02/02/09 Sheep and grazing

02/02/09 Sheep and grazing

Administrator
Administrator
There's an age-old rift between biologists and environmentalists and ag producers and it's all about encroachment. On the one side you have good people who are concerned about the impact that humans and their worldly pursuits have on nature. On the other, equally good people who are trying hard to make a living by providing food for the world. Bottom line: both sides have strong arguments but they don't necessarily coincide. The latest involves a Weiser, Idaho sheep rancher who's fighting for access to public grazing lands that have been taken away in order to protect wild bighorns from disease. Dr. Marie Bulgin, Coordinator of the Caine Veterinarian Teaching Center at the University of Idaho and, in fairness, herself a sheep raiser with some observations about bighorns. (Bulgin) " We do know that they do have die-offs periodically and the more recent ones that I'm familiar with have been pneumonia and the pneumonia is a pasteurella caused pneumonia, bacterial, and domestic sheep die of pasteurella pneumonias, but so far in the research we've done here, and we've done quite a bit of it, we haven't been able to connect the pasteurella in domestic sheep with that that causes the die- offs in bighorn sheep."
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