One elk that escaped from an Idaho game farm near the Wyoming border may be a red deer hybrid, according to preliminary test results.

That elk tested positive as having red deer genetics in two of three tests, according to Idaho Department of Agriculture spokesman Wayne Hoffman. Genetic and disease test results for the other escaped domestic elk in have come back with negative results.

Hoffman said what's confusing is that the elk in question has paperwork in which it is certified as a pure-blood elk.

"They both can't be correct," he said, referring to genetic test results and the certification that came from the state of Minnesota, by way of Colorado.

Idaho agriculture and wildlife agency staff and hunters with permits for the region went gunning this fall for up to 160 domesticated elk that escaped in August from the Chief Joseph hunting preserve near Tetonia, not far from the Wyoming border and Yellowstone National Park. The widely voiced concern at that time was that the escaped game farm elk might spread disease or breed with wild elk, passing on undesirable genetic traits.

The elk were owned by Rex Rammell, who has vigorously protested the hunting of his escaped elk.

Idaho Department of Fish and Game spokesman Niels Nokkentved said he's been told that 36 of Rammell's elk have been killed, with another 61 captured and in quarantine. The domesticated elk were bred for large antlers and canned hunts for hunters willing to pay top dollar for a guaranteed kill.

Rammell has continuously maintained that his game farm elk are derived from Yellowstone elk, have a pure Yellowstone genetics line and are free from disease. Game farm elk and deer elsewhere in the country have been infected with brucellosis, tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease. That's one reason many states - Wyoming and Montana among them - have banned game farms.

Hoffman also raised the possibility that the positive test results could be "false positives" - test results that are really negative, but mistakenly identified as positives.

To clarify the situation, the Idaho Department of Agriculture has already sent blood and tissue samples from the elk in question to genetics testing labs in Canada and California.

"We hope to get results this week or next," Hoffman said.

He added that he didn't want the public "to freak out" over this development, until conclusive results are back from the labs.

By Idaho law, red deer are illegal to import into the state, although there were red deer game farm operations in the 1980s, Mansfield said.

Peter Dratch, a National Park Service biologist based in Fort Collins, Colo., has said European red deer and North American elk, or wapiti, share an ancestor in Asia many thousands of years ago. The red deer spread across northern Europe to the British Isles, while the wapiti traveled over the Bering land bridge to North America, where they grew bigger.

Dratch, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on red deer/elk hybrids, said they'll readily hybridize, but that most states that have outlawed game farms have also banned red deer.