and they have passed the disease onto adjacent cattle, causing Wyoming to lose its brucellosis free status. Rather than abolish the feedlots, Wyoming Game and Fish Commission in response to a special committee formed by the governor, has embarked on a "test and slaughter" plan for the elk similar to Montana's approach to bison. Because of the vagaries of testing for brucellosis and the mixing of infected elk in other herds, test and slaughter ought to eliminate the disease from the elk in about a hundred or so years. Of course by then, chronic wasting disease will have moved in and burned like a wildfire in cheatgrass through the elk feedlots. The elk herds will probably be just a legend told by old-timers.

Uncontrolled subdivisions also mar the scene, although residents on their ranchettes on the range have learned their property rights don't amount to much when the gas boys come calling.

There is little the USFWS can do about the situation other than keep killing the wolves the come down and take some cattle. In a few years the cattle will probably be gone, and wolves can come down and scavenge off the wildlife killed by drainage from the gas wells or those run down for fun by methamphetamine-fueled roughnecks.

Regarding roughnecks and "speed," read

Methamphetamine fuels the West’s oil and gas boom. Long the drug of choice for rural down-and-out youth, crank becomes commonplace among drill-rig roughnecks. By Patrick Farrell. High Country News. Oct. 3, 2005.

If you look around the world, including the United States, an "oil patch" is almost always an area of environmental devastation, vast inequalities of wealth and rank, and corrupt politics. Democracy can ameliorate the damage, but hardly eliminate it; and democracy usually ends up damaged by oil money and the kind of politician that comes from such an environment. Can you think of any?

The plague of oil and gas is of course, not limited to Sublette Country, Wyoming, nor is brucellosis, but this stuff spreads. I say, "thank God I live in Idaho" where there is probably little gas and no oil, but there are some infected elk near the Wyoming border, and the nasty habit of feeding elk long ago slopped over a bit into Eastern Idaho's Swan Valley where even now there is a rumor that a cattle herd has contracted brucellosis.

After Wyoming's deer and elk get chronic wasting disease it will head into Idaho where winter wildlife feeding is limited, but also where a number of "game" farms have sprung up -- a new kind of ag facility that has been beset by the dread "mad elk" disease in Colorado.

Don't blame Idaho Fish and Game, however, for the Idaho game farms. They are under the jurisdiction of the Idaho Department of Agriculture, not an agency full of folks trained in conservation medicine.

Lest this article discourage you, I will soon have one on Idaho wolves where so far Idaho Fish and Game and the Nez Perce Tribe are doing a great job managing wolves, and limiting problems with livestock. The total number of wolves killed in Idaho this year in conflicts with livestock was just 22 out of 500 wolves, less than Sublette County, WY alone.

Dec. 16. More on oil and gas in Sublette County, "Environmentalists appeal Pinedale drilling approval." Associated Press. Mule deer are down by 46% in the area.

Dec. 17. It turns out they didn't manage to kill last 2 wolves in the Daniel Pack. Given the way things are managed in Sublette County I'm cheering for the wolves.

It also turns out the Wyoming border elk have infected a cattle herd in Idaho's Swan Valley. 55 cattle have been put down, including 16 at a place where an infected cow had been sold from the infected Swan Valley herd. Eight were infected. It's odd how things like this don't get much publicity. Idaho may now lose its brucellosis free status like Wyoming did. How ironic that the media keeps repeating Montana's claims of the dangerous "infected" Yellowstone bison, animals which are not even among the cattle and have never infected cattle. Meanwhile the brucellosis elk of Wyoming and the Wyoming/Idaho border are ignored by major media. Maybe that will change when Idaho too losses its brucellosis free status.

Could brucellosis be being used to carry water for some other agenda?

Here is the article in the Billings Gazette. The statement that the brucellosis 3 years ago came from Yellowstone Park elk is silly. The first infected herd was at Tetonia, ID at the base of the west slope of the Tetons. Swan Valley is even further south of Yellowstone Park. In both cases feeding elk were repsonsible for the brucellosis.

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Copyright © 2005 Ralph Maughan
Wolf Recovery Foundation
PO Box 444; Pocatello, ID 83204