A Slaughter in Yellowstone

I happened to be checking over at Crooks & Liars & read a reposted (from CNN) article about the slaughtering of bison in and around Yellowstone National Park.  Why did this peak my interest?  Well the first reason is the obvious, the second is that I learned about this practice of shooting bison when I lived in Montana 15+ years ago.

Follow below the fold for some history...

My husband & I lived in Montana some years ago as I mentioned in a beautiful small town nestled next to the Bitterroot Mountains near the Idaho border. It coincidentally was about 50 miles south of Missoula where my husband graduated from the University of Montana.  In our time there, I met several of his old friends from college, colorful characters all, who were still making their homes in Missoula.  

One in particular caught my attention because for all intents & purposes, he could have been a child of the sixties in both appearance and manner.  He seemed, like my hippie friends in the sixties, to be fairly unconcerned about his manner of dress in that he could care less what 'people' thought but also like me & my friends, committed to a cause.  His cause at the time that I met him was a practice outside of Yellowstone whereby any bison that wandered out of the park were being shot by ranchers or anyone really who was in the vicinity and the deaths were growing.  He was alarmed & devoted himself to saving these magnificent creatures.

Why were they being killed?  The conventional, and as yet unproven, reason for the slaughter was that the bison would pass brucellosis onto the cattle that are grazed both on public & private lands adjacent to the park.  To date, and as far as I know, no case of brucellosis from Yellowstone bison to adjacent cattle has ever been documented but the killing has persisted since I met Mike Mease in the early 90's.  

The last we spoke, he had taken the drastic step of moving to and camping in/around Yellowstone for each winter when bison are apt to step over the line outside the park to forage.  Mike has made it his life's work, in affect, to save the bison & to video document every instance of capture & kill that he can.

Here's a snip of the article from CNN:  http://www.crooksandliars.com/...

April 29th, 2008
Oh, Give Me A Home, Where The Buffalo Roam...Die
By: Nicole Belle @ 6:00 PM - PDT  

CNN:

   More than half of Yellowstone National Park’s bison herd has died since last fall, forcing the government to suspend its annual slaughter program.

 snip

More than 700 of the iconic animals starved or otherwise died on the mountainsides during an unusually harsh winter, and more than 1,600 were shot by hunters or sent to slaughterhouses in a disease-control effort, according to National Park Service figures.

As a result, the park estimates its bison herd has dropped from 4,700 in November to about 2,300 today, prompting the government to halt the culling program early.

"There has never been a slaughter like this of the bison since the 1800s in this country, and it’s disgusting," said Mike Mease of the Buffalo Field Campaign, a group seeking to stop the slaughter program for good.

snip

The USDA acknowledges that bison-to-cattle transmission is difficult to document, but it says investigations indicate that bison were the likely source of infections in cattle herds in Wyoming and North Dakota.

I realize that this is a political season & we all are giving until it hurts, but after seeing this article and seeing that Mike is still as committed in 2008 as he was when I first met him, if anyone can send even a few bucks or a word of encouragement to the Buffalo Field Campaign, it would go a long way.  Please check out the site if you have a minute if just to show your appreciation for the commitment Mike and all his compadres (including many Native Americans) have made to their cause.

Here's the website:

http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org/

On April 15 Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota Nation held a Releasing of the Spirits Ceremony for the thousands of wild buffalo killed in recent years in and around Yellowstone National Park.
The prayer was held north of Gardiner, near the site of the Park's Stephen's Creek bison trap.