Rangers Kill 13 Bison Outside Yellowstone Blackfeet Indians Immediately Begin Fielddressing Carcasses

Game wardens and park rangers killed 13 bison just a few yards from Yellowstone National Park on Tuesday, while Blackfeet Indians waited nearby to claim the carcasses.

A herd of about 50 animals had spent the night a few hundred yards outside the park, despite having been chased back inside the park two or three times.

But when the bison tried to return to Yellowstone Tuesday morning, park rangers and game wardens worked hard in sub-zero temperatures to keep them outside the park long enough to shoot 13 of them.

There are about 4,300 bison in Yellowstone this winter, and many of them migrate to lower valley pastures near the park, seeking winter forage.

That alarms ranchers because many of the bison have been exposed or infected with the disease brucellosis. The cattle industry fears the wandering bison could spread the disease to Montana cattle herds, which are now brucellosis-free.

Under an interim management plan, bison can be killed by park rangers and Montana game wardens if they leave the park.

In addition to the herd culled Tuesday, at least 200 other bison were visible from the road between the park boundary and park headquarters at Mammoth Hot Springs.

Wardens and rangers have killed about 60 bison this year, including 25 shot in the Gardiner area since Christmas. Most of those killed have been on private land near West Yellowstone, where about 200 bison are outside the park boundaries.

Blackfeet Indians, who had driven about 350 miles from their reservation in northwest Montana, immediately set to work field-dressing the bison.

Leader George Kipp said his group was composed of traditionalists who will divide the carcasses and hides among themselves for distribution on the reservation.

“We brought some young guys with us,” Kipp said, skinning knife in his hand. After the animals died, the boys “ran up and touched a buffalo,” Kipp said. “That’s something they’ll remember and tell stories about.”

Kipp said the Blackfeet have not hunted wild bison since 1880, when six animals were found in the Sweetgrass Hills.

People who don’t want anybody to shoot bison are ignoring the plight of both people and animals, Kipp said.

“The buffalo are in pretty pitiful shape,” he said, noting the almost total absence of feed on exposed ground in the area. Critics “are not thinking of the suffering of the buffalo, the people that could use the meat.”“It’s only the last hundred years it got all screwed up,” he said.