Activists Intend To Interfere
With Yellowstone Buffalo Plan

BOZEMAN, Mont. — A coalition of activists says it will have volunteers on call this winter to haze errant buffalo off private property near Gardiner and West Yellowstone, in hopes of avoiding more buffalo killing. Underlying that vow is a veiled hint that their hazing efforts will also be aimed at disrupting a federal-state cooperative effort to control brucellosis in park buffalo.

"We've got volunteers coming from as far as Hawaii," said Mike Mease, who co-founded the organization Buffalo Nations with Rosalie Little Thunder, the Lakota Sioux activist who was arrested during a buffalo protest last winter.

Almost 1100 Yellowstone National Park buffalo were killed when they left the park in search of forage last winter. Livestock officials fear the buffalo will spread brucellosis to Montana cattle.

Mease said his group wants to make sure killing on that scale doesn't occur again.

"No one has learned a lesson after killing 1100 buffalo last year and that's completely unacceptable," Mease said. "People aren't going to sit by and watch the state of Montana kill off the last wild buffalo."

He said there will be a core group of 10 volunteers available all winter and as many as 25 people on the ground at some times. Volunteers will include members of the Sioux, Blackfeet, Crow, Nez Perce and other tribes as well as non-Indian people, Mease said.

The group has offices in both Gardiner and West Yellowstone and has a cabin and a teepee set up near West Yellowstone.

The teepee will be the group's "base camp" and is on private land near Horse Butte, which is where the state Livestock Department plans to set up a buffalo capture facility this year.

Mease claimed the group now has 5000 members in all 50 states and "they are perturbed at what happened last year."

Volunteers, who will spend from one week to a month or more in the area, will haze the animals from snowshoes, skis and snowmobiles. They will not chase the animals back into the park, where deep snow and hunger drive them out in most winters, but instead will "shepherd" them to "areas where they're a lot more safe."

They also plan to intervene if buffalo are seen heading toward the buffalo traps.

Montana and federal officials this summer announced they had reached a tentative agreement on a long-term buffalo management plan that included a quarantine facility and trying to acquire more winter range for the animals.

However, an environmental impact statement outlining that plan has been delayed until late December or early January and a final plan cannot be put in place until several months after that at the earliest, park spokeswoman Cheryl Matthews said.

That means last year's interim plan is still in effect for this year. It calls for capturing and slaughtering all buffalo that try to leave the park in the Gardiner area on the west side of the Yellowstone River.

In the West Yellowstone area, all buffalo that can be captured will be tested for brucellosis, with only positive animals being killed. Animals that can't be captured will be shot.