Elk Management

Definition of savage. barbarous: (of persons or their actions) able or disposed to inflict pain or suffering. A member of an uncivilized people

The elk’s story goes back millions and millions of years as part of the deer family that evolved in Eurasia. From its origins as a small deer suited to tropical regions, it evolved to a cold hardy animal of the ice age, with massive size, magnificent crown of antlers, long legs and white rump. Let us take a look at the killing of one male elk, a descendant of the elk that came from Siberia into America, then into Yellowstone National Park and later transported by train to Colorado in the 1900s. Here is the story of the hunting of one male elk.

The killing of the elk by the bowman, Colorado, United States, 2007

The bow hunter was on the side of the hill. Across the valley, on the side of the opposite sloping hill was the great elk . He was walking quietly and calmly through his home terrain on a fresh, bright day, moving through the waist high grass and brush. The hunter used his elk whistle to attract the male elk. The male elk turned, all attentive to what it thought was another elk. It stood poised and in its grandness, looking toward the sounds, its mind working to tune in on the source. The bow hunter had his adrenaline pumping at the thought of killing this majestic beautiful animal. In his mind, this was a way to express his inner violence, his desire to be able to create a darkness, where there was grace and light. In his mind, this would give him joy, placing him above the animal. He felt in his shallow and small-mindedness, the taking of this life of this majestic elk would buttress his own ego. He took aim and the arrow passed loosely just above the elk’s back. The elk took off quickly and disappeared.

Greatly frustrated, the bow hunter wanted badly to satisfy this bloodlust. He had trained long hours for this killing, destructive event. So he decided he would go straight to the elk’s home, like a killer breaking and entering and then waiting for the person to come home, with no warning or escape. He found the elk’s home, very likely because paid scouts for a hunting company had surveyed the whole area and told him where it was. So he went in, covered from head to toe in his camouflage gear with a cloth across his mouth, so his smell did not reach the elk. He sat in the elk’s black earthen home, where the elk lay at night for sleep and rest. This was its privacy, its comfort. The hunter sat and waited.

The elk’s home was on a slope and the elk came up from the bottom. It sensed something. It stopped in its tracks and looked up, but must not have seen clearly enough. And so it continued walking step by step to its familiar home, its place of retreat and safety. And the bow hunter took aim, again his heart racing with the thrill he had in being able to ruthlessly snuff out the life of this beautiful, awe-inspiring elk. He took aim and shot. The arrow flew and hit the elk on the left side of his body near his front legs. The arrow pierced the elk with a fiery pain, and the pain spread throughout its body. In complete terror, the elk took off across the forest. The bow snapped off as it was running, and the arrow remained lodged deep in its body, a large gaping wound into his flesh. He kept running, feeling the searing pain. The elk felt a draining of his life source. He kept running, fleeing from the killer at his home, but it became more difficult as he felt weaker and weaker until he could no longer run. In his exhaustion, he crashed to the ground. He breathed for a few minutes longer and then his life was extinguished.

The bow hunter sat in the place where he had shot the arrow, waiting an hour for the elk to die. He was full of exhilaration, because he felt he had achieved something, to have dominated this magnificent animal and taken its life. He walked down to where the buck had crashed and had a murderer’s thrill at the kill as he yelled out in delight. His exhilaration was heightened even more because of the great magnificence of the male elk, because of its own exultant beauty, strength and size, particularly evidenced by its majestic crown of antlers. He pulled the elk’s head up, now lifeless, to reinforce he was the killer of this great animal.

The beautiful elk’s life was over that day, for the sake of bloodthirsty killing trip of a bow hunter. All of the elk’s long days and nights, his wanderings in the wonderful forest, its walks to the tops of hills and great presence on the earth were taken out by this murdering bow hunter.

This beautiful elk, killed as it was returning to its own home, has a lineage that goes back in time, the same way that human beings have their own journey through time.

The story of the elk, from Siberia to America and to Yellowstone National Park - the Ice Age

From Freedom to Slaughter

The story of the elk in North America starts approximately 40,000 years ago, when elk first came into North America from colder northern regions of Siberia during the ice age.

The elk came down from Siberia through a passageway across Beringia over to Alaska and into Canada and into America. This was the time called the ice age. Temperatures were actually just lower by some 15 degrees than they are today. Sea levels were lower because much water was in the form of ice. There were vast forests of conifers and evergreens throughout Siberia and North America. On the land mass known as Beringia, there were times during the ice age, when the ice would subside to an extent and a passage southward opened up to get from Siberia to Alaska. Many wild animals made this journey, including sabre tooth tigers, wooly mammoths, and eventually the elk.

The elk herds in Yellowstone National Park are descendants of elk who made a journey from Siberia to America. When an elk herd travels, it is led by a mature elk cow as the caravan leader. The lead elk cow way back 40,000 years ago, decided to go south, to more open areas to graze and less competition from other grazing animals. There was a new corridor that had opened up. It was many miles wide and many animals were coming through this passage southward. The ice had retreated for a while from this area. And where before this passage was blocked by ice, now it was open. There seemed to be something calling from that direction, beckoning to come and traverse the land to some place richer. She made her calls and signals with her body and looked closely over the whole herd. And they left for the journey. There was not much forage through this area, and so it was very important for the herd to get through it quickly to the other side, where there was more to eat. It took them many days and nights, but they finally made it through.

Coming out of the bottleneck of the passage, the herd came to wonderful new areas, just bountiful with plants and trees to eat from . However there was still some competition from other types of animals and deer here, so the elk cow led the herd further down into Alaska and eastward into Canada. And they made Canada their home. From this herd, many generations continued on, and many elk left the herd and formed new herds. And from these, many continued farther south into America. And at last a new herd came into the area that is called Yellowstone, Wyoming.

Descendants of the elk who started the journey in Siberia, now had their home in Yellowstone, Wyoming. From the time that the herd arrived to Yellowstone, and for some 30,000 years more, things remained very much the same for the elk. The weather warmed up about 15 degrees. The summers were longer. The winters were still hard and many times, parts of the herd would leave Yellowstone and travel southward to warmer areas. But there always remained in Yellowstone a large herd of elk. There were some animals of the human species who made Yellowstone their home. But human presence was sparse, and the elk herd was not greatly affected. There were many parts of Yellowstone that never saw the presence of a human being at all, and were the complete domain of the wild animals.

In the 1800s, things began to change drastically. White men had traveled across the sea from Europe to America, and then traveled on horseback westward . They were coming into North America in droves and westward into Yellowstone, Wyoming. These men were killing wildlife wholesale with no concern at all for what damage they were causing. They were shooting down elk and any other animal that they could. They would kill off scores of elk from herds as they passed by. Or worse, in wintertime, the men might come in and shoot them while they could not escape because of the high snow. And they just left the bodies to rot, without doing anything with them, except sometimes they might take the teeth for ivory. But many of these white settlers just killed the elk as if in a shooting gallery. The elk that lived in other parts of America fared a worse fate. In the southern and far eastern states, elk were completely killed off by white men in the 1700s and 1800s. There was not a single elk left in these regions.

It was not just elk that were being wiped out. Bison were being shot down in a shooting gallery fashion too, until there were no more bison roaming the plains. The killing of bison was done in part as a policy to starve the populations of native Indians, but it also worked to bring the bison to extinction levels. There was wholesale slaughter of all kinds of wildlife. Even the white-tailed deer had been completely extirpated from many states by this wanton wildlife slaughter.

In the late 1870s, Yellowstone was made into a national park. However white men were still coming into the Yellowstone and killing off animals non-stop. United States army generals who were witness to this wholesale slaughter and who had previously participated in some of it themselves, began to see how dire the situation was and decided to take hold of it . The army was brought into Yellowstone National Park to stop the killing of elk before they were gone forever from Yellowstone too. And so the slaughter was quelled and the elk populations of Yellowstone were protected.

The population of elk in Yellowstone, the only one truly protected from the wholesale slaughter, then became a nucleus population used to repopulate elk back into other parts of the United States where they had been completely extirpated.

Since elk had been completely killed off from most regions of the United States except for Yellowstone, these elk were used to repopulate elk back to those regions. In 1912, there began the program of transporting elk from Yellowstone to other parts of the United States. Elk were loaded onto trucks and then into train cars. This did not always go well, as elk were easily frightened and panicked and many elk would die in this process. There of course were also large number of casualties from the trips in the trains because of trampling, thirst and elk falling.

Current day elk management, the ties to hunting that should be broken

The history of the elk and the encroachment of hunters into their lives in the United States, began in the 1800s and has continued steadily and consistently since that time. Before that time, elk were not constantly on the run and being run down by cruel hunters. This is a recent development, if looked at in the long continuum of the history of the elk and humans. This has only been happening for the last 200 years, since the arrival of Europeans to North America, and the onset of widespread slaughter of all kinds of wildlife.

Current day management of elk is done by United States government at the state level by the Wildlife Agencies. The wildlife agencies are run in small part on monies obtained from public taxes. Most of the monies that run the wildlife agencies come from fees collected for hunting licenses. So wildlife is not managed for its own sake or for the general public, it is to a great extent managed for hunters, as game animals. This can be changed by having wildlife management being run by people who are interested in the elk themselves. The money obtained for wildlife management can come from the general public and not from a small percentage of the public who want only to kill wildlife. It just needs to be set up that way. Also, in the case of elk, an organization called the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, started in 1984 uses the elk as a huge money pot. It works to keep populations of elk growing in different states, by working along side hunters and hunting organizations and collecting money through their organization.

This is management run by savagery. Sports hunting is a form of human savagery and it is cruel harm inflicted on a defenseless animal. That this practice is able to continue in such a widespread manner is due to the wildlife agencies being operated in the same way that they were started in the 1900s, by people interested in keeping populations of wild animals alive for conservation purposes, but even more intently, for hunting purposes and the money to be made off of the killing of elk. In Washington state for example, in 2007, 7000 elk were killed. The number of license purchased to kill elk was 100,000, at a cost of 40 dollars a license, for a total for 4 million in revenue. The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation brought in 57 million in revenues in 2007, from those interested in killing elk for recreation.

Wildlife agencies routinely keep out the general public from wildlife management by promoting hunting as way to relate to wildlife. Instead of promoting classes on tracking or classes on learning to draw wild animals, the wildlife agencies have classes on hunting and even promote youth hunting in order to keep the hunting way of life going.

In Wisconsin for instance, the wildlife agency meetings are attended by nearly 99% hunters. They advise the wildlife agency on matters concerning wildlife, which really boils down to serving their own hunting interests. Year after year, a proposal has been brought for the general public to be brought into the management process of the wildlife. But since the general public does not vote on it, it always fails. However the solution is there in turning over wildlife management to the general public. It just needs accomplished through legislation.

Proposal bought before the Wisconsin Department of Wildlife 2006

RESOLUTION: 130706
Reforming Conservation Congress Voting Format

Fail 24 to 141

The Problem:

Voting on nature is a citizen right. The current process co-sponsored by the hunting lobby (self-named the "Conservation Congress") and the Department of Natural Resources is flagrantly undemocratic and cumbersome. Citizens have only a several hour time frame to appear in person to elect candidates and vote on important nature and wildlife issues. Elderly individuals and those who cannot attend are left out of the process. Candidates do not debate the issues publicly and the issues are only those proposed by the hunting lobby. Further, issues are not published to the public at large before the vote. Hunters run the vote and count the vote. Non-hunters are not allowed to place literature at the voting site, but hunters design and create all of the literature having to do with the vote and election. Whereas non-hunters have not been a part of the voting process, and are unaware of the process or the issues, and whereas the non-hunting environmentalist is reviled and made to feel unwelcome and uncomfortable, Be it Resolved, the Conservation Congress at its annual meeting, held April 10, 2006, recommends that the Dept. of Natural Resources take action to correct this situation by creating a traditional structure of voting with non-partisan candidates running and counting the vote, and use a traditional format of walk-in secret ballot voting after extensive public debates between candidates on the issues so that the public is informed.

There is a great need to separate the management of elk by people who are by definition treating the elk in a savage manner. For the good of the elk, they need to be managed by people who care deeply for them as the majestic animals they are, and want them to be treated as humanely as possible and able to roam free without being the targets of the savagery of hunters.

Sources for information

- Elk Country by Valerius Geist, 1991
- Deer of the World, Their Evolution, Behavior and Ecology, Valerius Geist, 1998
- Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Missoula, Montana Washington State Fish and Wildlife

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