Editor's note: Reprinted with permission from Wyofile. This story first ran on October 21, 2014.

Two Teton County photographers filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. on October 20 seeking to stop the annual elk hunt in Grand Teton National Park.

Tim Mayo and Kent Nelson, operating as Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, target the “elk reduction program,” in which hunters killed 202 elk last year. The hunt also resulted in the shooting of a grizzly bear, a federally protected species, in 2012.

The suit goes beyond hunting alone, challenging supplemental winter elk feeding on the nearby National Elk Refuge. The hunt violates a slew of federal laws, the suit claims, including the Grand Teton Act, the National Park Organic Act, the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act.

Nelson and Mayo ask a judge to declare the 2014 hunt illegal, along with the park’s “policy, practice and pattern,” of adopting it annually. The suit challenges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2013 determination that park hunters could kill four additional grizzlies by 2022 before Grand Teton would run afoul of the Endangered Species Act.

The suit seeks reversal of that Fish and Wildlife “incidental take” number. It also asks for an environmental review, with public comment, of the park’s elk reduction program.

The legal action names National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Daniel Ashe and Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell as defendants.

A Fish and Wildlife spokesman said his agency does not comment on pending litigation. Grand Teton officials did not comment by press time Monday evening.

“The various laws define a rigorous process which the agencies that authorize and administer the hunt are required to follow,” Nelson said Monday in a statement. “We are alleging that the agencies’ legal obligations were sometimes ignored and at other times were essentially rubber-stamped without performing legally required due diligence.”

Before the suit was filed, a park spokeswoman and biologist outlined how and why the elk reduction program is authorized each year. Among other reasons, the hunt is necessary to ensure the Jackson Elk Herd remains within population objectives and evenly distributed across four summer ranges, spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs and Grand Teton Senior Wildlife Biologist Steve Cain said last week. The Wyoming Game and Fish objective for the herd stands at 11,000 while biologists estimate 11,600 in the herd in the last annual winter census.

Hunt Keeps Elk Distributed, Park Says

Without a hunt, more and more of the elk in the herd would move to Grand Teton, overwhelming habitat there as they abandoned other areas, Skaggs and Cain said.

“That’s not desirable ecologically or for any other reason,” Cain said. Stopping the hunt would “greatly affect recreational hunting and the ability to manage the herd outside the park.”

Mayo and Nelson’s suit comes as the public continues to scrutinize the hunt, which is highly unusual in a National Park. The law expanding Grand Teton in 1950 allows the Elk Reduction Program “for the purpose of proper management and protection of the elk.”

In cooperation with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Grand Teton has staged the hunt in all but two of the last 64 years, Skaggs said. The 2014 hunt began Saturday.

The 2012 Thanksgiving Day killing of a grizzly by hunters in Grand Teton emerges as a pivotal incident in the suit. Hunters sprayed the advancing 534-pound bear with bear pepper spray and shot it dead, practically simultaneously, park reports say.

That put Grand Teton at the limit of anticipated grizzly deaths due to the hunt. One more and the hunt would have violated the Endangered Species Act.

The park closed 8 miles of wooded Snake River bottomlands to hunting as a result. It is the only agency to require hunters to carry bear spray.