Wyoming Study: Carnivores and Scavengers Could Help Reduce CWD
January 4, 2024 | Source: Billings Gazette | by Christine Peterson
Wyoming Game and Fish biologists and technicians have spent the last year and a half feeding four captive bobcats ground meat infected with chronic wasting disease. The study isn’t to see if bobcats can contract the disease — it hasn’t been shown to cross the species barrier to carnivores like big cats — the goal is to see what comes out the other end.
The results so far have been promising. Only 2% of the chronic wasting disease prions that go into a bobcat’s mouth can be detected in the bobcat’s poop. And that’s day one. By day two there’s less than 1%, and by day three there’s none at all.
It might seem strange, but whether or not carnivores or scavengers like bobcats keep depositing infectious prions on the landscape may matter quite a bit.
“There’s a lot of individuals that believe that carnivores and scavengers play a very large role in the movement of CWD prions in the environment,” said Dr. Samantha Allen, the state’s wildlife veterinarian. “I think that it shows that they’re maybe not contributing as much as some folks would like to believe.”