Buffalo Field campaign in town for fund-raiser

By JOAN HAINES For the Chronicle

Bison are an American icon that are being slaughtered, said Mitch Burnham, and that's why he spent his Sunday afternoon at the Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture along with about 50 others attending a Buffalo Field Campaign fund-raiser.

"I think the slaughter is kind of hasty," said Burnham, a former tour guide in Yellowstone National Park, interviewed at the money-raising event in the Emerson gym. "There's got to be another way.''

A total of 231 bison were sent to slaughter last week by the National Park Service after they were trapped at Stephens Creek, northwest of Gardiner, according to Chronicle reports.

"How someone could find it in their conscience to kill such a beautiful animal is beyond me," said Kyle Deschamps, 20, who was attending college in Massachusetts when he learned about the Buffalo Field Campaign work.

"When I got here, I decided this was an important place to be," he said while walking down Main Street with about a dozen volunteers who were spreading the word about their feelings for the animals. Some wore bison and bald eagle outfits. When they returned to the gym, they listened to musical groups and watched videos of the bison.

Buffalo Field Campaign volunteers patrol two areas where the bison are most likely to enter Montana from Yellowstone National Park -- near Gardiner and West Yellowstone. They patrol from before sunrise until after sunset, documenting whether the animals are hazed back into the park or sent to slaughter.

Money from the fund-raiser will pay for food, gas, film equipment and skis to allow the volunteers to be in the field with the bison, said Ted Fellman, the field campaign's media coordinator.

Bison are killed under a federal and state management plan which mandates the deaths when bison cross the park's boundary west of the Yellowstone River. Some Yellowstone Park bison have brucellosis, a disease which can cause cattle to abort.

If Montana cattle contract brucellosis, the state would lose its brucellosis-free status, and ranchers would be forced to conduct expensive blood tests before they ship cattle out of state.

Bison can be slaughtered without testing for brucellosis if the size of the overall Yellowstone herd is above 3,000 animals. A fall park count placed the number at between 3,800 to 4,000 bison.

"I think what they're doing to the buffalo is wrong," Cheryl Delaney, a bison supporter, said in the gym. "It's got to stop. There's no disease. The buffalo have a right to live like anyone else. This is supposed to be America."

The buffalo should be managed as free-roaming wildlife on public land just like elk and deer, said Joe Gutkoski, 75, a landscape architect in private practice, who has been on patrols with the Buffalo Field Campaign.

Andy Tuller, outings coordinator for the Sierra Club, said he is concerned about the arbitrary killing of the buffalo.

An easy solution would be to stop cattle from grazing on Horse Butte near West Yellowstone and to remove cattle from the Gardiner area near the park, Tuller said.

"They're spending an awful lot of money" to manage bison, he said. "Why not use the money to buy habitat to give the buffalo more range?"

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