Don't bother to 'manage' park bison for Horse Butte residents

By Liz Kearney

As spring turns to summer on Horse Butte, another season of buffalo hazing and killing is behind us. Horse Butte, just north of West Yellowstone, is a peninsula, roughly 10,000 acres in size, surrounded on three sides by Hebgen Lake. Horse Butte is primarily public land, part of the Gallatin National Forest, but it also contains some private property and a number of homes, including mine.

Horse Butte could be home to buffalo too. In late winter and spring, they routinely cross the nearby Yellowstone National Park boundary, drawn to the peninsula's exposed southern hillsides and easily accessible forage. While we residents welcome these shaggy icons of the wild West, including many pregnant buffalo who choose Horse Butte as a place to give birth, not so the Montana Department of Livestock (DOL). Our pleasing observations of these patient, noble critters quietly munching grass in the sunshine are tempered with the sure knowledge that, within a day or two, DOL agents will swoop in with a very different response.

DOL's reception is usually in the form of a helicopter, flying close to treetop level, scaring buffalo and anything else around. DOL agents charge in on snowmobiles or ATVs, shouting and shooting their "cracker" guns, getting buffalo moving, and sometimes stampeding, back toward the park. It's a circus atmosphere, but there's nothing funny about it. Taxpayers have spent millions for these performances, and close to 3,000 buffalo have been slaughtered in the past decade.

We've all heard, again and again, the official reason this travesty is carried out. Brucellosis. Some Yellowstone buffalo carry the disease, which can cause pregnant cows to abort. But there has never been a recorded transmission of brucellosis from buffalo to cattle in the wild. Likewise, that elk carry it too, in far greater numbers, but are ignored, doesn't seem to make a bit of difference. When buffalo set foot in Montana, they're on borrowed time. The state has zero tolerance for them.

Most of my neighbors and I deplore the senselessness of the DOL's buffalo "management" activities. Buffalo are unnecessarily terrorized and injured. The expense to taxpayers is insulting. Several friends have told me that the only time buffalo have broken fences or damaged property is when they were being chased by DOL.

There's only one family that has cattle on Horse Butte, on private fenced pasture, and only in summer. Left alone, buffalo would return to Yellowstone Park on their own once the snow starts melting, but they don't get that chance. The months of hazing, and frequent killing, to protect a small herd of cows here only in summer, is absurd!

DOL is not doing what it does in the public interest. We'd far rather see some occasional wild buffalo than DOL agents playing cowboy. What other community in America can boast wild buffalo in its midst? But sadly, our neighborhood is also a killing field.

Living with wildlife is a privilege we enjoy on Horse Butte, not something we complain about. We marvel at the opportunity to see - out our kitchen windows and off our front porches - sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans, moose, osprey, white pelicans, mountain bluebirds, porcupines, bald eagles, fox, deer, even bear, and yes, if only briefly, wild buffalo. We started an informal community group here, called HBNOB. That stands for Horse Butte Neighbors Of Buffalo, and our message to the DOL is clear: You're not doing what you do for us.

We aren't anti-cow or anti-rancher. Everyone I know has a high regard for our cattle ranching neighbor. But well fenced and vaccinated, and trucked in when buffalo are miles away, the few cattle on Horse Butte simply are not threatened with disease from buffalo. Ironically, in the Jackson area of Wyoming, buffalo with brucellosis and cattle have grazed side by side for decades without problem.

Surely, if there is one place in Montana we could let wild buffalo roam free for a few months a year, shouldn't it be Horse Butte? It's a peninsula, so the buffalo aren't going anywhere else, and residents welcome them. Being good neighbors, after all, is a two-way proposition.

Liz Kearney writes on behalf of the Horse Butte Neighbors of Buffalo.

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