Disease ravaging western ungulates after red states slaughter apex predators

Republican former South Dakota legislator Betty Olson writes a mostly-weekly column for the Rapid City Journal. She never misses a chance to rail against big government, climate science and apex predators especially if it boosts her bottom line.

The attached photo is lifted from her Facebook page and as we can see she was a drop-dead, stone-cold fox in earlier days. Her daughter is in her arms as her mother photo-bombs in curlers.

Betty blames deer for bovine tuberculosis while praising the destruction of the cougars, coyotes and wolves that control deer.

Irean is 93 years old and has just written a paperback book about her father who was a government hired wolf hunter from 1898 to 1912. He rode horseback up from the Sand Hills in Nebraska to Bixby, S.D. and worked for Ed Lemmon for seven years, cowboying and wolf hunting. He learned how to hunt wolves from Charles Bollinger at Camp Crook and hunted for all the big cattle companies in seven counties in South Dakota and into the southern edge of North Dakota. Mike Kintigh and John Kanta with Game Fish and Parks held a meeting with Harding County folks in Buffalo this week to explain the TB testing of wildlife in the quarantined area. Veterinarians from the Animal Industry Board will do the testing and some of them came to answer questions from the crowd. GF&P will bring in the APHS [sic] plane and a helicopter to help with the gather. Starting this Monday, they planmed [sic] to test 100 white tail and mule deer, 100 antelope and all the coyotes, fox, raccoons, and small mammals they can get. [Grand River Roundup]

In her previous article she wondered why Game, Fish and Plunder hadn't slaughtered every wild critter in northwestern South Dakota.

South Dakota Game Fish and Parks put out a draft of its 2017-2023 Deer Management Plan last week and it calls for increases in mule deer populations throughout the western half of the state. The latest population directives from 2016 indicated that GF&P wanted to see the mule deer population grow "substantially." Mule deer, as a species, have a slower growth rate than white-tailed deer. [Rapid City Journal]

It's not that Betty has lousy aim: she has called South Dakota's christianic LGBT hating governor "Dennis Do-nothing who sells out South Dakotans every chance he has and lies" so she has that going for her.

And from the Jackson Hole (Wyoming) News and Guide:

The arrival of chronic wasting disease in Sublette County became official in mid-February, when Wyoming Game and Fish Department technicians whose job is to sweep the countryside for the malady sampled a dead mule deer doe at a home near the Pinedale Airport. National Elk Refuge officials are bracing for the disease’s arrival and have said they believe the initial detection is inevitable and possible at any time. [story]

Wildlife Services, part of the US Department of Agriculture and the APHS in Betty's article, has wanted to exterminate a wolf pack that killed nineteen elk in a Wyoming refuge that feeds and over-winters the ungulates. Elk in the region are dying en masse from CWD that researchers say results from the federal government feeding of elk in close proximity.

Cougars are in the cross hairs, too.

We all know this: unless the West embraces rewilding on portions of the Missouri River basin west of a north/south line from Oacoma, South Dakota through the CM Russell National Wildlife Refuge to Yellowstone National Park then to the Yukon water wars will clog the courts leaving violent armed vigilantism to settle disputes.

We have met the road kill...and he is us.

The feds should buy out landowners unwilling to lease for wildlife corridors.

It's time to tear out the Missouri River dams and rewild the West.