Wildlife agents for Montana chased 259 bison back into Yellowstone National Park and sent eight to slaughter in an ongoing campaign against a livestock disease carried by the animals.

The state Department of Livestock said 13 other bison captured in a pen were tested for brucellosis, found not to have been exposed to the disease, and released. Three calves were sent to a quarantine yard as part of an experiment.

This week’s slaughter and quarantine brought a protest from Buffalo Field Campaign, a group of activists that objects to interrupting bison movements to protect livestock. The activists live in West Yellowstone, Mont., and monitor the west boundary of the world’s first national park, where the bison most often leave Yellowstone.

In a statement, the campaign denounced the slaughter and also the quarantine experiment.
"While the state touts quarantine as an alternative to slaughter, it is merely an attempt to domesticate and imprison the Yellowstone herd," said Dan Brister of the campaign.

This season, 1,053 bison have been moved back into Yellowstone after they entered Montana from the park’s west boundary, the livestock department said. Twenty-two bison have been slaughtered and donated to Native American tribes.

The operations carried out near Yellowstone involve five state and federal agencies: the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Montana Department of Livestock, and Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks. An agreement forged among them seeks to keep the park herd separated from livestock to prevent transmission of the disease.

Buffalo Field Campaign has criticized the operations, saying bison should be free to roam on public lands outside Yellowstone, just like elk, which also carry the disease. They say fears of brucellosis are overblown and that slaughtering bison is not the appropriate reaction given limited cattle grazing in the area.

"The DOL purposefully misrepresents the wild buffalo in Yellowstone as diseased animals even in the face of overwhelming evidence that most of the buffalo are not infected with brucellosis and the risk of transmission is extremely low," Josh Osher of the campaign said in a statement. "This is nothing more than a policy of deception to mask a centuries-old range war."

Stockmen see the issue differently. In Wyoming within the last year, four cattle herds, including two in Jackson Hole, have been infected with brucellosis, leading to their condemnation by the federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Most of the cattle were slaughtered and their owners paid market price.

Elk were suspected as the source of infection in those cases.

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