The National Park Service is facing nothing but unattractive options for disposal of the surplus elk at Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

As told last Sunday by the Tribune's Lauren Donovan, the park already holds nearly twice as many elk (600) as the ideal population (360). With no predators for control, their numbers will double within three years. The old solution - shipping the surplus out of state - is not available because of a quarantine resulting from chronic wasting disease elsewhere.

Letting the surplus establish itself outside the park is opposed by surrounding ranchers justifiably worried about their grass, hay and row crops.

Sooner or later, somebody is going to have to shoot a whole lot of elk, and the unhappy task of the NPS over the next couple of years is deciding who and how.

State Game and Fish has suggested opening the park for a special season, but this is a violation of NPS rules and philosophy, and it should be disqualified on public-safety grounds, alone. Likely, the NPS will have to conduct a roundup and either do the shooting itself or hire professional marksmen.

This will make a lot of the public unhappy, and rightly so. If the NPS has no choice in the matter this time because of the derailing of its old plan by chronic wasting disease, it can at least try to ensure that it is a one-time event. As a rule, we should not be cultivating wildlife that we know will have to be shot one day like fish in a barrel.

If elk birth control is practical - apparently, it is being looked at by the NPS in Rocky Mountain National Park - that would be ideal.

Another Rocky Mountain possibility, reintroduction of gray wolves, should be out of bounds at Theodore Roosevelt as the last thing needed by surrounding ranchers.

Before it does anything, the NPS has to have an environmental impact statement, which requires public hearings. The NPS will be in Dickinson Nov. 29; Minot, Nov. 30; Fargo, Dec. 1; Bismarck, Dec. 2; and Medora, Dec. 6.

That's plenty of opportunity for interested members of the public to make themselves heard. Maybe somebody will have a blockbuster idea whose irresistible logic rides up to save the day. If not, we can spare the NPS the emotional outpourings. The NPS already feels bad on its own.