(P)neumonia

(P)neumonia

   It works like this, plain and simple.  You drown.  Not always of course, but the difficulty pneumonia can cause in infecting your lungs can make you feel that way.  As Wikipedia writes: ...in developing countries, and among the very old, the very young, and the chronically ill, pneumonia remains a leading cause of death.  Pneumonia often shortens suffering among those already close to death and has thus been called "the old man's friend...Pneumonia affects approximately 450 million people globally (7% of the population) and results in about 4 million deaths per year."  Bacteria, fungus, parasites can all cause pneumonia.  But this isn't about the prevalence of pneumonia among humans...this is about the repercussions in the wild animal world; and for some reason, we're back to that word...culling.

    With bighorn sheep (written about in an earlier post), the problem of pneumonia is affecting some of the herds in Montana and elsewhere.  In the wild, such bighorn sheep don't appear to catch pneumonia...but domestic sheep and goats do (and appear to not be affected by such); and in what wildlife managers suspect is a case of wild sheep coming into contact with domestic sheep and catching pneumonia, it is becoming a serious concern and in some cases, destroying 90% of the wild bighorn sheep.  The Tendoy herd in Montana is just one of many wild herds of Rocky Mountain and Sierra bighorn sheep; but of the 15 states that have such herds, 13 of them have had their herds affected by pneumonia.  For the wild bighorns, it's a repeat of when they were eradicated back in the 1900s.  Here's how Charles Sheldon described his hunt back then in his book, The Wilderness of Denali as excerpted in a piece by Bill Sherwonit: Finding a slight depression at the edge [of a canyon that separated him from the sheep] I crept into it and lay on my back.  Then slowly revolving to a position with my feet forward, I waited a few moments to steady my nerves.  My two-hundred-yard sight had been pushed up, and watching my opportunity, I slowly rose to a sitting position, elbows on knees.  Not a ram had seen or suspected me.  I carefully aimed at a ram standing broadside near the edge of the canyon, realizing that the success of my long arduous trip would be determined the next moment.  I pulled the trigger and as the shot echoed from the rocky walls, the ram fell and tried to rise, but could not.  His back was broken.  The others sprang into alert attitudes and looked in all directions.  I fired at another standing on the brink, apparently looking directly at me. At the shot he fell and rolled into the canyon.  Then a ram with big massive wrinkled horns dashed out from the band and, heading in my direction, ran down into the canyon.  The others immediately followed, but one paused at the brink and, as I fired, dropped and rolled below...Seven fine rams had been killed by eight shots—and by one who is an indifferent marksman!  My trip had quickly turned from disappointment to success...The U.S. Biological Survey had entrusted me with the mission of securing the skulls of at least four adult rams, with some of their skins, for the study collection in the National Museum, and I desired four reasonably good trophies (the legal limit) for myself.  Most of these were now before me.  The rain had stopped.  I sat there smoking my pipe, enjoying the exhilaration following the stalk, while the beauty of the landscape about me was intensified by my wrought-up senses.  

    Adds writer Sherwonit: To his credit, Sheldon painstakingly recovered the animals he’d killed.  One by one he butchered the sheep and hauled their meat, skins, and skulls down the mountain, then treated them for preservation, took measurements, and studied the stomach contents.  Once reunited with his companions, he packed his specimens out and returned east.  His trip had been a resounding success.  Sheldon’s main work was now complete.  Several of the sheep he’d killed and collected would be studied by scientists and displayed in the American Museum of Natural History...Given what I knew of Charles Sheldon --legendary champion of Alaska’s wild sheep and Denali’s wilderness-- his account of the killing spree stunned me when I first read it.  I understand the unfairness of using contemporary standards to judge people who lived in other eras, under different value systems and moral codes.  In his time, Sheldon was considered a consummate conservationist.  And by most accounts, he worked harder than anyone to get the homeland of these sheep protected.  He is celebrated for his wilderness advocacy, especially his role in getting the federal government to establish Mount McKinley National Park, later to become Denali National Park and Preserve.  Still, both the actions and attitude he exhibited that long-ago day disturb me.

    Back to today's time.  Healthy bighorn sheep were introduced to the sickly Tendoy herd and others, but none of that worked.  The wild herds were wheezing and dying off at an unprecedented rate.  The domestic sheep and goats were everywhere (ranchers cheaply rent the Bureau of Land Management land to graze their animals for production and some of the sheep escape from the fenced areas) so that left only one alternative...kill the bighorns (efforts in one of Idaho's National forests to ban domestic sheep from grazing on previously allotted BLM acreage, all in order to protect the bighorn sheep, was contested and taken to court by the ranchers...they lost due to the severity of the herds dying off, although the ranchers are being compensated generously for the lost grazing area).  The entire Tendoy herd was shot and killed to see if that would stop the outbreak (the pneumonia has appeared now in both the Mojave desert and in Joshua Tree National Park, two areas well separated from domestic sheep herds...in one population, the bighorn population went from 140 to 40 in a few months).  Now there are fears that a similar fate is moving onto wild burros and horses with 18 deaths just in one herd.  The BLM is investigating, Jeff Fontanta (BLM public affairs officer) telling the Salt Lake City Weekly: We have thousands of horses and wild burros across the country. Anytime we have any numbers that die, we have cause for concern.

    For the Tendoy herd and others, was this another Charles Sheldon slaughter, taking out an entire herd of animals?  In a piece in National Wildlife, writer Michael Tennesen said that it proved to be just the opposite: Montana is only one of several states taking drastic steps to save bighorns from disease, he wrote.  This February, for example, the Nevada Department of Wildlife (NDOW) discovered pneumonia in what had been a healthy herd of about 100 bighorns.  Wheezing and frail, the herd suffered a 75 percent die-off, prompting NDOW to dispatch wildlife professionals to gun down the last survivors to prevent the disease from infecting adjacent herds. “Our guys were devastated by having to do this,” says NDOW spokesman Chris Healy. “But if we didn’t do anything, we had a good chance of this thing spreading.” 

    Eliminate a few for the good of the whole.  It's an age-old argument and many wildlife biologists try to find any and all alternatives before commencing with the decision to cull an entire herd.  But is this so with trophy hunters?  Generally, there is little science behind their shoot; just hire a trekker, find an animal and take it down.  Two versions of a mass kill, one for sport and one to stop the spread of disease (this was and is done during threats to human health such as mad cow disease or the recent H1N1 bird flu culling that meant destroying 50 million chickens, and quickly).  The fascination with staring at a mounted (stuffed) animal is prevalent throughout museums and many hunting lodges; and I admit to being fascinated as a child by the rather large hanging skeleton of a blue whale in a museum.  So to Charles Sheldon, was he merely following orders in a sense, bringing the animals back for study and later for display for others to view in elaborate dioramas, thrilling adults and children alike to get so close to something dead and alive (looking).  Madame Tussauds.  Would we feel the same if an alien race came to cull us humans in an effort to preserve what they perceived as the greater good?  Could we justify such a culling by standing behind a religion or a culture to do the same?  ISIS? 

    In the case of the bighorns, it is a symbol of wildness being taken down, an effort to protect future herds, to start over.  But the question might be where will it stop?  From sheep, pneumonia has possibly moved to horses and wild burros.  But what if something similar moved to elephants or tigers or dogs or cats...even vegetables (efforts to stop the spread of the fungus currently hitting orange crops is proving far more difficult than expected; a similar fate is sweeping across the world with the banana crops)...take them all out?  We are entering a new world, a world which we thought we knew but apparently didn't, a world still full of not-always-pleasant surprises...the decisions we make from this point onward could lead us in a direction we might not want to envision.