Buffalo Field Campaign Weekly Updates from the Field 2006/2007

The poet's words have lived for 200 years. They ring still with truth. They come to mind in reading an Associated Press story about a bull buffalo that has taken up residence this winter in a thick stand of trees outside Yellowstone Park. The final three words "outside Yellowstone Park" are those that so inflame Montana Department of Livestock officials.

Livestock officials are bent on keeping buffalo and the brucellosis they may bear - a "gift" from imported cattle - inside Yellowstone Park. So this errant buffalo is an irritation.

The bull offers virtually no threat of brucellosis - none. There have been no documented cases of buffalo returning their disease in the wild to the imported cattle from which it sprung. Scientists do believe that cattle, eating the placenta of birthing bison cows, could become infected. But buffalo don't birth calves in February; bulls never. And cows don't come into heat when they're calving, so even the most lovelorn bison seeking an interspecific interlude would find himself unrequited.

This bull is grazing in a meadow. He plows through three feet of snow to get at the grass, but the winter has been relatively gentle. The snow doesn't have a hard crust, and buffalo are built for surviving Montana winters. Still, the bull is, well, irritating. Montana policy allows no buffalo outside the park, not even those that pose no danger to cattle herds.

So officials from the Department of Livestock have been attempting to haze the buffalo back into the park. That's haze as in "to persecute or harass with meaningless, difficult, or humiliating tasks," according to Microsoft's dictionary. They have attempted to chase the buffalo on snowmobiles, with blank-loaded shotguns. They came once on snowshoes, but ultimately decided that it is not the height of reason to chase a buffalo through deep snow on snowshoes.

This buffalo isn't dumb. He runs into heavy timber to elude the hazers. When they have gone, he comes out to eke a winter's sustenance on that meadow, to drink from a winter stream. It is difficult not to attribute human characteristics to the bull. We have all felt crowded by this rule or that, felt the heavy hand of bureaucracy on our heads.

It is difficult not to think of the bull as standing up for his principles: "This is my own, my native land." It is difficult, too, to think of the hazers as serving a higher purpose. Persecution, harassment and inflicting meaningless, difficult or humiliating tasks is not the stuff of which heroes are made.