Coalition Sues Park Service and Forest Service to Stop Bison Kills

A group of Native American and environmental groups filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana today to prevent the National Park Service and the Forest Service from participating in state roundups of wild bison in Yellowstone that state officials suspect of being infected with brucellosis. The groups' press release can be viewed here.

Yellowstone is home to a herd of 3000 bison. (Although bison are no longer endangered, there are still only about 150,000 in North America). According to an AP story on the suit, "[d]uring severe winters and when bison numbers are high, thousands of the animals try to migrate to lower elevations outside Yellowstone in search of grass for grazing." Under a 2000 agreement between Montana and the federal government, bison who are in danger of coming in contact with cattle are rounded up and tested for brucellosis, and those who test positive (about 50%) are slaughtered. According to this article from Yellowstone Insider, this was done for the sake of Montana's beef industry, so the cattle could be certified as brucellosis free. A total of 3,000 have been slaughtered over the course of the decade, including over 1,400 in spring 2008.

Yellowstone is also home to a much larger elk population, but officials have been focusing all their energies on the bison based on arguments that the incidence of disease is higher in bison and elk, and because elk are more disperse. The Government Accountability Office, in a highly critical report released last year, criticizes the practice:

This difference in management remains even though there have been multiple suspected elk-to-cattle transmissions in recent years in Idaho and Wyoming, some of which have been detected through DNA testing; the National Research Council reported in 1998 that the risk of transmission from bison to cattle was low; and there have been no known cases of brucellosis transmitted from bison to cattle in a wild, uncontrolled setting.

The whole report can be viewed here.

According to the GAO report, the roundups were supposed to be only temporary, and officials expected to move on to delivering brucellosis vaccine to the bison by the winter of 2002-2003. But, the report says, mismanagement and miscommunication among the agencies and state officials involved has kept them stuck in first gear. The report accuses the federal agencies involved of wasting time and money in an opaque process that depends on trial and error rather than sensible planning.

The group that filed suit today to stop the roundups includes Western Watersheds Project, the Buffalo Field Campaign, Tatanka Oyate (Buffalo Nation), the Gallatin Wildlife Association, the Native Ecosystems Council, and the Yellowstone Buffalo Foundation.

The complaint argues that the Park Service and the Forest Service have arbitrarily and capriciously failed to provide for providing for adequate and appropriate diversity of plant and animal species in their implementation of and actions under the Interagency Bison Management Plan and the Gallatin National Forest Plan. Should DoJ choose to vigorously defend this suit, they would most probably defend much of the complaint on ripeness or other jurisdictional grounds. However, one would hope in light of the GAO report, the poor track record of efforts so far, and the change in administrations that some sort of settlement will be reached relatively quickly.