Big Velvet Game Farm: A Blight on Montana's Bitterroot Valley

by Hal Herring

At Len and Barbie Wallace's Big Velvet Elk Ranch in the Rye Creek drainage just south of Darby, Montana, the seasons dictate the workload. Early summer is the time for "velveting," when all the bulls not slated to be killed by paying clients are herded into the processing facilities to have their still-soft and acutely sensitive antlers sawed off nearly flush with their heads. The horns are sold for $60 per pound as part of the $3 billion Asian aphrodisiac market.

In the early days of farming elk for aphrodisiacs, ranchers used anaesthesia to ease what is thought to be an excruciatingly painful process for the bull elk, but the radical amount of blood flow into the growing antler transported detectable amounts of the anaesthetic. Chinese buyers, demanding purity in their aphrodisiac sources, protested.

At the Big Velvet, niceties such as anaesthesia are not a part of the process. Bulls are violently immobilized with a device called the Little Seiz'er, marketed by High Plains Systems in Rapid City, South Dakota. The Little Seiz'er has a clamp for the animal's lip and another for the bare skin around its anus; and a paralyzing current of electricity runs between them. According to a former Big Velvet foreman, the first three bulls immobilized using this device sustained such severe muscular and skeletal injuries that they had to be euthanized, but ranch personnel have now worked out a more efficient voltage. A representative of High Plains Systems recommends that the current be cranked up initially to knock the animal down, then tuned to a lower voltage to allow the animal's paralyzed lungs to exhale. According to the representative, this greatly lowers the risk of animal mortality. At the Big Velvet, bulls will undergo the velveting process every year until they attain an age and antler development sufficient to interest a client who will come to the ranch and shoot them in an expensive and surrealistic hunting mock-up.

In early September, clients arrive to stay at the "lodge" nestled into the scattered timber in the foothills of the Sapphire Mountains, on the east side of the Bitterroot Valley. The clients will be driven around the upper enclosure of the ranch with a ranch employee, called a "guide," to peruse the farm bulls and decide which one of them to shoot. The bulls are harassed by ranch employees for several days preceding the arrival of the client to ensure that they will not mistake the truck carrying the clients for the truck which weekly brings them hay and feed. The entire experience (including videotaping and still photography of the kill) will cost the client anywhere from $5,900 to $20,000 or more, depending on the size and age of the chosen bull, and how many points his antlers will score on the Boone and Crockett official scoring scale, even though the Boone and Crockett Club has made it very clear that no farm-raised animal will ever be knowingly recognized in their Record of North American Big Game. Clients often become evasive about the experience once they leave the ranch, and a client from Minnesota managed to have a picture of himself and his Big Velvet kill printed in the outdoor section of the local newspaper.

Neither he nor the reporter mentioned the 96-inch wire mesh fence that encloses the shooting area. The client did say that "we had a dickens of a time getting him out," even though the animal was shot within easy range of the truck's winch and cable setup. In 1996, clients of the Big Velvet Ranch dispatched 67 bulls to a local meat packing establishment.

Cruel as it may be, the "velveting" process is legal. Shooting farm-raised animals inside a fence is also perfectly legal. But other aspects of the Big Velvet operation are not nearly so well-approved by the law. Since Len and Barbie Wallace came to the Bitterroot Valley from southern California in 1990, they have received violation notices from the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the Bitterroot Conservation District, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks (MDFWP) and the US Army Corps of Engineers. In the late spring of 1993, Wallace constructed of several makeshift and thoroughly illegal dams along Lowman Creek to provide water and wallowing areas for his captive elk. Several locals, including Wallace's own ranch foreman at the time, advised him that the dams would fail during runoff. During a period of chinook winds in late February of 1994, snowmelt caused the failure of every one of the dams, sending a wall of water and debris down into Rye Creek, flattening the ranch fences and tearing away the creek banks on both the Big Velvet property and that of the Wallace's downstream neighbors. The mud and debris eventually reached the main stem of the Bitterroot River. The small resident population of westslope cutthroat trout in Lowman Creek disappeared and riparian areas along Rye Creek were destroyed. The dam construction alone was cited by the Corps of Engineers as a violation of the federal Clean Water Act, and when field representatives of that agency visited the Big Velvet, they cited the Wallaces for other violations concerning the vast network of roads recently pushed through the upper property to access the lodge and shooting areas. These roads had been built with absolutely no regard for terrain or erosion potential; they lacked culverts where they crossed the many drainages, and fill from the roadbeds had blocked seasonal creeks. These violations remain unaddressed four years later, as do citations from the local Bitterroot Conservation District concerning outright pollution of Rye Creek from the Big Velvet's CAFO-"concentrated animal feeding operation." An employee of the Bitterroot Conservation District has called Len Wallace a "tapdancer" who has repeatedly shown "disregard and contempt for the district."

In 1996, Wallace built a maze of fences and bridges around, over and along the creek, in an attempt to keep the elk from further degrading the banks and threatening his own property. He said in a recent interview that he built the fences and put up the bridges and posted little signs for the elk that say "Do Not Poop or Pee Here," and that the elk have read them and been "very compliant." The local community and the many representatives of public service agencies that are forced to deal with him find this statement far less humorous than does Mr. Wallace.

Ongoing pollution from the crowded feedlots where the elk are confined during the colder months has been a problem at the Big Velvet since 1994, when Wallace received his fourth expansion permit from the MDFWP to erect a so-called "game-proof" fence around 1,400 acres of his 5,000-acre property. Although he stated at the time that he planned to use the expansion only for grazing the 77 head of elk then penned on the Big Velvet, Wallace began to pack the ranch with elk from all over the US and Canada as soon as the fourth enclosure permit was approved. Within two years there were over 800 elk, whitetails and mule deer on the ranch. The feedlots are all clustered on the banks of Rye Creek, which at one time was the single most productive trout fishery in the Bitterroot drainage. By 1995 the packed feedlots at the Big Velvet produced an epidemic of the cryptosporidium virus that killed 30 head of elk and caused illness in ranch employees. Cryptosporidium is nasty; it once contaminated the water supply of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, causing severe illness in 400,000 residents. The outbreak at the Big Velvet was reported to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta by the veterinarian then employed at the ranch. Downstream neighbors fear contamination of Rye Creek and the Bitterroot River and believe, along with nearly every wildlife conservation and hunting group in Montana, that the Big Velvet Ranch has proven itself to be, in the words of a representative of the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), a "rogue operation," threatening humans livestock, and, most of all, native wild elk and deer populations. "The Big Velvet Ranch," says the representative, "illustrates exactly why the NWF is opposed to game farming."

In 1996 Len Wallace applied for yet another permit to fence in another 1,800 acres of his property. This expansion would have made the Big Velvet the largest game farm in the state of Montana, and it would have displaced a large herd of wild elk and more than 700 native mule deer. Public outcry against the mighty expansion plan was loud and fast. As it is now, the fenced-in area at the Big Velvet has already destroyed a huge section of traditional winter range for wild elk and mule deer. The fenced land was once home to over 400 mule deer, all of which had to be displaced before the fences could legally be installed. A massive hazing effort to displace the animals was deemed a "mixed success" by MDFWP officials, and wardens of that agency were forced to shoot 49 mule deer that refused to leave the property. Many times during the winters of 1995 and 1996 wild deer breached the giant fence, trying to gain access to their winter ranges. A cougar entered the enclosure, as well as a black bear and numerous coyotes. Each breaching had to be extensively investigated by the wardens from MDFWP, and any wild animals found were either killed or tranquilized and examined, as any contact with the captive ranch animals could easily transmit exotic and devastating diseases to the wild herds and native animals living just outside the ranch perimeter. Citing the fact that MDFWP already spent over $200,000 of the public's money trying to bring the Big Velvet Ranch into compliance with Montana and federal laws, the many unresolved water quality violations, the loss of winter and summer range for wildlife and the negative public comments, MDFWP denied the expansion permit. Wallace has promised to appeal and has gathered support from the local "property rights" movement, which opposes any environmental regulation on private land. The Wallaces have entered into running feuds with their neighbors and have also recently been under investigation for a series of threatening telephone calls made to game farm opponents, including Terry Klampe, a former Montana state senator. A photographer taking photos of the penned elk from a public road had ranch employees buzz him with an ATV, just after game farm supporters declared at a public meeting that the Big Velvet was "a wonderful tourist attraction."

The Big Velvet Ranch is very high profile in the rapidly-expanding game farm industry. While Wallace has perhaps been more defiant of the regulatory agencies than most game farmers, the industry is filled with unsavory characters and profiteers who risk the destruction of all wild game. The laws are not yet in place to stop them, even though biologists have long been aware of the risks. In 1994, bovine tuberculosis was passed from game farm animals owned by Greg Stires of Chino, California into wild herds of mule deer around Hardin, Montana. A 1990 tuberculosis epidemic on game farms in Alberta, Canada, forced the Canadian government to exterminate 2,700 head of farm elk, pay $24 million in compensation to game ranchers and issue a general warning to Alberta hunters. 41 human beings contracted the disease during the outbreak. Genetic pollution of Alberta's wild herds has also been confirmed, as an estimated 20 game farm elk carrying the genes of New Zealand red deer have escaped into the wild. No one is certain what this genetic pollution will bring about-except for Len Wallace who asserts, "My elk have far superior genetics to any wild herd around here." Game farms in Canada make all their money from the velvet market and from meat sales. Shoot-for-pay is illegal there, so many of the largest bulls are exported to game ranches in the US as so-called "shooter bulls."

In Montana, there were 85 new permit applications for game farms in 1996 alone. It is only a matter of time before this industry, which profits a few people from the unconscionable torture of elk, will cause great and probably irreparable harm to all of us.