Buffalo Field Campaign Weekly Updates from the Field 2006/2007

Recently inaugurated Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer should be forgiven if he is a bit overambitious. New governors, after all, should be full of ideas for making things better.
But he may be a bit starry-eyed if he thinks he is going eradicate brucellosis from Yellowstone National Park bison. If it were as simple as that, after all, the park would have been sterilized of the disease a long time ago.
Brucellosis can cause domestic livestock to abort their calves. Though there has not been a case of bison transmitting the disease to cattle in the wild, the presence of the disease in park bison has led to very little tolerance for bison that roam outside the park and into Montana.

Schweitzer has proposed a plan that would involve capturing all of the park's 4,000 or so bison and testing them for the disease. Those that test negative would be confined for return to the park later -- presumably after it could be demonstrated there were no brucellosis-infected bison left. He acknowledges that would involve eliminating all free-roaming bison from the park for a while.

Selling the National Park Service on such an idea will be tough enough, but the political fallout from the virtual elimination of free-roaming bison from the park -- even temporarily -- would be withering.

And even if -- somehow -- the plan could be implemented and it worked, the disease-free herd that would be returned to the park would be likely to be reinfected by brucellosis-infected elk. It would just be a matter of time.

The most realistic -- and meritorious -- part of Schweitzer bison strategy is a plan to meet with Wyoming officials about that state's practice of feeding concentrated populations of elk during winter. The elk feeding grounds not only artificially inflate elk populations and make them permanently dependent on human handouts, they also serve as incubators for brucellosis and -- potentially -- other wildlife-decimating diseases.

Schweitzer's interest in the bison issue is admirable and may lead to positive developments on the brucellosis-control front eventually. But his plan as outlined so far needs a lot of work.

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Buffalo Field Campaign West Yellowstone Montana

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