In the towns that pepper the terrain northwest of Yellowstone National Park, there are some things you can count on each year when the biting, frigid winter locks down on the land.
One is the capture and killing of bison. Another is the loud butting of heads.
The heads are human. Some belong to National Park Service, which annually culls the Yellowstone bison herd – more than 600 so far this year – in wild, noisy, snowmobile-powered roundups and sends most to the slaughterhouse.
The other heads are those of activists who passionately try to protect the gigantic, shaggy symbols of the American West.
As you’d imagine, the two groups don’t agree on much. Take an incident two weeks ago. Here are a few facts: Forty buffalo stampeded onto Hebgen Lake near West Yellowstone, Mont. Fourteen of the buffalo crashed through the ice. Two drowned.
Getting the rest of the story is about as easy as trying to eat a buffalo steak with a spoon.
If you listen to the folks at the Buffalo Field Campaign, an animal-rights group that monitors the annual roundup, the animals were driven onto the lake by the merciless hazing of cruel government agents on snowmobiles.
The Park Service, on the other hand, said it had nothing to do with the ice hazing, that it was probably an accident.
Yellowstone is the only area in the lower 48 states where bison, or buffalo, have lived continuously in the wild since prehistoric times. The area that now includes the park was home to vast herds of buffalo, after the last of the giant glaciers vanished some 10,000 years ago.
By 1900, they had nearly been eliminated by hunters. Records from 1902 indicate there was a teetering-on-elimination herd in the Yellowstone River Valley of between 22 and 30 animals. That, the experts agreed, was not enough. Hunting was banned.
Today there are about 4,000 wild buffalo. That, the experts say, is too many. Especially with the threat of brucellosis, a nerve-destroying disease that infects some buffalo. The fear is that brucellosis might be transmitted to cattle grazing in the Yellowstone area. So buffalo that leave the park or get too close to the boundaries are targets.
Which makes Buffalo Field Campaign members so mad they want to snort and paw the ground. They point out that there has never been a confirmed case of brucellosis being transmitted from a wild buffalo to cattle.
“Since Jan. 12, the National Park Service has captured 651 buffalo,” said group spokeswoman Stephany Seay. “And 388 of them have gone to slaughterhouses in Montana and Idaho.”
Rick Wallen is the park service’s head bison biologist in Yellowstone. He confirms that 651 buffalo have been captured this year. But, he said, the correct number of animals sent to slaughter thus far is not 388, as the buffalo protectors claim.
As of Tuesday afternoon, he says, 565 buffalo had been sent to slaughter.
Wallen said the procedure leading to capture is dictated by the Interagency Bison Management Plan adopted by the federal government in 2001.
“We have a series of operations designed to turn the bison back into the interior of the park,” he said. “We try to block their route of travel with men and horses and sometimes vehicles.”
Wallen said when bison repeatedly refuse to turn back or challenge the men and horses by lowering their heads and charging they are, as a last resort, captured.
“We haze them along a series of fences and gates, toward the small end of the funnel,” he said.
A few are selected for brucellosis testing in a quarantine facility. Most are herded into trucks for the trip to the slaughter yards without being tested.
This is already the second-busiest Yellowstone roundup in the past decade. The busiest winter was 1996-97, when 1,087 buffalo were killed. Last winter 101 buffalo were culled.
“We can’t let them go wherever they want and spread out wherever they want because of brucellosis and because of cattle,” Wallen said.
Ironically, brucellosis first appeared in the United States in the early 1900s. The disease is believed to have been brought from Europe.
In cattle.
“Ever since,” said buffalo protector Seay, “the buffalo have lost. Over and over and over again.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
