YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK- Bison mill around dusty pens with numbered white tags stuck to their wooly backs; a slash of pink marks the rump of one, who has lost her hide, exposing a wound.

Many calmly await their fate. But some kick up dust, butt heads and cause a clatter as bodies slam against metal and wood.

In video footage from earlier this winter at the Stephen's Creek Capture Facility inside Yellowstone, a bison tagged No. 18 runs around an enclosure to escape another female, who hooks her with a horn and drives her against the wall. No. 18 escapes, runs across the pen and stops with her tongue out, panting. She is soon chased again. There is a football-sized hole in her hide, exposing blotchy red flesh.

George Nell, a Gardiner, Mont., resident who works with the Buffalo Field Campaign to document the operations that the activist group opposes, expressed his disgust last week at the ongoing capture and slaughter.

"This, you consider humane?" he asked. Nell and others have taken the fight to Congress where a bill has been introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to temporarily halt the slaughter.

Bison are held at Stephens Creek inside the world's first national park because Montana does not allow bison past the park's northern border where 180 cattle graze on private land. Bison carry the disease brucellosis, which could be passed to cattle ú though such a transmission has never been documented in the wild.

Other video clips of Stephens Creek, some recorded by the National Park Service, show bison with bloody horns, with bloodshot eyes, slobbering and kicking up a storm as handlers clamp their heads into metal chutes designed for cattle.

Nell would rather see bison shot than held in unnaturally close quarters where they can hurt each other, he said.

"Would you rather see that buffalo go down in a minute or suffer for four days?" he asked. "Let's put them down quick if we have to."

Yellowstone park officials defend the operation, saying they have altered procedures to minimize harm to bison and will continue to make adjustments as problems arise. The Park Service is obligated to carry out the slaughter as part of a bison management plan signed in 2000.

Though critics contend the plan inhumanely treats like livestock what is a national treasure, Yellowstone wildlife biologist Rick Wallen said the population is better off though some individuals may suffer.

"As difficult as it seems for the American public, what Yellowstone park is doing, we've set in place a management plan that's going to preserve a population of bison," Wallen said Tuesday.
The plan gives bison room to roam outside Yellowstone in a few designated spots. Just across the Yellowstone River from Stephens Creek is a safe zone where bison wander freely onto national forest.

As many as 200 bison were counted in the safe zone this winter, Wallen said. As recently as the 1980s, any bison stepping outside the park would be shot.

The current bison plan is a compromise that expands tolerance outside the park but requires more hands-on management inside the park, Wallen said.

But critics see the plan as a waste of taxpayer dollars and an abuse of bison, which they say ought to be allowed to roam anywhere in national forests, just like elk, pronghorn, black bears and cougars. Some elk also carry the disease brucellosis.

Under the plan, Yellowstone spends $1.2 million annually for bison management and related research. Combined with other agencies, the plan is expected to cost more than $3 million this year, according to the Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Association, a coalition of 15 groups.
That Yellowstone has bison to fight over at all is a testament to park efforts to preserve the American icon, Wallen said.

More than 30 million bison once roamed the United States, according to conservative estimates. But by 1901, they had been hunted nearly to extinction with only 25 remaining in Yellowstone. Those bison were rounded up and another 24 brought into the park to start a breeding program to restore the herd. Today, more than 4,000 bison inhabit Yellowstone.
DNA testing has shown that Yellowstone's bison herd is one of the nation's most pure and genetically-diverse herds compared to other federally managed herds, many of which carry cattle genes. How exactly Yellowstone's herd ought to be managed, however, is a decades-old fight.

Bison summer primarily in the park's interior. But once snows descend, depriving bison of food, they wander beyond park boundaries, leading to conflicts with ranchers.

Montana livestock officials worry that the bison will mingle with cattle and put the state's brucellosis-free status at risk. Some bison carry the bacteria, Brucella abortus, which causes bison, cattle and elk to abort their first pregnancies.

State and federal governments have spent billions trying to eradicate brucellosis from livestock. Brucellosis can cause undulant fever in humans, but is not a problem if meat is properly cooked and milk, pasteurized.

Nonetheless, the disease is taboo among stockmen, and other states can impose costly testing requirements and restrict cattle exports if Montana were to lose its brucellosis-free status. Wyoming just suffered such a fate after two cattle herds were infected by elk.

The bison management plan calls for trying to protect Montana's status while allowing for wild, free-roaming bison. Critics say the brucellosis risks are overblown because only 450 cattle graze in the areas where bison might roam along the park's northern and western boundaries.
"We're approaching this whole thing inside out," said Will Patric, of the Greater Yellowstone Wildlife Association. "We're spending $3.1 million a year to protect 450 cows from brucellosis."
Instead of intensively managing bison, Montana should intensively manage cattle, he said. The millions now being spent on bison could pay for improving vaccines for cows, fencing pastures, phasing out grazing or changing cattle operations.

This point fires up Glenn Hockett of the Gallatin Wildlife Association, which represents hunters.
"You have a Serengeti, and we're trying to raise a few cattle," he said, suggesting marketing free-roaming bison as a tourist draw in Montana.

Last week, Hockett and Patric drove north past the Stephens Creek pens, past the park boundary and then across a narrow strip of national forest. From there, they crossed onto the Royal Teton Ranch, which is owned by the Church Universal and Triumphant. On the northern end of the ranch, several miles north of the park, roughly 180 cows were grazing in a ranch pasture.

The herd of cows and calves is a risky operation to run near bison that may be carrying brucellosis, Hockett said. He questioned why the church did not switch to raising yearlings, which could be brought onto the ranch in summer (when the bison are gone), fattened up and then sold. Hockett approached the church with this suggestion but got little response, he said.
Church officials did not return a phone call Tuesday seeking comment.

Even Wallen said park officials had hoped grazing would end on the ranch once it stopped leasing its land for grazing in 2002. But after the lease expired, the church brought on its own cattle.
Conservationists are particularly critical of the church's grazing because the church received $13 million from federal taxpayers for land exchanges and a conservation easement promoted as a way to protect wildlife. In a news release touting the land deal in 1999, church leaders said they considered the land "sacred ground" and wanted to protect "the integrity of this place."

The controversial bison management plan calls for eventually allowing up to 100 untested bison to roam north of the park's border. But no bison may cross that line as long as cattle remain on the church's land, Wallen said.

That angers Mike Mease, a long-haired Buffalo Field Campaign volunteer, who first began documenting the slaughter in 1996-97 when more than 1,000 bison were killed.

"Why does the burden always have to come on the wildlife for this subsidized industry that is the cattleman," he said. Mease and other volunteers have spent the past six weeks in Gardiner documenting hazing, capture and slaughter operations in Yellowstone.

The Buffalo Field Campaign is pushing for passage of the Yellowstone Buffalo Preservation Act, a bill introduced by Reps. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Charles Bass, R-N.H.

The bill would place a three-year moratorium on hazing, capture and killing of buffalo around Yellowstone by both federal and state agencies. In addition, the bill calls for tearing down the Stephens Creek capture facility, which is inside Yellowstone's north boundary. If a capture facility is needed, it should be moved further north outside the park, Hinchey has said.
Mease has sent his video of Stephens Creek to Washington, D.C., to win support for the bill, which now has 80 co-sponsors, he said.

At the Stephens Creek pens on Thursday, Patric surveys the remaining 42 bison ú the last of 464 bison rounded up from inside Yellowstone this winter. Of those, 264 were consigned to slaughter.

Patric asks whether the bison have water. The answer is no.
Though bison get water from springs at the capture facility, those sorted for slaughter are in a processing area where water is not available and where bison typically stay for less than 24 hours, Wallen said.

"I'm surprised about the water," Patric said, looking down at the animals from a boardwalk above the pens.

These bison may not carry brucellosis. They were not tested.

Yellowstone is holding 198 bison that tested negative for the disease in a fenced pasture where they are being fed hay. Those bison will be released in the spring once grass greens up in the park.

"We chose to capture and protect as many disease-free animals as possible," Wallen said.
But that pasture is full. So 50 bison, which could not be held or released, were consigned to slaughter without testing. Eight of those bison were sent Thursday morning. One bison died of trauma including a broken rib while in the pen awaiting shipment, Wallen said. Park staff has reduced such problems by sorting and separating bison by age and sex and giving them more room, he said.

At dawn on Friday morning, park rangers and livestock agents tightly pack the remaining bison into three horse trailers. Nell, Mease and two other Buffalo Field Campaign volunteers document the procession ú a park ranger, a county sheriff's deputy, state highway patrol, the horse trailers and state livestock agents. The trailers and security patrol cross the Yellowstone River at Corwin Springs and drive right past the headquarters for the Royal Teton Ranch.
The procession also passed through the Devil's Slide Wildlife Viewing Area where a rocky buttress looms over the Royal Teton Ranch's conservation easement, which encompasses prime wildlife winter range.

At a highway pullout overlooking Devil's Slide, a geologic feature that resembles a slab of bacon draped across the buttress, glossy signs describe the importance of this wildlife migration corridor. The sign describes the land as a "wildlife highway" and "Winter Range Bed & Breakfast" where animals seek food and shelter in winter.

The sign depicts mule deer, pronghorn, coyotes, trout, mink, eagles, elk and bighorn. The text proclaims: "Wildlife knows no boundaries."
Bison are not part of the picture.

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