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[from Pat Morris via AIM_AUTONOMOUS_PA@onelist.com]
Buffalo Wars Transcript - part 2
http://abcnews.go.com/onair/nightline/transcripts/nl000209_trans.html
CHRIS BURY Inside Yellowstone National Park, just beyond
that riverbank, the wild buffalo are protected. But when
they leave the park’s boundaries in search of food as they
do every winter, the buffalo come here, to the state of
Montana, and this is where the trouble begins. They may be
icons of national heritage, but to the cattle ranchers in
Montana, the buffalo are symbols of something else, a
dreaded disease known as brucellosis.
LAWRENCE GROSSFIELD You know, If I got it in my herd, my
cows would be basically unmarketable.
CHRIS BURY (VO) Like most Montana cattlemen, Lawrence
Grossfield believes the buffalo must be contained, even
killed, if necessary, to protect the state’s livestock, a
big part of Montana’s $2 billion a year agriculture
industry.
LAWRENCE GROSSFIELD The disease, if you get it in a herd,
can be devastating. It can cause miscarriages in 40, 50
percent of your cattle. It can cause milk production to
decrease dramatically in the rest of them. The last biggest
reservoir of the disease is in the Yellowstone National park
bison herd.
CHRIS BURY (VO) But that fear of cattle becoming infected is
greatly exaggerated, even unfounded according to the US
Department of Interior. What is the real risk of brucellosis
to the cattle in Montana?
DON BARRY We believe it’s unbelievably small.
CHRIS BURY (VO) Don Barry, the Interior Department
undersecretary says Montana’s fears stem from the realm of
theory not fact.
DON BARRY There’s not a single documented example of where
bison have been proven to have transmitted in the wild
brucellosis to cattle.
LAWRENCE GROSSFIELD That’s true, there hasn’t been a
documented case. But in my mind, what that speaks to is the
success of the interim program that we have. So far we’ve
been successful in not allowing cattle to come into contact
with bison.
CHRIS BURY (VO) But that success has come at a heavy price.
In the harsh winter of 1996-97, when the wild buffalo went
looking for food outside the park, nearly half of
Yellowstone’s herd, more than 1,000 in all, were killed.
With the approval of the federal government, hundreds of the
animals were shot, some right in plain view of horrified
tourists. Hundreds of others were trapped, forced into pens
like cattle, and sent off to slaughter. The activists of the
Buffalo Field Campaign documented it all.
MIKE MEASE Let’s go ahead and call Fox television, NBC, up
in Bozeman.
CHRIS BURY Are these videos your weapon in this war?
MIKE MEASE I would say more or less they are. Unfortunately,
the majority of the media revolves around sensationalism
nowadays. And if we’re just out holding...
CHRIS BURY And you manipulate them, or you—you play on that?
MIKE MEASE I wouldn’t say manipulate, but we play our hand
into their hands.
1ST CORRESPONDENT (From CBS “Evening News”) Bison being
shot.
2ND CORRESPONDENT (From CNN) Montana state riflemen gunned
down another dozen animals.
3RD CORRESPONDENT (From CNN “Earth Matters”) Montana’s
Department of Livestock continue shooting bison outside the
park.
CHRIS BURY (VO) After images like these showed up repeatedly
on the network news, the federal government reversed itself
and called for a cease-fire.
MICHAEL FINLEY It was a disaster for the American public. I
mean, they own these bison. I think it was a serious
statement of mismanagement. That was unnecessary killing.
Unjustified killing, in my mind.
LAWRENCE GROSSFIELD Although people have pointed the finger
at Montana and said it was irresponsible, nobody’s come up
with an alternative. You know, they’re coming out, there’s
nothing to eat, they’re starving. And are we to allow them
to just, you know, take off and spread across Montana or
whatever?
CHRIS BURY The federal government got so disgusted with
slaughtering buffalo and with Montana’s failure to
compromise on a more tolerant approach, that in December it
abandoned the shoot and slaughter policy. Instead, the
Interior Department has come up with a new plan and has told
Montana in so many words to take it or leave it.
ANNOUNCER This is ABCNEWS: Nightline, brought to you by...
(Commercial break)
CHRIS BURY (VO) The very sight of these wild animals being
hazed by snowmobiles and corralled like cows points to a
fundamental difference in how Montana and the federal
government see the nation’s last free-roaming buffalo.
MICHAEL FINLEY I think we view them as wildlife. The public
views them as wild animals. I think the Montana Department
of Livestock use them as overgrown cattle, and a nuisance at
best.
KEITH ONEY We are a state that prefers to determine for
ourselves what we will do, what our future will be.
CHRIS BURY (VO) Indeed, that independentsentiment from state
wildlife supervisor Keith Oney is wildly shared in Montana.
Such federal government programs as the reintroduction of
wolves into Yellowstone and the protection of grizzly bears
as an endangered species are still deeply resented by some.
KEITH ONEY We see oftentimes—and I’m speaking also as a
person who was raised in this state—we see the federal
government trying to dictate to us a policy that appeals to
a national audience, but may not be in our best interests in
the state of Montana.
CHRIS BURY (VO) So the buffalo wars are about more than just
disease, they are also about long-standing conflicts and
about competition among wildlife and agriculture for the
same land and forage. Ranchers like Lawrence Grossfield
insist they want to preserve the buffalo, just not in their
backyards. And they accuse the federal government of letting
the herd at Yellowstone get completely out of control.
LAWRENCE GROSSFIELD This is not a question of are we going
to have buffalo or not? It’s a question of what’s the herd
size going to be and are they going to be disease-free?
Nobody’s talking about eliminating the herd.
CHRIS BURY (VO) But Yellowstone is not an animal theme park,
as federal officials like to say, and a wild herd will go
where it will go.
DON BARRY You can have a very small herd, but if you have an
incredibly severe winter, they’re going to leave. They’re
going to look for food. That is a natural thing to do. Bison
don’t work with compasses, they don’t read maps. They
basically go where there’s food. And that’s going to happen
regardless of whether the population is five bison, or 500,
or 5,000.
CHRIS BURY (VO) But in a major concession to Montana, the
federal government has now, for the first time, agreed to
limit the size of Yellowstone’s herd to around 3,000. It’s
part of the new plan that the National Park Service believes
will stop the slaughter of buffalo and protect Montana’s
cattle from brucellosis.
MICHAEL FINLEY We’re talking about a proposal that separates
bison and cattle in time by season. Cattle are not here in
the winter. The bison are inside Yellowstone in the summer.
They only go out on certain times in the winter. So by
timing they’re separated. By space, we proposed zones where
there’s a limited range in which bison may range. How are
they going to put these cattle at risk, when the cattle are
20 or more miles away, in some cases, 60 miles away?
CHRIS BURY (VO) Research is also under way to develop a
vaccine for buffalo that the federal government has agreed
to administer. What’s more, Washington promises to pay for
the vaccination of all cattle around Yellowstone.
CHRIS BURY Wouldn’t vaccination of the cattle be a far more
reasonable thing to do than to slaughter the bison?
KEITH ONEY Vaccination of the cattle, again, does not
eliminate risk but reduces risk.
CHRIS BURY It seems that in almost any endeavor, risk is
never going to be eliminated entirely?
KEITH ONEY I think that in reality, we are in a program
right now that is very conservative.
CHRIS BURY (VO) But Montana’s approach is not so much
conservative as stubborn, in the eyes of the Interior
Department’s Don Barry.
DON BARRY My personal feeling is that it’s time for Montana
to move on and to abandon old thinking. This is the approach
that was used in the ’50s. It was used in the ’60s. It was
used in the ’70s. We’ve all learned a lot since then.
CHRIS BURY If there’s another bad winter and bison leave the
park, as they will, will they be shot?
KEITH ONEY Whether there’s a bad winter or a mild winter,
some bison that leave Yellowstone Park, in some situations
will be shot. Where there’s property damage, human health
and safety concerns, or there’s a concern for exposure of
brucellosis to cattle, bison will continue to be shot.
MICHAEL FINLEY There’s really no reason to kill these bison
at the times of year when they’re outside of the park, and
there are no cattle present. Why should we see a repeat of
1996 and ’97 where a thousand bison are unnecessarily killed
when the federal government is offering a plan that protects
the economic viability of this state’s cattle industry, and
kills as few bison as possible?
CHRIS BURY But the state of Montana refuses to budge. It
remains adamant it will do everything it can to protect its
cattle industry, even if that means killing wild buffalo.
When we come back, a conversation I had earlier with Montana
Governor Mark Roscicot.
(Commercial break)
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