Mary Bowerman

USA TODAY Network

Nineteen elk were killed by wolves earlier this week in what’s being called a “surplus kill,” according to Wyoming wildlife officials.

Wolves killed seventeen elk calves and two adult cows near Bondurant, Wyo., according to John Lund the Pinedale regional wildlife supervisor for the Wyoming Game and Fish Department.

It’s not unusual for wolves to kill one or two elk a night, but to have 19 killed in one night “is fairly rare,” he said.

Lund said a surplus killing is when an animal kills more of its prey than it can eat and then abandons the surplus.

"We’re not sure what triggers surplus killing, because in many cases predators will kill with the intent to eat, but in this case something triggered and they went crazy and just took down each elk and moved on to the next,” he said.

He said over the past winter, wolves in the area have killed at least 70-75 elk, which is a "significant" number.

"Based on what we’ve seen in this elk herd, likely [the deaths] will impact our hunting season and hunter opportunity," he said.

Because the wolves are federally protected, Wyoming wildlife managers can not take measures on a local level to curb their populations, even if they are killing high numbers of elk, he said.

He notes that the federal government typically refrains from managing the wolf populations unless they are killing livestock.

For the most part, wolves do not “kill for sport,” Mike Jimenez, the Northern Rocky Mountain Wolf Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told County 10.

"We did an eight-year study, and we looked at elk feed grounds. What we found is that generally wolves did not kill what they did not eat,” he told the outlet.

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