Rockey Mountain National Park Looking For “Elite Sportsman” to Cull Elk Herd

November 10, 2008

Rockey Mountain National Park has an over abundance of elk and has come up with a plan to cull the herd that does not use hunters. As a matter of fact they have gone out of their way to make it clear that the volunteers they seek to help them with the culling are not hunters.

RMNP spokeswoman Kyle Patterson said officials are looking for elite sportsman who can work as part of a team and understand how to ethically cull an animal.

She said the park doesn’t view the culling act as recreational hunting.

Hunters looking for a chance to pull the trigger for a recreational experience need not apply, she said.

Hunting remains illegal in the park since its inception, though hunting advocates lobbied the National Park Service to open the region to public hunts of some kind when it began considering culling efforts to reduce the herd size.

In fact, last year state wildlife commissioners attempted to change a 1929 federal law outlawing hunters in the park.

Park Superintendent Vaughn Baker said public hunting was not an option for the park, but the decision to allow the volunteers to assist in culling partly was related to requests for public access.

Coloradoan
I don’t know what the difference is between a hunter and an “elite sportsman” is but it seems to me you would want someone that has the knowledge base to humanly and safely kill the animal with a rifle. Additionally that person should have the ability to handle the chore of field dressing and packing the animal out … sounds like a hunter to me.

While I think it is great the National Parks plans to use volunteers to accomplish some of this task the opportunity for hunters to harvest a creature that their monies have gone towards establishing and protecting is lost. The National Park Service could actually raise some much needed monies to help with their operations by offering limited tags.