NWF Vaccine Offer Eliminates Last Excuse For Montana Bison Slaughter - Brief Article

National Wildlife, August-Sept, 1999

In a dramatic effort to end the slaughter of bison outside Yellowstone National Park, the National Wildlife Federation has offered to reimburse ranchers who graze cattle near Yellowstone for the cost of vaccinating livestock against the disease brucellosis.

Fear of brucellosis, which causes cows to abort their fetuses, has been used by Montana officials to justify the slaughter of nearly 1,200 wild bison that have wandered outside Yellowstone since the 1996-97 winter. There is not a single documented case of wild bison transmitting the disease to cattle.

The vaccine offer complements an overall bison-management plan proposed by NWF and the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, which calls for testing any bison that wander onto private land and moving healthy animals to tribal lands. So far, Montana officials have rejected that plan.

Not surprisingly, Montana's state veterinarian also quickly discounted NWF's vaccine offer, which in effect means that the state plans to continue kill-ing bison, says Steve Torbit, NWF's bison project manager. Individual ranchers can still accept the offer, which does not require state or federal sanction.

'It's very apparent that this issue is not about brucellosis,' Torbit says. 'It's about control of land in the West, which has been dominated by livestock interests for more than a century. Those interests see the bison as competition for grazing land, pure and simple.'