| Yellowstone Bison Slaughter
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| News
Article 3/14/04 |
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| It's
all a haze
By Nadia White
Casper Star-Tribune staff writer
March 14, 2004
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GARDINER,
Mont. -- The lone bull bison slowly grazes the
manicured lawn alongside the yellow, clapboard house.
He crosses the cement walk, parts two rows of neatly pruned
shrubs and leaves the yard through the whitewashed fence
at the ranch gate.
He is in big trouble.
George Nell knows it. Michael Mease knows it. Ranger Eric
Morey isn't even on the scene yet, and he knows it. Only
the buffalo doesn't have a clue.
Mease is the founder of the Buffalo Field Campaign, a
buffalo advocacy group with a base in West Yellowstone.
Nell embodies the group's Gardiner operation. Mease calls
him "a one-man BFC."
It's a brisk, March Sunday and the two have been sitting
in a Subaru station wagon since first light, watching
the bull, filming video of his plodding rumination.
"We're worried about this guy. We heard last night
they were going to take care of that problem, 'permanently,'"
Mease says.
But when Morey shows up at about 8:30 a.m. in his white
Park Service pickup, he is followed by a horse trailer,
not a flatbed. That, Nell says, is a good sign. "They
use the flatbed to haul the bodies away."
For several days, the bull has grazed on the lawn of the
Church Universal and Triumphant's Royal Teton Ranch operations
office and the occupants aren't happy about it. The bull
is stuck in a routine that involves retreating up Reese
Creek drainage at midmorning -- just inside the park boundary
-- and returning to nibble the lawn at dusk before bedding
down nearby.
"They're screaming bloody murder," Morey says,
nodding toward the office building.
Mease calls the uniformed Morey "sir" and assures
him Buffalo Field Campaign has no intention of interfering
with the operation. He asks what the plan is. The conversation
is congenial, both men are easy-going, Mease with his
long hair sticking out from his fleece hat, Morey with
his trimmed mustache and green uniform with a patch with
a buffalo in the foreground.
Morey says riders on horseback will try to haze the bull
away from Reese Creek and steer him toward the road and
south onto park lands. "We'll try to change his routine,"
Morey says.
"Promise me you won't kill him?" Mease asks.
"We won't kill him today," Morey replies. "But
I can't promise you he won't get killed someday. This
guy's in trouble."
The bull is at risk for two reasons: There are too many
buffalo in the park and some of them have the disease
brucellosis.
Too many of an animal that once numbered in the tens of
millions across the West is, of course, relative. But
3,000 is the highest population scientists agreed should
live in the park to minimize the compulsion buffalo feel
to leave in the spring. There are currently about 4,200
buffalo in Yellowstone, an all-time high.
Preventing large groups of buffalo from leaving the park
is an integral part of a broader goal, which is to keep
Montana's cattle brucellosis free -- with the economic
benefits to the ranching community that that entails.
Some people think infected buffalo may spread the disease
to cattle if they share grazing lands. Brucellosis can
cause cows to abort their first calves,
A plan that took a decade to hash out calls for the Park
Service to control the buffalo that leave the park north
of Gardiner. This is the fourth year the plan has set
the rules for managing the buffalo. It has two main goals:
To reduce the risk of transmission of brucellosis from
bison to cattle; and to conserve free-ranging bison.
Now, on arid, rolling rangeland west of the Yellowstone
River near Gardiner, the Park Service has pledged to keep
buffalo away from cattle and in the park. The deal is
they will haze and haze again, but bison that prove unmovable,
no matter how peaceful their headstrong meandering may
seem, will be killed.
"The concept of this plan is one of balancing many
competing interests," says Glenn Plumb, supervisory
wildlife biologist for Yellowstone National Park. "From
a practical mitigation standpoint, avoiding commingling
(of bison and cattle) is the most important thing we can
do."
And in finding that balance, every agency that signed
off on the plan -- state and federal -- gave some ground.
For the Park Service, that meant capturing, testing, corralling,
vaccinating and maybe killing wildlife,
something that many inside and outside the Park Service
feel is inappropriate.
For a key federal agency, APHIS (Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service), which is in charge of keeping cattle
safe from contagious diseases, it means accepting that
eradication of the disease is not a goal.
"Is this plan anybody's favorite plan?" Wayne
Brewster, deputy director of resources for the park, asks
rhetorically. "I doubt it. But it seems to be the
one that's hung together longer than any other plan, and
we've
still got lots of buffalo and we haven't had any commingling
of cattle and bison."
The plan is definitely not to Mease's liking. Too many
buffalo get killed or handled like livestock, he says,
and it's all to "cowtail" to the cattle industry.
Mease would rather ranchers who run cattle along the edges
of the park shift from cow-calf to steer operations to
avoid problems caused by infection. He would prefer that
resources spent on the challenging task of vaccinating
wildlife be shifted instead to inoculating cattle.
"Why do we bother vaccinating buffalo when we could
put all that money into developing a bomb-proof vaccine
for cows and vaccinating all of them?" he asks.
And while federal and state researchers continue examining
the details of the disease, Mease's group does what its
members feel has been effective.
Since 1996, when more than 1,000 buffalo were killed leaving
the park after a hard winter, Buffalo Field
Campaign has worked to document the way public officials
handle bison that leave the park.
The spotlight they have put on the issue of bison management
has changed the way the animals are handled, Mease says.
But it has not stopped hundreds of wild bison from being
handled like livestock, and as the number of healthy animals
slaughtered declines, it is the preservation of wildness
that is becoming the group's paramount concern.
Brewster and Plumb share the concern. But they say the
intense focus Mease and others have put on the several
hundred bison that cluster at the borders fails to show
the thousands of bison that wait out the winter in the
park's less-accessible interior.
"If what we have to do to preserve the larger population
is handle a few of them every year or every other year
to protect the larger population, well, we're willing
to do that," Brewster says.
That means getting a handle on the lone bull with a taste
for manicured lawn.
On Sunday, he dodges the hazers in a steep, sage-filled
ravine and heads back to Reese Creek.
Monday morning, he is out of the park again. This time
grazing in and around a collection of rusting stuff --
old signs, a hay rake, a refrigerator -- in a private
yard north of the yellow ranch office. Three horses agitate
around their corral. They're worried. Their owner isn't.
He tells Mease and Nell the bull can leave on his own,
he isn't going to call anyone. Then he gets in his truck
and leaves for work. The bull, on his own schedule, moseys
back toward the park.
But another 11 bulls have made their way onto Church-owned
land and Morey and the hazers are back. The bulls head
off on their own, closer than the lone bull to Reese Creek
but headed that way, too. Morey says the men will haze
the sole bull in with the other 11 and push the whole
bunch back to the park. That's the plan, he says.
The riders herd the one bull slowly toward Reese Creek.
Mease films the action from the road. And he waits in
the Subaru. The riders disappear up the distant drainage;
the hazing area is closed to the public in the spring.
Mease and Nell shared their stories and the roots of their
passion for the bison. Another Buffalo Field Campaign
patrol with a better vantage point of the hazers radios
updates and watches the mouth of the drainage. A U.S.
Forest Service lawman stops to chat. He is new to Mease
and Nell and it's a little odd he is visiting. A K-9 officer,
he lets his dog stretch while he goes and talks with Morey,
who is parked nearby, also watching.
This is pretty much what Buffalo Field Campaign does,
Mease had said earlier, "We sit with the buffalo
that are in danger, from sunup to sunset."
Somewhere in the small talk and wind there is a gunshot,
but that's not too uncommon on these flats. It draws some
comment in the Subaru, but not much. Morey and the K-9
officer each slip away. Then the horse trailer comes up
the road at a good clip, surprising Mease because they
had been gone so long and hadn't been seen returning.
He makes a halfhearted gesture at getting them to stop
and tell what happened on the haze, but with a head of
steam and a heavy load, they haul up a little incline
and keep going.
The watchers split up. It is noon, and a break is in order.
The other patrol on the highway can survey the valley
alone. It seems calm.
Later, the hazing crew steps into the sunlight from the
dim interior of the Gardiner Cafe, and is flagged down
with questions from someone going in for lunch.
"Say, did you get those 11 bulls out of Reese Creek?"
"No," says a horseman. "They went up pretty
far."
"How about that one bull?"
"Uh, Eric should tell you about him."
And there is Morey, matter-of-factly: "We had to
put him down. Our orders changed and we were told to put
him down today."
And the day heats up to a shocking 60 degrees of brilliant
blue sky and about 200 bison decide north is the place
to be and head laconically toward trouble.
On Tuesday, the hazers would go back and push almost every
buffalo in the valley clear back to the Roosevelt Arch.
And Mease would be there filming them all the while.
The death of the bull make filming the big haze seem all
the more urgent, and Mease moves with anxious speed to
change locations for his film. And a young Buffalo Field
Campaign member filling in for Nell throws curses into
the wind as the bison run ahead of the horsemen.
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