LARAMIE – The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced a reversal of an appeal win on the Medicine Bow Forest Plan earned by Biodiversity Conservation Alliance that would have protected bighorn sheep in the Encampment Herd of the Sierra Madre Range from diseases spread by domestic sheep. Deputy Undersecretary of Agriculture David Tenny reversed the ruling by the Chief of the U.S. Forest Service that the current Medicine Bow Forest Plan violates legal requirements to maintain viable populations of bighorn sheep throughout the Forest. Specifically, the Chief’s ruling originally found that by failing to maintain separation between domestic sheep and wild bighorns, potentially allowing the Encampment Herd to be wiped out by pasteurella or other diseases spread from domestic sheep.

“It’s disappointing that the Forest Service was poised to make key improvements in domestic sheep grazing to protect the Encampment Canyon bighorn herd, based on the best available science, and now this important progress has been reversed by inside politics,” said Erik Molvar, wildlife biologist with Biodiversity Conservation Alliance. “We were looking forward to working with the Forest Service and livestock permittees to trade sheep pastures with cattle pastures so the bighorns could be protected with the least amount of inconvenience for the livestock interests.”

The reversal, called a Discretionary Review Decision, was undertaken in response to petitions from the Wyoming Game and Fish Department and other groups. In an ironic twist, WGFD’s mission is “conserving wildlife – serving people,” yet the state agency decided to take action to prevent solutions to a serious threat that faces the Encampment Canyon bighorn herd, which the agency has invested a great deal of time and money to get established.

“It’s bad enough that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department didn’t step up and advocate for common-sense protections for the Encampment Herd during the Forest Plan process,” added Molvar. “But intervening to prevent the Forest Service from exercising its legal obligations to protect wildlife is simply inexcusable. This agency has a serious crisis in leadership when it takes a hard stand in opposition to the welfare of the very wildlife it is charged with protecting for the benefit of sportsmen and all Wyoming citizens. Heads should roll.”

Both the appeal decision and the Discretionary Review Decision agreed with BCA that disease transmission from domestic sheep was a serious threat to the Encampment Canyon bighorns, and that the viability of the herd was not maintained by the current Forest Plan. These determinations were made in light of a scientific review of the bighorn sheep disease literature conducted by the Forest Service, available online at http://www.fs.fed.us/biology/resources/pubs/wildlife/bighorn_domestic_sheep_final_080601.pdf

The appeal reversal cited challenges faced by the Encampment Herd in terms of its small size, which may not be sufficiently large to ensure genetic viability over the long term, and argued that since there are doubts about the long-term viability of the bighorn herd, that the Forest Service has no obligation to provide suitable habitat to provide a viable bighorn population in the Sierra Madre Range. Both the Encampment Herd and the Douglas Creek Herd (in the Platte River Canyon of the Medicine Bow Range) hover around 50 adult animals, and will need additional transplants of sheep to increase their genetic diversity; such transplants would be expected to maintain genetic viability of the populations over the long term. The Douglas Creek Herd is hunted, while the Encampment Herd, with its lower lambing rate, is not.

“The Encampment Herd has been a self-sustaining and stable population for decades,” added Molvar. “This is a native species that should have a place to survive, and one day flourish, in the Sierra Madre Range.”

The Discretionary Review Decision is available for review online at http://www.fs.fed.us/emc/applit/includes/woappdec/med_bow_disc.pdf .

Erik Molvar, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, (307) 742-7978