Our Tax Dollars at Work
Posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010
In recent weeks wildlife managers from the state of Montana and National Park Service have engaged in their spring ritual of hazing bison back into Yellowstone.
Of all the contentious public land issues in the Rocky Mountain West, none is more maddening than the harassment and slaughter of bison in the world’s first national park. These animals are being forced to leave public land, in many cases, to make room for cattle that won’t even arrive to graze for another month, if at all. Livestock officials fear the bison could transmit the disease brucellosis to cattle, even though there has never been a documented case of such a transmission in the wild.
Buffalo Field Campaign, a group of rugged and passionate activists based in West Yellowstone, Mont., has been fighting to end this practice since the winter of 1996-97, when the Park Service and Montana Department of Livestock killed more than 1,000 bison and decimated America’s last free-roaming herd.
BFC volunteers have worked tirelessly to keep the hazing and slaughter in the public eye. This latest video shows our public servants at work with a helicopter inside the park.
A few bewildering facts to consider, with state and federal governments strapped for funding:
• During the winter of 2007-08, half the bison population of Yellowstone died, and the National Park Service was responsible for killing more than 1,600 animals.
• The bison were killed for migrating out of the park onto public land in Montana, and testing positive for a disease, brucellosis, that’s exceedingly rare to transmit to cattle.
• We paid for this slaughter with millions of our tax dollars.
• Bison would not leave Yellowstone so easily if the Park Service did not provide groomed roads/snowmobile trails for the animals to walk on.
• Brucellosis is a disease originally introduced to wildlife from domestic livestock.
• Despite these extreme measures, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming have had outbreaks of brucellosis in recent years — transmitted by elk, which are far more numerous than bison and often commingle freely with cattle.
Visit Buffalo Field Campaign’s Web site to learn how you can help stop the madness.
(Thanks to Tony B. for posting the video.)
I am priority number 587 on the hunt list this year