Winter, Politics Take Toll On Bison Fear Of Brucellosis Spreading Beyond Park Stirs Debate

As spring unfolds across Yellowstone National Park, biologists calculate that less than half of the park’s bison survived the herd’s worst winter since 1902, the year that Congress ordered Yellowstone to rescue bison from extinction.

With ice like concrete covering winter forage, about 850 of the shaggy giants starved or froze to death in the park. An additional 1,080 lumbered out of the park, to be shot by Montana officials worried that the bison could spread disease to cattle.

“Got to kill the buffalo for the holy cow,” chanted members of the Bison Action Group at a recent protest in Bozeman. “Got to shoot the buffalo, pow, pow, pow.”

Emotions over the shootings have run high, often trampling the facts as thoroughly as bison stampeding across the plains. Ranchers and the federal Agriculture Department want to make sure cattle in states on Yellowstone’s border are not contaminated. American Indians and environmentalists say there are alternatives to shooting the bison. And many rural Westerners criticize the Interior Department’s herd and range manangement.

This tourist village at the park’s northern entrance has become the epicenter of the bison battles. One morning in March, as 150 American Indians and their white allies gathered in “a circle of life” to pray for the bison, gunfire could be heard from a mile away as Montana officials shot 14 bison approaching grazing cattle.

Two weeks later, a woman burst into a public meeting in Gardiner and tried to dump a 5-gallon bucket of rotting bison innards on a panel of public officials, including Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, the state’s two senators, Conrad Burns and Max Baucus, and the governor, Marc Racicot.

Park rangers have placed black mourning tape over the bison image on their gold badges. Some environmentalists have called for a summer tourism boycott. And a billboard in Billings reads, “Grown in Yellowstone, slaughtered in Montana.”

By contrast, Burns, a Republican, drew wild applause at a recent meeting of the Montana Farm Forum when he referred to Michael Finley, the park superintendent, as “this jughead we’ve got running Yellowstone Park.” Burns represents a state where agriculture is the No. 1 industry and cows outnumber people 3 to 1.

Finley works for the Interior Department, an agency that features the bison in its seal. Every year, Yellowstone is visited by about 3 million people, many of them attracted by the chance to see bison grazing by roadways. The park has received thousands of letters and telephone calls in recent months from people concerned about the fate of the bison.

Two factors have brought about the current situation: overpopulation of bison in the park, and the park’s status as the last major reservoir in the United States of brucellosis, a disease that crops up in humans as undulant fever.

While some environmentalists portray Yellowstone’s herd as the last wild bison herd in the United States, it is in reality the nation’s only unmanaged herd. Hunting keeps in check the nation’s two other wild - or unfenced - bison herds, one in Alaska and one in Utah.