Reports Of Plague In Wyoming Mountain Lions

Plague never seems to go away. Every time we think we have beaten it, it pops back up again.

Wildlife researchers have been out and about and testing. The number is high. According to an article in Range Writing Natural Recourse News 43 percent of mountain lions in their Teton County, Wyoming study tested positive for plague (Yersinia pestis) in a sampling from 2005 to 2014.

Human plague was also found in the area. (a Boy Scout visiting from another state in 2008). The boy made a full recovery.

A Grand Canyon National Park biologist preformed a necropsy on a mountain lion in 2007 and made the mistake of not using any protective equipment. He died six days later after inhaling the disease from the infected mountain lion. On average there are about seven human plague cases reported per year

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Plague can be transmitted in many different ways including flea bites contracted as a predator or scavenger feeds on an infected animal.

It is wise to stay away from dead animals and not handle them.

Back in 2020 National Geographic reported "A quiet plague outbreak has been killing Yellowstone’s cougars for years"

“Everyone assumed it was starvation,” says Mark Elbroch, cougar program director for Panthera, the global wildcat conservation organization. After all, “it was the middle of winter.” But tissue samples sent to Wyoming’s Game and Fish Department revealed another fate. “We were as surprised as anyone to learn that the cats had died of plague,” Elbroch says.(NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)

A headline in LIVE SCIENCE reads: "Yellowstone study finds plague (yes, that plague) in nearly half of tested cougars."

Results showed that 12 (43%) of the 28 cougars tested were positive for plague. That number includes eight (47%) of the 17 living pumas and four (36%) of the 11 dead pumas. (LIVE SCIENCE).

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Filed Under: Death, die, dying, hunt, hunted, hunter, hunting, Mountain Lion, plague, wyoming

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