More proof that reintroduction and recovery is all just a big game for state wildlife department managers: Missouri recently reintroduced a mere 100 elk over the past two years, and already they’re talking about implementing a hunting season on them soon.

It seems hunting groups and their “game” department lackeys live by a time-tested formula:

1) Wipe out a species through over-hunting and/or trapping
2) Allow it to recover
3) Open a season and sell tags to kill the animals off again

Lately we’ve seen this formula in action with wolves in the intermountain West and Great Lakes states. In addition to their full-scale assault on wolves, Montana recently started up a hunting season on bison, and they’re already talking about one for grizzly bears the minute they lose federal protection.

Now the recovering elk in Missouri may soon be under fire, as a local paper tells us in the following article entitled,

“Elk hunting in Missouri now predicted to start in 2016”

Tuesday, July 9, 2013 Supervising editor, Jake Kreinberg

COLUMBIA — The Missouri Department of Conservation now estimates that an elk hunting season in the state will begin in 2016.

The department slowly reintroduced elk from 2010 until earlier this year, trapping about 50 annually in Kentucky and then bringing them to the Peck Ranch Conservation Area in southeast Missouri for observation. The program has since moved to its operational phase, in which the herd will grow only via reproduction.

Elk were common in Missouri before European settlement but had been eradicated from the state by the end of the Civil War. Resource scientist Lonnie Hansen says “about 100” elk are now in the herd following several dying off during relocation and last year’s drought.

“I’d be pleased if we had 125 animals in the herd” by the end of this year, Hansen said.

The department wants at least 200 elk in the herd before it will give any consideration to allowing elk hunting, which might not happen for another three years, Hansen predicted. He previously expected hunting to start in 2015, according to previous Missourian reporting. Whenever hunting begins, it won’t be easy to get a license, as there may be only 30 to 40 available.

“We’d like to see them become part of the natural landscape,” Hansen said about the animals.

Reintroducing elk to the state could be beneficial not only to the ecosystem of Missouri, but also the economy. Joe Jerek, the department’s news services coordinator, said the conservation areas could “expect to see a lot of people” hoping to catch a glimpse of the new herd.

“There are lots of people that just want to see them,” he said. “It brings another large native species back to Missouri.”

According to the department’s website, residents’ interest in reintroducing elk led to a restoration feasibility study in 2000, but that was suspended a year later because of fears of Chronic Wasting Disease the elk could introduce to local livestock.

A method for testing for the disease and continued interest in having elk revived the reintroduction effort in 2010.

[Just who is interested in “having elk,” and for what purpose, the paper didn’t say.]

Wildlife Photography ©Jim Robertson, 2013. All Rights Reserved