A wild animal getting acclimated to humans is one thing. That wasn't what was happening. That elk had fixated on a human as one of them. This is more typical of people who mistakenly raise a buck fawn which fixates on humans. Everything is fine until one day when the male animal goes through puberty and has those raging hormones that drive mating behavior. Then it wants to fight, sometimes to the death depending on the species. If a deer, turkey, elk, etc. has fixated on humans and a human happens to be around at the wrong time, the animal goes into fight mode, usually with tragic results for the human...or mating mode which is even worse to my way of thinking. Accepted practice is to put the animal down once it is discovered. Even in a zoo setting it have become the practice to avoid letting non domesticated animals become fixated on humans.

If you put out food for a wild animal that can be OK under very strict circumstances such as severe weather events. If you lure it to you with food in order to "tame" it, you are most likely signing its death warrant. Feeding bears, even unintentionally, will absolutely get them killed. Feeding raccoons generally winds up with the person doing the feeding hating raccoons and wanting to do the killing in fairly short order.

I completely agree with the decision to out this elk down, but I don't like that it had become necessary.