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As the number of elk infected with brucellosis in and around Yellowstone National Park rises—and with it the threat of the ungulate spreading the disease to domestic cattle—a Montana legislator seeks to aggressively manage elk the same way the state does bison.
Sen. Debby Barrett, R-Dillon, has requested a draft bill, LC0029, to "Expand the bison management plan to include other wildlife."
The bill has yet to be written, but Barrett says expanding the Interagency Wildlife Management Plan—a 10-year-old pact among the National Park Service, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP), U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service and Montana Department of Livestock (DOL)—could give Montana's livestock industry influence over elk management in the state.
Barrett says that under her proposal the DOL wouldn't manage elk, per se, but it would manage brucellosis, giving the agency influence over FWP's elk management.
"Diseases in wildlife are detrimental to livestock, wildlife and humans and they have to be addressed," Barrett says, "especially in Montana where we have a constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment—and that means everyone, even livestock producers."
Elk in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem appear to be increasingly affected by brucellosis, a bacterial infection that causes cattle, elk and bison to abort their young. In late March, a U.S. Geological Survey study showed that the prevalence of the disease among the region's more than 100,000 free-ranging elk was between 8 and 20 percent in 2006-2007, up from 0 to 7 percent in 1991-1992.
Montana's billion-dollar cattle industry lost its brucellosis-free status in 2008 after cattle infections were discovered. Wildlife managers suspect elk caused the infections. The state regained the brucellosis-free status last July.
While transmission of brucellosis from bison to cattle has never been documented in the wild, state and federal agencies have largely focused their efforts on bison. The animals have been hazed, quarantined and slaughtered to ensure that they don't infect cattle.
"We can't haze the elk and do all of that stuff," Barrett says, "but we have to address this disease."
Multiple FWP wildlife managers declined to comment before seeing a draft of the proposed legislation.
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Sen. Barrett reminds us that Montanans have a constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment. Just as soon as she gets her damn cows out of our trout stream we should start listening.
Until then, let's remember that it was DOMESTICATED CATTLE that were responsible for dumping the brucella pathogen into our ungulate population, not the other way around. As such, its the people of Montana, aka the "owners" of our state wildlife, who should have a case against cattle producers for introducing this menace to our native wildlife. That some invasive cattle will occasionally abort their firstborn is of far less concern to the taxpayer, Senator.
If Barrett thinks hunters are going to roll over and allow FWP to relinquish management to the very agency that has f'd bison hunting and management for decades she is gravely mistaken.
What people don't realize is that the livestock industry already has strong control over wildlife agencies, both in Montana and elsewhere in the West, through its historic de facto control over politicians, political institutions, and the political process at the state level. Does anyone doubt that Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks takes its orders from the Stockgrowers and Department of Livestock? It always has. All Barrett's bill would do is simply give DOL a more direct, de jure control over elk as it now has over bison.
Why? The livestock oligarchy is feeling pressure from the diversification of Western society, new people moving to the West who aren't so enamored of cows, cowshit, cowboys, and ranchers and who prefer wildlife--wolves, bears, elk, bison--on the landscape.
In other words, demographic and cultural changes in the West threaten the rancher oligarchy and its illegitimate economic and political privileges in the control of land and land use. Barrett's bill is merely an attempt to bolster the declining power of the rancher oligarchy against loss of power. It has nothing to do with disease.
Wake up people. The so-called brucellosis disease problem in wildlife is actually the brucellosis fraud. The only way to deal with the fraud? Destroy the political power of the livestock industry.
You know I spend a lot of money in Montana when I go there and I don't go to see cows, Montana has lived by the cow and now it will die by the cow. Grandpa said remember where your bread is buttered,but you better have the bread to butter.
Debbie Barrett will only be happy when every elk and every wild bison and every bit of wildlife is dead. Ms. Barrett is an insult to Republicans that believe that Theodore Roosevelt was one of our nation's greatest presidents and the person the coined the word "conservation" with George Bird Grinnell who was the man that helped create Glacier National Park. All of us need to send messages via e-mail to newspapers and statewide radio shows criticizing Barrett's outrageous hatred of wildlife throughout Montana and especially in and around Yellowstone National Park.
Senator Barrett is a typical conservative. She cries about government until she wants the government to take care of her own problems. she is too lazy to fence out her livestock so her solution is to slaughter every elk, deer, antelope, and moose in the state - anything that eats grass. This bill will bancrupt FWP, raise our taxes, quadruple our tag and license fees and kill off our game herds. Every legislative session some nutcase in Helena wants to stick it to Montana hunters and its always some proud conservative republican. The more conservative, the more they want to steal from the rest of us.
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