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The Park Service Plans To Cull Nearly a Thousand Yellowstone Buffalo

New bison populations are in demand, but that won't keep them from the slaughterhouse.

Visitors to Yellowstone love seeing the park's famous buffalo, while farmers in Montana hate when the buffalo return the favor. This is partially why park officials are preparing to cull 900 of the park's bison herd.

While buffalo were once found across North America from Alaska to Mexico, the only part of the lower 48 states that the herds have never left is what is now Yellowstone National Park, a 3,500 square-mile expanse spanning three western US states.

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The icon of the American West still has the yen to roam, especially in winter months, when buffalo seek low-elevation habitats, a rarity in the mountainous park. During harsh winters, thousands of animals may leave the park, causing tension with farmers in neighboring regions of Montana. Farmers are concerned that the buffalo are carrying the disease brucellosis, which can be transferred to domestic cattle, causing cows to miscarry.

If all goes as planned, the largest cull since the winter of 2007/2008 will go down this winter, in which Yellowstone buffalo will be hunted or rounded up and sent to Native American tribes for slaughter, Reuters reports. The goal is to get the herd closer to a target population of between 3,000 and 3,500 bison, a figure set by a long-standing management plan hammered out among federal and state wildlife and agricultural agencies. The population is presently closer 4,900.

"The plan requires all of us to do two things: protect a viable wild bison population and reduce the risk of transmission of brucellosis from bison to cattle. We're required to keep bison and cattle separate," Al Nash, a National Park Service spokesman, told CNN, explaining a 2008 cull that saw 1,600 buffalo shot by hunters or sent to slaughterhouses.

By one metric, this seems to be working. According to the National Park Service, "to date, no documented transmission of brucellosis from Yellowstone bison to cattle has occurred."

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For all of their hardy appearances, winter is hard on the American bison, even without human intervention. According to Yellowstone's Bison FAQ, on average, nine out of 100 adult bison will die during the winter. But generally those animals, "entered winter in poor condition due to age, disease, or injuries," and young bison face much higher risks of dying, with 20 to 40 percent of first-year bison lost on average.

As you might imagine, the culling of such an iconic and culturally important animal is controversial.

To protest the 2008 cull, two women chained themselves to a railing in the park's visitor center, and distributed leaflets stating, "The Park Service is meant to protect and preserve wildlife in national parks, not indiscriminately slaughter hundreds of [bison]," according to a CNN report.

Yellowstone buffalo. Image: Ed Sweeney/Flickr

There are plenty of people willing to take any extra buffalo that Yellowstone might have, however, as roughly half the herd has been exposed to brucellosis. The disease likely originated—somewhat ironically—from exposure to cattle that used to graze in Yellowstone. As the disease has been largely eradicated from both cattle and all but one other buffalo herd, transferring Yellowstone buffalo to brucellosis-free states isn't popular.

Still,First Nations and Native American tribes are looking at re-introducing buffalo to land on both sides of the United States-Canada border. Yellowstone buffalo are the most genetically pure American bison specimen, having never been bred for their meat, so there's been a lot of interest broadly in acquiring buffalo from a select group of brucellosis-free animals.

For much of the last decade, a population of Yellowstone bison has been raised in Montana, carefully monitored to eliminate brucellosis, as a pilot program to eliminate brucellosis from whole population. Now Montana is looking to unload 145 animals.

Reuters reported Wednesday that the state reviewed 10 requests for donations of the buffalo, "but narrowed its choices to groups demonstrating the iconic, hump-shouldered animals would be used for conservation purposes or to augment existing herds," according to the plan. Proposed recipients include the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, the Queens and Bronx zoos in New York, the Wilds Conservation Park in Ohio, and the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes in Montana."

As a New York-resident, I might be a little biased when I root for at least a few buffalo to find their way to the Queens or Bronx zoo, but New York City also has the advantage of very few cattle farmers around to object to their presence.