Escaped elk cause for concern

I don’t usually pinpoint where hunters can shoot a bull elk sporting a rack of trophy antlers, but today I’m making an exception.

First, the meat of the story.

The mid-August escape of roughly 100 captive-raised elk from a southeastern Idaho canned-hunt farm apparently was covered up by the state Department of Agriculture until an intrepid reporter started digging into the incident.

Following reports from the editor of Wild Idaho News, a bi-monthly tabloid, the Fish and Game Department issued a release on Tuesday of the potentially disastrous escape. Meanwhile, Ag Department officials, who supposedly oversee domestic cervid operations, had few specific details and no plan for dealing with the incident.

“This is the train wreck we’ve seen coming for a long time,” said Steve Huffaker, Idaho Fish and Game director.

Even though captive-raised elk pose a serious risk to Idaho’s famed native deer, elk and moose herds – and the businesses they support – the Idaho Legislature has stripped the Fish and Game Department from any jurisdiction over game-farm operations.

Fish and Game biologists can do little but sit in the gallery as the state plays Russian roulette with one of the state’s priceless natural resources.

Three weeks ago, I wrote a column about the looming threat of spreading chronic wasting disease, hybrid gene pools and other perils of pen-raised elk and shooter-bull operations. The Ag officials I interviewed made no mention that a large number of elk had just escaped from Rex Rammell’s Chief Joseph Idaho trophy elk hunting ranch in Unit 62 about 10 miles from the boundary of Yellowstone National Park.

Rammell reportedly is a notorious keep-government-out-of-my-life kind of guy.

Not surprisingly, he’s the kind of guy government should be treating like a virus that threatens us all.

Rammell, who has kept Ag officials busy enough to amass a foot-thick file in the Boise headquarters, did not report the elk escaping through the single fence that keeps them in his 200-acre facility. John Chatburn, Ag Department domestic cervid coordinator, confirmed Wednesday that the report came from one of Rammell’s neighbors, who called Ag officials on Aug. 14 and said she had about 110 of Rammell’s elk in her field.

Chatburn said his agents have gone to Rammell’s place several times, but they’ve never received a firm answer as to how many pen-raised elk were lost and how many have been recovered.

“We won’t know until we do an inventory verification in November or December,” Chatburn said. “We don’t have the authority to do anything with the escaped domestic cervidae unless we have a solid verified reason to suspect a disease issue.”

Wildlife biologists inside and outside of Idaho who know anything about chronic wasting disease are rolling their eyeballs in disbelief over the incident.

CWD is nothing to gamble with. There’s no treatment.

When it infects deer, elk or moose, they die.

Since the 1996 finding that it might be linked to mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, CWD has become a major concern among wildlife managers from coast to coast.

CWD has been documented in domestic or wild deer or elk in Colorado, Illinois, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, Wyoming and Saskatchewan.

The Canadian government has spent $30 million dealing with CWD found at elk farms in that country.

“A fourth of the Wisconsin DNR budget is being eaten up by CWD programs,” said Lloyd Oldenburg, the recently retired Idaho Fish and Game wildlife manger. “A hundred million dollars have been spent trying to test and prevent the spread of chronic wasting disease, and sportsmen are paying most of the bill.”

CWD has not been detected in Idaho or Washington, but Washington is doing most of its testing and monitoring along the Idaho border because Fish and Wildlife officials know the biggest threat is from Idaho’s 80-100 (the exact number is not clear) domestic cervid operations.

The folly of the Idaho Ag Department’s non-response to Rammell’s escaped elk is found in a few facts:

“Most CWD cases are linked to captive cervid situations.

“The diagnosis for CWD is made from the brain tissue of dead animals.

“CWD can remain dormant in deer, elk or moose for five years before symptoms occur.

In other words, there’s no sure way to determine whether Rammell’s elk are clean, but statistically speaking, they pose a high risk to wild elk.

“The Department of Agriculture (officials) do a good job of going ‘Shucky darn,’ and sounding like they’re good dirt-farmer boys, but they’ve been covering for these domestic cervid ranchers over and over again,” said Doug Schleis, the Wild Idaho News editor who deserves praise for sleuthing the undercurrents of the shooter-bull operations.

An offshoot to his research could be a hot tip for elk hunters.

Part of the reason for the coverup is that some really big bulls that canned-hunt goons pay thousands of dollars to plug escaped Rammell’s shooter bull farm, which is in Idaho Unit 62 on Conant Creek near Drummond.

Those elk are now fair game during open seasons for licensed hunters.