Bighorns

I was wandering from to booth to booth at a sportsmen's show when I ran into Jim Jeffers of the Idaho Wild Sheep Foundation. He had an alarming message. "It's a sad story but it is true, we have seen populations continue to plummet since the late 1800s and they are just in a spiral. They continue to go down and down and it has been worse recently as in the past 15 or 20 years that what would affect the population so drastically, we have validated scientifically within the past 10 years that it is a bacterial pneumonia and other problems associated with disease or bacteria passed from domestic animals. Primarily domestic goats and sheep to wild sheep populations or bighorn populations. The Big Horn are completely naïve to those bacteria, they have no immunity, they haven't evolved with it so it hits them pretty hard. In some situations you can lose an entire population, lose a large segment of the population and generally when you lose just part of it, those that survive, they can produce lambs at the lambs won't survive. So you end up with a lot of older age animals that are just occupying the landscape but they are not bringing on a new generation.