An article in Wyofile starts off with this statement: "Findings emerging from an intensive, years-long Wyoming research project are beginning to substantiate suspicions that elk may be thriving on western landscapes at the expense of widely struggling mule deer."

 

My first reaction to this is why? Why would elk affect the weight of mule deer when their diets don't have much overlap? Elk are grazers and deer are browsers. If you aren't familiar with those terms what that means is that elk eat primarily grasses where deer, as browsers, eat more shrubs and leaves, small branches, etc (woody type plants). So my curiosity was piqued.

 

What I found from a statement on the Forest Service website is that elk will revert to more browse in the winter if there is a particularly bad winter when the snow is deep. However, in this particular area there are elk winter feed stations so the elk do not use the deer winter range. If elk aren't the problem, as this article suggests, more questions about the statement itself arise. Sadly, after watching our federal land managers use scientists who seem to build a narrative that is desired instead of presenting truth, we don't just take articles like this at face value.

 

For decades I have been a wild horse advocate and have always warned that once the wild horse numbers were too small for livestock producers to continue to blame the rangeland damages on the horses that they would quickly turn on the elk. I saw that start with the dairy industry with herds of elk on the western coast (Tule and Roosevelt elk) and now here we are.

 

" Many of the findings aren’t yet published, but the science is far enough along that the Wyoming Game and Fish Department is acting on it, and is in the process of identifying areas to knock down elk numbers in hopes of helping deer."

 

Elk eat what cows eat, just like horses do. So now they are the main competitors for the livestock producers who rape our public lands with their non-native profit-making cows. These huge corporations who put their privately owned, invasive animals out on our public lands in the west are going after every species that might cost them a dime. They do this instead of acknowledging that perhaps putting an animal that is native to wet, humid climates out in the western deserts was a bad business plan that is not sustainable.

 

The article attempts to drag in the wild horses but states; "They also set out to understand how mule deer interface with wild horses, though that effort was shut down by federal officials." calling the radio collaring of wild horses a political "impossibility". We have seen numerous herds of wild horses with big, clunky radio collars so we know that isn't true, but it is definitely not well accepted by the public in general.

 

Without having the wild horses (WY has approx 4,200) in this study who would they find to blame for the loss of grass we see out there on the range in Wyoming? The total number of livestock on the Wyoming range in 2022 was nearly 1.6 million (just over 200 thousand of that number were sheep). Elk number only 75,000 in the state of Wyoming. Finally, to keep things in perspective there are over 300,000 mule deer in Wyoming according to the article.

 

It's important to note here that it takes approximately 2 (1.7) elk to eat what 1 cow and her calf (under 4 months of age) would consume. (Coughenour 1999).

 

So, again why this study? Why are they blaming a species who has little dietary overlap for a decline in mule deer numbers, and for skinnier mule deer overall? And why is this frankenstein science being accepted by other public lands users like the hunters? That answer seems to be clear in the article also where they say:

 

"Even if the science isn’t yet cemented, state wildlife managers intend to hunt down elk populations in places to see if mule deer respond."

 

“We’ve got enough information from the work Kevin’s done to this point,” Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik said during a March 2022 meeting. “We can feel very comfortable doing some pilot work to see if making prescriptions and adjustments with all the species in the system can actually have some effects on the ground.”

 

"Other pilot projects intended to help mule deer will target predators like black bears and mountain lions."