Entangled elk to become educational aide

DIXON — A couple weeks ago, Confederated Salish and
Kootenai Tribes Game Warden Pablo Espinoza received an unusual call. Two bull elk were tangled in a length of barbed wire fencing just outside of Dixon. The elk, seven point and six point bulls, had been there for an indeterminate amount of time before Espinoza was called to the scene. Both had their antlers entwined in the wire, which by then had been wrung from the fence posts. Both were tired and stressed.
Espinoza dispatched the animals, and their saga began.
The elk are now traveling cyberspace, subject of emails called “tied up in Montana.” Soon the Dixon elk will be on display in the tangible world as well.
The skulls have been cleaned and preserved, and will be sent to the CSKT Fish and Wildlife headquarters in Polson. There, they will greet school children who tour the facilities, and serve as an example of the sometimes tragic interface between the natural and the man-made world.
Rodney Tobler is a taxidermist at Alpine Taxidermy on Valley Creek Road. He said cleaning and processing the skulls was a challenge.
“The wire made it extremely difficult,” he said. “It was hard to cut off the skin.” In order to process the skulls, he said, “we have to take off as much meat as we can.”
After stripping the skin, flesh, and organs from the skulls, they were placed in the taxidermy shop’s beetle room, where flesh-eating beetles remove remaining scraps from the bone.
The beetle room is kept at about 85 degrees, Tobler said, and leaving too much flesh or soft organs in the skulls would be detrimental to the bugs, which do their work in a crate filled with dry straw.
“We have to take off the eyeballs and the brains,” he explained, or “the brains turn to soup and the beetles would drown.”
After the bones have been worked by the beetles for a few days, they are boiled, bleached, re-boiled, and bleached again.
“We had to do some major reconstruction on these,” Tobler said, as the skulls were fragmented due to being head shot.
That was necessary, Espinoza said, to salvage as much meat as possible from the game.
There was no possibility of releasing the animals, Espinoza said. “They were so tangled, there was no way to safely snip the wires,” he said. Plus, there is no guarantee the elk would have lived.
“They were both on their sides exhausted,” he remarked, adding there is no way of knowing what internal injuries the animals may have already been facing.
Espinoza told of a situation last year, where the CSKT tranquilized a deer caught in a flooded stream. Even though the animal was subsequently rescued, it died due to stress and exhaustion.
With the two bull elk, Espinoza decided the highest possible good would come of quickly ending their ordeal, and getting the meat to the processing plant.
The drugs used in tranquilizing big game are extremely powerful, and not suitable for human consumption, Espinoza said. Also, game wardens do not carry them, he said, as they are a highly regulated controlled substance. If he had chosen to attempt to drug the animals, they would have continued suffering until the tranquilizers could have been retrieved. In addition, once filled with tranquilizers, the meat would be unusable for human consumption.
Espinoza said there were a lot of bystanders watching the elk, which contributed to the animals’ stress. That also contributed to the potential for a hazardous encounter, Espinoza said. “These are wild animals. You could get tripped or kicked.”
Espinoza felt it was most humane to dispatch the animals as soon as possible. “I tried to put the animals down as quickly as I could without any more suffering,” he said.
The head shots, he said, while not the best for taxidermy, were the best for the job. “You could shoot them in the body, and they might not die right away, and the meat could get damaged. With a head shot, you don’t waste any meat.”
The elk were put down with a 12-guage shotgun, which Espinoza described as “a very powerful shotgun. That’s the weapon of choice for bear protection,” he said.
After dispatching the elk, they were taken to a nearby meat packer by rancher Ross Middlemist, whose fence they had tangled with.
“Ross and Terry and Reese Middlemist were very helpful,” Espinoza said, “and I’d like to thank them.”
The meat, once processed, will be utilized by the “tribal diabetic program,” he said, which will provide the lean, high protein meat to those who need it.
“I knew the meat was not going to go to waste,” he said, “and that’s the most important thing.”