• Chronic wasting disease, which poses a grave threat to western Wyoming’s hay-fed wapiti, has been found for the first time in the Fall Creek Elk Herd.

By Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile.com

Someone recreating on public land south of Jackson called in the report of a dead cow elk. 

Wyoming Game and Fish Department personnel went to investigate, and while they were at it they took a tissue sample to ascertain what might have killed the cow. Two days before Christmas, the state agency publicized the unwelcome, but not unexpected news: The forlorn animal tested positive for chronic wasting disease, an always-lethal sickness with the potential to devastate big game herds.

The CWD confirmation was a first for an elk from the Fall Creek Herd and Game and Fish’s hunt area 84, which sprawls south of Jackson in the Gros Ventre and Wyoming mountain ranges. With it the region has entered a new era in which CWD, with all its uncertainty, is part of the landscape. The confirmed presence of the neurological disease, which causes progressive body damage and behavior changes, will factor into wildlife managers’ decisions about the future of feedground operations. Elk congregating around human-supplied feed can inflame the spread of the disease.

Chronic wasting disease is spreading steadily through feedground elk, though perhaps not with the haste that many have feared. The prion disease first showed up in the Jackson Elk Herd in late 2020 when a hunter-killed cow in Grand Teton National Park tested positive. It’s been detected every year since, with verified CWD cases occurring south of Pinedale in 2021 and 2022. About this time last year it appeared for the first time in the Piney Herd. Now it’s in the Fall Creek Herd, too.

WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.