Wyoming’s Elk Feedground Crisis

Last week’s decision keeps the status quo, as disease spreads and science points in the opposite direction.

Image from the Upper Green feedground that is covered in cowpies. Dagny Signorelli/WWP

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service signed a Record of Decision allowing continued use of the Dell Creek and Forest Park elk feedgrounds through September 30, 2028.

The no-feeding option was the environmentally responsible alternative, demonstrated both by the Service’s EIS and this USGS report, and the agency declined to choose it. But the push to continue feeding did not originate with the federal government. Wyoming requested it. The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission sets the policy, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department (WGFD) carries out the feeding, trapping, vaccinating, testing, and removal of diseased elk. In fact, the State of Wyoming is working to “purchase and install an incinerator in Sublette County to properly dispose of elk carcasses.”

That certainly gives the appearance of expecting a massive elk die-off, and not caring.

Wyoming still operates 21 elk feedgrounds in western Wyoming, seven of them on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. These sites were built to serve state management priorities: keeping elk away from private ranches, limiting brucellosis transmission to cattle, sustaining elk numbers, and preserving hunting opportunities. The new decision makes that rationale explicit. This system exists because the state has chosen, for more than a century, to manage elk in unnatural concentrations rather than do the harder work of restoring winter range, reducing conflict on private land by other means, and aligning herd objectives with ecological reality.

There’s a simpler solution: Ease off on livestock grazing on elk winter ranges so there’s plenty of forage for the elk to eat at natural densities. But neither the State of Wyoming nor the Forest Service seem interested in solutions.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal, contagious, neurological disease affecting elk, deer and moose, is no longer a looming threat somewhere down the road. It is here. The Record of Decision recounts the first confirmed CWD-positive elk on a feedground at Scab Creek in the foothills of the Wind River Range in December 2024, six CWD-positive elk found dead on or near the Dell Creek feedground near Bondurant in both winter and spring 2025, and additional feedground-area detections at Black Butte (along the headwaters of the Green River) and Horse Creek (north of Hoback Junction). CWD is always fatal. CWD was first detected in a mule deer inside Grand Teton National Park in 2018, and in an elk inside the Park in 2020. There is no vaccine. Once infectious prions are deposited on the landscape, they can persist for years. Feedgrounds don’t just crowd elk together, they help turn the landscape itself into a long-term reservoir of disease.

The Forest Service’s own analysis says the feedground system increases disease risk. In the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), direct CWD transmission among elk was estimated at 1.86 times higher on feedgrounds, and environmental transmission four times higher, than among unfed elk. The Record of Decision openly acknowledges that supplemental feeding creates artificially high concentrations of elk and increases disease transmission risk. The science is not hiding in the margins. The real issue is the policy choice to keep feeding the wildlife anyway.

The same EIS shows that the differences among alternatives at the Dell Creek and Forest Park feedgrounds alone are relatively modest because only a fraction of each herd unit is fed at those two sites. Roughly 20 percent of the Afton herd uses Forest Park and about 12 percent of the Upper Green River herd uses Dell Creek. That does not mean feedgrounds are harmless. It means the system is bigger than these two permits.

When the analysis looks cumulatively across all feedgrounds in five herd units, the contrast sharpens dramatically. After 20 years, continued feeding is associated with about 29 percent CWD prevalence, while a no-feeding scenario across all feedgrounds drops that to about 13 percent. Elk population size at year 20 is also higher under the no-feeding scenario than under continued feeding.

The Forest Service extended this authorization to 2028 in part to give WGFD time to finish its Feedground Management Action Plans, which are expected by March 2027, and then reevaluate all seven Bridger-Teton feedgrounds together in a future National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. The practical result is that Wyoming has been handed more time, and with it, more responsibility. All while business-as-usual continues and the risk of a catastrophic epidemic in Yellowstone and Grand Teton increases.

The Forest Service bears responsibility for allowing feeding to continue on national forest lands. But the state remains the principal architect, operator, and defender of the feedground regime itself. The pressure to make change before CWD digs in deeper is on the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Commission that directs it, and the State of Wyoming that keeps choosing feed over reform.

Dagny Signorelli is the Wyoming and Northern Utah director for Western Watersheds Project.