U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan brought an abrupt end to the discussion of how to thin the elk herd in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. He put language in the Interior Department's appropriations bill requiring that any plan by the National Park Service to reduce elk numbers in the park use North Dakota hunters as volunteers and allow them to keep the meat.

Using volunteer hunters in this manner had been rejected as an option by the NPS, despite pressure from the North Dakota Game and Fish Department and Dorgan. It was rejected because it was seen as "hunting,"which is prohibited in national parks. Except there's an exception. Volunteer hunters had been used in a similar program in the Grand Teton National Park to reduce elk numbers.

The Dorgan solution piggybacks on the Grand Teton precedent.

Using volunteer hunters to deal with the elk represented a common-sense solution to many in North Dakota, where there's a strong hunting culture. Certainly using volunteer hunters will not be cost-free, but it pales in expense when compared to using professional sharpshooters and helicopters to retrieve the harvested animals.

Further, the National Park Service had been working on the problem since 2002, and was widely seen as being bogged down in a bureaucratic process while the problem, based on the fertility of these wonderful quadrupeds, just got worse. It began to represent the kind of behavior by government that people find so annoying - the inability to get anything done.

Reducing elk numbers needs to get done. There are about 900 elk in the park and that number needs to be cut to nearly 200.

The dividing issue has been hunting in a national park. It runs against the grain of what most NPS employees believe and what most Americans understand to be right. The Dorgan solution is to use North Dakota hunters as volunteers to thin the elk, and allow them to keep the meat. Will it be hunting? It will look a lot like hunting, sound a lot like hunting, but will be conducted in such a manner, and for a purpose, that sets it apart from hunting. That is if you can split the hair of bull elk with the blade of your skinning knife.

Is this where common sense trumps principle?

In this whole proces, the NPS managed to raise the ire of a U.S. senator on the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. And it managed to blow off North Dakota's game and fish officials and the state's hunters. It will be interesting to see how the NPS responds to the senator's obvious annoyance at the NPS performance on the elk issue, and how it incorporates the Dorgan solution into the NPS plan.

The most important piece of all of this is that the overgrazing of the park by the elk end. The Theodore Roosevelt National Park represents a rugged landscape with meager top soil and little ability to quickly bounce back from abuse. Hopefully, the elk numbers can be brought under control in a reasonable length of time and cost.