"Environmental attorneys are calling on the National Elk Refuge to make good on old promises and produce a decade-delayed plan detailing how it will achieve a court-ordered reduction in elk feeding.

The confirmation of chronic wasting disease in Jackson Hole last month adds urgency to ending business-as-usual elk feeding, Earthjustice wrote this week to Elk Refuge Manager Brian Glaspell. The deadly and incurable disease’s presence in the valley makes it “imperative” that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service-owned property take “prompt action” and issue a phase-out plan that was supposed to be released to the public in 2008.

“Failing to do so,” Earthjustice’s Dec. 4 letter says, “would undermine the conservation purpose of the Refuge, violate the Improvement Act, and court ecological disaster by regularly encouraging high numbers and densities of wild elk to occupy the refuge, thereby facilitating the spread of wildlife disease among the fed elk population.”"

Mike Koshmrl reports for the Jackson Hole News and Guide December 7, 2018. [2]