Takhini River Valley landowners with problem elk on their property will soon be permitted to shoot the invading ungulates as part of a pilot program to keep the animals off agricultural land.

Landowners will first need to come up with an elk deterrence plan focused on using non-lethal methods to bar the animals from their property.

Euthanizing the elk will be the last resort, and will require landowners to have a Wildlife Act kill permit tied to their property-specific plan.

The long-term goal is to condition the entire elk population to stay away from farms, so the problems stop and the elk don’t need to be killed.

The program was developed by the Elk-Agriculture Steering Committee, which includes officials from the agriculture branch and Conservation Officer Services, as well as representatives from the Yukon Agriculture Association and the Yukon Fish & Game Association.

This comes after years of seemingly intractable problems caused by elk herds, with farmers ending up with destroyed crops, broken fencing and barren pastures.

“There were some tough conversations getting here but we got through them in the spirit of working together and what’s best for the Yukon and Yukoners and elk,” chief conservation officer Gordon Hitchcock told the Star on Thursday.

The whole program will be run through a co-ordinator — a job posting for this is going out in a few weeks — whose role will be to help each landowner develop individual property-specific management plans.

At this point, the program is being run as a two-year pilot project, with the steering committee still open to changes.

“We have a good solid plan and we’re prepared to implement it and re-evaluate and assess as we go,” Hitchcock said.

Previous plans didn’t work

Elk are not technically native to the Yukon, having not lived in the territory consistently for about 1,500 years.

In 1951, Yukon hunters advocated for the introduction of a limited number of elk to increase hunting harvest opportunities. This was done through lobbying by the Yukon Fish & Game Association.

Since then, several rounds of introductions have been done and two distinct herds were established, one called the Braeburn herd and the other the Takhini herd. The last rounds of introductions were completed in the 1990s.

The Takhini herd has about 200 animals, while the Braeburn herd has about 60.

These numbers are considered healthy by the government, and the pilot program is not seeking to change this.

Since the 1990s, the government has used an Elk Management Plan to regulate these herds. Several incarnations of these plans have been created over the years.

The 2008 version created several zones where elk receive various levels of protection, and hunting is allowed in certain areas.

There is a core zone, where they are fully protected; several buffer zones with partial protection; and open hunting areas.

Local farmer Wayne Grove lives in a buffer zone.

He said it was 2008 when the trouble began.

Grove owns the El Dorado Ranch, a 450-acre parcel of land near the Takhini Hot Springs where he grows hay and raises domesticated elk and bison.

He said he’s had wild elk break fences, destroy hayfields and try to mate with his domesticated elk — basically wreaking havoc and destroying his farm. He estimates it has cost him about $2 million.

It got so bad he and his wife had to sleep in shifts to keep an eye out and scare the elk away.

He’s also put up 10 kilometres of eight-foot-tall game fence.

But the problems have continued.

“I’ll tell you what: I’ve got a problem here right now,” Grove told the Star on Thursday. “I got the elk in my yard right now. Have been here for two months.”

All the while, he is not allowed to shoot the elk without facing charges under the Wildlife Act. Grove has already faced these charges once.

He has also sued the government. In the suit, he argued the Yukon government has a “duty of care” to keep this introduced elk off his land.

He lost the case initially, but has since appealed and the case is ongoing.

At this point, Grove isn’t sure the government is really going to do what the farmers want and need.

“I’m skeptical,” he said.

Reaching a consensus

On Thursday, the Yukon Agriculture Association’s Carl Burgess, along with agriculture branch director Kirk Price and chief conservation officer Hitchcock met with the Star by video to explain how the new program will work.

Price began by laying out the program, with the acknowledgment that past measures weren’t good enough for some property owners.

“There’s been some conflicts that we hadn’t foreseen,” he said.

Price said the major change now isa that this new approach becomes more property-specific, using on-the-ground information gathered from landowners themselves.

Hitchcock said this will allow them to take a much more active role in elk management.

“The implementation plan is a lot more proactive approach in getting ahead of some of these known conflict areas that produce historical and ongoing, persistent issues with elk,” he said.

The way the elk issues were dealt with most recently was to have landowners call on conflict hunters to come out and shoot the elk.

This process took time, though, and often the damage had been done by the time the hunters organized and arrived.

Property owners also expressed concern about having strangers hunt near their homes.

It simply wasn’t working well enough.

To find a fix, a consensus between the different interest groups was needed.

“It’s been a lot of effort to get to where we are,” Burgess said, “and it’s gonna be a lot of effort to deliver what everyone expects.”

He called the process a “delicate dance.”

The difficult part now will be getting buy-in from property owners like Grove who have built up a level of mistrust with the government.

Grove forwarded the Star an email between him and a conservation officer from two weeks ago in which he details newly-broken fence posts and explains how he cannot contain horses he would be getting paid to board, therefore losing $600 per month.

The response email just says “your email has been added to your file.”

“They didn’t even come out,” Grove said of the officer’s response.

With the creation of a co-ordinator wholly dedicated to dealing with these issues, the goal is to have a more consistent response for people like Grove.

Burgess said the agriculture association will be doing a lot of the engagement work, using the “neighbour network” to get the word out.

“We want to get as many people on board as possible,” he said.

The more people sign on to do elk deterrence plans for their properties, the more successful the program should be, Burgess said.

The idea is to condition the elk population broadly to stay out of these agricultural areas entirely. This requires an interlocking chain of farms working together.

“The goal is not to do this forever,” Burgess said. “The goal is to teach not to punish.”

Burgess said the idea is to create an “intense and consistent deterrence over a broad land base.”

In creating individual deterrence plans, Burgess said that some landowners may not want to include an elk kill permit as part of the plan, but that is okay.

He also said this is not just a big plan to go out and shoot elk.

“There’s lots of different ideas out there,” he said.

When elk are shot with one of these permits, the landowner will be responsible for trying to preserve the meat and get it to conservation officers to be distributed back to the community.

“We have a number of not-for-profit, First Nations communities, some health programs, like at the hospital,” Hitchcock said. “It’s distributed through those avenues.”

Partly this is to make sure the meat is not wasted, but partly to make sure the plan is not looked at like hunting.

“We wanted to signal that difference that this isn’t a hunting harvest situation,” Burgess said.

The whole plan is still open to change, and the Elk Steering Committee expects to adjust as they gain more information and see what works and what doesn’t.

Working to keep hunters, farmers, government agencies and other local landowners happy will likely take some adjustment.

“There’s overlapping interests and policies that are all completely valid,” Burgess said.