| Yellowstone Bison Slaughter
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| News
Article 3/27/04 |
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| Management
saps wildness from Yellowstone's Bison
Billings Gazette Op Ed
by GREG GORDON
March 27, 2004 |
All
winter we watched them move and shook our heads. It was
the
earliest anyone had seen the bison heading north. By January,
the
football field in Gardiner was covered in buffalo chips.
Normally
this doesn't happen until March.
"I just hope this isn't a repeat of last year,"
one of my coworkers
in Yellowstone National Park said.
Throughout January and into February, park rangers on
horseback
herded small groups of bison back to the snow-covered
range the
animals were abandoning. By Feb. 24, the order came through:
the
hazing was over, and the United States' oldest free-roaming
herd of
bison was to be rounded up.
As feared, in just the first two weeks of operations,
Yellowstone
National Park rounded up twice the number of bison as
last year to
total thus far 464.
Agitated captive
Fifty-six of Yellowstone's bison are herded into the corrals,
then
separated into holding pens for testing. The pens, about
30 by 80
feet are lined with plywood and the bison can't see out.
This is the
first time any of them have been in captivity and their
agitation is
apparent. One yearling cow can't handle the confinement
and begins to
panic. She pants, her long black tongue hanging out, and
runs back
and forth along the edge of the pen. This in turn disturbs
the
others. As she passes, the adults lower their heads and
slam into
her. Their horns rip gaping wounds in her hide. She will
likely
survive the ordeal, but something in her will have died.
This year is different. It isn't just the numbers; a new
policy is
also being implemented. Bison that test positive for brucellosis
(a
disease that causes cattle to abort their calves) are
sent to
slaughter, while those that test negative are vaccinated
and then
held in the capture facility until spring when they will
be released.
Vaccination ethics
The testing and vaccinating of wild animals raises some
ethical as
well as practical issues. Once penned, the bison are prodded
into
metal chutes where they undergo a series of tests. One
of these is a
serology card test which screens for the presence of brucellosis
antibodies. While this test ascertains whether the animal
has been
exposed to the disease, it does not necessarily determine
if the
animal is indeed infected and can potentially pass it
on to cattle.
In fact, a culture tissue test (which was discontinued
three years
ago), revealed that only 20 percent of the animals that
tested
positive for the antibodies actually carried the disease.
Animals that test negative are now being vaccinated with
the eventual
goal of immunizing all of Yellowstone's bison. The result
of this
policy is that the National Park Service is eliminating
animals that
are resistant to the disease (i.e. those that have been
exposed and
remain healthy), on one hand and vaccinating the rest
in hopes of
reducing the risk of transmission to cattle. Incidentally,
cattle
have never gotten brucellosis from wild bison.
Wildlife are just that - wild. In wildness we find plants
that harbor
miraculous medicines; we find mosquitoes resistant to
DDT; we find
evolution, adaptation and a heterozygous gene pool that
can readily
adapt to changing environmental conditions. Yellowstone's
bison
population shows no ill effects from brucellosis, since
getting it
from cattle, ironically. They have adapted and proved
resilient. The
presence of antibodies confirms this.
The vaccination of wildlife seems like a quick fix, yet
we have
little regard for the long-term implications. At what
point will we
be vaccinating elk since they actually have transmitted
brucellosis
to cattle? Should we dust deer herds with insecticide
to prevent deer
ticks and the spread of Lyme disease?
Is the imprisonment and vaccination of wildlife any different
from
logging in roadless areas?
With each incursion into wildlands and each step toward
domestication
of wildlife, we reduce our humanity and our own wildness.
Even the
term "wildlife management" belies our hubris.
Wild animals are the
most visible vestige of a world outside our control and
manipulation.
With our landscapes subdivided, our neighborhoods strip-malled
and
our wilderness threatened, can we really afford to domesticate
the
very essence of wild nature: those stubborn, shaggy and
insouciant
bison?
Greg Gordon is a writer, biologist and college instructor
living in
Gardiner.
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