Measures taken to prevent disease in bighorn sheep

Wyoming Game and Fish Wildlife Biologist Will Schultz and Game Warden Biff Burton were forced to euthanize a bighorn ram in the Sierra Madre mountains on July 9.

The Forest Service contacted Game and Fish about the bighorn ram, which was seen mingling with a herd of domestic sheep on Forest lands near Haggerty Creek.

Schultz said it should be clear the euthanization has nothing to do with herd management in the Sierra Madre’s and the Biodiversity Conservation Alliance lawsuit against the US Forest Service for special protection of Bighorn in the Sierra Madre range.

The Game and Fish department has a protocol for dealing with bighorn sheep that are co-mingling with domestic sheep herds.

According to department policy, “if possible, the bighorn sheep should be live captured and transported to the Department’s Tom Thorne/Beth Williams Wildlife Research Center at Sybille. Any live bighorn sheep taken to Sybille shall not be released back into the wild. If the bighorn sheep cannot be live-captured, that bighorn sheep shall be lethally removed and, if possible, transported to Sybille or the EGFD wildlife disease lab in Laramie.”

“There are diseases or bacteria in domestic sheep that they seem to have a resistance to that our wild sheep in North America do not have. They did not evolve with the same (resistance) as the European sheep breeds,” said Schultz. There is strong evidence linking sheep die off, generally pneumonia from bacteria, to contact between wild and domestic sheep. The concern of disease transmission among sheep is state-wide.

The Encampment River herd of bighorn is around 30 to 40 sheep, and there are also sheep in the Douglas Creek area and near the state line around six-mile.

It is unclear where the ram that had to be put down was from. Schultz said “There is documentation of younger rams traveling hundreds of miles.”

This kind of incident only happens about once a year, but Game and Fish staff are sent on three to four calls a year to investigate the interaction of bighorns and domestic sheep.