Starvin Larry

(Reuters) – The die-off of bighorn sheep from pneumonia led Montana wildlife managers on Monday to take the unusual step of abruptly closing a hunting season tied to a wild herd near Yellowstone National Park whose seasonal mating rituals attract scores of wildlife watchers.

The emergency closure came after state biologists estimated that pneumonia had claimed nearly 40 percent of a herd near Gardiner, Montana, whose numbers fell to 55 this month from 89 last year, state wildlife managers said on Monday.

Such pneumonia outbreaks have been linked to contact between wild sheep and domestic ones that graze on public allotments and private lands across the Rocky Mountain West.

More than 1 million bighorns once roamed the region but their numbers had fallen to just tens of thousands in the first decades of the 20th century because of unregulated hunting and disease, according to the Wild Sheep Foundation.

Wildlife managers in Montana and other Western states have renewed efforts in recent years to reintroduce wild sheep in areas where disease and historical over-hunting pushed them close to extinction.

Bighorns are prized by sportsmen and wildlife watchers for their curled horns and for mating rituals in which rival rams crash horns after running at each other at speeds up to 40 miles per hour.

Moves by U.S. land managers to reduce the number of sheep grazing allotments to lessen the disease risk to bighorns have been met with fierce resistance by sheep ranchers, who say the leases of ground are vital to their operations in states like Idaho where the majority of land is under federal control.

Hunters and ranchers, usually in harmony about wildlife management, are divided over bighorn sheep.

“It’s an issue of conflict,” said Bret Stansberry, landowner-sportsmen coordinator with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.

The pneumonia among bighorns near the northern entrance of Yellowstone marks the first time the ailment has affected that herd, which is native rather than reintroduced, said Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks wildlife biologist Karen Loveless.

Biologists have counted at least 34 bighorn carcasses in the area and a recent survey indicated additional wild sheep have become sick, Loveless said.

It is suspected the bighorns contracted pneumonia by mingling with domestic sheep that graze on private lands in the vicinity, said Loveless, adding that there is no sign yet the disease has infected Yellowstone bighorns.

(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho)

Mark Potok trying to remain relevant…

Methinks Bracken is spot on with his analysis.

Details @ http://iiipercent.blogspot.com/

h/t SLL

“One of the mysteries of our era is why there seems to be no learning curve in Washington. Over the last 13 years, American wars and conflicts have repeatedly helped create disaster zones, encouraging the fragmentation of whole countries and societies in the Greater Middle East and Northern Africa. In the process, such American wars, drone assassination campaigns, raids, and conflicts have acted as recruitment posters for and aided and abetted the growth of terror outfits. And here’s where the genuine strangeness begins to enter the picture: after all of this is absorbed and assessed in Washington, the response is regularly more of what hasn’t worked and a clamoring for yet more of it.

It turns out, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon reports today, that the same kind of process has been going on so much closer to home — right across the border in Mexico, in fact, resulting in the kind of blowback that Chalmers Johnson would have appreciated. Yet while hysteria and panic reign over the barbaric acts of the faraway Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, U.S. involvement in the “war on drugs” in a neighboring country gets just passing attention here. Curiouser and curiouser, hysteria and panic over Mexico only seem to rise when ISIS is reputed to be involved (at least in the fantasy worlds of various right-wingers). Consider it all part of the true mysteries of our strange American age of repetitive war. Tom”

Read the rest @ http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175971/tomgram%3A_rebecca_gordon%2C_it_didn%27t_work_in_afghanistan%2C_so_let%27s_do_it_in_mexico/

Since the end of World War II, the US government has deluded itself, but like all delusions, the government’s has run into reality. It has done so before, but this may mark a demarcation. It would be too much to expect the delusion to give way to wisdom, but the delusion cannot persist, as even a few of the deluded are beginning to realize.

Washington’s delusion has been that the anomalous position of supreme, unchallengeable power in which it found itself at the end of the war—leader of the winning alliance, sole possessor of the atomic bomb, keeper of the reserve currency, with the only intact industrial infrastructure—would be permanent. Reality soon intruded. The USSR penetrated the US nuclear weapons program and detonated its first bomb in 1949. The Korean war was a stalemate, not a win. Vietnam was a defeat. The US abandoned the responsibility it had undertaken to maintain the world’s reserve currency, to redeem dollars for gold, when President Nixon closed the gold window in 1971. Islamists overthrew the US puppet Shah of Iran and installed a theocracy hostile to the US. This sparked an upsurge of Islamic militancy in the Middle East that bedevils the US to this day.

US hegemonic triumphalism rallied after the dissolution of the USSR, but it proved to be a dead cat bounce. Welfare state transfer payments, overall spending, and the national debt continued to grow as the we-can-have-it-all fantasies of the populace and its politicians persisted. There was no scaling back of either domestic or global commitments, even as the economy began to demonstrate subtle signs of deterioration. That deterioration was masked by central bank machinations that promoted rising equity, bond, and housing markets, bestowing paper wealth that served as an imperfect and skewed replacement for shrinking opportunities in an increasingly debt-saturated and government-controlled economy.

Read the rest @ http://straightlinelogic.com/2015/03/23/the-partys-over-by-robert-gore/

Via David Codrea