The National Park Service (NPS) has released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for a new Bison Management Plan at Yellowstone National Park to replace a hopelessly outdated and harmful plan. The current plan severely limits bison migration, in large part because of hysteria promoted by the livestock industry and states surrounding Yellowstone that bison will transmit brucellosis to cattle, despite not a single documented case of this occurring. The current plan also allows the national mammal of the United States to be slaughtered on a firing line just outside the Park, as well as captured and relocated, all so that bison numbers are kept at an artificially low number to appease the livestock industry.
The Draft Bison Plan puts forth three alternatives: - Alternative 1 would continue management under the existing Interagency Bison Management Plan, approved in 2000; maintain a population of 3,500 to 5,000 bison after calving; and would continue the capture-for-quarantine-and-relocation program and continue hunting-trapping by using culling and hunting outside the Park.
- Alternative 2 would manage the population of about 3,500 to 6,000 bison after calving with an emphasis on using the capture-for-quarantine-and-relocation to Tribal lands, and Tribal hunting outside the Park to regulate numbers.
- Alternative 3 would rely on natural selection, bison dispersal, and public and Tribal hunting in Montana as the primary tools to regulate the population, ranging from 3,500 to 7,000 after calving.
Only Alternative 3 moves bison management in the right direction. But it must be extensively strengthened by expanding the landscape where bison are allowed to inhabit outside of Yellowstone, ending the NPS’s capture-for-slaughter program, eliminating the Beattie Gulch firing line slaughter just outside Park boundaries, requiring that any hunting outside the Park on federal public lands be managed by the federal agencies (not by the states), and removing all population limits. Yellowstone buffalo are the last continuously wild, migratory buffalo left in the United States, but they are treated as livestock rather than wildlife—denied the ability to roam or inhabit their native territory on Wilderness or other public wildlands outside the Park. This is our chance to insist that bison deserve better protection and that the Wildernesses surrounding Yellowstone need their bison back, so please speak up by October 10! Buffalo migration follows forage availability. Yellowstone sits on a high elevation plateau and winters can be extreme, with snow averaging six feet deep. As Ice Age mammals, buffalo are well equipped for extreme winters, but when the snow gets that deep, buffalo need to move to lower elevation habitat. This lower elevation habitat is often found outside of the Park, in Gardiner or West Yellowstone, Montana. The Draft Bison Plan fails to fully involve the federal agencies that administer federal lands and Wilderness just outside Yellowstone—especially the U.S. Forest Service—and it allows way too much influence from Montana’s Department of Livestock, whose goal is to limit bison numbers and keep the animals confined to Yellowstone. While Alternative 3 in the Draft Plan moves in the right direction, it must still be dramatically improved to fully protect Yellowstone bison in the long run.
Please submit your comments by Tuesday, October 10 at the NPS portal here: https://parkplanning.nps.gov/commentForm.cfm?documentID=130873 |
