Yellowstone Buffalo
Plan A Step Nearer

BOZEMAN, Mont. —(AP)— The government is backing a plan to capture and then quarantine buffalo wandering outside Yellowstone National Park as the way to control brucellosis.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle has reported that the capture and quarantine option is the preferred alternative for long-term buffalo management, based on an early copy of a draft environmental assessment.

The long-range management strategy preferred by officials would cost an estimated $1 million to start and $1.5 million a year to maintain, according to the draft environmental analysis, which is to be released soon.

The bulk of the expense would come in operating quarantine facilities to determine which of the park's buffalo are infected with brucellosis, the disease that causes cows to abort and that ranchers in the three-state park area fear could impose costly testing requirements to sell cattle.

Infected buffalo would be slaughtered and the meat sold. Animals testing negative would be quarantined and either turned over to Indian tribes or some other qualified recipient or killed if the park herd is above a target level of 2400. Managers put 1700 head as the low end of the herd's management range.

Buffalo would be vaccinated for brucellosis as soon as a safe and effective vaccine is developed.

Set-up costs involve traps, quarantine facilities and possibly land purchases. Operating costs would include expenses for trapping, shooting, quarantining, and vaccinating buffalo as well as managing recreational hunts and the labor-intensive quarantine facility.

The environmental analysis has been put together by the state and federal agencies involved in the long-running debate over wandering buffalo and brucellosis control that resulted in 1100 animals being shot or slaughtered two winters ago to preclude the disease's spread to domestic cattle.