Category Archives: Elk Hoof Disease

Appearance on Horns and Hooks Radio

 

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I was honored recently to share my insights into the issue of elk hoof disease with Horns and Hooks listeners throughout the Longview, Aberdeen and Olympia areas. Many thanks to Kelly Barnum, Rex Peterson and Colin Hamilton for having me on the show, but especially for continuing to shed light on this horrendous disease, as well as the way in which certain corporations and landowners appear to be controlling WDFW’s ineffectual response. I only hope that we were able to encourage a few more hunters and conservationists to ask WDFW the tough questions about what they plan to do to save our great elk herds of southwest Washington.

Click on the link below to listen to the entire podcast. And if you want to get right to the issue of elk hoof disease then skip ahead to minute 15:00.

http://www.hornsandhooks.com/2016/01/07/january-9-elk-hoof-rot-gun-control-and-more/


My ongoing investigation of elk hoof disease and toxic forest practices is funded entirely by my readers. If you appreciate my work and believe that journalism should be fearlessly independent of corporate influence, then consider clicking on the donate button below so that I can continue giving these issues the time and attention they deserve. Thank you for your support.





Editor of Northwest Sportsman Magazine Supporting Herbicide Study

 

Excerpt from Andy Walgamott’s recent post, followed by a link to the entire article:

WDFW continues to maintain that laboratory testing shows the hoof ailment is very similar to a “contagious bacterial infection in sheep,” but freelance Seattle journalist Jon Gosch has received some media attention for his dogged investigation and questions about whether possibly herbicides used on industrial forests might play a role.

Blogged Scott Sandsberry at the Yakima Herald-Republic recently:

Civic leaders in southwest Washington communities, as well as several members of the WDFW’s citizen panel working on the issue, are demanding what Gosch and some of his supporters have been saying for months: that those crippled elk be separated and studied until wildlife biologists can actually figure out once and for all what’s behind the disease.

That seems like a no-brainer to me. (That — “a no-brainer” — is also precisely how a member of that working panel described it to Gosch.)

Seems like a good idea to me as well.

http://nwsportsmanmag.com/headlines/wdfw-requesting-publics-reports-limping-elk-sw-wa/

WDFW’s Wrong Call on “Hoof Rot”

http://tdn.com/news/opinion/guest-column-wdfw-s-wrong-call-on-hoof-rot/article_3b406b82-2fbd-11e4-894d-001a4bcf887a.html

After my family’s unsuccessful hunting season this past fall I became curious about why there were so few elk in the woods of southwest Washington. The answer of course was the epidemic of hoof disease that is currently ravaging elk populations throughout the Pacific Northwest, and since then I have attended numerous meetings on the subject, written several articles, and probably parsed through more scientific papers than there are healthy elk left in Cowlitz County, where I was born.

Along the way I have learned a great deal about the dangers that herbicides and their adjuvants present to nearly every living organism, and like many hundreds of local citizens, I have come to believe that the forest chemicals routinely sprayed on industrial timber lands are at the root of “hoof rot.” The insights into true herbicide toxicity have been disturbing, but what has been especially maddening is that our Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) appears to be casting these concerns aside and discounting herbicides as a potential cause.

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Yakima Herald Outdoors Editor Praises Elk Investigation

 

By Scott Sandsberry / Outdoors Editor / Yakima Herald-Republic

Gadfly: gad-fly, n. 1) any of several large flies, as the horsefly, that bite livestock; 2) an annoying person, especially one who provokes others into action by criticism.

Jonathon Gosch is neither a horsefly nor annoying. But when it comes to the state’s increasingly widespread epidemic of hoof rot and other deformities and ailments among its elk population, it’s not a reach to call him a gadfly – in the best sense of the word.

While the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has tried in vain for years to get a handle on what’s debilitating the elk in southwest Washington and elsewhere, Gosch has become the horsefly nipping at the department’s heels, demanding accountability and answers.

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Save Our Elk (from toxic herbicides)

“Shall we see our children stripped of everything provided by a wise Providence for the sustenance of untold generations? The earth does not belong entirely to the present. Posterity has its claims.”

— Frank Lamb, Grays Harbor forester, 1909

 

Hardly a day goes by anymore without the release of a disturbing new article or study exposing the terribly destructive impact toxic herbicides are wreaking on our world. Just in the last few months, popular articles have linked common herbicides to autism, anencephaly birth defects, and an exceptionally deadly outbreak of kidney disease in Central America. In that same time, a study published in the journal Biomedical Research International revealed that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is 125 times more toxic than regulators say; a feature in The New Yorker described how large chemical manufacturers like Syngenta systematically harass scientists for producing research that threatens their profits; and the Seattle Times ran an editorial entitled “The Failure of the EPA to protect the public from pollution” which documents the chemical industry’s cozy ties to government regulators.

In this context, the battle to defend our wildlife populations in the Pacific Northwest from the known dangers of forest chemicals is but one front in a global war on this most pervasive and insidious toxicity. Our elk herds, suffering as they are from multiple maladies including an epidemic of hoof disease, are simply the largest and most obvious victims of a prolonged siege that is being waged on industrial timber lands throughout the states of Washington and Oregon. Thankfully, just as Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) officials began informing the public of their intention to euthanize crippled elk before actually understanding the cause of their disease, the collective rallying cry to save these animals, or at least properly study them, has become very loud indeed.

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