Wyoming Game and Fish: Regional Awards, Individual Excellence, and the Painful Logic Behind Killing Two Bighorn Sheep in a Cheyenne Backyard

Two separate Wyoming Game and Fish stories are circulating this week, and together they tell a more complete picture of what wildlife management in the American West actually looks like in practice — the recognition that comes from sustained, excellent institutional performance, and the difficult, sometimes heartbreaking operational decisions that are the reason that performance matters.

The first story is one of celebration. The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission was named Commission of the Year at the 2026 Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies annual awards, and two department staff members — Dave Zafft and Christina Maleesa — received individual professional honours that reflect the quality of people the department has built and retained over decades of dedicated service.

The second story is harder. Two young bighorn sheep rams wandered into a residential area of Cheyenne in early June, were spotted in a resident's backyard, and were subsequently euthanised by game wardens. The decision was made under an established, science-based protocol designed to protect wild bighorn herds from devastating disease. The rams were killed to save a herd they might otherwise have infected, and a wildlife biologist thinks there might have been a better way.

Both stories come from the same institution, in the same week. Understanding each requires understanding the other.

The WAFWA Honours: What the Awards Represent

The Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies represents 23 states and several Canadian provinces across the American West and Canada, serving as the primary regional body through which state-level fish and wildlife agencies share science, build partnerships, and recognise excellence in management and conservation. Its Commission of the Year award is presented to a state commission or provincial board that has made significant contributions to the management, protection, or enhancement of fish and wildlife resources within the past five years — not for a single action, but for a body of sustained work that the membership judges to represent regional leadership.

Wyoming's Commission received the 2026 award in the context of a state that faces some of the most complex wildlife management challenges in the American West. Wyoming is home to elk, mule deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, mountain goat, moose, bison, black bear, mountain lion, wolf, and an enormous variety of migratory bird species. It manages those populations across a landscape that is simultaneously one of the most public-land-rich environments in the nation and one where private land access, agricultural interests, and energy development create constant competing pressures on wildlife habitat. The Commission's job is to translate biological science, public input, economic realities, and legal obligations into hunting seasons, harvest limits, special protection measures, and long-range management policies that serve both Wyoming's wildlife and Wyoming's people. It does this across seven appointed commissioners, a professional department staff of hundreds, and a budget that depends substantially on licence sales, federal aid, and the sustained willingness of hunters and anglers to invest in the system.

Department Director Angi Bruce stated that the award reflects the Commission's success in balancing the complex scientific and socio-economic needs that come with determining effective policies and regulations. The WAFWA recognition is, in this sense, a peer assessment of the Commission's effectiveness delivered by the region's other wildlife professionals — the people who understand the difficulty of the work from the inside and who are best positioned to judge when a body of work deserves recognition.

The two individual staff honours fill out the picture of institutional depth that underlies the Commission's record.

Dave Zafft, who received the WAFWA Professional of the Year Award, has worked for Wyoming Game and Fish since 1986. He began as a seasonal technician, earned a master's degree in fisheries biology in 1991, and has since held virtually every significant role in the department's fisheries management structure — Lander Regional Fisheries Biologist, instream flow biologist, fish population biologist, supervisor of the aquatic assessment crew, assistant fisheries management supervisor, and fisheries management supervisor, before arriving at his current role as Deputy Chief of Fisheries. A career spanning 40 years, from seasonal entry-level field work to the second-highest position in the fisheries division, is a specific kind of institutional biography. It is the biography of someone who chose the work rather than the credential, who accumulated knowledge through proximity to the resource rather than through professional reinvention, and who built the kind of relationships with the land and water and fish that cannot be acquired on a shorter timeline.

Christina Maleesa, who received the Outstanding WAFWA Contributor of the Year Award, joined Game and Fish in 2014 and has served as the department's Federal Aid Coordinator since 2023. Federal Aid coordination is among the most consequential administrative roles in any state wildlife agency. The Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act of 1937 — the Pittman-Robertson Act — and the Federal Aid in Sport Fish Restoration Act of 1950 — the Dingell-Johnson Act — together direct excise tax revenues from the sale of firearms, ammunition, archery equipment, and fishing tackle into a fund that supports state wildlife conservation programmes across the country. The amounts involved are substantial. Managing that money — securing grants, meeting compliance requirements, documenting outcomes, and ensuring that every federal dollar is spent in ways that satisfy both state objectives and federal accountability standards — requires the kind of fiscal precision and institutional knowledge that Maleesa has demonstrated in a way that earned her the department's own Fiscal Employee of the Year honour in 2022, a Director's Coin for her administration of the Governor's Big Game License Coalition, and now the regional recognition from WAFWA. She also represents the US Fish and Wildlife Service Region 6 on the national Federal Aid Working Group, extending Wyoming's expertise into the national conversation about how these crucial funding streams are managed.

Bruce described the agency as full of dedicated professionals who help keep Wyoming at the forefront of conservation in the country. The recognition from WAFWA validates that description through the mechanism that carries most weight among professionals: peer recognition from the people doing the same difficult work in adjacent states.

The Cheyenne Bighorns: Why Two Young Rams Had to Die

On the evening of June 7, Cheyenne resident Valarie Grace spotted two young Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep rams in the yard of her parents' house on the outskirts of the city. The rams appeared to be between one and two years old. They took off after she spotted them, still moving when she last saw them, and her immediate concern was not disease or herd management — it was traffic. Pershing Boulevard is close. Sheep in an urban environment at night are sheep in danger.

The rams were subsequently located by Game and Fish wardens and euthanised. Department spokeswoman Amanda Fry confirmed the killings and explained the reasoning in a formal email statement. The meat from both animals was donated to Wyoming First Lady Jennie Gordon's Food from the Field programme through the Wyoming Hunger Initiative, ensuring that the animals served a purpose even after the decision that ended their lives.

The biological logic behind the decision is specific and well-established in bighorn sheep conservation science. Bighorn sheep are, for all their ruggedness in the face of Wyoming's winters and topography, extraordinarily vulnerable to pneumonia. The primary transmission risk comes from domestic sheep and goats, which can carry Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae and related pathogens as endemic carriers without showing clinical signs. When wild bighorns encounter domestic sheep, the disease can jump to the wild population with catastrophic consequences. Unlike domestic breeds that have developed some resistance over generations of co-existence with the pathogen, wild bighorns have essentially no immunity. An infected wild herd can experience lamb mortality rates of 80 to 100 percent for years following a spillover event, and adult mortality can be severe as well. In some cases, the disease becomes enzootic — permanently established within the herd — and the population never fully recovers.

The Whiskey Mountain bighorn herd near Dubois in northwest Wyoming is the most painful local example of what this looks like over time. Once one of the largest and most celebrated bighorn herds in Wyoming, the Whiskey Mountain population has been reduced to a fraction of its historical numbers by pneumonia infections that have persisted for decades. The disease management challenge it represents has consumed enormous resources and produced enormous heartbreak for the wildlife professionals and hunters who have invested in the herd's recovery. It is the cautionary tale that every Game and Fish bighorn sheep biologist carries.

When bighorn rams wander — and young rams do wander, seeking new territory as is natural for their age and sex — the concern is not where they end up but what they encountered on the way. The urban fringe of Cheyenne, where the rams were found, contains domestic sheep and goats in agricultural settings, hobby farm operations, and residential properties within driving distance of where the rams appeared. If the rams encountered domestic sheep along their travel corridor — which could have stretched many miles from their origin, thought to be either the Iron Mountain herd in southeast Wyoming or a herd near Scottsbluff, Nebraska — they may have been exposed to the pathogens that could devastate a wild herd upon their return. The critical problem is that exposure does not produce immediate visible symptoms. A bighorn can carry a disease it contracted from domestic livestock for weeks or months before clinical signs appear, during which time it can infect every member of the wild herd it returns to.

The Bighorn Sheep/Domestic Sheep Working Group Plan that guides Game and Fish's response establishes the protocol clearly: if suspected commingling has occurred, Game and Fish will euthanise the wandering bighorn sheep to protect the rest of the wild herd from disease. The decision is not arbitrary and it is not punitive. It is a calculated trade-off between the loss of two individual animals — animals whose loss is real and whose killing requires something of the people who do it — and the potential loss of a wild herd that the two individuals could infect upon return.

Not everyone accepts that the trade-off is unavoidable. Biologist Zach States, speaking to Cowboy State Daily, said that the rams could potentially have been quarantined instead of killed — captured, held until their origin and health status could be determined, and released or managed accordingly. Newer technology including GPS wildlife tracking collars has made aspects of this kind of assessment more feasible than it was when the Working Group Plan was originally developed, and States argued that killing bighorns is not necessary in every instance of urban wandering.

Katie Cheesbrough, executive director of the Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation, offered the institutional response to that critique. Game and Fish cannot know the travel path the rams took along the way and cannot know where they were headed. The uncertainty is not resolvable through quarantine alone, because the incubation period for the relevant pathogens, the cost and complexity of maintaining wild sheep in quarantine conditions, and the impossibility of reconstructing every livestock contact along an unknown travel corridor all make the quarantine option significantly less straightforward than it sounds in principle. Cheesbrough said that euthanising the rams was the prudent thing to do under the circumstances, while acknowledging that newer tools and approaches are worth evaluating for the future.

Fry's statement that suitable habitat for bighorn sheep tends to be steep, open, higher-elevation, rocky slopes captures why the presence of these animals in suburban Cheyenne was itself a signal that something had gone wrong in the natural guidance systems that normally keep bighorns in appropriate terrain. Young rams seeking new territory can make poor decisions, following water corridors far beyond the habitat boundaries that older, more experienced animals would respect. The stream corridor route into Cheyenne — Fry's assessment of how the rams most likely arrived — is a natural pathway that wildlife have used for millennia, but it is a pathway that now runs through or near agricultural lands, suburban developments, and the livestock holdings that create the disease transmission risk in the first place. The landscape has changed around the bighorns, and the animals' instinctive navigation systems have not.

The Same Institution, Both Stories

It is worth holding both of these Wyoming Game and Fish stories in mind simultaneously, because they illuminate each other in a way that neither does alone.

The WAFWA awards recognise an institution that has made significant contributions to the management, protection, and enhancement of fish and wildlife resources over five years. Those contributions include the kind of science-based decision-making that produced the Bighorn Sheep/Domestic Sheep Working Group Plan — the systematic, evidence-based approach to a genuinely difficult conservation problem that the Cheyenne incident required the department to implement under public scrutiny. The fact that the decision is painful, that a wildlife biologist publicly questioned it, and that the department's spokespeople had to explain it clearly and honestly to the public while the social media response to images of two young rams found in a suburban backyard was running hot — that is part of what good wildlife management looks like. It is not always popular. It is not always easy to explain. It requires the kind of institutional confidence and professional depth that Zafft and Maleesa represent, and that the Commission's five-year record reflects.

Wildlife conservation is not a sentiment. It is a practice. It requires people who can hold a 40-year career in fisheries biology, who can manage federal grant funding with the precision that Christina Maleesa brings, who can make the decision to euthanise two young bighorn rams in a Cheyenne backyard to protect a wild herd that may never be aware it was protected, and who can explain all of it to a public that loves Wyoming's wildlife and deserves to understand the science behind the decisions made in its name.

WAFWA recognised that Wyoming does this well. This week, in two very different stories, Wyoming demonstrated exactly why.

Sources

1. Wyoming Game and Fish Department Official — Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, Staff, Recognized by WAFWA — https://wgfd.wyo.gov/news-events/wyoming-game-and-fish-commission-staff-recognized-wafwa
2. Oil City News (Casper) — Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, Staff Recognized by WAFWA — https://oilcity.news/wyoming/2026/06/17/wyoming-game-and-fish-commission-staff-recognized-by-wafwa/
3. Cap City News (Cheyenne) — Wyoming Game and Fish Commission, Staff Recognized by WAFWA — https://capcity.news/wyoming/2026/06/17/wyoming-game-and-fish-commission-staff-recognized-by-wafwa/
4. El-Balad — Wyoming Game and Fish Wins 2026 WAFWA Commission Award — https://www.el-balad.com/17022479
5. Cowboy State Daily — Wyoming Game and Fish Kills Bighorns That Wandered Into Cheyenne — https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/06/15/wyoming-game-and-fish-kills-bighorns-that-wandered-into-cheyenne/
6. WAFWA — Member Agencies Directory — https://wafwa.org/about-us/agencies/
7. Wyoming Game and Fish Department — Commission Members and Profiles — https://wgfd.wyo.gov/commission
8. Wyoming Game and Fish Department — Wyoming Game and Fish Commission Sets 2026 Hunting Seasons — https://wgfd.wyo.gov/news-events/wyoming-game-and-fish-commission-sets-2026-hunting-seasons
9. Wyoming Game and Fish Department — Official Homepage — https://wgfd.wyo.gov/