SKAMOKAWA — On one side of the debate over elk hoof disease sit 16 scientists — veterinarians and Ph.D.s in a range of wildlife specialties. They think hoof rot is most likely caused by the infectious treponeme bacteria, which has been linked to hoof disease in cows and sheep.
On the other side sits Boone Mora — an 83-year-old soft-spoken retiree who lives a few miles from Skamokawa.
Mora says all indications are that hoof rot is caused by leptospirosis, a disease common to humans and animals that he studied extensively during his career in public health.
Mora doesn’t just complain that the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s experts are misdiagnosing hoof disease.
He said the agency’s reluctance to consider his opinion results from the inner politics of science, with researchers wanting to take credit for discoveries.
Mora’s quest to do his own research has been supported by Wahkiakum County Commissioners, who wrote a letter to the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Several non-scientist members of the WDFW’s Hoof Disease Public Working Group also have rallied to Mora’s defense.
In an article in the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation’s magazine, outdoors writer Rich Landers said Mora “has become a white knight for people frustrated with (WDFW’s) lack of certainty and action on the elk hoof disease.”
Mora, a relative newcomer to the lower Columbia area, might seem an unlikely player in wildlife issues.
He describes himself as growing up a North Carolina farm boy and he still speaks with a soft drawl. After attending several schools, including the University of Washington, for his undergraduate degree, he got his Ph.D. in public health at the University of North Carolina.
Mora spent much of career as a county public health director in North Carolina, and worked for a decade as an unpaid researcher for the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. He also worked at the CDC full-time for a year on leptospirosis.
After retiring, Mora and his wife, Jean, moved to California and then Portland to be closer to their sons. Two-and-a-half years ago, Mora saw an ad for the public health director in Wahkiakum County and decided to investigate.
He didn’t get interviewed for the Wahkiakum County job — but fell in love with the area.
The Moras bought a small house near Skamokawa.
“I’m kind of an innovator and an experimenter,” Mora said, as evidenced by his cultivating a new variety of blackberry and his plans to grow passion fruit.
Living in rural Wahkiakum County, Mora started spotting limping elk as stories about the condition started to appear.
“We had a herd of about 30 over here,” he said. “I said, ‘It looks like leptospirosis.'”
Leptospirosis is a bacterial infection that is found around the world, though it’s most common in tropical regions.
WDFW’s researchers have indeed considered whether leptospirosis is linked to hoof disease.
Two of the researchers on the WDFW technical advisory group, Dr. Tom Besser of Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Dr. Jennifer Wilson-Welder of the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Animal Disease Center have concluded that leptospirosis isn’t a cause of hoof rot.
“There is no evidence of an association between leptospirosis and hoof disease in any of the elk that have been examined,” Sandra Jonker, regional wildlife manager, wrote in an email.
WDFW points out that laboratories around the world have been enlisted in hoof rot research, with treponema — not leptospirosis — the most likely cause, so it wants to concentrate its efforts there.
But Mora counters that just as leptospirosis is misdiagnosed in people, the researchers are failing to diagnose the disease in elk, too.
Mora wants to collect samples of tissue from a live elk or one that’s recently died and culture for leptospirosis.
The state Department of Health wouldn’t help him get the laboratory supplies he needed — so Mora bypassed the agency and paid $325 for the supplies himself.
Now all he needs is some urine and other body fluids from an elk.
“I want a fresh killed or a live elk,” he said. Several hunters volunteered to help him this season, but none of them got an elk.
State wildlife officials “won’t cooperate with me in any way,” he said. “They are very unethical, in my opinion. They suppress information.”
Jonker said staff members have met with Mora several times and invited him to present a detailed study plan.
But Mora hasn’t sent them such a plan, Jonker said.
Mora said the WDFW’s hoof rot technical advisory group is “paralyzed by politics.”
As he learned in a career of research, scientists want to get credit for discoveries, with recognition in scientific journals.
“Publication is the currency of academia,” he said. “If they find leptospirosis, they won’t get much out of it” professionally.
