Over a lifetime, some Lancaster County residents may have seen a fox with mange. Hunters may have glimpsed an infected coyote. It’s a horrible sight with clumps of hair missing from the beautiful animals. Now, unfortunately, the scourge of mange has spread to bears, and the Pennsylvania Game Commission recently declared that the highly contagious disease has reached epidemic proportions in the state’s population. Though mange can and does kill bears, the Game Commission says there is no evidence that populations are declining because of it.Still, bears increasingly susceptible to mange in Pennsylvania suffer in the wild, and the Game Commission feels the time has come to know more. It has launched an extensive study along with Penn State.The capturing of 36 bears around the state has already begun. Each will be fitted with radio collars so they can be tracked for two years and studied by a group of biologists, immunologists and entomologists from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences.
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