Tribes Plan Quarantine For Bison Yellowstone Bison ‘Seed Stock’ To Re-Establish Historic Herds

The Fort Belknap Indian Reservation could provide a quarantine facility for up to 300 brucellosis-free buffalo from Yellowstone National Park, the tribe’s fish and wildlife director says.

Mike Fox plans to ask the tribal council next week to draft a resolution declaring the reservation’s willingness to accept bison that test negative for the disease.

Fox was recently elected president of the Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative, a coalition of 40 tribes based in South Dakota. The cooperative has joined the National Wildlife Federation in asking state and federal officials to let park bison be used as seed stock to re-establish free-roaming herds in the West.

More than 730 buffalo have been shot or trapped for shipment to slaughter this winter to keep them from coming in contact with domestic cattle in Montana. Many of the bison are believed to carry brucellosis, which causes cattle to abort and can be transmitted to humans as undulant fever.

Fox will propose a quarantine facility of 4,000 acres on the Fort Belknap reservation, surrounded by an electrical fence, an 8-foot-high wire mesh fence outside that and a barbed wire fence enclosing them both.

He said some private land is in the area, but most of the facility would be surrounded by tribal land.

“It’s totally do-able,” Fox said.

He estimated the cost of the facility and the monthly testing of bison during the quarantine period could exceed $1 million.

Fort Belknap includes the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes. They have maintained a herd of 250 buffalo on 10,000 fenced acres since 1974. Fox said the entire herd tested negative for brucellosis in 1978, and since then 80 animals that have died or been sent to slaughter have tested negative.

Park officials have endorsed a quarantine of bison, but state Livestock Department Director Larry Petersen has said no bison from an infected herd should be quarantined in Montana.

The federal Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has threatened to revoke Montana’s brucellosis-free status for cattle if park bison are allowed to roam in the state.

However, pressure has been mounting for the state and federal officials to find some way to stop slaughtering buffalo by the hundreds every winter as they move out of Yellowstone in search of food.