INTRODUCTION
Advocates of Congressional bighorn management restrictions (introduced in 2011 for the sake of the domestic sheep industry) promulgated the notion that they would give sheep producers a five-year break from bighorn-related management restrictions while a vaccine is developed that could protect bighorns while allowing them to live near domestic sheep (Hirai 2011; IPT 2011).
FEASIBILITY
In 2011, Washington State University (WSU) researcher Subrimaniam Srikumaran claimed that if all went well, a field vaccine would not be ready sooner than 10-15 years from then (Hirai 2011; WSF 2011a). Hirai describes development progress:
“The vaccine Srikumaran used on four bighorn sheep earlier this year required a series of booster shots, but was successful. The one Srikumaran envisions would be a single vaccine administered through food and would require additional time for a pharmaceutical company to manufacture in large quantities” (2011).
In a 2011 scientific paper, Wehausen, Kelley, and Ramey II emphasize the logistical difficulty of possible bighorn vaccination and say that “vaccination trials largely have failed to mitigate the spread of respiratory disease and appear to be an unrealistic solution to the problem” (2011, 8).
However, an October 2011 paper (coauthored by Srikumaran) published in Clinical and Vaccine Immunology describes a vaccine experiment in which four treated bighorns were successfully protected against Mannheimia haemoloytica while four untreated bighorns died within 48 hours of infection (Subrimaniam 2011).
Srikumaran is the WSU Endowed Chair for Wild Sheep Disease Research that the Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF) has helped fund (WSF 2011b; WSF 2011a). The WSF stresses the impracticality of vaccination and points out that there are “moral, ethical and philosophical issues [involved with] ‘vaccinating’ wild animals to prevent them from dying from contact with domestic stock in the wild” (WSF 2011a). The WSF is also funding WSU research to find ways to prevent domestic sheep from spreading their pathogens to bighorns—“a much more practical alternative [than] vaccinating and ‘domesticating’ wild sheep in the wild” (WSF 2011a).
According to November 2011 meeting minutes of the Wild Sheep Working Group (WSWG) of the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA), Srikumaran updated the WSF on vaccine progress with the general points below.
“Experimentally, a wild sheep vaccine may be developed [within] 5 years, but it wouldn’t be available for widespread field implementation for possibly 10-15 years.
Work continues, and holds promise, to render domestic sheep less lethal than at present, by overgrowing Mannheimia haemolytica leukotoxic bacteria with other, more benign bacteria.
Both [domestic and wild sheep vaccines] would require field trails, agency permission and a pharmaceutical company willing to produce it” (2011, 3).
The WAFWA elaborates on the WSF’s vaccine aims and states that “[Srikumaran’s] emphasis is reducing shedding of lethal bacteria by domestic sheep. 95% of research should be focused on [a] domestic sheep vaccine, not on wild sheep” (2011, 3). The WSF has encouraged the American Sheep Industry Association (ASI; significant domestic sheep advocacy group) to help fund the vaccine research (WAFWA 2011).
In response to the wild-domestic sheep disease problem, the ASI established a “Bighorn Resolution Account” (Hinson 2012). According to ASI president Margaret Soulen Hinson, “ASI has established an account for funding the very promising vaccine research and to assist the state sheep associations in their defense of domestic sheep grazing” (Hinson 2012). The ASI has gone so far as to solicit tax-deductible donations on its website (Hinson 212).
REFERENCES
Hinson, Margaret Soulen. 2012. Bighorn Resolution Fund. American Sheep Industry Association. http://www.sheepusa.org/Bighorn_Fund (accessed May 27, 2012).
Hirai, Kimberly. 2011. Big money bill could restrict bighorn management. High Country News. November 10. http://www.hcn.org/blogs/goat/big-money-bill-could-restrict-bighorn-management (accessed November 17, 2011).
Idaho Public Television (IPT). 2011. Dialogue: “Bighorn Sheep.” IPT Website. Windows Media audio/video file. http://idahoptv.org/dialogue/diaShowPage.cfm?versionID= 234317 (accessed October 21, 2011).
Subramaniam, Renuka, Sudarvili Shanthalingam, Jegarubee Bavanthasivam, Abirami Kugadas, Kathleen A. Potter, William J. Foreyt, Douglas C. Hodgins, Patricia E. Shewen, George M. Barrington, Donald P. Knowles, and Subrimaniam Srikumarn. 2011. A multivalent Mannheimia-Bibersteinia vaccine protects bighorn sheep against Mannheimia haemolytica challenge. Clinical and Vaccine Immunology 18, no. 10 (October): 1689-1694.
Wehausen, John D., Scott T. Kelley, and Rob R. Ramey II. 2011. Domestic sheep, bighorn sheep, and respiratory disease: A review of the experimental evidence. California Fish and Game 97, no. 1 (Winter): 7-24. http://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=4651 1(accessed May 23, 2012).
Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (WAFWA). 2011. WSWG Teleconference : November 9, 2011. N.p.: WAFWA. http://www.wafwa.org/documents/wswg/wswg minutes110911.pdf (accessed May 27, 2012).
Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF). 2011a. Vaccine is no Silver Bullet for Big Horn Sheep. http://www.wildsheepfoundation.org/Page.php/News/182/1317445200-1320123599 (accessed October 22, 2011)
Wild Sheep Foundation (WSF). 2011b. Wild Sheep Foundation Policy on Domestic Sheep and Goats. http://www.wildsheepfoundation.org/pdf/2012/domesticpolicies.pdf (accessed December 31, 2011).