'A problem waiting to happen': Headstrong elk euthanized after confrontation video goes viral

[joeybee12]

A young elk was put down late Friday after being put in the spotlight by an amateur video that caught the animal headbutting a nature photographer, officials said.

The footage, which went viral last week, showed lensman James York sitting beside a road in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Asheville, North Carolina, as the one-and-a-half-year-old elk continues to headbutt him and periodically jab its antlers.

The YouTubed incident was the tipping point for park officials since the elk had a history of unmanageable behavior, Dana Soehn, a spokeswoman at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, told NBC News.

Soehn said that since September the elk had been "hazed" an estimated 28 times. Hazing includes shooting the animal with bean bags and paint balls, running after the elk as well as lighting firecrackers to scare it off, Soehn explained.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/11/18/21521252-a-problem-waiting-to-happen-headstrong-elk-euthanized-after-confrontation-video-goes-viral?lite

Pisses me off...the elk was being a good elk...he ould have grown up to be a very dominant male and kept his females safe...maybe they should have thought of maybe keeping that area closed off to fucking people since he kept going back there...jackasses.

[Scuba]

1. Elk euthanized for being an elk.

That sucks.

[uppityperson]

2. Sounds like they tried and tried to let him live, but having a friend gored to death by a mt goat,

sometimes human lives take precedence. If they'd not attempted as much as they did, I might be upset, but in this case, they did what they had to.

[Larkspur]

3. This is terrible! Shame on the park rangers.

That elk was playing with the cameraman. If he really wanted to injure the human, he could have, but it appeared to me that he was trying to figure out what the cameraman was. The elk may have thought the camera was the human's horn and thought the human was some type of strange elk.

The cameraman was doing the right thing by staying calm and not challenging the elk nor running away.

We've got people on this planet searching for intelligent life on other planets, but what happens if that life is not hominid? It's body language may be the way we can communicate with it initially.

[Go Vols]

4. Full Vid

[nolabear]

5. Aw, no. Wonder why they didn't relocate him.

To answer my own question, that might have been a death sentence as well. Putting an unfamiliar, fractious youngster in established territory might have turned out badly. Poor fella. He didn't know how tough humans are to live with.