Beautiful animal! How's the health of the herds stateside? We've got a small, increasingly managed herd in New Zealand (we call them Wapiti, which I'm sure is the American Indian name for elk) and you need to ballot to get into the blocks containing them. They're facing hybridisation issues with the local red deer population, and you would be strung up for shooting anything other than a mature bull, making them unattractive to a meat Hunter like myself.
So to quit my rambling, do they face hybridisation with other species and are there plenty about?
Yeah, depending on what subspecies you guys got there in NZ, and because of your Eurasian roots, they probably would refer to it as "wapiti" so as not to confuse it with a moose, which in the other parts of the world is referred to as "elk". We all speak English, but it sure isn't the same language!
We have pretty healthy herds here, mostly due to proper game management by our state fish & game agencies and groups like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation doing their part to purchase and protect habitat. There's no real hybridization, since technically all elk in North America are of the same species (Cervus canadensis), with four extant subspecies. I'm not a scientist, but I did some bumping around and it would appear that there are 8 subspecies in Asia (referred to as red deer or wapiti) that are also of the same species as the North American elk, but not the same as the red deer of Western Europe (Cervus elaphus). That must be the hybridization you guys are dealing with.
Admittedly I'm new to the forum and don't quite understand how to do the quoted stuff...
Areaman - to my knowledge the hybrids are Western European reds, introduced by colonists with American "Wapiti" which were a gift from Roosevelt (cheers guys) and were from Minnesota. They can produce fertile offspring but are incapable of surviving in the wild with predators, we however don't have any predators except for humans.
1611 - the number of true Wapiti is too low for people to go shooting cows right now. The Department of Conservation is not exactly on the side of hunters, our current Minister of Conservation wants to remove anything with "four legs and fur" from the country and damn near ordered an aerial eradication of Tahr very recently. Only public outcry stopped it, but the battle is far from over.
One of the points we raised was the revenue brought in by hunters from the U.S. Trying to fulfil their bucket list so please do come over, Tahr hunting is the best!
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