An environmental group has filed a federal lawsuit in an attempt to force the U.S. Forest Service to separate domesticated sheep from a small herd of wild bighorn sheep in Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court by the Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, renews an eight-year-old fight over whether special protection should be provided for the 50 or so bighorn sheep in the Sierra Madre Range near Encampment. If that happens, opponents of the suit say, sheep herding will be all but wiped out in the area. Unless the 50 or so bighorns stay separated from domestic sheep, they’re the ones likely to be wiped out, said Duane Short, wild species program director with the BCA. That’s because the bighorns will likely contract diseases such as pasteurella carried by domestic sheep grazing in the same area, he said. All three Medicine Bow-area bighorn herds were established by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department through transplants in 1964, 1970 and 1977. The Encampment herd has held steady at around 50 animals for the past 25 years, far below the number thought necessary for a bighorn population to survive over the long term. The debate over the sheep dates to 2004, when ranchers and wildlife advocates reached a compromise agreement that emphasized separation of bighorn sheep and domestic sheep in areas of northwest Wyoming, where historic bighorn sheep populations have persisted, but placed less emphasis on protection of transplanted herds elsewhere in the state. The BCA subsequently challenged a portion of the Medicine Bow National Forest plan that called for no separation in the Sierra Madres...more
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