My elk. Sorry the picture is crappy, it was a very quick photo before we speed-quartered because we had about 40 minutes of daylight left and like a noob I had forgotten my flashlight.
My elk had a hoof disease that rendered one hind foot almost unusable to the animal, and my hunting buddy/mentor’s elk (he got his the following morning) was an elderly cow with a poor body condition who had become separated from the herd. Both our animals would have been winter-kill or taken by predators within the next few months, but aside from a low body weight on his, their conditions didn’t affect edibility of the meat. They were both animals past their prime, past the point of calving. Useful to us, but taking them had little to no impact on the herd or on population numbers. For the conversation surrounding hunting, this is how it should be done: well-managed, law-abiding, taking herd dynamics into account, and mimicking predator behavior. We are locally overpopulated with elk. The loss of these two animals means a fractional increase in forage available for other animals, and when the winter is set to be as hard as last year’s, that can mean the difference between survival and starvation.