Dan Brister, Buffalo Field Campaign

Dan Brister has been working with the Buffalo Field Campaign since December of 1997. He alternates winters on the Yellowstone boundary with falls in Missoula, Mont., where he is earning an MS in environmental studies. Dan can be contacted at dan@wildrockies.org.

It has been snowing for the past few days. I wonder where the herd is. We did a flyover of the park a few weeks ago and found more than 50 buffalo within several miles of the boundary. Will this snow trigger a mass exodus? Wishing for buffalo to stay where they are seems inherently strange and counter to the rest of my beliefs. I want them to be free to go where they want, like deer and elk, yet I find myself wishing, for now, that they'd stay where they are. I don't want to see bloody buffalo this spring. I don't want to spend days on end awake, like last winter, when the Montana Department of Livestock (DOL) seemed to be slaughtering buffalo every other day, and we were out on skis around the clock at Duck Creek, trying to deter 80 hungry buffalo from the hay-baited trap.

Just one bull outside the Yellowstone boundaries, and I am tired. Free of the mayhem and despair of the kill, we've been shifting our focus, working to strengthen our community support, building alliances with other groups, writing editorials and letters, making press contacts, preparing ourselves, as much as we can, for what may lie ahead. We are stronger now than we've ever been, with more than 50 volunteers on hand, many willing to sacrifice their freedom and go to jail for the buffalo, because they know the killing is unjustified.

The state of Montana justifies the slaughter on the unfounded grounds that the buffalo pose an unacceptable risk of transmitting the disease brucellosis to cattle. Brucellosis is a bacteria that can cause domestic cows to abort their first calf. The disease, which originated in European cattle, is fairly common in many wildlife species such as elk, deer, moose, coyotes, and bison, though it doesn't affect them.

Livestock producers in states recognized as "brucellosis-free" by the federal government are allowed to export their cattle without having them tested for the disease. According to federal regulations, a state cannot have its brucellosis-free status revoked merely on the presence of the disease in wildlife. There must be an outbreak among cattle.

There has never been a documented case of brucellosis transmission from wild bison to cattle. In Grand Teton National Park, where bison and livestock have co-mingled for decades, cattle have never contracted brucellosis. During the winter of 1989, more than 900 Yellowstone bison left the park and grazed with livestock just to the north. The state tested 20 cattle herds and found no trace of the disease. According to John Mack, a National Park Service wildlife biologist, "There is no evidence of wild, free-roaming bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle. The state is saying this is a grave threat, and here you had all these bison mingle with livestock and nothing happened." Dr. Paul Nicolletti, a leading expert on brucellosis, concurs: "The threat doesn't seem to be there."

Control of disease transmission is not Montana's true motivation for killing buffalo. If it were, the state would address the presence of the disease in elk and other wildlife, which it currently ignores. Though there are more than 10 times as many elk as bison in the park, and elk are known brucellosis carriers, they are not targeted by the DOL.

Because the only possible avenue for brucellosis transmission between bison and livestock is through the ingestion of afterbirth or aborted fetal material, bull bison, non-pregnant females, and calves -- which do not produce fetal material -- pose no risk of passing the bacteria. Even the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the federal agency responsible for downgrading a state's brucellosis-free status, has said it will tolerate the presence of infected bulls and other "low risk" bison, such as non-pregnant cows and calves. Yet the state doesn't discriminate in its policy of killing bison wandering into Montana. All bison, regardless of the level of risk, find themselves within the crosshairs of the state's rifles. Montana has killed more than 500 bulls in the past three years.

West of the park, where all the killing has taken place in the past two winters, bison and cattle do not intermingle. Because of the severity of the winters, cattle are only present from June to September, when the buffalo occupy their summer range inside the park. The brucellosis bacteria, which dies after just four hours of exposure to sunlight, provides the livestock industry with a convenient but unconvincing excuse to kill bison, which threaten ranching's subsidized monopoly of public lands.