AMERICAN BUFFALO:
A Yellowstone National Park biologist draws blood from a bison to test for exposure to brucellosis, a disease harmless to bison but that can cause cows to abort their young. Brucellosis was originally introduced to the US from Europe in cattle.
The wild bison is North America’s largest land animal and the United States’ national mammal. An estimated 30-60 million once roamed the Great Plains as a keystone species, pivotal to the health of what was one of the biggest grassland ecosystems on Earth. With the endorsement of the US War Department - which reasoned their extermination would force Plains Indians onto reservations - railroads and white hide hunters slaughtered bison to within extinction. By 1906 only 2 dozen wild animals survived in Yellowstone National Park, from which almost all wild bison are descended today.
Wild bison are distinct from farmed bison (numerous today) that were interbred with cattle and held in captive environments, stripped of much of the wild conditions and behaviors that shaped bison as a species over millennia. Today the only large, truly significant population of wild bison remains the one in Yellowstone National Park. Except these have become island animals, forbidden from migrating - unlike elk, bears, wolves and other wildlife - or otherwise leaving the park due to exposure to a disease called brucellosis. Perceived as a threat by the Montana cattle industry, management practices for Yellowstone bison has included a cap on the growth of their population and annual slaughter of the surplus. Thus far some 10,000 animals have been culled since the 1980s… despite the fact that transmission from bison to cattle has never been documented and that elk are deemed the primary vector of the disease.
WHAT TRIBES ARE DOING:
Robbie Magnan, Director of Fort Peck Fish and Game, makes daily pilgrimages to the tribes' buffalo pastures to check on the well-being of the animals, observe them and ensure no fences are damaged or down. Among the last generation of Indian children to be forcibly sent to boarding schools, Robbie did not grow up well-versed in traditional culture but connected to it later in life. He aims for the buffalo program to play an instrumental role in reviving tribal knowledge, traditions and practices.
Bison were once the foundation of Plains Indian culture, economy and religion. Following lengthy negotiations, legal action and an experimental quarantine process, the FORT PECK RESERVATION in North-Eastern Montana, home to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes, created the first large conservation herd outside Yellowstone in 2014. Starting with 160 disease-free Yellowstone animals, allowed to roam on 13,000 acres (and growing), the tribes' goal is to share these genetically pure animals with other tribes and conservation groups when their numbers grow, providing seed stock for future wild herds. Going further, the reservation has set in motion a quarantine facility (the sole such facility in Montana) that would allow all future healthy Yellowstone animals to escape the firing line - and change the management paradigm of these iconic animals for good. But movement of any Yellowstone bison around the state of Montana faces stiff opposition from the state's department of livestock and area cattle ranchers, who fear bison could break free, wreak havoc, and transmit disease (even if reputedly healthy) no matter the precautions taken. Ranchers also fear losing access to cheap federal grazing allotments.