As CWD looms, Wyoming threads feedground risks

JACKSON — After years of deliberation, Wyoming has a plan for one of the longest-standing – and most controversial – wildlife management practices in the Cowboy State: feeding elk and maintaining elk feedgrounds.

Though Idaho and Montana have eliminated elk feeding programs, except in emergency situations, Wyoming has continued to lay out feedlines for wintering wapiti. 

The state feeds elk to maintain population numbers and entice elk to winter away from private land, where they can cause property damage, eat ranchers’ hay, and spread diseases like brucellosis to wildlife. 

But when elk are fed, they congregate in close quarters, increasing the risk of transmitting diseases like chronic wasting disease, an always-fatal neurological condition spreading through western Wyoming’s elk herds. 

Research indicates that if feeding stops, elk populations will fall in the short term. But if feeding continues, researchers predict populations will crater even further as chronic wasting disease sets in, causing widespread population declines.

Under the new plan, Wyoming will continue feeding elk. 

But local staff at the Wyoming Game and Fish Department will start to develop plans for feedgrounds to accomplish two goals onlookers have described as contradictory “needle-threading”: continuing to feed in a way that limits disease transmission, but reducing reliance on supplemental feed while adhering to specific sideboards.

“We are faced with a new challenge with CWD,” Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik said March 12, shortly before the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission voted unanimously to approve the Wyoming Elk Feedgrounds Management Plan. “I think this is our best step forward to try to address that.”

The governor-appointed board voted for the plan, after making modifications requested by outfitters. One change removed a sentence in the plan that declared feeding “unsustainable.”

The department will now have to determine where to begin. The state operates 22 feedgrounds spread across six herd units in western Wyoming. Game and Fish’s Jackson and Pinedale regions both oversee their herd units, and officials want each office to tackle one herd unit a year, meaning it should take three years to complete all six plans.

Working groups, tasked with developing feedground management action plans, will hold public workshops. Regional wildlife disease biologists from Jackson and Pinedale will coordinate the effort. Wildlife managers plan to meet in the next month to decide which herd unit will be first.

“They’re all equally important in my opinion, but some of them may get elevated to the top based on decisions made in other federal processes,” said Brad Hovinga, Game and Fish’s regional wildlife supervisor for the Jackson region and one of the key architects of the state feedgrounds plan.

Wyoming’s overarching plan is now complete. 

But planning for the future of individual state feedgrounds will begin as the U.S. Forest Service and National Elk Refuge make decisions about feeding on federal land.

The Bridger-Teton National Forest, for example, is deciding whether or not to reauthorize expired permits for the Dell Creek and Forest Park feedgrounds. That process has resulted in backlash from ranchers and outfitters who say they’ll fight the closure of any state feedgrounds via the executive branch.

The refuge, meanwhile, is revising its 2007 Bison and Elk Management Plan, which established how officials manage and feed elk on the 24,700-acre refuge north of Jackson. 

The refuge has been trying to wean elk off feed since 2019, using a strategy that environmental groups say is too slow. That plan has not worked, in part because of wicked winters and in part because of Game and Fish’s concerns about elk causing problems on private land that made it nearly impossible to limit feeding.

Progress on those two plans may determine which herd units Game and Fish focuses on first, Hovinga said.

Environmental groups and outfitters contested the feedgrounds plan at the March meeting when it was approved. Conservationists said it didn’t go far enough, arguing that phasing out feeding was necessary to slow the spread of chronic wasting disease and to avoid harming western Wyoming’s elk. In contrast, outfitters called on the department to move slowly, crediting feeding with maintaining elk populations and quality hunting.

But one Pinedale hunter said he was worried about where elk are headed, and urged support of the plan.

“Feedgrounds have worked great for the past 90 to 100 years. And they still work great. But we have a new kid on the block called CWD,” Bill Ames said. “We have to look at the long-term success of elk, when there isn’t a model out there that shows continuing feedground operations like we are is better for elk.”