Park Service Follies
Kim du Toit
May 26, 2006
1:49 PM CDT
I know that the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) is not a government body in much favor with most, but even they must take a back seat to the Park Rangers (NPS) at the Rocky Mountain National Forest (sent by Reader VB):
An estimated 2,200 to 3,000 elk live in the park, overgrazing vegetation that is also important to other wildlife including songbirds, beavers and butterflies, biologists say. Elk numbers have escalated because the animals have few predators and no hunting is allowed in the park. The park’s goal is a herd of 1,200 to 1,700 elk.
Sounds simple to me. You have 1,500 elk too many. Set up an online auction (with Congressional approval) for about 500 special elk tags per year over the next three years, proceeds to the Parks Dept.
My guess is that this would generate a total of about $1.5 million from the bidding.
Close the park for two weeks each year for three years, specially for this event, and allocate each tag a specific block to hunt. The RMNP has about 160,000 “huntable” acres (the remaining 100,000 are steep mountain slopes), so this would result in about 300 acres per hunter. That’s plenty enough so they don’t start shooting at each other.
End of three years: elk population is back to the desired level.
Of course, that’s not what the Park Smokeys are going to do. Instead:
A 20-year plan to thin the burgeoning elk herd in Rocky Mountain National Park could cost $18 million to kill some animals and disperse others, park officials said.
...
Park officials outlined the proposed program and its estimated costs during a public meeting Monday. The park’s favored plan would involve killing up to 700 elk annually for four years. After that, an additional 25 to 150 elk would be culled annually for 16 years.
The costs would come from hiring extra staff or a contractor to shoot elk, building fences to protect vegetation, transporting carcasses, testing them for disease and processing the meat.
“Doing something like this is not going to be cheap, for sure,” said park Superintendent Vaughn Baker. “But we’re talking 20 years.”
The park’s preferred plan calls for killing elk at night with silencer-equipped guns in part to minimize disturbances to park visitors.
So instead of earning a couple million, they’re going to spend $18 million. And why?
Park officials said they recognize that some people are upset by the prospect of killing elk in the park. While most recognize that something needs to be done to manage the population, there are contentious disagreements over the best method, said park biologist Therese Johnson.
Of course, as the article notes elsewhere, all you need to do is introduce a couple dozen wolves into the RMNP and let Nature take its course—but then, at the end of about five years, you’d have to start killing the wolves because their increased population would result in an elk shortage. And all the farmers in the area would be pissed because wolves wouldn’t confine themselves to elk when there are tasty cattle and sheep to be had as well, outside the RMNP.
The reason I categorized this as a “Red State/Blue State” post is that my solution is a Red State one, whereas the NPS plan is a Blue State one.
You know, it’s not often that I state on these pages that the South Africans are better than the Americans, but when it comes to game management, my former homeland has it nailed. They have to, because the biggest problem is elephant, which are hugely destructive beasts in terms of the habitat. Here’s how they handle it.
Once a year, the South African Park Service (SAPS) designates which elephant herds are to be culled. Then the Park Rangers mount a combined ground/air offensive, and wipe out entire elephant families: bulls, cows and calves, the whole lot. The meat is processed and sold on the open market (elephant jerky is a staple of many a South African). There’s none of this Blue State bullsh*t about silencers and contractors—the SAPS goes in themselves and gets the job done in about five brutal days. (It’s no picnic, by the way: park rangers are animal lovers and they hate the job. At the end of the cull, they all generally drink themselves into a stupor to try to dull the memory.)
But the result is that South African game parks are the envy of the rest of Africa in terms of their habitat and game diversity.
Now, elk aren’t anywhere as destructive as elephant, of course. But as their numbers burgeon because of lack of predation, they become inimical to the rest of the park and its animals.
This strikes me as a fine opportunity to let the market take care of the problem, rather than spending millions to fix it over a long period. (And you just know that the $18 million is not going to end up being $18 million, but $40 million, because no one in government knows how to budget properly.)
That’s not going to happen, of course. Instead, the NPS is going to blunder around, trying not to offend Park guests, PETA and the other eco-loonies, and the net result is that after spending a ton of money, the job will only be half-done—and they’ll have to do it again.
Oh, and something just occurred to me: in the absense of wolves, what’s going to grow is the cougar population, which means added danger to Park visitors.
Gah. What a total cock-up.
