A long-range plan for the National Elk Refuge released Friday afternoon proposes continuing to feed elk for the long haul in the Jackson Herd, even as deadly chronic wasting disease propagates across the landscape.
Long-awaited, the refuge’s draft environmental impact statement includes a “proposed action” calling for a “range of strategies” to reduce the number of overwintering elk on the 24,700-acre U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service property to 5,000 animals over the next 10 years. That’s the same numeric goal listed in the 2007 plan the refuge is operating under currently — a goal the service has, thus far, been unable to achieve.
Strategies that the draft plan highlights include increasing and modifying hunting seasons, adjusting the feeding season start and end dates, and redistributing elk across the landscape — the last of which has proven to be a persistently difficult task.
Additionally, the plan calls for using hunters to more effectively target “suburban” elk that only migrate short distances and spend summers on nearby ranchland and in subdivisions between Wilson and Grand Teton National Park.
A multi-agency “Cooperative Elk Studies Group” will meet annually in June to determine if the strategies are working and if changes are needed, based on the “best available science.”
There was anticipation that the National Elk Refuge’s plan would include rigid management designed to address the spread of chronic wasting disease, an always-lethal malady that showed up in Jackson Hole in 2020, was detected on the refuge for the first time this spring and again in July.
Federal wildlife disease experts who’ve modeled CWD transmission on the refuge predict that feeding in the face of the disease will result in the worst-case scenario for elk populations and elk hunting for the Jackson Herd.
While the National Elk Refuge plan was in the works, federal scientists studied what, at the time, was described as the forthcoming proposed action. It called for feeding elk until rates of the ugly prion disease reach 7%, and feeding bison for the long haul.
But those triggers were stripped out of the “proposed action,” Alternative D, included in the draft EIS.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Brian Nesvik, who ultimately calls the shots at the refuge, is a former Wyoming Game and Fish Department director who in 2020 described elk feeding as a “wicked problem” that isn’t going away in the “short or mid-term.”
Feeding has occurred at the National Elk Refuge since 1912, and it’s intended to keep wapiti off of private land, prevent the spread of brucellosis to cattle and prop up populations to support hunting. But it’s also a disease-spreading practice that unnaturally concentrates animals, truncates migration routes and is seen by many experts as an antiquated way of managing wildlife.
“Feeding only occurs in a handful of counties in northwest Wyoming,” former National Elk Refuge manager Brian Glaspell said in 2019. “Everybody else thinks it’s a bad idea, let’s just be honest about that.”
National Elk Refuge staff were not granted clearance to discuss the plans on Friday. A press release sent out by the Fish and Wildlife Service that afternoon came from an unnamed email account. WyoFile’s inquiry about an interview did not receive a response before this story was published.
The public can comment on the updated plan and draft EIS until Oct. 13.
A virtual meeting — join by clicking here — has been scheduled from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sept. 15. An in-person meeting is also scheduled for 5 to 7 p.m. on Sept. 22. The location has not been announced.
