4-26 SS AI in Elk

 Artificial insemination and its role in hunting.

 I do a TV show on the Outdoor Channel and it takes me to all kinds of outfitters. A recent journey found me at a very high and elk operation and a very important part of their program was artificial insemination. Almost every bull in the wild was massive. In a recent conversation with Joe Dalton, Caldwell’s UI Extension dairy specialist, who helped design artificial insemination workshops for dairymen, I asked if AI in outfitting operations was the same. “They find a bull from someplace north of Calgary Alberta. They fly in straws of semen. Is it the same thing? It is. You hit the nail on the head and what drives it is the bull elk that is somewhere in Canada north of Alberta, has some set of marketable traits. What it would be is obviously physical stature, but it would be the rack that he puts out. So he’s got this huge set of antlers, obviously they have looked at his off spring and this trait comes through. So then, this ranch in New Mexico, Texas or they even have them in Idaho, they breed their females to this male because they are hoping they will get more males and they become what that hunter or those groups of hunters are interested in. They are interested in a certain size in a male and they are interested in a certain size of a rack so that when it is hanging on the wall, it is what they desired.