In their on-going effort to curb the mountain area’s exploding elk population, state and county wildlife officials are trying something new in Jefferson County – abstinence.
Elk who love too much
“If it works, it’ll be a win-win situation,” says Colorado Department of Wildlife spokesman Randy Deere. “We’ll significantly decrease the size of foothill elk herds and strengthen their moral character at the same time.”
Styled “The Great Colorado Rut-Out,” the program comes on the heels of a string of tactics that ultimately succumbed to public resistance or economic limitations. Repeated attempts to raise the bag-limit on elk have met stiff opposition from animal-rights groups, and recent efforts to chemically neuter female elk have proved costly and time consuming. “We can’t shoot them and we can’t put them on the pill,” Deere explains. “The only thing left is to guilt them into submission.”
For the time being, the abstinence strategy will be limited to elk, long recognized as the Cassanovas of the deer family. “Yeah, elk are always on the make,” Deere says. “Depending on our results, we might expand the program to include mule deer, but they typically spend more of the rutting season dreaming up bad haikus than they do getting busy.”
In practice, the ground-breaking program will both educate young elk about the perils of unplanned parenthood and offer tools to help them resist both peer pressure and their natural inclination to behave like animals. “It’s really about empowerment,” says Jefferson County wildlife officer Harry Buck. “These creatures have never been exposed to a structured, self-affirming program that tells them it’s okay to resist their base, procreative urges.”
Buck is one of a dozen county employees who’ll spend late August and September following local elk herds around and reading selected passages from “Not Until I’m Ready” aloud. In addition, a motion-activated recording of “My Body, My Most Precious Gift” as sung by Colorado Springs’ trendy “Chaste ‘n’ Chillin’” youth choir will greet young ruminants each time they pass beneath Highway 74 through the underpass at Elk Bridge Center. “It’s a pretty lame number with no real beat and uninspired vocals,” Buck says, “so it should get the point across without stirring up any unsavory passions.”
As a last deterrent to unsanctified physical relations, young female elk will be prominently marked with ear tags reading “WWBD,” or “What Would Bambi Do?” According to county wildlife psychologist Fawn Imbraisse, numerous studies indicate that young male elk regard the fictional cartoon deer in much the same way young human males once esteemed youth icons like Pat Boone and Richie Cunningham.
“Bambi holds a position of tremendous cultural significance within the deer community, where he’s revered as a symbol of integrity and purity; of ideal ‘deer-ness,’ if you will,” Imbraisse says. “I anticipate that when an interested young stag approaches an attractive doe with licentious purpose, the tag and its implied reproach will force the brute to confront his inner Bambi and expend his sexual energy by mauling someone’s mature and highly prized lilac bushes.”
Based on successes enjoyed by similar programs aimed at reducing human teen pregnancies, “Rut-Out” advocates feel confident that the innovative abstinence program will significantly reduce local elk herds and help solve a growing problem in the mountain area. “If it works on teenaged boys, it’ll work on young elk,” Deere says. “They’re all animals.”
'I don't know who my daddy is'