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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
When bison wander from Yellowstone National Park, they fall prey to Montana gunmen -- unless they're rescued by a motley band of eco-warriors.
Mar 28, 2002 | They had driven two days and nights from Bloomington, Ind. They had studs in their tongues and rings in their noses, and after they trudged out into the woods to get a feel for the territory, they carved the letter A -- for anarchist -- in a circle, in a snowbank. They had come to Montana on a singular quest: to let the buffalo roam.
Now they stood, Emily and Tim and Piper and Lindsey, like hobbits at the gates of Mordor, on a snowy Forest Service access road across frozen Duck Creek from the bison trap on old man Koelzer's farm. Shivering in the 20-below-zero cold, clad in Salvation Army pea coats and plaid pants and Doc Martens, the youthful quartet were briefed on how to fight the power, which, in this case, meant getting ready to sit. To sit, to watch, and to videotape.
Over the past five years, more than 1,000 volunteers have come to an unheated backcountry cabin north of West Yellowstone to participate in a remarkable campaign of environmental activism. They have come to the coldest spot in the lower 48 states from places as far-flung as New Zealand and Israel and Germany to witness, and at times obstruct, the Montana Department of Livestock in its roundup and slaughter of buffalo that wander out of Yellowstone National Park.
There are reasons for the roundup. About 40 percent of the bison in Yellowstone carry antibodies to brucellosis, a bacterial disease that weakens cattle and sometimes causes them to have spontaneous abortions. In the 68th year of a brucellosis eradication campaign, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is on the verge of eliminating the disease from cows and other domesticated animals. But the bacteria live on in the wild, particularly in Yellowstone. European beef cattle originally spread the disease to elk and bison. Now, these animals threaten to return the microbial favor.
During the summer, about 2,000 head of cattle graze on the private and Forest Service lands around Yellowstone where buffalo like to wander. Morbidly afraid that their cows will be contaminated by the bison, the state Department of Livestock is spending $1.4 million this year to haze wandering buffalo back into the park, using trucks, snowmobiles, helicopters and firecrackers. When hazing fails, the livestock agents capture the buffalo and test them for brucellosis -- those with positive serology are slaughtered, their meat donated to Indians in Bozeman.
Protests against the roundup began in earnest following the bitterly cold winter of 1996-97. Montana slaughtered 1,083 bison that had migrated from the Yellowstone plateau onto less snowy lands outside the park. Another 800 -- out of a total herd of perhaps 3,500 -- died of starvation.
Mike Mease, a self-described "undercover journalist" who had produced CopWatch-like documentaries for Indian tribes and environmental activists, was so incensed by the slaughter that he and Rosalie Little Thunder, a Dakota activist, set up the Buffalo Field Campaign to try to stop it. The following year, Mease and his volunteers started filming every step of the operation.
"I learned a quick lesson: I could be out there with a video camera and they would not kill the herd," says Mease, 40, who is your basic blue-eyed, shaggy-haired, Christ-lookalike Army brat. "They didn't want it documented. Because this had been a pretty swept-under-the-rug operation."
Mease argues that the eradication campaign is pointless. Brucellosis is essentially a form of ungulate venereal disease, spread through the reproductive tract or aborted fetuses. There haven't been any confirmed cases of bison-to-cattle transmission, he says. And the antibody tests performed on the bison, he argues, result in false positives and unnecessary killing.
But scientists dispute Mease's analysis of the brucellosis threat, even if they don't necessarily support the slaughter.
"Our work has shown that the bison are truly infected and we've shown that the organism is the same one that can infect cattle," says Thomas J. Roffe, the wildlife veterinarian in charge of the U.S. Geological Survey's brucellosis research program, based in Bozeman. "Of course, until you see a cow walk up to a bison abortion, lick it and then abort herself, you're never going to have proof that it occurs."
