Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s<\/a> (IDFG) plan calls for relocating about 40 elk to areas with below-average elk populations and lethally removing about 60. Game officials aim to remove the elk, which live year-round on private land owned by five landowners in Unit 32, located in Payette County.<\/p>\nThe herd has grown to 350 over the last five years. Game officials tracked the animals via GPS and learned that it remains on the property year-round.<\/p>\n
Despite efforts by hunters, landowners, and Fish and Game staff to reduce elk numbers and crop damage, the herd caused over $1 million in damage to agricultural land in 2025, according to game officals. The landowners were only reimbursed for about 35% of their reported losses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The shortfall was due to two claims exceeding the single-claim payment maximum of $125,000 in state law, and overall, statewide claims last year exceeded Fish and Game\u2019s fund for depredation payments, which resulted in proration of claims,” game officials said in a news release.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fish and Game said it learned from previous rollouts that “projects have shown that attempting to trap all of a large herd, or a large portion of a herd all at once, risks the safety of the elk.”<\/p>\n
The animals had learned how to avoid traps set by game officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The elk will be trapped and hauled to public lands outside of Unit 32.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fish and Game said it will contract with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services to lethally remove elk that cannot be translocated. Those animals will be processed by a licensed meat processor, and the meat will be distributed to regional food banks.<\/p>\n
The project will occur during spring and summer to ensure that resident elk are translocated or removed, rather than the roughly 1,000 migratory elk that winter in the area.<\/p>\n
For more information about Fish and Game’s plan, visit their presentation here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Game officials said the goal is to reduce damage to agricultural land after a herd of 100 nonmigratory…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":421298,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":{"0":"post-421297","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421297\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/421298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}