Young Elk Finds Home With Holsteins

Young Elk Finds Home With Holsteins LIVESTOCK Exotic Animals 23-6-21 After he was abandoned by his herd, a confused young elk took up residence with a group of Holstein cows and quickly became the talk of residents of Ouray, Colo. It happened a year ago last fall when other animals in his herd jumped a pasture fence. The young elk had earlier got tangled in the fence and refused to jump it, leaving him stranded with the cattle. He grazed in the pasture by himself along U.S. Highway 550, often looking toward the mountains where the herd had disappeared. The herd would occasionally come back to the pasture, but the young elk's mother had dried up and refused to ler her calf nurse her. When rancher Jeff Woolston began trucking in hay to feed his cattle, the elk decided to join the cattle. "For a while he was all stressed out, but he stuck right with the cows and became one of the crowd," says Woolston. The animal was soon the talk of the town and became known as "Isabulla". If they couldn't see Isabulla from the highway, people in town would start calling the Woolstons wanting to know where he was. The local newspaper started keeping track of Isabulla's fate. A cartoon showed him with a "moo" coming out of his mouth, and his photo was used in advertisements bearing the message "stand out in the crowd." Then last April the Colorado state department of wildlife ear-tagged Isabulla and relocated him to a wilderness area. "Everyone was upset when they moved him and they still miss him a lot," says Jackie Wagner. And how did Isabulla get his name? Jackie explains. "For the first few days we thought it was a female elk. Then one day while he was eating hay we saw the elk peeing, and that's when we decided to call him Isabulla." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Jackie Wagner, Box 1364, Ouray, Colo. 81427 (ph 970 325-0201).

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