Projects and Issues

What Do You Do With 88 Wild Bison?

What do you do with 88 brucellosis free wild bison that are being held on behalf of the public? That’s the question that has MWF scratching it’s head. The 88 bison captured from migrating Yellowstone National Park bison that are about to come out of the Corwin Springs quarantine facility need to be placed somewhere, but the proposals that have been filtering in to Fish, Wildlife and Parks have ranged from “needs some improvement” to “no way.” A proposition submitted by Turner Enterprises, Inc., a private company with ranch holdings in Montana owned by Ted Turner is one that MWF simply cannot support.

 The Turner proposal would give a private enterprise a public resource to hold, our wildlife, in exchange for some benefit to the private ranch, the majority of offspring. That the private enterprise is Turner Enterprises makes no difference one way or another as to our concern that handing over these bison in exchange for the majority of the young constitutes a privatization of public wildlife.

 There are complex, and intricate problems surfacing here: how do we define the next phase of bison conservation in Montana while keeping in mind that we are talking about a public resource, wild public bison managed in the Public Trust? Do we simply give away what is arguably some of the most valuable genetic material in the world so that we can declare the quarantine facility a success and make room for more bison to be quarantined, or do we take a little more time, and find a solution that fits within the existing parameters of the IBMP, the Quarantine Facility EA ROD, and the wishes of the public? The Turner proposal does not fit in with the strategy or decision as far as the Quarantine Facility EA stands. That EA supposes that the bison that are currently being held under Quarantine would be transferred to another, publically held area, or would be held in the public trust to build herds of clean, public bison.

 What Turner Enterprises is proposing is this: they will take the 88 head of bison currently being held in the Corwin Springs Quarantine Facility, and place them on Turner’s Flying D Ranch. They will be quarantined there, away from the current herd of bison on the ranch, for five more years while more testing and monitoring is completed to ensure brucellosis free status of these wild, public bison. At the end of the five years, Turner Enterprises would keep 75 percent of the offspring from the original 88 bison, and return the original 88, or what is left of them, and 25 percent of the offspring. While we understand the cost, time and trouble it takes to maintain spatial separation of 88 bison, we simply cannot support giving away 75 percent of the offspring of these bison to a private entity.

 Therefore, we’re left with the question, what do we do with 88 bison? Fort Belknap Tribal Community has offered to take these bison, and while their proposal isn’t perfect either, it does represent a proposal more inline with MWF interests; an eventual public to public transfer. While the Tribal plan does need some modification to make it more sustainable, the political will to send these bison to central Montana is weak due to stiff resistance from local politicians, and ranching interests who do not wish to see bison outside of Yellowstone National Park or at the few isolated and scattered private herds already around the state.

 Other proposals include sending some of these bison to zoos, another would send a small number of bison to Guernsey State Park in Eastern Wyoming.

 Given the interest in these animals, and their extremely valuable genetics, it just seems wrong to MWF to throw them out to the entity that provides the easiest solution to what is an ongoing and extremely complex issue. To that end, MWF would rather see some more substantial thought put in to relocating these bison over the next month or two; it’s in the best interest of the bison, our wildlife management tradition, and it’s in the best interest of Montana.