A trophy-sized bull elk that was a showpiece at a living-history ranch museum near Craig gored a ranch hand to death Thursday morning.
The bloodied and battered body of John Renner, a 56-year-old transient worker from Kansas, was found by co-workers about 10:30 a.m. in a feeding trough where the elk had tossed him, said Sgt. Rick Holford of the Moffat County Sheriff’s Office.
“From the looks of things, he got tossed around a lot,” Holford said.
Holford said that when he and other deputies arrived, the elk, which had blood on its antlers, was still acting upset and aggressive.
“I think he was probably still in rut, the way he was acting,” Holford said, referring to the annual mating season. “He was defending his territory. He was a wild animal acting like a wild animal.”
The seven-point elk named Clyde had been raised at a ranch owned by Lou Wyman. Clyde is about 9 years old, and Wyman told The Craig Daily Press that he had never bothered anyone before.
Wyman also said that Renner was told not to go inside the pen to feed the animal, which weighs more than 1,000 pounds. Renner had worked at the ranch for only a few weeks.
Wyman has raised captive elk since 1968 and once had the largest elk ranch in the state. He had turned a 10,000-acre portion of his ranch, 20 miles south of Hayden in northwestern Colorado, into a living-history ranch and museum in recent years and kept Clyde in a central enclosure where visitors could view the massive animal. Children were known to feed him apples and carrots through his 8-foot fence, Wyman told reporters.
Holford said he doesn’t know what will happen to Clyde.
“I can’t see putting him down,” he said. “You can’t blame him for what happened.”
John Ellenberger, a former big-game manager for the Colorado Division of Wildlife for more than three decades, said wildlife workers have occasionally been injured by elk during trapping operations. He said they usually avoided the slashing horns and kicking hooves by entering enclosures carrying plywood shields a half-inch thick.
“Elk can get very aggressive,” he said, adding that he could not recall a case in which one killed a person.
Last year, a deer killed a man in a gated community in Southern California, and in 2000 a pet deer killed a Kansas woman. In the 1970s a man was fatally attacked by a deer on the grounds of a Masonic home in Ohio and a 5-year-old boy was killed while feeding a deer at Yosemite National Park.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
