Plan to 'cull' elk may harvest woes

Think things got controversial in Yellowstone National Park over bison? Or wolves?

Officials at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado may go Yellowstone one better with a proposal to kill off hundreds of elk, and a hint that wolf reintroduction may be the long-term solution to elk overpopulation.

Reaction has yet to come in, but it's a safe bet that the National Park Service will be hearing from park purists, hunters, ranchers and environmentalists for starters.

The park does appear to be in a pickle. With no top-end predator regulating the population, the elk herd has tripled in size since 1990, to an estimated 3,000 animals. The herd has apparently become a nuisance, causing traffic problems and heavy impacts on the park's vegetation.

The proposal released this week for public comment includes one alternative that calls for shooting as many as 1,800 elk over 16 years.

And get this: the culling effort would involve using "sharpshooters" equipped with silenced guns to pick off the elk at night, so as to keep the dirty work quiet and out-of-sight. Sure enough, having sharpshooters roaming a national park during daylight hours probably wouldn't go over too well. How they plan to pack out a couple hundred 800-pound animals every year without being seen is beyond us.

We certainly can imagine the controversy the proposal will generate, having watched efforts to control the Yellowstone bison population become a full-blown cause for animal rights activists and other protesters.

Like Yellowstone's bison, Rocky Mountain National Park's elk herd is inside the park most of the time, but it ranges beyond park boundaries in the winter.

It's striking that the National Park Service has so far been a fairly reluctant player in managing Yellowstone bison, leaving the dirty work to the state of Montana, while it is entertaining a plan for massive manipulation of an animal population inside another park.

But some critics are already pointing out that the prolonged shooting campaign will not be an effective long-term solution. One wildlife advocacy group is flatly saying that wolves are the solution, and, yes, the park proposal does include a wolf reintroduction alternative.

If that happens, folks in Colorado would likely witness the same type of cascading effects that rapidly developed after the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. They certainly would see a sharp and sustained reduction in the park's elk herd.

But that's not all. While elk may linger in and around the park, wolves would disperse well outside it, despite one park official's assurances that wolves would be "intensively managed."

Even with an "experimental" status that allowed for liberal management methods, Yellowstone's wolf population has exploded over the last decade to an estimated 1,000 animals. And critics insist that the wolves have destroyed big-game populations in and around the park.

The people of Colorado, and officials at Rocky Mountain National Park, may soon find out that there are few things as controversial as wolves, or shooting animals in a national park.