Editors Note: As one who has been fighting in the trenches for the last quarter of a century, watching the decline of U.S. conservation organizations has been painful. Many people don’t realize what we have lost.
This examination of RMEF comes from an insider who has seen it happen. This is from David Stallings, who writes From The Wild Side.
by David Stalling
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) was once a decent organization. They were a conservation group supported by hunters. They told the truth, based on science, about topics such as the negative impacts of ATVs on elk and elk hunting; bull elk vulnerability and habitat security; the negative impacts to elk and elk hunting of a growing number of hunters with increasing hunting technology and easier access to elk; how low bull-to-cow ratios and a lack of mature bull elk in many hunted elk herds was effecting breeding, calving and calf survival and making elk more susceptible to predation; the positive effects of wolves on elk herds; the alarming wounding rates during archery season . . . and so on.
But eventually RMEF succumbed to the McCarthyism-like pressure to conform that is so prevalent in the hunting community. Profit and popularity took precedence over telling the truth. They decided to appease what Aldo Leopold referred to as the “lowest common denominator” within the hunting community. They became a hunting group that pretends to support conservation.
In other words, like all hunting groups, they went to the dark side.
I was the conservation editor of RMEF’s Bugle magazine at the time, a job I held for 10 years. Here’s my take on what happened. It explains much about the hunting community.
July 24, 2012
In a sad, but justified move, the family of Olaus Murie recently demanded that the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation (RMEF) cancel the organization’s Olaus J. Murie Award because of the RMEF’s “all-out war against wolves” that is “anathema to the entire Murie family.”
I conceived and created the Olaus J. Murie Award (with coordination and approval from the Murie family) on behalf of the RMEF in 1999, when the RMEF was a science-based conservation organization. The award recognized scientists working on behalf of elk and elk habitat in honor of Olaus Murie, who is widely considered the “father” of modern elk research and management for the ground-breaking work he conducted at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the 1940s. He also wrote “Elk of North America” in 1951 – the first, most thorough and comprehensive scientific treatise on elk and elk management, which has since been updated several times by the Wildlife Management Institute. (I have read Murie’s book several times, and was honored to have written a chapter for the most recent edition, North American Elk: Ecology and Management.)
Since then, the RMEF got rid of all the good leaders who not only helped create and shape the RMEF, but had solid, impressive backgrounds in wildlife biology, ecology and science-based wildlife management. The organization now ignores and defies science and panders to outfitters, politicians and hunters who have little understanding of wildlife and, in particular, interactions between wolves and elk. The group has abandoned principle for income and popularity.
During my ten years as the conservation editor for RMEF’s Bugle magazine, I wrote many award-winning science-based articles and essays regarding wildlife, ecology, natural history and wildlife management. Several of those stories focused on science that the RMEF itself helped fund showing clear, solid evidence of improvements in the health of habitat and elk herds living among wolves; how wolf predation was mostly compensatory and not additive; how elk behavior, habits and habitat choices changed in the presence of wolves, and many other interconnected complexities that factored in such as habitat conditions, habitat effectiveness, vulnerability, bull-to-cow ratios, breeding behavior, calving and calf survival rates. In those days, the RMEF helped convey and disseminate accurate information to keep people informed , supporting the kind of good, solid science that Olaus Murie himself began and would have been proud of.
Today, the RMEF is run by a former marketer for NASCAR and the Pro Rodeo Cowboys Association, with no understanding of wildlife or elk ecology, who has called wolf reintroduction the “worst ecological disaster since the decimation of bison herds;” continues to erroneously claim wolves are “decimating” and “annihilating” elk herds; who viciously attacks anyone who disagrees; and does what he can to keep the truth from being published. (Myself and other science-based writers have all been banished from writing for Bugle, with no explanation.)
This, despite the tremendous recoveries and improvements to elk and other wildlife habitat in Yellowstone thanks to wolf recovery; that there are now more elk in Montana (and more hunting opportunity) than ever; that I see as many elk as always in the country I hunt, and that Montana outfitters are claiming the best elk hunting success in years.
Good for the Murie family! The RMEF has become a disgrace to the good, science-based research and management that Olaus Murie began and promoted.