Regionalizing Brucellosis Can Be A Win/Win Solution

To protect Montana’s brucellosis-free status for cattle herds and to protect property rights, and to secure buffalo ranges on public land outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park (YNP), we must regionalize the disease and delineate brucellosis management areas within the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE).

Certain practical strategies for cattle grazing on public land leases can be used to reduce the threat of brucellosis such as grazing steers, young or spayed heifers, horses and mules. This strategy would relieve the cattle herds in Montana from losing our brucellosis free status in the event of another infection within the GYE.

The disease is endemic in buffalo and elk, in the vast wild lands in the GYE where it is impossible to eliminate brucellosis by hazing, capture, confinement, testing, vaccination, quarantine and trucking to slaughter hundreds of miles in Idaho and Wyoming. Success is not possible by using these expensive, outdated measures without a huge takeover by the federal U. S. Department of Agriculture and its sister agency Animal and Plant Health Inspection Services (APHIS). Montana would not accept or tolerate this takeover.

It would not only involve Montana, but Wyoming and Idaho and their 22 elk feed grounds (where brucellosis is truly transmitted), and YNP, Grand Teton National Park, 6 national forests, 3 national wildlife refuges, 6 purchased Wildlife Management Areas in only southwest Montana, the Wind River Indian Reservation, plus the private lands within the GYE.

Buffalo and elk have survived and expanded through natural selection with brucellosis for over 100 years. Managing them as wildlife by Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks and not as diseased livestock by Montana Department of Livestock will assure healthy buffalo and elk stay in balance with available forage in the long run. They continue to move across YNP boundaries looking for winter forage on adjacent public lands. Certainly the public can accept them as year round wildlife on our public lands.

The GYE is a unique area unlike anywhere remaining in the world. Its center is Yellowstone Park which cannot be managed as a fenced-in island but must interact with plant and wildlife outside its political boundaries to survive. Brucellosis is one of many natural occurring diseases of wildlife that limit population growth and protect health. Wild, free ranging wildlife will eventually develop an immunity to brucellosis under a natural selection process.

Buffalo on public land can be an economic gift to Montana, Idaho and Wyoming the same as elk are today. Recreation tourists viewing wildlife, hunters using state licenses on public land will come from all over the world for this unique opportunity. They will require outfitter and carcass services, taxidermists for trophy and hide processing, meat cutting and packaging and winter customers for hotel and restaurants. Such a win-win solution would be a benefit for the general welfare and livestock industry who increasingly rely on financial gain from public wildlife on private land.

Respecting and promoting the wild nature of buffalo would prove to the nation that Montana can be trusted to manage buffalo for national purposes. It would protect Montana from becoming a pariah in the nation as we did in the winter of 1988-89 when 586 buffalo, leaving YNP in a snowy winter were slaughtered by licensed hunters. These animals have as much rights to the ecosystem as other wildlife.