These are among the last winters of the elks' content at Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

The park staff is gradually working toward a final plan to kill hundreds of them in order to get the herd back down to a manageable number.

Opening the park to public hunting is not included in any further analysis. There was a high level of interest in the idea at public meetings a year ago.

The analysis will eventually be drafted into an environmental impact statement, hopefully next summer. Then it will be open for comment and review before being made final.

The healthy elk are good breeders, but the park has been unable to thin them out by roundup and shipment to other parks and preserves, as it has on several occasions in the past.

A moratorium because of chronic wasting disease prohibits relocating elk to prevent spread of the killer disease.

So far, there isn't any known chronic wasting disease in North Dakota deer or elk.

Still, the moratorium remains in effect and the elk herd only gets bigger and bigger. The herd is estimated at 750 now, about twice the optimal number for habitat and range.

Park staff have been looking at how to reduce the herd for a year. This week, it announced it has advanced some means for further study and identified some means that will not be advanced.

One that won't be advanced is public hunting inside the park.

Superintendent Valerie Naylor said public hunting is illegal in national parks. To change that would require a change in federal law and set a precedent for every national park in the country, Naylor said.

Instead, the park will look at the possibility of killing up to 400 elk to test them for chronic wasting disease. They have to be dead to look for the disease in the brain stem.

If none are positive, that guarantees a statistical likelihood that none of the rest is positive and could be shipped out.

Naylor said that plan would depend on the park's ability to find other entities that will take the animals.

She said that could be a challenge, given that the same moratorium has put other states and reserves in the same overpopulated position.

The park would have to kill far fewer elk if it could test and ship them. It's possible the plan can't be implemented until 2008, when the park's elk population will have doubled to nearly 1,500. The kills required to reach statistical probability on the chronic wasting disease question won't greatly increase beyond the 375 needed to establish that probability for the current 750 elk in the herd, Naylor said.

Without anyone to take the healthy elk, though, the park's only remaining option will be to kill what could be as many as 1,000 in order to get back down to the optimal size herd.

How the killings would be done remains under study.

The options include, but are not limited to, bringing in sharpshooters, or rounding up the elk into pens, where they would be killed by injection in a way that doesn't affect the meat consumption, or shock killed, like for beef slaughter.

The park would find groups or individuals to take the meat.

The longer the park takes to study the problem and find solutions, the more elk will be born and the bigger the problem will get.

"It's important to do it quickly. It's also important to do it thoroughly," Naylor said.

Other ideas that won't be carried forward for more analysis are hazing the elk outside the park, removing all or most elk, or reintroducing elk's natural predators.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)