Park Service ships 86 Yellowstone bison to slaughter

By SCOTT McMILLION, Chronicle Staff Writer

GARDINER -- Most of the bison in Yellowstone National Park are facing two bleak scenarios: several weeks of thin rations or a trip to the slaughterhouse.

They can stay in the park and try to find something to eat in an increasingly hostile environment, a place where most available forage lies beneath layers of snow and ice, where a spring thaw is at least a month away.

Or they can try to leave the park. If they do, they'll be corralled, loaded in trailers and shipped to a slaughterhouse.

Those are the options in a world shaped by bad weather and government policy, a National Park Service official said here Wednesday, citing a thick and complicated bison management plan.

Some people don't believe those are the only options. Environmental groups maintain the Park Service could grant the animals a lot more leeway but is caving to political pressure.

The Park Service "has sacrificed the animal's lives and its own integrity for politics, pure and simple," said Andrea LoCoco of the Fund for Animals.

A total of 86 animals were shipped to slaughter Wednesday, following 47 that made the trip Tuesday.

Another 86 are in a pen here, waiting until enough trucks and trailers arrive to ship them.

There is one escape valve. Bison that leave the park and stay east of the Yellowstone River can linger in the Bear Creek drainage near the old mining town of Jardine. And about 80 are doing that, after crossing a bridge over the Yellowstone in Gardiner.

But most bison prefer the river's west side, where there isn't much feed, but there isn't much snow either. There, Reese Creek forms the park's northern border and crossing that line is fatal. Cattle are grazing north of there on private land.

"Our responsibility is to preclude the bison from moving north of the Reese Creek boundary," said Wayne Brewster, Yellowstone's deputy director of resources.

That means chasing them into a large trap where they can be sorted by age and sex, then loaded into trailers for shipment.

Wednesday morning, park rangers and Montana Department of Livestock agents yipped and yelled to keep the bison trotting, loading a dozen yearling animals into a four-horse trailer, packing them tightly to reduce the chances of them injuring each other.

Other trailers waited nearby while, in the pens, edgy bison butted each other and ran in tight circles.

Not since the winter of 1996-97 have so many bison died so quickly. And none of them were even tested for brucellosis, the disease at the basis of two decades of acrimony over the wandering giants.

The Park Service has no choice but to ship the beasts to slaughter, explained Brewster, standing beside a park roadway as another three-dozen animals trudged down a hillside behind him, making their way for the park boundary.

Rangers have repeatedly hazed hundreds of bison deep into the park's interior, said Brewster.

"They come back the next day," he said.

Since they won't be hazed and they won't stay put, the bison must die, according to the 2000 Interagency Bison Management Plan.

The plan says, according to Brewster, that when the number of bison in the park tops 3,000 in the "late winter, early spring" -- which is right now -- any animals crossing Reese Creek will be rounded up and killed.

Testing them for brucellosis is futile, Brewster said, because they're all going to slaughter anyway. This is a population-control job mandated by the fact there are more than 3,000 bison and many of them are moving north.

The park's herd totals about 4,000 animals, nearly a record level.

Not everyone agrees with the Park Service's strict interpretation of the plan.

"They're choosing to do this," said Hope Sieck of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. "The Park Service is not required to do what they are doing."

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