Hunters and ODFW aren’t the only ones to blame for Gearhart elk killings

From ‘elk selfies’ to continuing habitat encroachment, the Oregon Coast has a long way to go to address human/elk conflict

Your help just hurts: People are outraged about the killings of “problem” elk at the Oregon Coast. But for the most part elk aren’t the problem. Illustration: Mackenzie Miller

By Nathan Gilles. May 9, 2024. In 2020, concerned that wild elk had damaged the fencing as well as pastureland used by their horses on their private property on the Oregon Coast, Craig and Dana Weston asked the state for help.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife responded by issuing multiple “damage tags” that authorized the couple to bring licensed hunters onto their land to kill the elk and, hopefully, stop the damage caused by the animals.

In total, 77 elk were killed on the Weston property from 2021 to 2023 through damage tags issued by ODFW via the Oregon Landowner Damage Program, a program that authorizes the killing of wild animals responsible for property damage.

As has been widely reported, the Weston elk killings were seen by many local residents as excessive and are believed by some to have decimated the Gearhart elk herd. Popular with tourists and some locals, the herd is known to wander in and around Gearhart, Ore., and nearby Surf Pines, where the Westons live.

Following news of the killings, the Westons, both real estate brokers at Windermere’s Gearhart office, became social pariahs among their elk-loving neighbors.

What’s less well known are concerns that the Weston killings could have slowed a larger effort extending throughout Oregon’s coastal Clatsop County to better manage local elk herds.

Started in 2019, the 27-member Clatsop Plains Elk Collaborative was initiated by the cities of Gearhart and Warrenton.

In addition to including representatives from the two cities, Collaborative members also included representatives of several state agencies, ODFW among them.

Designated as an Oregon Solutions project by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, the Elk Collaborative was created to address a growing concern that elk in the region represented a serious threat not only to private property but to public safety.

Map: Wellville

Negative human/elk interactions in Clatsop County have included elk chasing and charging people, including children; a man being pinned to the ground by an elk; elk charging and attacking cars, sometimes moving, sometimes parked; and multiple dogs being trampled to death by elk.

The Elk Collaborative floated multiple ideas to control the wild animals, including culling, the reintroduction of wolves, shooting birth-control-laden darts at the elk and even infecting the elk with a bioengineered virus designed to sterilize the animals. (This last idea was dropped after 2020 for obvious reasons.)

However, in researching possible solutions to what Elk Collaborative documents describe as “an increase in the number and severity of interactions between humans and elk,” the Collaborative came to the unflattering conclusion that the reason Clatsop County’s “chronic elk-human conflict” was largely to due to humans, not elk.

As the Elk Collaborative’s 2021 Declaration of Cooperation states: “Human behaviors and activity have increased the potential for dangerous interactions with elk.”

What’s more, human fascination with elk is largely behind the problem.

But addressing this bad behavior is far more difficult than most might imagine.

Elk Collaborative members stressed the Collaborative is just an advisory committee rather than an official governing body. Nonetheless, because the Collaborative included representatives of local governments, its members have had enough power to enact some if not all of their own recommendations, including measures to reign in humans behaving badly around elk.

These measures, however, have been hard to enforce.

Then there’s the big picture decision-making behind it all: continuing development in elk habitat in Clatsop County.

Collaborative efforts to slow down development and create space for elk to move appear to be dead on arrival.

“Still wild animals”

According to Collaborative documents and participants interviewed for this story, enthusiasm for elk in Clatsop County led to a litany of poor human decisions.

The most dangerous were feeding elk and approaching the large charismatic animals to take selfies with them. Or doing both simultaneously.

These activities habituated elk to people, making the animals dangerous in the process.

Ironically, this elk-loving behavior also led to multiple elk being killed in the interest of public safety.

Elk Collaborative member Dr. Dana Sanchez, a wildlife specialist at Oregon State University Extension, believes that what lies behind these poor human decisions is both a fascination with wild animals and a lack of awareness of what wild animals are and how to deal with them.

“In my experience as an extension wildlife specialist, I often find myself needing to remind people that wild animals are a thing and that they are not the same as domesticated animals. They have not been selectively bred to interact with human beings either as livestock or pets,” says Sanchez.

Wild scene: Pushing boundaries in Warrenton, Ore. in December 2023. Photo: Henry Balensifer

Sanchez says fascination with and ignorance of elk in Clatsop County has led people to get too close to the large animals. A mature male can weigh over 1,000 pounds; a mature female as much as 630 pounds.

Fascination has also led people to feed elk.

This is especially dangerous, according to Sanchez, because it “conditions” the animals to see humans as sources of food.

“These are still wild animals that still have instincts, including self-preservation instincts,” says Sanchez. “The danger of shortening that distance [between people and elk] is that at some point, known only to the animal, a threshold can get crossed, and then the animal might go into fight or flight mode.”

Sanchez says there’s no way to reverse the behavior of a habituated elk.

When an elk’s behavior becomes problematic for humans, the solution, more times than not, is to kill the animal.

This happened to an elk that had become so habituated to human handouts it started raiding campgrounds in search of food in Fort Stevens State Park near Astoria, according to Elk Collaborative member Paul Atwood, North Coast District wildlife biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“We had a report of kids sitting on a picnic table eating cereal in the morning, and the cow [female elk] just really knocked a kid out of the way with her head and stuck her nose into the bowl and started slurping up the cereal,” says Atwood.

The elk was shot with a tranquilizer and then moved far away from the campsite. However, she eventually found her way back to people.

Identified by a tag in her ear, she was later found “cornering” a group of children who hid in a shed. Atwood says that’s when the decision was made to euthanize the animal.

“We often take heat for euthanizing individual animals,” says Atwood. “But this is a great example of why relocation often just doesn’t work because once wildlife becomes habituated, that’s what they become, and they don’t really recover from that.”

Relocation of elk was also officially considered by the Elk Collaborative but was deemed too expensive and impractical.

Human Behavior Modification Subcommittee

Henry Balensifer, mayor of the city of Warrenton and Elk Collaborative co-lead, says sometime around 2018 he became aware of just how badly people were behaving around coastal elk populations when he heard about organized groups of tourists descending on Gearhart from as far away as Seattle to snap pictures of themselves with local herds.

This crowd, says Balensifer, included a friend of his.

“And he shows me a picture and there’s a cow elk that’s sniffing the nose of his chihuahua that he’s hanging out the window of his car,” says Balensifer. “I told him, You idiot. That’s dangerous. Don’t do that!”

This kind of behavior led the Elk Collaborative to create the aptly named “Human Management/Human Behavior Modification Subcommittee.”

A report written by the subcommittee states: “Many human/elk interactions that have been reported in the Clatsop Plains region are directly related not only to elk behavior but human behavior as well.” To address the issue, the report calls for “both elk and human management.”

One element of human behavior the Collaborative sought to alter was feeding.

This led the Human Management/Human Behavior Modification Subcommittee to recommend the adoption of no-feeding ordinances, something the cities of Warrenton and Gearhart had already accomplished before the subcommittee report was finalized in May 2020.

Balensifer says enforcement has been difficult.

“One of the problems with enforcement of no feeding [ordinances] is either you have to personally fill out a form and gather the evidence [demonstrating feeding] and go to court and testify in person, which is a real pain, or the police have to witness [the feeding],” says Balensifer, adding that police don’t always ticket offenders.

As an example, Balensifer says an Oregon State Police officer told him that he had to euthanize a bull elk that had been fed by a person after the animal became violent. The person who admitted feeding the elk was never ticketed, according to Balensifer.

What’s more ODFW, while backing the Collaborative’s efforts to ban the feeding of elk, continues to run “elk feeding tours” at the Jewell Meadows Wildlife Area east of Gearhart.

The tours allow tourists to feed wild elk by throwing hay from the back of a trailer pulled by a tractor.

ODFW didn’t answer questions submitted by Columbia Insight via email about the organized feeding program.

Gardens vs. Elk

Beyond intentional feeding, there’s also been the problem of unintentional feeding.

As one report put it, “elk like to eat many plants used in landscaping” and this was drawing elk into close contact with people and holding the elk “in place.”

Elk Collaborative member Chad Sweet, city administrator for the City of Gearhart, says a landscaping ordinance to ban certain kinds of plants known to attract elk, including roses, was considered but was deemed too prohibitive and unrealistic to enforce.

“Elk were eating all sorts of things,” says Sweet. “We just want people to understand that sometimes what we plant in our gardens can bring in wildlife.”

The Elk Collaborative also called for ways to disseminate educational material outlining what not to do around elk.

While the Collaborative had ambitious goals, what resulted was a series of signs around Gearhart about how to maintain a safe distance from elk.

Warrenton has yet to put up signs due to funding issues, according to Balensifer.

Policy changes unlikely

The Collaborative’s most ambitious goals dealt with land-use planning.

If feeding elk and approaching elk for selfies represents poor individual decision-making, the continued building in elk habitat that is occurring across Clatsop County represents problematic (at least for elk) civic decision-making.

On this point, the Elk Collaborative was clear.

The “Clatsop Plains Elk Project Human Management/Human Behavior Modification Subcommittee and Land Use Subcommittee Report” states: “As development continues and humans continue to alter the vegetation available in this area of Clatsop County, the likelihood of continued human/elk encounters will not abate.”

House guest: Once habituated, elk feel right at home around humans. Illustration: Mackenzie Miller

The most far-reaching Elk Collaborative recommendation to address this is to formally implement policies that would ensure that elk migration corridors “remain undeveloped.”

The Collaborative also recommended the “possible establishment of a wildlife habitat buffer or transition area between urban communities and known elk habitat.”

So far, these recommendations have remained just that, according to Elk Collaborative Land Use Subcommittee member Gail Henrikson, community development director for Clatsop County.

Henrikson says Clatsop County has incorporated the Elk Collaborative’s land-use recommendations into the county’s comprehensive plan, but these are only recommendations, not regulations.

“In terms of more formal implementation of those [Elk Collaborative] recommendations, our [county planning] board has not had a discussion about that,” says Henrikson.

Asked if she thought the Elk Collaborative’s recommendation to keep elk corridors undeveloped will ever become officially adopted, she responded, “I don’t know that there’s a very strong political will right now to move forward with regulatory changes.”

Sweet also thinks regulations designed to protect elk corridors are unlikely.

“I think that ship has sailed a long time ago,” says Sweet. “There’s not a lot of room left for an elk corridor. I think that with more and more people retiring, the coast is only getting more and more filled in.”

Balensifer says while that might be true for Gearhart, Warrenton is a different story.

“I would say that that ship hasn’t sailed for Warrenton. I still think there’s room for elk corridors,” says Balensifer.

Divided community

Whether or not the political will is found to protect elk habitat depends on whether the community comes together to address the issue.

But, according to Elk Collaborative member Denise Löfman, director of the Columbia River Estuary Study Taskforce, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon because the killing of elk on Craig and Dana Weston’s property has divided local residents.

“When a topic becomes really heated, it can be very difficult to find common ground because people retreat to their corners and conversation kind of ends,” says Löfman.

Löfman says she suspects the Weston killings have “slowed down the work” of the Elk Collaborative.

Balensifer is careful how he responds to the same question, saying only that the Weston killings “confused the Collaborative’s role in elk management.” He declined to comment further.

Part of the confusion, no doubt, comes from ODFW’s Atwood being both a member of the Collaborative and the person who issued the damage tags that authorized the killing of elk on the Weston property.

What’s more, Atwood led the Collaborative’s Elk Management Subcommittee, which explored culling the Gearhart herd as a way to “right size” it. The herd was believed to be larger than it had been historically.

However, culling, like landscaping ordinances and land-use regulations, was deemed to be impractical. This led many in the Gearhart area to conclude that Atwood and ODFW had used the damage tags on the Weston property as a way to do culling without calling it that.

ODFW responded to these “rumors” “circulating locally in Gearhart” by issuing a lengthy statement describing what the damage tag program was and how it was different from culling.

Atwood told Columbia Insight the program has never been used to reduce elk population sizes.

He also takes issue with assertions that the Weston killings have divided the community, slowed the work of the Collaborative or confused the Collaborative’s role, saying he had to follow the rules of the Oregon Landowner Damage Program because it’s the law.

“There are laws, there are statutes on the books that require ODFW to assist landowners in addressing damage,” says Atwood. “So, whether or not there had been a collaborative, we have that statutory responsibility and mandate to do that.”

As for the Westons, they say they stand by their actions.

Asked about the response to elk killing on their property, Dana Weston told Columbia Insight: “I think the majority of the response that we have received has been from people who understand and have been positive about it, and that it needed to be to done,” adding that a few of her neighbors “have been very vocal and, unfortunately, very hateful about the whole situation.”

Craig Weston was less diplomatic.

“I’m getting so much shit from the crazies that I cannot deal with this anymore. I mean, it is really getting ridiculous. I want this to go away,” said Weston.

However, while the Westons might hope that the issue will eventually vanish, if the Elk Collaborative’s findings are any indication, without policy and behavior changes elk controversies in Clatsop County probably won’t.

Balensifer says the Collaborative, which is no longer administered by the Oregon Solutions program, plans to meet later this year to discuss next steps.