Locked up

RENO, Nev.(AP) -- It's not all checking hunting and fishing licenses. Sometimes the issues are bigger. Like when a Nevada game warden was handed the chore of figuring out how to separate two bull elk who locked horns while sparring and couldn't untangle themselves.

The saga began Nov. 21 when a rancher in Reese RiverValleyspotted the two elk. By the following day, the animals were gone,and the rancher assumed they had separated.

A week later, according to Nevada Division of Wildlife biologist Tom Donham, the rancher was out looking for some of his cows and saw the elk again. This time, he called the wildlife department and Donham, game warden Brian Eller and Bureau of Land Management wildlife biologist Bryson Code headed out to see what they could do. When they reachedIndian Valley, south of Austin, it was Nov. 29, one week after the elk were first seen.


'When we arrived where the rancher had last seen them, we found them pretty quickly. They were both lying on the ground, and one of them was in a very uncomfortable-looking position with his head directly above the other's head and his nose pointing straight up to the sky,' Donham said. Eller said he wondered if they had survived their ordeal.

'Once we found out they were alive, I was hoping they couldn't move and would stay where they were. That didn't happen. When they ran off, I was hoping they could not go very far. That didn't happen either,' he said.

The elk may have been sparring at the outset, but Donham and Eller say they used teamwork to run for nearly a mile to evade the newcomers. 'It looked like they had been doing it all their lives; serious cooperation if I've ever seen it,' Donham said.

After two unsuccessful att empts, Donham was able to get a tranquilizer dart into one of the elk. With one down, the other could not run, but was also partially tranquilized in order to separate the two.

Eller and Code helped hold the elk down while Donham used a hand saw to remove part of an antler from one of them.