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I have had a scientific curiosity concerning wildlife diseases since my experiences as
a gradu ate student studying deer nutrition. In fact, one of my first publications was
about a fawn that exhibited skull deformities and was assumed to be abandoned by
its mother because it could not suckle (Jenks, Leslie, and Gibbs 1986). I realized that
most wildlife studies at the time (especially in northern states) considered diseases
and disease- related mortality to have minimal impacts on wildlife populations, and
that those who studied movements, survival, or population dynamics focused more
on human or predator impacts, rather than diseases, no matter the focal species (deer,
elk, mountain sheep) under study. But I still wondered about interactions among dis-
eases and nutritional condition, interactions among diseases and the probability of
se lection of prey by predators, and the full extent of the effect of disease- related mor-
tality on the maintenance of wildlife populations.
Not long after I arrived in South Dakota, a new disease, chronic wasting disease,
was documented in elk in Wind Cave National Park. It was thought that captive elk
had been transferred from an area in Colorado where the disease was prevalent to a
private ranch just south of Wind Cave National Park. Those elk had then interacted
with free- ranging elk within the park or elk that moved out of the park via the peri-
meter fence, which was about 1 m (3 ft.) in height along the southwest border of the
park (Bauman, Jenks, and Roddy 1999). Elk that crossed the fence line moved into
the adjacent Black Hills National Forest and into close proximity with the captive elk.
Despite the high probability of transfer of the disease from captive to wild elk, there
was little known about the status of the disease in South Dakota. Some within the
captive animal industry questioned whether the disease had always been in the Black
Hills region as well as other regions within the state.
CHAPTER 5