Urban bighorn sheep climbing to nuisance peak in Deadwood

Yep, South Dakota Game, Fish and Plunder have forced wildlife management on someone else again after losing control of another self-created crisis.

After the 2002 Grizzly Gulch Fire opened nearly 13,000 acres of overgrown and beetle-killed ponderosa pine invasive weeds and cheatgrass moved in because cars and hunters have killed off most of the native elk, white-tailed and mule deer.

GF&P released 26 head of bighorns trapped and transferred from the Hinton, Alberta, Canada area, somewhere east of Jasper National Park, then hauled them down for release at a high-country place near Deadwood left open by the burn in 2002. Sheep like open country more than dense forest. The project was helped along by the $82,000 raised last year by the auction of one of three bighorn hunting tags authorized by the state Game, Fish & Parks Commission. [Kevin Woster, KELO]

Now, a herd of disease-prone bighorn sheep have moved right in and made themselves at home within the City of Deadwood causing traffic snarls and wreaking havoc on gardens and lawns.

The below video has been lifted from Bob Reiling.

During the Sturgis Rally riders loop through Aladdin to Hulett and Devils Tower then back through Sundance. Highways are often crowded to capacity and drunken bikers can be seen weaving over every roadway in the Black Hills. Collisions with deer and bighorn sheep regularly injure and kill motorcyclists.

The reasoning is hardly mysterious: it's all about the money hunting and subsidized grazing bring to the South Dakota Republican Party depleting watersheds and smothering habitat under single-party rule.

The stills below have been lifted from Sandy Smith Bittner.

Events like these are hardly unexpected in a Republican-choked state that stages an annual mock bison roundup appropriated from indigenous cultures and keeps a drove of allegorical mooching donkeys in a park as a slap in the face to a feckless South Dakota Democratic Party.