National Elk Refuge will stake out the future of feeding; legal challenges all but certain

“We’re not going to stand by and let it happen,” Gilliland said.

Gilliand’s comments underscore the central difficulty for National Elk Refuge officials, who started to unveil how they’re thinking about the future of the refuge’s century-old elk feeding program Wednesday night at Teton County Library. By fall 2025, they plan to make a decision: To feed, not to feed, or come up with an in-between strategy.

If officials depart from the status quo, they could be sued by a group like Gilliland’s, which has again allied itself with an international hunting advocacy group, Safari Club International.

But if the Elk Refuge chooses to continue feeding, environmental groups could also sue, building on suits they’ve already filed, arguing the refuge hasn’t moved fast enough to stop feeding and slow the spread of chronic wasting disease, an always fatal neurological condition spreading through Wyoming’s elk, deer and moose.

Legal challenges aside, the stakes are high. Chronic wasting disease has been detected in the Jackson Elk Herd, but not yet on the refuge. Feeding elk props up their populations, helps wapiti survive the winter and keeps the migrating ungulates out of ranchers’ hay and away from mingling with cattle, to which they can spread disease.

But feeding has a cost. It gathers the migrating ungulates in tight quarters, increasing the risk of spreading disease, and the chances of chronic wasting disease spreading faster than it would in the wild. That matters because the best available science predicts that, when 7% of the wapiti in the Jackson Elk Herd are infected, the population will decline, whether or not hunters pursue cow elk each fall.

In that light, deciding whether or not to continue feeding will not only impact the longevity of a nationally significant elk herd, but also the livelihoods of hunting outfitters and ranchers, and Wyoming heritage. Between the refuge, and the state’s constellation of 22 feedgrounds in the area, the Equality State is the last state in the American West with a formal elk feeding program. Feeding culture is deeply ingrained.

“This is a highly polarized decision,” National Elk Refuge manager Frank Durbian said. “But it is an extremely important and extremely difficult decision to make because it has a lot of potential impacts to wildlife, but also recreation, the economics of the area, people’s values.”

Officials haven’t yet indicated how they plan to manage the refuge during the next 15 years. They also didn’t release any details until 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Teton County Library, where officials hosted a public workshop to explain what the objectives of their new plan will be, and the alternatives they’ll analyze to produce a final plan. Whatever officials said at that meeting, and at subsequent meetings with a group of stakeholders, will be closely scrutinized and inform how they develop a draft plan.

The National Elk Refuge is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose mission is to “conserve, protect, and enhance fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service is, in turn, an arm of the Biden administration, which has in the past year released a number of federal land plans focused on conservation. The planning process, however, is not expected to be complete until 2025. With the next American president set to be inaugurated in 2025, deciding the future of feeding programs will span the current presidential administration — and the next.

Where, exactly, the refuge will fall on the question of feeding remains to be seen. But officials are concerned about chronic wasting disease. Refuge officials have spent close to $500,000 on a carcass incinerator designed to destroy disease-causing agents. FAQs about the planning process say that CWD “will have significant negative effects on the Jackson elk herd over time, and that supplemental feeding will exacerbate these effects.” Refuge scientists co-authored the aforementioned study about population declines, and another study showing that continued feeding will lead to steep population declines over time, while stopping feeding will reduce elk numbers now but lead to larger herds in the long run.

“Everything is on the table at this point in time, through the continuum of continuing to do business as usual to the other extreme of not feeding,” Durbian said. “We will do our best to analyze all options.”

For the time being, environmental organizations who have sued before feel the refuge is on their side.

“Feeding is a problem, not just for treating wildlife like livestock, but also because of chronic wasting disease,” said Rob Joyce, director of the Wyoming chapter of the Sierra Club, adding that his employer’s priority is ensuring the long-term health of western Wyoming’s ungulate herds.

“It sounds like that’s also the Fish and Wildlife Service’s goal,” Joyce said.

The Sierra Club, along with Defenders of Wildlife and the National Wildlife Refuge Association, sued the refuge in 2019, arguing that its plan to wean elk off feed — dubbed the “step-down plan” — moved too slowly to prevent chronic wasting disease and gave too much veto power to the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. That’s one of many lawsuits that environmental groups have filed about feeding. Some have prompted closures of feedgrounds on U.S. Forest Service land, like the Alkali Creek feedground in the Gros Ventre. Others have prompted the Forest Service to reconsider state permits for feedgrounds.

The step-down plan was an outgrowth of the 2007 Bison and Elk Management Plan, which is now being revised, and outlined a strategy to reduce the number of elk that winter on the refuge from roughly 7,000 to 5,000. But the step-down plan failed, in part because of sideboards Game and Fish enshrined in the plan to prevent conflict between cattle, private property and elk off the refuge. Elk numbers haven’t dropped.

Still, going into the planning process, Brad Hovinga, regional wildlife supervisor for Game and Fish’s Jackson office, said the state agency’s priority remains seeking to minimize conflict off the refuge.

“We’re concerned about conflict with elk and people should elk leave,” Hovinga said. “That’s our concern. Damage, co-mingling, competition with other species wintering on the landscape.”

The state, like the refuge, is reconsidering how it’s managing its own feedgrounds, and the Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association and Wyoming Livestock Growers have both said they plan to challenge any closures of state feedgrounds. What’s new is that the Guides Association has lawyered up, hiring an in-state law firm to represent it in cases against the state, and allied with Safari Club International and its team of lawyers to handle legal disputes involving the National Elk Refuge, Gilliland said.

The Wyoming Outfitters and Guides Association doesn’t want to see feeding stop and elk populations fall in western Wyoming, where nearly 100% of the herds’ habitat is on public land, making for great hunting.

“It’s this huge bastion of elk hunting without relying on private property,” he said. “We just can’t lose that.”

Safari Club attorneys, meanwhile, declined to comment on a legal strategy and said they wanted to work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state of Wyoming in the upcoming process.

“But our No. 1 goal is to protect the elk herd,” Regina Lennox, senior litigation counsel for Safari Club International, said in a statement. “They already face threats from reintroduced wolves and human development. Human activities have changed their migration options and available winter range. Since we have created the conditions that require feeding, we should continue to meet our responsibility.”

Lennox said that Safari Club International recognizes the “enormous challenges” chronic wasting disease presents, but that it needs to be managed “appropriately.”

“The best available science suggests that shutting down feedgrounds would do little to contain the spread of disease but would undoubtedly expose elk to the severe threat of winter time starvation,” Lennox said. “In other words, CWD must continue to be addressed in North America, but we must ensure any treatments are not worse than the disease.”

But a study conducted by researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service, found that closing feedgrounds south of the National Elk Refuge would limit the spread of chronic wasting disease over 20 years, and would lead to larger elk populations in the same time period.

If feeding continued, CWD prevalence in five herds south of Jackson would hover between 23% and 34% in 20 years, the researchers predicted. If it stopped, prevalence would fall to between 12% and 14%.

Meanwhile, at year 20, continued feeding would lead to a population of roughly 8,300 elk across five southerly herd units. Stopping feeding, meanwhile, would lead to a population of roughly 12,500 wapiti.