The Future of Wild Elk, Elk Country & the Hunt:

The Future of Wild Elk, Elk Country & the Hunt:
A Conversation with Valerius Geist by David Petersen

In the last issue, longtime Bugle contributor David Petersen profiled Valerius Geist, one of the world’s leading cervid biologists, a passionate hunter and a director of Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Canada’s board. What follows is a provocative and wide-ranging interview gleaned from their week together at Geist’s home in British Columbia. Geist’s views don’t necessarily represent those of the Elk Foundation.

David Petersen: Throughout your long and distinguished career as a research biologist, you have often put forth hypotheses which, at the time, were dismissed by some fellow scientists as “wild ideas.“ Yet in most cases, time has proven you right. I’d like to start our conversation with a couple of your current “wild ideas“ having to do with elk. Describe, please, the odd duck you refer to as a “shirker bull.“

Valerius Geist: This is the fellow who, for mysterious reasons, shirks his biological duty by choosing not to participate in the rut. As a byproduct of this avoidance, he is able to put all of his energy into growing exceptionally massive antlers. My wild idea here is that most world-record antlers are probably produced by shirkers.

The shirker phenomenon first occurred to me while studying red deer in Europe, many years ago. For centuries, professional foresters there—we would call them game managers—had worked to produce the biggest possible antlers for the political and social elite who employed them. As a form of job insurance, those foresters who mastered trophy production kept their methods secret, thus enhancing their worth. While the greatest successes date back to medieval times, not until the 20th century did those long-kept secrets become known.

In sum, to produce exceptional antlers you must satisfy four criteria. First, of course, is genetic potential. Second, the animals must have access to an exuberant diet in quantity, quality and variety of nutrients. To maximize results requires five generations under such optimal nutritional conditions. Third, you have to protect the most promising bulls from being killed until they reach their prime. These first three requirements—genetics, nutrition and protection—are obvious and well known. What isn’t so obvious—the secret ingredient “discovered“ only in the 1930s but probably known to European gamekeepers of historical times—is that even under otherwise optimum conditions, you still won’t maximize antler growth potential unless you prevent young males from actively participating in the rut. By forcefully preventing younger bulls from rutting, managers assured that all the caloric energy they had accumulated during the summer would be preserved and used to lessen the physical stresses of winter, with the excess going to jumpstart the following year’s growth.

In addition to size, a second attribute of trophy antlers is symmetry. Symmetry is enhanced by preventing body and antler injury, which occurs most often and most severely during the rut. The average mature bull elk receives 30 to 60 antler wounds to his body per year—wounds that extract a huge cost in energy to heal out, energy that could otherwise be diverted to antler growth. Severe body wounds are likely to cause antlers to grow crooked or otherwise become deformed.

From my research into the techniques of both medieval and modern trophy production among red deer, I came to believe that truly exceptional trophy antlers—the very biggest and most symmetrical among North American wapiti—owe to a lucky combination of these four essential ingredients: superior genes and nutrition, living to a ripe old age and a lifetime, or at least several years in a row, of avoiding the rut. Thus, my term “shirkers.“

Extremely rare among wild elk, shirkers are somewhat less rare among mule deer. During my field studies of that species, I was fortunate to come to know several huge-antlered shirkers, whose behavior confirmed my theory. Not only did they not participate in the rut, they were full-time loners who avoided associating with other deer. This great secrecy makes such hermits almost impossible for hunters to find, providing the third essential to exceptional antler growth: longevity.

Petersen: What might prompt a bull or buck to become a shirker? After all, to play and win the rutting game is a powerful instinct among all male cervids.

Geist: To employ a human term, I suspect the underlying cause is cowardice. While cervids, like humans, are born with varying degrees of courage, even a bold bull or buck can suddenly lose his nerve and become a shirker following a traumatic experience. Consider the following example:

At Waterton National Park one fall, I was observing a population of male muleys, one of whom I would eventually come to know as Old Buck. That first year, however, he was a normal 4-year-old male. As the rut progressed he got into a fierce fight with an older, larger and far more aggressive buck. The two locked antlers and the bigger buck tossed the smaller animal high into the air. The loser landed hard on his back in a patch of aspen logs just 10 feet from me. After a while the dazed young buck struggled to his feet and limped humbly away—and took no more part in the rut that year. But to my initial surprise, he also avoided the rut the following year, and the next and the next. And during those years of shirking, he grew into a real monster, with a huge body and massive antlers. The fourth winter after Old Buck had quit rutting was extremely harsh, with deep snow and cold, prompting a major die-off among mature bucks who had worn themselves thin during the rut. But Old Buck, with his wealth of body fat and absence of rutting injuries, survived nicely—only to find himself, come the next fall, with no real competition. Suddenly, he started rutting again and for the next three years had virtually every doe in the area to himself.

So, you see, shirking doesn’t necessarily eliminate a male from the evolutionary race to maximize his genes in future generations but can be a highly effective alternate rutting strategy. We see this also among bighorn sheep. While most mature rams get involved in extremely violent head-butting battles, there are always a few pretty boys who keep well away and just watch, never getting involved in either the fighting or the breeding, all the while growing exceptionally large, pristine horns—the finest of trophies.

Petersen: Another “wild idea“ of yours, which is being increasingly accepted among cervid taxonomists, proposes that rather than the traditional six subspecies of North American wapiti—Rocky Mountain, Roosevelt’s, Manitoban and Tule, plus the extinct Eastern and Merriam’s—there is but one: Cervus elaphus canadensis. This stance makes you the leading “lumper“ among elk experts, while the traditional view, as still reflected in the literature, is dominated by “splitters.“

Geist: It is my firm view that just one subspecies of advanced wapiti exists not only in North America but in the entire world. This opinion is supported, to begin, by classic taxonomic characteristics: All of these elk have basically the same external coloration, the same antler configuration, the same bugle. The common ancestor of our elk originated on the huge landmass of Beringia, formerly known as the Bering Land Bridge, which connected Alaska and Siberia during the great ice ages of the Pleistocene epoch. This we know from the fossil record. From Beringia, modern elk spread into both North America and Asia. In Asia, C. e. canadensis is narrowly confined to the grassy highlands of the Mongolian and Siberian mountain regions. The Asian lowlands, meanwhile, are occupied by more primitive subspecies of elk and red deer.

Here in North America, the Beringian wapiti found a wholly elkless continent and consequently spread far and wide to occupy every suitable habitat. Therefore, what we have today are not different subspecies, but merely different ecotypes—localized populations that express in their body growth, antler shape and size, the influences of the environments they occupy. To settle the subspecies versus ecotype argument once and for all, we would need only to transplant a population of tule elk to the Rocky Mountains and a second population of Rocky Mountain elk to California. Within a few generations, I confidently predict, each would adapt the physical characteristics of the other.

Petersen: Yet another of your long-held theories is the relationship between game farming and disease. You were among the first to warn that chronic wasting disease, like bovine tuberculosis and other diseases, could and would be spread from captive game farm animals to wild populations. In the final chapter of Elk Country, written 14 years ago, you foretold the advent of exactly the crisis we’re facing today when you wrote:

Our elk are clearly and presently in danger. If they are to remain unadulterated, if we are to pass them on to those who follow, as was done for us, then we need to make sure that elk have large areas of public land to roam and that they are not threatened with poaching and genetic pollution, diseases and other perils generated by wildlife ranching.

What are your feelings today regarding game farming and diseases as threats to wild elk and the future of hunting.

Geist: My early concerns about the direct links between game farming and wildlife disease were hardly soothsaying. The evidence was clear all along that we were heading toward disaster; nor was I the only one to see it. But our reward for speaking out back then was, too often, to be called names—not only by game farmers but by veterinarians occupying responsible government positions, doing all they could to denigrate us and our concerns. They hadn’t done their homework! Even today, a major problem is that we still don’t have the ability to identify the presence of CWD in carrier animals. Given this weakness, combined with the relatively massive legal and illegal movement of game animals in the past—from state to state, province to province and between the U.S. and Canada—the only logical way to assure that CWD will not be further spread to wild populations, except by natural routes, is to get rid of all artificial routes. And the primary artificial route for spreading CWD is game farming, which involves the constant shipment of animals hither and yon. This is a problem that will never go away on its own. If we truly want to stop the spread of CWD, there is no alternative in my judgment but to get rid of the game farming industry, on both sides of the border. Period.

Petersen: Aside from its role in the spread of diseases, what are your views on the elk farming industry?

Geist: North American sportsmen and women must wake up to the realization that in the end, it’s going to be either captive elk behind fences, to be executed by the wealthy, or free-roaming wild elk to be hunted by all who so choose, following the cherished North American hunting tradition. There can be no compromise. Game farming is utterly incompatible with the maintenance of free-roaming wildlife on this continent, standing in direct opposition to all four basic tenets of the North American model of wildlife conservation and democratic hunting.

Petersen: Examples?

Geist: The first rule of North American wildlife management and the democratic hunting tradition upon which it depends, is that wildlife “ownership“ must be held exclusively in the public domain, as a public resource, with no private-sector interference. The corollary is that wildlife must never become private property.

Second, to save North American wildlife from extinction, we long ago outlawed market hunting and commercial trafficking in dead wildlife. Today, interstate and international commerce in dead wildlife is a felony. This policy is essential to wildlife conservation. But game farming depends utterly on developing a huge and growing legal market in dead wildlife, throwing the doors open to illegal marketing of wild animals as well.

Third, the allocation of the public wildlife resource among private citizens—that is, for taking via hunting, fishing and trapping—must be regulated by due process of law. Wildlife management agencies consult with biologists and other experts in order to draft sound hunting and fishing regulations. All proposals are evaluated, discussed and publicly debated. In the end, laws are passed by elected representatives to assure that all who wish to participate in the legal taking of wildlife have equal chance to do so and must follow precisely the same rules. This is serious business. Under the North American model it doesn’t matter if you’re the Emperor of China; if you want to hunt or fish, you must follow the same rules and regulations as the poorest among your servants. It’s the law. It’s the American way. It’s a way that works for all. And what does game farming give us? Canned hunts, where the only consideration is one’s ability to pay. This is wildlife allocation by financial privilege, not by science, ethics, law or democracy. Canned hunts make a mockery of ethical, democratic hunting.

A fourth glaring conflict between the North American hunting model and game farming comes under the heading of fair chase, in that the U.S. and Canada do not allow the frivolous killing of wildlife. If I am to kill a bird, fish or mammal, I must do so with legal sanction and moral justification. Our culture stipulates that we may legally and ethically kill animals only for good cause: for food and/or fur, or in defense of property or human life. But what restraints against frivolous killing exist in the private sector? None. A canned shooter may buy as many animals as he or she wants and kill them for whatever reason, in whatever fashion, no matter how frivolous, immoral and disgusting. Wildlife laws can’t touch them. Ethics and morality provide no constraint to unethical, immoral participants. Public opinion doesn’t matter to them. Biological and wildlife management concerns mean nothing. The only constraint to canned killing of privatized wildlife is the size of the killer’s pocketbook.

North American wildlife deserve to be managed with the best tools we have: the best scholarship, the best science, the best management experience. That’s what we are striving for. That’s why we have the profession of wildlife biology, an American invention pioneered and epitomized by Aldo Leopold. But the owner of a game farm can thumb his nose at all of this and abuse his animals any way he wants: uprooting their genetics in order to produce unnaturally large antlers, then sawing those antlers off each summer to sell on the Asian pharmaceutical market. Likewise, game farmers quite inadvertently breed captive animals toward domestication—and domestication of any wild species is genetic wreckage. Such captive animals can escape to pollute the wild stock’s genetics, and we, the public and ethical hunters, have little recourse to stop it.

Petersen: What do you think of ballot initiatives as a tool for managing wildlife and hunting?

Geist: Ah, the joys of democracy! In fact, the ballot initiative is bad democracy, insofar as it removes important decisions from the realm of calm deliberation and thrusts them into the emotionally charged public arena, where, precisely as with candidate politics, it’s all too possible for the side with the most money or the best spokespersons to triumph, right or wrong. Yes, some wildlife ballot initiatives have done good things. Others have not. And here we come to Aldo Leopold’s advice to keep an arm’s-length separation between wildlife managers and elected representatives—to maintain a gap that cannot easily be jumped by irrational voting on the part of elected representatives in the service of special interests. In many states today, no such protective gap—no provision for professional accountability to the public—exists. By restoring and maintaining independence of wildlife management agencies from political whim, we can largely eliminate the need for ballot initiatives.

Petersen: You often refer glowingly to “the North American system of wildlife management.“ What is it?

Geist: The North American system is based on democratic hunting, public access to public wildlife, public lands and public input to the wildlife management process. There are a great many serious problems currently facing hunters and wildlife managers in North America. Sometimes these problems seem overwhelming. Yet today, in our darkest hours, our darkness doesn’t compare to the utter blackness of a century ago when a relative handful of dedicated hunter-conservationists sat down together to deal with the fact that the continent was essentially empty of wildlife. Things were so bad a hundred years ago that the U.S. Army had to be called in to protect remnant populations of elk and bison in Yellowstone National Park, and with no federal laws to help them. If you realize how totally grim the situation was then, and what an enormous success American wildlife conservation has been since then, this realization should give us all great fiber to continue with the good fights, even when we suffer setbacks and despair. Dedication and perseverance are the keys to continued success in any worthwhile political venture, just as they are in hunting.

Petersen: In your youth, you were a trophy hunter and a good one, as evidenced by the skull mount of a huge 6x6 bull elk and the many other horns, antlers and skins decorating your home. You’re also a professional member of the Boone & Crockett Club. Yet, you have said that the current trophy mania, goaded by the commercial outdoor media, is a serious threat to the integrity and future of both democratic hunting and scientific wildlife management. Could you explain?

Geist: It’s a market gone wild and unrestrained by even a modicum of personal, social or biological ethics, nor by true respect for the hunted animals. One problem is that the trophy craze we’re experiencing today generates a socially and biologically harmful spin-off by creating a lucrative market for trophy heads. And driving this market are those who, by fair means or foul—by any means—will acquire exceptional trophies, about which they can falsely brag. It’s like a raven wearing peacock feathers. The craze, which naturally is most evident among wealthy hunters who can afford to travel and to buy, totally destroys the original notion of a trophy, which stood as a tangible, artful reminder of all that’s involved in a true and honorable hunt, rather than something to be entered in competitions for bragging rights. I understand traditional trophy hunting and respect the individual who goes afield with the conviction to fulfill a challenge that to him or her has become a holy grail, the hunter who works hard and repeatedly passes up opportunities to kill lesser animals, where extreme discipline and tenacity are exercised. This variety of trophy hunting, which involves real hunting, I have no problem with whatsoever. What I do have problems with is the current craze for “trophies at any cost,“ involving everything from unethical technology to fortunes being spent and, at worst, the artificial generation of store-bought trophies on game farms.

Petersen: What do you see as the primary strengths of the wildlife management and hunting paradigms in North America today?

Geist: The greatness of both of these systems is that they represent grassroots democracy in action. As long as democracy continues to steer these complex endeavors, they shall continue to be the great successes they now are. Growing up in war-torn Europe, I’ve had personal experience with totalitarian regimes. Therefore, I’m quite sensitive to democratic processes. And accountability is the key to democracy. You and I and every U.S. and Canadian citizen can openly approach our elected representatives and speak our minds to them about wildlife conservation. Hunters and nonhunters alike get involved, entering enthusiastically into the debate about how best to manage wildlife. And that’s not a bad thing. The nonhunter’s role is to keep us hunters and our wildlife agencies honest.

Certainly, it is we hunters who get most deeply involved with our hearts. Hunters, particularly as we age and gain wisdom, feel a very strong bond with wildlife. Consequently, we are the ones who are most likely to dip into our pockets for money and to volunteer our time. This means, in turn, that the volunteer hopes to get something in return. Even among hunter-conservationists, there exists a subtle “profit“ motive. This hoped-for reward is that when we return from a hunt, we may bring home an animal. That animal is important first in a utilitarian way, as food for the family table. Increasingly today we are becoming more aware of the incredible, unequaled nutritional value of wild meat compared to domestic. But the animal the hunter brings home is also valuable symbolically, insofar as it represents and reminds us of every aspect of the hunt: the place, the weather, camaraderie, challenge, personal skill and effort. And here too enter ethics, insofar as an animal taken by cheating symbolizes and rewards nothing but lies and self-deceit. Thus, the more honesty we put into our hunting and conservation efforts, the greater the rewards we take from both.

The miracle of North American conservation is that it is basically a blue-collar system, grounded in the political and financial support and the active participation of large numbers of middle-class citizens who bring their basic honesty and decency to bear on important issues. This is just the opposite of the elitist system that has existed throughout Europe for centuries and is spreading like cancer around the world today, even right here at home. Because of the democratic nature of American hunting and wildlife management, and the demands for accountability it implies, our system has worked miracles in returning wildlife to a continent that, just a hundred years ago, saw the near-extinction of most big game animals and other wildlife. In my mind, this represents the world’s greatest environmental achievement of the last century.

Petersen: And what do you see as some of the key weaknesses of these wildlife management and hunting paradigms?

Geist: As you can see, I am all in favor of keeping every man and woman involved in wildlife management. But looking around today, sad to say, I foresee a very hard sled ahead for hunters if we want to maintain our democratic system of broad, class-blind participation and accountability. There is a tendency afoot today in North America to follow the European pattern, where wildlife become playthings for the wealthy and powerful. Under such a system, game is protected from the public in favor of the privileged few. Historically when this has happened—in Europe and currently in Africa— the disenfranchised public turned against wildlife, which becomes a symbol not of freedom and democracy but of a selfish elite. The French Revolution, as you know, was in great part fueled by the anger of the peasants who were not allowed to hunt. In the process, wildlife were caught in the middle, symbolically, and ruthlessly slaughtered. You have this very thing happening in some southern states today, where huge ranches are fenced off to keep public wildlife in and all but paying client-hunters out. Consequently, some among the disenfranchised hunter population have turned to killing wildlife simply to spite landowners and their wealthy clients.

To prevent this tragic end—toward which both the U.S. and Canada are clearly drifting today via canned hunts and leased private hunting lands—we must maintain the honorable and successful tradition of grassroots democracy in wildlife management and hunting. And that, of course, requires that hunters work to maintain not only elk, for instance, but also vast areas of public elk habitat where the resource can thrive and anyone with the proper license is allowed to hunt.

Petersen: Yet, there are some built-in weaknesses and dangers to our democratic hunting and wildlife management system . . .

Geist: Before my mother and I fled from Iron Curtain Germany to Canada, in 1953, I was being groomed to become a Jaeger, a hunter, one of Germany’s elite. Consequently, when I arrived here I was full of the German hunter’s elitist ethics and thus filled with contempt for red-dressed North American hunters. Your populist hunting culture revolted me. In the half-century that has since passed, I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve changed a lot. I deeply admire the populist hunting culture now, and I vigorously defend it. Wildlife is much better off with than without it. There is little doubt that with more stringent mandatory hunting training and education, enforced with periodic examinations, you would get better hunters. But you would also get fewer hunters and lose critical financial and political clout. By all means, provide motivation and opportunity for self-improvement, but do not impose it. For democracy to function in any area requires maximum public participation.

Petersen: I agree that a majority of hunters are good, decent people. Yet, it’s among the built-in flaws of democracy that any fool can do anything he wants, any old way he wants, so long as it’s marginally legal. It’s this minority who bias the public against hunting and turn many nonhunters into antihunters. In our system of egalitarian access to hunting, how can such harmful slobs— not poachers or other criminals, just rude, careless and hurtful individuals—be controlled?

Geist: I’m grateful for people like you and other Bugle writers and editors, who make this important point in a strong and telling fashion. While we can never eradicate the problem of slob hunters entirely, we can minimize it. And that should be our goal. Perhaps a good place to start is to remind ourselves that hunting in America is a privilege, not a right. And privileges can be revoked. What we must do is to keep the problem out in the open and under discussion. To ignore or deny our flaws, our family problems so to speak, will only make things worse. The whole hunting community— individuals and organizations—must make it increasingly clear that unethical behavior is unacceptable and that slob hunters are traitors, the enemy, never to be given shelter. This becomes most difficult, of course, but also most important, when dealing with the friends and family members with whom we hunt. Being a sportsman means that you are an honorable person who upholds honorable conduct, even when the law does not require you to do so—say, in deciding what is and is not an ethical shot offering a high probability of a fast kill and a low probability of wounding. That’s what sportsmanship is: honor, self-restraint, respect for the prey, for our fellow hunters and the nonhunting public, and most of all for ourselves.

Petersen: You have been openly critical of the national park system in Canada, and your criticisms could apply to U.S. national parks as well. In particular, you criticize the park bureaucracy for encouraging what you term “honky-tonk“ development at the expense of wildlife welfare in ecologically essential places. If parks don’t work, what do you consider the optimal form of public lands management from a wildlife conservation perspective?

Geist: The optimal way to manage public wildlands is with the active involvement of a wide array of interest groups working in conjunction with basic laws and regulations that all can abide with—everyone from local residents to national organizations. Here again, I’m falling back on the democratic process, because I believe the ultimate outcome—not always the immediate outcome, but the ultimate outcome—will favor the most rational, the most sensible voices for the protection of the resource. This is democracy’s record over the long term. Open dialogue, honest discussion, reasoned rather than emotional debate, frustration overcome by perseverance, intelligent compromise, balance and the eventual triumph of what’s best for the resource, land and wildlife over what’s best for special interests—these are the hallmarks, the essential tools of democracy in action. But when the public is excluded from the process, while industry and other special interests are allowed to be major players, democracy becomes bureaucracy, favoritism comes into play and wildlands and wildlife invariably suffer.

Petersen: What do you think viable populations of big game animals need to survive for the long-term future?

Geist: Clearly, to enjoy tomorrow what we have today, we must work to maintain large expanses of high-quality wildlife habitat, on both public lands and private. Nor should this goal even be controversial among hunters. Habitat preservation and enhancement, after all, is the primary mission of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and other leading hunter-conservation groups! We must reconnect—not further splinter—our public lands and wildlife habitat. To make this work, we must have open, honest debate focusing on local problems and striving to deal with these problems on a wider basis, viewing them not as isolated issues but as pieces in a larger puzzle. What are our choices otherwise? The current trend, on both sides of the border, is toward the rapid loss—both in quantity and quality—of public wildlife habitat, with a simultaneous increase in game farming and lease hunting on private lands. I personally can’t stomach the idea that my grandchildren might not be able to buy a license and go hunting on public land and enjoy the great privilege of putting wild meat on the table, as you and I have always done.

Petersen: Particularly since nutritional scientists are increasingly singing the health praises of wild game meat.

Geist: Bravo! Wildlife provides the highest quality food available for humans. Period! Agriculture cannot match nature. Happily, it’s becoming widely known that organically raised, grass-fed livestock—minus all the antibiotics, hormones and artificial fattening—live better lives and produce far healthier meat. Yet, even that can never come close to the quality of life enjoyed by wild animals—who wander free and eat an infinite variety of natural forage—and the healthfulness of the food they provide.

Ultimately, we must learn how to live with planet Earth. Wise wildlife management, allowed its full potential, can serve as a model for the wise use of all natural landscapes. Rather than converting more wildlands to agricultural production, as we’ve done in the past, it’s necessary now to go the opposite way—to husband our planet rather than continuing to destroy it piecemeal. Wildlife and wildlands conservation science is pregnant, pregnant, with ideas regarding how to do this. Frankly, if we had managed our once-great forests and ocean fisheries as we have managed our elk and deer and waterfowl, we would still have great, healthy forests and rich coastal fisheries today. And conversely, had we mismanaged our wildlife as we have our forests and fisheries, there would be no democratic hunting today, because we would have nothing left to hunt.

Petersen: Concerning the trans-border management of wildlife, are there areas where the U.S. and Canada could and should be working more closely together?

Geist: Yes! We need a continental treaty on terrestrial wildlife management, such as we’ve long had for migratory birds and, to a more limited degree, for marine mammals. These treaties are howling successes because they remove wildlife management from the often weak and misguided jurisdictions of state and provincial legislatures, courts and bureaucracies, replacing this hodgepodge of often conflicting local preferences with the consensus and authority of international law. Chronic wasting disease serves as a horrid example of what can happen when we disregard the lessons of scientific wildlife management and dole out authority to state and provincial departments of agriculture. If the CWD problem isn’t soon contained—in every state and every province—we could see the collapse of public and political support for wildlife due to fear. This is an international problem that can only be solved through international cooperation in the form of a treaty. If we can achieve a continental treaty for the management and protection of terrestrial wildlife, we will have protected hunting!

Petersen: Whatever its merits, such a treaty flies in the face of state’s rights, a cherished institution among many conservative rural Americans, including some hunters.

Geist: No matter! The future of wildlife and hunting are far too important to be left to local whim! Look at waterfowl management. With state-by-state and province-by-province management—state’s rights, if you will—North America would have no waterfowl hunting today, because we’d have no waterfowl. Certainly, there are many areas of government that are best managed at the local level. But not all, and not wildlife! All major hunter-sponsored wildlife conservation organizations—the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation is a brilliant example—are continental in membership and scope. We need to give this citizen cooperation the force of international law. For those of us whose primary concern is preserving huntable populations of elk and other wildlife, encouraging such a treaty is among the most important and positive things we can do.

http://www.rmef.org/bugle/pages/04JF/geist.html

I agree with almost everything he said and it was a good article. However, he is a little off base on the elk subspecies subject. There is considerable grey area between a subspecies and the sort of "species ecotypes" he is talking about. Morphlogical (appearance) differences are not always enough to seperate a subspecies. Still, the definition of a subspecies is "geographical races, two subspecies represent two population of a species that have been geographically isolated over time but not enough genetic differences have come about yet to make them seperate species."

So he is in effect wrongly lumping elk into one species, when in fact by virtue of their geographic isolation, behavior, morphlogical and physiological differences they fit the definition of subspecies.

Transplanting elk to the coast and from the coast to the mountains would prove nothing since they could still have enough genetic plasticity to survive in unfamiliar places while being different subspecies. The simple fact that the subspecies are physically and behaviorly different yet still could interbreed means they are subspecies not one species.