Thinning bison herd triggers anger
By JIM ROBBINS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
GARDINER, Mont. — This was not the Yellowstone National Park that tourists see.
At first light on Tuesday, at the end of a closed road, past a boneyard of junk cars, trailers and old cabins, more than 60 of the park's wild bison were being loaded on a semi-trailer to be shipped to a slaughterhouse.
With heavy snow still covering the park's vast grasslands, hundreds of bison have been leaving Yellowstone in search of food at lower elevations. A record number of the migrating animals -- 1,195, or about a quarter of the park's population -- have been killed by hunters or rounded up and sent to slaughterhouses by park employees. The bison are being killed because they have ventured outside the park into Montana and some might carry a disease called brucellosis, which can be passed along to cattle.
The large-scale culling, which is expected to continue through April, has outraged groups working to preserve the park's bison herds, considered by scientists to be the largest genetically pure population in the country. It has also led to an angry exchange between Montana state officials and the federal government over a stalled agreement to create a safe haven for the bison that has not received the needed federal financing.
"When they leave the park they have nowhere to go," said Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a Democrat. "This agreement would have given them a place to go."
Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone National Park, said park employees try to haze the bison into returning to the park, but often meet with limited success. Last week, two employees on horseback drove a large herd across a snow-flecked mountain from the north entrance back into the park.
"They come right back out again," Schweitzer said. "They just rebel. What would you do if you were a starving buffalo?"
The culling of bison at Yellowstone, while legal, has been a briar patch of controversy for more than two decades. In 1996, the count reached a peak -- until this year -- when 1,084 animals were killed.
In 2000, Montana, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, which oversees disease issues for the Department of Agriculture, signed an agreement to manage the population. It had two main objectives: to stop the spread of brucellosis, which can also be transmitted from elk, and to allow some bison to leave Yellowstone unmolested.
Conservationists, Montana state officials and other critics say the first part of the agreement has been honored, but the second part has been ignored by the federal government.
"The public should be outraged," said Amy McNamara, national parks program director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman, Mont., which has worked to allow bison to leave the park. "An American icon is being taken to slaughter."
In the last few years biologists have discovered that Yellowstone's bison are one of only two genetically pure herds owned by the federal government. James Derr, a professor of genetics at Texas A&M who is studying the Yellowstone bison, said he feared some behaviors or traits -- including the propensity to migrate -- could be lost with the killed bison.
"The great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and daughter often travel together," he said. Killing them "is like going to a family reunion and killing off all of the Smiths. You are affecting the genetic architecture of the herd."
By JIM ROBBINS
THE NEW YORK TIMES
GARDINER, Mont. — This was not the Yellowstone National Park that tourists see.
At first light on Tuesday, at the end of a closed road, past a boneyard of junk cars, trailers and old cabins, more than 60 of the park's wild bison were being loaded on a semi-trailer to be shipped to a slaughterhouse.
With heavy snow still covering the park's vast grasslands, hundreds of bison have been leaving Yellowstone in search of food at lower elevations. A record number of the migrating animals -- 1,195, or about a quarter of the park's population -- have been killed by hunters or rounded up and sent to slaughterhouses by park employees. The bison are being killed because they have ventured outside the park into Montana and some might carry a disease called brucellosis, which can be passed along to cattle.
The large-scale culling, which is expected to continue through April, has outraged groups working to preserve the park's bison herds, considered by scientists to be the largest genetically pure population in the country. It has also led to an angry exchange between Montana state officials and the federal government over a stalled agreement to create a safe haven for the bison that has not received the needed federal financing.
"When they leave the park they have nowhere to go," said Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a Democrat. "This agreement would have given them a place to go."
Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone National Park, said park employees try to haze the bison into returning to the park, but often meet with limited success. Last week, two employees on horseback drove a large herd across a snow-flecked mountain from the north entrance back into the park.
"They come right back out again," Schweitzer said. "They just rebel. What would you do if you were a starving buffalo?"
The culling of bison at Yellowstone, while legal, has been a briar patch of controversy for more than two decades. In 1996, the count reached a peak -- until this year -- when 1,084 animals were killed.
In 2000, Montana, the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service, which oversees disease issues for the Department of Agriculture, signed an agreement to manage the population. It had two main objectives: to stop the spread of brucellosis, which can also be transmitted from elk, and to allow some bison to leave Yellowstone unmolested.
Conservationists, Montana state officials and other critics say the first part of the agreement has been honored, but the second part has been ignored by the federal government.
"The public should be outraged," said Amy McNamara, national parks program director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition in Bozeman, Mont., which has worked to allow bison to leave the park. "An American icon is being taken to slaughter."
In the last few years biologists have discovered that Yellowstone's bison are one of only two genetically pure herds owned by the federal government. James Derr, a professor of genetics at Texas A&M who is studying the Yellowstone bison, said he feared some behaviors or traits -- including the propensity to migrate -- could be lost with the killed bison.
"The great-grandmother, grandmother, mother and daughter often travel together," he said. Killing them "is like going to a family reunion and killing off all of the Smiths. You are affecting the genetic architecture of the herd."
