Judge protects free-roaming bison near Yellowstone

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Wild bison wandering out of Yellowstone National Park onto nearby Horse Butte in search of food get a free pass until May 15 of each year -- cattle ranchers can’t demand that they be hazed back into the park or slaughtered, a judge in Montana has ruled.

The decision leaves in place an adaptive management plan designed to allow the buffalo, often stressed by the rough, frigid winters up higher in the park, to forage in early spring in an area near West Yellowstone that has become a favorite calving ground.

Homeowners on Horse Butte, joined by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, have sought to allow the Yellowstone bison to expand their range onto the Butte, where they often graze harmlessly in back yards and where there are no domestic cattle to potentially contract the disease brucellosis from infected Yellowstone bison.

The Montana Stockgrowers Assn. has filed suit seeking to require state officials to drive the bison back into the park. Though the Butte currently has no cattle, bison are sometimes able to wade across to adjacent pastures that are stocked with cattle after mid-June, and scavengers can carry brucellosis-infected material into cattle pastures, ranchers in the area argue.

‘This is one of the few times that the ranchers of Montana have ever been turned back when it comes to management of bison,’ said Tim Preso, who argued the bison defenders’ case for Earthjustice in Bozeman, Mont.

Gallatin County District Judge John C. Brown’s decision does not dismiss the heart of the ranchers’ case, which will be heard later, but it does leave intact for the moment the new strategy that allows bison to graze a few miles outside the park on Horse Butte until May 15 -- a crucial period when bison, weakened after the winter and beginning to give birth to their young -- often can’t find forage inside the still-snow-covered park. Ranchers fear that allowing bison outside the park threatens the state with a disease that could have devastating economic consequences. Many fear opening the door to what they predict will be a continually expanding door to wild bison ranging ever-farther outside the park.

‘We’re obviously disappointed in the preliminary outcome,’ said Errol Rice, executive vice president of the stockgrowers association. He said ranchers still hope to prevail on their claim that changes to the Interagency Bison Management Plan should have been more fully scrutinized under Montana environmental laws.

But the management plan is ‘only one piece of this very complex brucellosis puzzle,’ Rice said, ‘and we’re going to continue to work toward finding a solution.’

Ranchers also hope for an easing in regulations that require cattle owners to slaughter their entire herds when even a single case of brucellosis, which causes pregnant cows to abort, is confirmed. Likewise, they are pushing for a change that would not require the entire state to lose its ‘brucellosis free’ status when a herd in only one part of the state is infected.

Conservation groups say the emerging science shows there is little real threat from bison to cattle near Horse Butte. Not only has there never been a reported case of transmission of brucellosis from bison to cattle in the wild, there are new studies showing that the bacteria is so short-lived that none of it would likely be present in the field after mid-June.

Keith Aune, senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, who did the persistence studies, said his findings are important not only for bison and cattle, but for all the other species that have historically lived on the American prairies.

The shallow wallowing trenches and uneven grazing patterns of bison were important sculptors of the landscape of the prairies when 30 million bison once roamed them. Their absence may have threatened a number of prairie species, Aune said at a recent briefing in Montana sponsored by the NRDC.

‘If we can’t recover things like prairie dogs and burrowing owls and black-footed ferrets, it might be because we don’t have this other species sculpting the land. Prairie birds are in the steepest decline of all other birds, partly because the species that sculpted the land is gone. And cattle can’t replace that,’ Aune said.

Matthew Skoglund, wildlife advocate for the NRDC, said the adaptive management plan is part of a bigger aim to free up land outside the park to establish once again free-roaming herds of wild bison unconfined by fences.

‘You’re cleansing the landscape of wild buffalo, and artificially suppressing their natural movement out of the park. That to me is a huge issue,’ Skoglund said. ‘They’re the only continuously wild buffalo population that exists in America.’

--Kim Murphy