Three law students at the Sturm College of Law and the Environmental Law Clinic are filing suit against the National Park Service due to its controversial plan to cull the elk population in Rocky Mountain National Park without considering reintroducing gray wolves into the elk’s environment to control the size of the elk herd.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Denver two weeks ago on behalf of WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group that protects and restores wildlife, wild places and wild rivers in the American West.

The complaint argues that the government has not considered every option for controlling the elk population in Rocky Mountain National Park and has settled on hiring hunters to shoot the young, female elk.

The complaint includes that hiring hunters is a violation of the law that requires officials to investigate more than one way to solve herd overpopulation.

The National Park Service is also violating the National Park Service Organic Act, the Rocky Mountain National Park Act and the Endangered Species Act, according to the complaint.

“The National Park Service had the opportunity to restore the natural balance of the Park by reintroducing wolves when they were analyzing how to solve the unnatural problem of elk overgrazing,” said Kate Williams-Shuck, a law student.

“Instead, the Park Service chose the unnatural alternative of shooting the elk.”

The compliant describes that the The National Forest Service has even considered giving birth control to some of the female elk in addition to killing them with the goal of preventing the elk from reproducing.

More elk would lead to continuous overgrazing of the vegetation in the park while introducing wild gray wolves would prevent the elk from always gathering in the open meadows, according to the complaint.

There has been a similar problem with introducing gray wolves before, but in Yellowstone National Park during the 1990s.

“The National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service introduced wolves into Yellowstone National Park in 1995 but they have never reintroduced any wolves in Colorado,” said Williams-Shuck.

“The scientific studies done in Yellowstone National Park after wolf reintroduction show that the presence of wolves in the area disperses elk, thus allowing plants to regenerate.”

The spokesman for the client WildEarth Guardians was also available for comment.

“By the late 1990s, it was clear that we needed to restore wolves to as many places as possible in the West, not simply for the sake of wolves, but for the sake of entire ecosystems that were withering in the wake of theB extirpationB of wolves,” said Rod Edward of the WildEarth Guardians.