Disease and Behavioral Dynamics for Brucellosis in Elk and Cattle in the Greater Yellowstone Area

This paper investigates private responses to policies that have been proposed to confront a human-wildlife conflict that likely emerged as a result of a management regime designed to address an earlier human-wildlife conflict. The artificial elk feeding which is intended to conserve wildlife and reduce elk predation on cattle forage, now led to the emergence of brucellosis in elk and has allowed it to become endemic, in turn imposing great risk to the livestock. We propose a joint model of wildlife and livestock population and disease dynamics, and behavioral dynamics, to gain insight into the challenges of managing brucellosis infection between livestock and the Jackson elk herd in Wyoming. We examine population and disease dynamics under several different management options for the Jackson elk herd, where each option involves a combination of changes in elk feeding and population levels. Farmer responses to these dynamics, when vaccination is not required, are modeled along with the associated impacts to livestock dynamics. Our findings suggest that the feedbacks between jointly determined disease dynamics and decentralized economic behavior matter when choosing among various policy approaches