Idaho elk ranches fear backlash after breakout

REXBURG, Idaho – When 160 domestic elk busted loose from an eastern Idaho shooter-bull operation in August, Gov. Jim Risch issued a shoot-to-kill order on the animals.

Now, the state’s nearly 80 owners of domestic elk ranches fear negative publicity from that incident will cause the 2007 Idaho Legislature to put out a shoot-to-kill order on their livelihoods – by banning the industry on fear that future big-game breakouts will spread disease and genetic impurities to wild herds near Yellowstone National Park.

Lawmakers who oppose such ranches are counting on momentum from the summer elk crisis to win support for plans to follow neighboring Montana and Wyoming in banning the operations. Elk farmers, meanwhile, say that would be an overreaction that would snuff out a growing industry that brings in $20 million a year to the state economy.

“We as an industry did nothing wrong,” Cataldo elk rancher Gary Queen, who heads the Idaho Elk Breeders Association, told the Idaho Falls Post Register. “In fact, we’ve gone the extra mile to make sure we’ve done everything right.”

Around Aug. 14, dozens of elk stormed from Rex Rammell’s fenced-in Chief Joseph hunting preserve near Ashton. In intervening months, game wardens and private hunters killed more than 30 of the animals on orders from Risch.

Rammell, meanwhile, has made news by proclaiming the emergency hunt a violation of his property rights. He was arrested twice – once on suspicion of socking a man, and again on suspicion of interfering with officers trying to remove an elk they’d just shot. But while Rammell has won lots of attention, Queen’s elk ranching group points out that none of his escaped animals that were killed had feared diseases including brucellosis, which can cause infected cows to abort their calves, or chronic wasting disease, which eats away the animals’ brains.

“The results weren’t surprising to us. You can test any elk ranch in (Idaho) and get the same results,” said Queen, who says he suspects Risch and the state Department of Fish and Game have used the Rammell incident to demonize the industry to try to maintain their regulated-hunting monopoly and to distract from diseases trickling into the state’s wild herds.

Sen. David Langhorst, D-Boise, who last year failed to get fellow lawmakers to support a bill to ban ranchers from importing domestic elk from outside Idaho, said he doesn’t hate elk farmers. Still, he fears it will be too late if Idaho waits until disease emerges in domestic elk populations before tackling the issue.

“In this case, the responsible thing to do is prevent (chronic wasting disease) from being brought into Idaho,” he said. “When weighing the risks versus gains, the domestic cervidae industry simply poses too great a risk to Idaho’s wild elk herds and fair chase hunting traditions.”

By contrast, the elk industry is proposing new rules for themselves – in an effort to diffuse some of the energy behind a ban. And they’ve won support from some quarters, including cooks who rely on elk farms for meat.