As a retired career USDA veterinarian and infectious disease researcher, I urge Coloradans to vote Yes on proposition 127. A Yes vote will protect 2,500 non-offending mountain lions and bobcats each year from unethical trophy hunters using GPS-equipped packs of hounds and commercial fur trappers.
A Yes on 127 vote will also protect Colorado’s magnificent deer and elk herds from the ongoing and accelerating decimation by Chronic Wasting Disease. CWD is a uniformly fatal contagious brain disease of deer and elk. Over half of Colorado’s deer and elk herds are already infected with CWD at prevalences often exceeding 20%. Mountain lions selectively prey upon CWD-infected deer, slowing animal to animal spread. Their digestive tracts also uniquely inactivate the otherwise indestructible CWD infectious agent, preventing environmental contamination with this possibly zoonotic pathogen.
CWD is hyper-epidemic in deer in Colorado’s eastern plains that lack mountain lions as apex predators. CWD is much less common or even absent in much of the Western slope, largely due to the natural disease sanitizing efforts of mountain lions and in spite of the trophy hunting of 500 or more lions each year. Colorado needs every mountain lion it can in the landscape to curtail the spread of CWD.
Jim Keen, DVM
Wessington Springs, South Dakota