Utah wildlife officials secretly culled 170 elk from LDS Church ranch land

Editor’s note • The following story was reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune.

A massive gang of elk — with thousands more animals than the land could support — had been growing for years in Morgan and Rich counties.

The best solution, the Division of Wildlife Resources decided late last year, would be what became likely the state’s largest-ever project to euthanize wildlife. It was a big operation and an even bigger secret.

Records obtained by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project show state officials continually worried about the possibility that the culling would become public, especially since no public hunters were invited to take part in hunting the area.

From January through March, dozens of DWR staff members worked with privately contracted hunters to bait and shoot 170 elk on the Deseret Cooperative Wildlife Management Unit, or CWMU, located on ranch land operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

DWR sent out weekly updates which frequently noted the lack of media coverage and cautioned not to post any photos of the killed elk on social media.

“The media and social media have still been relatively quiet, thankfully,” wrote Xaela Walden, the DWR wildlife biologist overseeing the project, in a Feb. 20 email to agency officials, including Wildlife Section Chief Covy Jones.

Two weeks later she wrote an update with an all-caps “THANK YOU” to the team that had successfully finished the culling project. DWR spokesperson Faith Jolley replied with congratulations to Walden and the teams adding: “And I am for one very glad it never hit the media and that it stayed relatively quiet on social media.”

CWMUs provide landowners with vouchers for big game permits they can sell, typically wrapped with guiding services, for prices that can reach tens of thousands of dollars. In exchange, a CWMU manages its wildlife under its agreement with the state, and must allow a number of public hunters onto the land.

The culling project on the Deseret CWMU was needed not just for its property, but to address elk overpopulation across the Morgan-South Rich hunting area, said Mark Hadley, DWR’s northern region outreach manager, in a recent interview. The herd was nearly 3,000 elk over a healthy objective, he said.

Hadley emphasized that there was strong scientific reasoning behind the decision to only use DWR staff and Deseret CWMU staff to kill the elk, and to not call for help from public hunters who had elk tags for the area but had not harvested animals.

The meat from the culled elks — over 39,000 pounds — was donated to local food shelters, he added.

So why didn’t the agency just tell the public all this in the first place?

“Well, we do a lot of outreach to the public,” Hadley said. “To teach them more about wildlife and help them live in harmony with wildlife and to enjoy wildlife. Those are the messages we try to send out to people. I guess we could have let them know about the culling project.”

‘At a saturation point’

In the fall of 2023, DWR staff huddled and began strategizing. The Morgan-South Rich hunting unit’s elk population was close to 7,000, almost 3,000 above the area’s sustainable population level.

On top that, 80% of the deer in the area died during last year’s heavy winter. Wildlife officials believed the widespread loss was due to the herd having to compete for scarce resources with the dominant elk herds.

“It was the most affected deer unit in the state,” Hadley said.

A DWR memo about the culling plan noted that “annual elk harvest over the last five years has averaged 870 elk,” while the number of new elk born or moving into the area was estimated at about 1,500. A variety of hunt options over the years had not successfully checked the elk population growth, DWR contended.

“The Division feels that permits on Deseret are at a saturation point where increasing permits will not increase the number of elk harvested,” the memo stated.

The solution the agency came up with was a drastic one — the issuing of a certificate of registration, or COR, authorizing the killing of up to 300 elk.

The plan called for focusing on female elk. DWR employees would be able to bait the animals and shoot them with “suppressed high caliber rifles” — essentially muffling the noise of the shots so as not to spook the herds.

The plan also called for the use of walk-in traps that would allow DWR and Deseret CWMU employees to “euthanize the elk with a penetrating captive bolt.”

Killing so many animals in a short time span in secret was a complicated logistical operation. Multiple stations were set up on the Deseret CWMU for gutting and skinning the elk and also for collecting samples to test for chronic wasting disease and brucellosis.

Other groups would haul carcasses to a butcher and also take meat from the butcher to nine different food banks and homeless shelters.

It cost $47,614.80 to butcher the animals and another $5,781 to have the animals tested in a laboratory for disease, according to DWR. The agency reached out to five other CWMU operators in the Morgan-South Rich hunting unit who contributed $22,000 to help with the cost, while DWR covered the remaining $25,614.80. But DWR did not have a firm estimate of costs for employee time, equipment and fuel.

Documents show it might have been the largest culling project state officials have ever undertaken. Officials said there were large culling operations in the 1980s, but weren’t certain of the number of animals killed at that time.

So why weren’t public hunters brought in to help?

A representative of the church-owned Deseret CWMU declined to be interviewed, instead referring a reporter to DWR.

It’s important to understand that in addressing the habitat damage that occurred last winter, the state needed to take action quickly and efficiently, DWR said through spokesperson Hadley. The agency did not have the authority to issue new permits to public hunters, according to state law and DWR’s administrative rules.

In the past, the agency has been able to call hunters who purchased a hunting tag but weren’t successful to offer them another opportunity to take part in hunts to help control over-capacity populations. But the agency decided that would not be as successful as taking the more drastic measure of issuing the COR and undertaking the culling project.

Plus, Hadley said, it would not be as effective.

“Sometimes just putting a bunch more hunters on the same landscape to hunt elk doesn’t always work the way you hope,” he said. “Elk are really wary animals — if you get too many hunters on the landscape, that can tend to push elk up to areas where it’s really hard to access them.”

‘Grow animals like weeds’

Now the Utah Wildlife Board has approved a plan that going forward, a single hunter going for a cow elk in the hunting unit will be able to take an extra cow elk on the same hunt. “We’re hoping that will help us out quite a bit,” Hadley said.

The agency is also setting new harvest objectives that will require a CWMU itself to harvest a certain number of cow elk if public hunters don’t meet the goal number.

Guy Perkins has been hunting elk for the past 51 years and worked for a time in the early 1990s as a hunting guide on the Deseret CWMU. He was surprised to learn about the culling project, he said, but overall was sympathetic with the difficult position DWR was in and said wildlife officials often get a “bad rap.”

He also agreed that bringing in more hunters may not have been the right call in this case.

“More hunters don’t always help the situation because more hunters usually create a commotion and a commotion doesn’t ever help your hunting,” Perkins said. Relying on state employees might have been the more effective and humane solution, he said, given that inexperienced hunters could end up wounding elk instead of killing them.

Still, Perkins said that the overpopulation problem clearly didn’t happen over just one season, and instead likely resulted from years of neglectful herd management.

“If you only take a few elk every year and you continue to have the habitat available,” he said, “you’ll just grow animals like weeds and they’ll eat themselves into a problem.”

Hadley insisted the elk problem was unitwide and not specific to the Deseret CWMU, noting that over the last five years an average of 217 antlerless elk were harvested annually by public hunters on Deseret. “They’ve been a really good partner,” Hadley said.

But the COR document also noted that while the elk were a problem across the Morgan-South Rich area, “Deseret also holds a large proportion of the unit’s elk.”

The COR documents said that CWMUs in the area besides Deseret also contributed to the over-capacity elk herd. DWR documents also state that Deseret was not supposed to “profit” from the culling. Among the area CWMUs, Deseret contributed the most — $10,000 — to the expenses for culling the animals.

But this spring, DWR announced new recommendations for CWMU permits and Deseret was allowed to offer 11 new bull elk tags. Since the elk population still remains massively over objective, Deseret can sell more lucrative bull elk tags, each one potentially worth tens of thousands of dollars.

DWR notes that the bull-to-cow ratio on Deseret is “outside of biologically sound thresholds” of 91 bulls to 100 cows and argued that “even if the population was near objective, with the current bull-to-cow ratio, the 11 additional permits could have still been offered.”

Perkins said this is where the profit motive for CWMUs can complicate managing herd health. He recalled a famous hunting guide from Colorado posting a YouTube video of hunting on the Deseret CWMU and being amazed at how many bull elk there were. The CWMU guides with the Colorado hunter were encouraging him to wait to find a truly large bull elk, and not just bag the first one in his sights.

“They are going to try and make their dollars by creating a best-case scenario — a big bull elk with inches on the antlers and a very happy hunter to talk about it so they create demand,” Perkins said. But having lots of top-dollar bull elk often means there may have been too much breeding happening, as well, he said.

“Next thing you know, they are over objective and that could happen pretty quickly” he said. “Especially if there’s no other predators.”

Hadley said that while the CWMUs have been great for preserving private land for wildlife, the land does remain private. Previously, he said, there has been little the state could do when it comes to CWMUs that might not be allowing enough hunters on their property.

“We can talk and encourage but we can’t force private landowners to do anything,” Hadley said.

Late last month, however, the Wildlife Board implemented new ways to address elk overpopulation on multiple CWMUs, including Deseret. The new tools allow hunters with a CWMU big game permit to buy an additional antlerless elk permit for the same hunt. They also include harvest objectives set by DWR for CWMUs, including asking Deseret CWMU to harvest a total of 300 antlerless elk for the season.

The board also plans on more hunts, including a depredation hunt and an emergency hunt at the end of the year. Board members have also agreed to issue private vouchers that are not for profit, and approved a new requirement for a hunting unit-wide plan to be presented to the CWMU Advisory Committee.

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