By Virginia Ravndal
Guest Columnist
Indian Country Today
Sept. 21-28
(Editor's note Virginia Ravndal is a Wildlife Ecologist who studied buffalo in South Dakota and has been active in seeking a solution to avoid killing or confining Yellowstone buffalo to manage disease)
Beginning next year, after thousands of years of roaming free, wild buffalo will roam no more, at least not in the country which informally adopted this animal as its symbol of strength and wild spirit. Not if the government gets its way. The recently released $50 million federal plan to manage the nation's largest and longest free-roaming herd of Amercan Bison is bad news for the icon of the West. It involves capturing, confining, killing, quarantining, and trucking to slaughterhouses some of the last wild buffalo.
This is not the first time a government plan has spelled disaster for buffalo. Little more than 100 years ago, the government implemented a policy to exterminate buffalo so as to subjugate Indian people. It may have seemed impossible to get rid of an estimated 60 million buffalo, but once the killing was over, only about 50 wild buffalo remained, mostly in what is now Yellowstone Park. The present day Yellowstone herd is descended from the few survivors of the slaughter of last century.
The killing did not end back then. One-third of Yellowstone's buffalo herd was killed not last century, but last year (1996/97). The "interim" plan which called for the slaughter is still on the books today. And, the recently released proposed long-term plan looks just as bad.
Why has the government proposed killing wildlife we worked diligently to bring back from the brink of extinction? A few powerful cattlemen might best answer that question. They claim to be concerned that buffalo will transmit a disease, brucellosis, to their cattle. ( A disease, incidentally, which buffalo originally contracted from cattle.) But their real concern appears to be quite different from their stated concern.
How much of a threat is this disease? Yellowstone buffalo have lived unaffected by the disease for 80 years, and have never given it to a single cow. Cattle have co-mingled with infected buffalo inside bordering Grand Teton National Park for 50 years, with no attempts to separate the two (until recently), and without ever contracting the disease.
Dr. Paul Nicoletti, a leading expert on brucellosis, says the risk that Yellowstone buffalo will give the disease to cattle "is as close to risk-free as you can get". A vaccine for cattle exists, yet Montana does not advocate mandatory vaccination.
The far more numerous elk in and around Yellowstone also have the disease and, unlike buffalo, elk have transmitted the disease to livestock, yet, the livestock industry has never suggested that government employees shoot elk that leave the Park. (elk hunting is a multi-million dollar industry in Montana).
The real reason federal taxpayers are paying Montana's livestock industry to kill and confine buffalo is fewer than 1,000 cows, owned by nine ranchers, can continue to graze, with hefty subsidies, on some of the country's most pristine public land (much of which was purchased by the federal government specifically for wildlife).
Yellowstone buffalo are being killed in Montana because they are perceived as a threat by ranchers who insist that the West belongs to cattle, and cattle alone. There is no place for buffalo except within the confines of a few parks.
There are much more reasonable and cost-effective approaches to resolve the buffalo/brucellosis dilemma, such as Plan "B", a plan developed by wildlife professionals with input from hightly qualified veterinarians. But, pacifying a powerful special interest group that considers buffalo (not the disease some of them carry) a threat, appears to be the real goal of the government plan.
Wild buffalo and the more recent inhabitants of the West, cattle, can co-exist in the West; that is unless the cattle industry continues to force the choice between one or the other. In that case, we will be forced to choose between adding to the 1.3 billion cattle on the planet or, setting aside a small fraction of the land for the few wild buffalo left in the world.
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For more information about Plan B, check out http//www.wildrockies.org/planb/
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