Sunday, June 08, 2014
3 Montana bighorns killed after mingling with domestic sheep
Three wild bighorn sheep that mingled with domestic sheep on Mount Jumbo had to be killed Tuesday to prevent them from spreading disease to other wild bighorns.
“It’s pretty random,” Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks spokeswoman Vivaca Crowser said Tuesday afternoon. “Grazing has been going on up there for 15 years or so, and there’s only one other occurrence that’s ever been documented. Our plan is to make sure we’re grazing domestic sheep where the bighorns aren’t.”
Domestic sheep can carry bacteria and viruses that cause fatal pneumonia outbreaks in wild sheep. A pneumonia epidemic in the Bonner area in 2010 killed nearly 60 percent of the wild bighorns there through either the disease or culling efforts to halt its spread. The exact source of that pneumonia outbreak remains unknown, Crowser said...more
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There has been a relentless effort to prove that domestic sheep pathogens are a substantial threat to wild sheep and all efforts have failed.
However, the absence of facts does not interfere with agency biologists accusing domestic sheep and sheep owners of causing disease in bighorns.
Most of the pneumonia is bacterial in nature caused by one of several bacteria species. Bighorns everywhere have the pneumonia causing bacteria in their respiratory system but are immune from disease most of the time. So do domestic sheep and apparently all other large ungulates.
All it takes is some stress event to interfere with immune response and the bighorns get pneumonia and die. Stress that triggers the pneumonia includes such things as lung worm infections, malnutrition, bad weather, and helicopters full of agency biologists.
The problem is that pneumonia in bighorns and shipping fever in sheep have the same symptoms but is usually caused by different bacteria. DNA testing almost always has demonstrated that the pathogen causing disease in the two species is not the same bug.
Biologists know this as fact but ignore it since there is nothing like a dramatic disease outbreak in bighorns to use as a political club against domestic sheep and to use as justification for more agency biologists to wander around and look at the wildlife.
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