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A judge in Motana has ruled that if wild bison wanders out of Yellowstone National Park into the nearby Horse Butte in search of food then cattle ranchers can’t demand that they be hazed back.
By virtue of this judgment an adaptive management plan is implemented that is designed to allow the buffalo to forage in early spring neat Yellowstone,.
However, homeowners on Horse Butte have joined Natural Resources Council and the Greater Yellowstone Coalition has sought to allow the bison to expand their range onto the Butte.
The Montana Stockgrowers Ass. had filed a suit seeking to require officials to drive the bison back into the park. The butte doesn’t have any cattle but bisons are sometimes able to wade across to adjacent pastures that are stocked with cattle.
"This is one of the few times that the ranchers of Montana have ever been turned back when it comes to management of bison," said Tim Preso, who argued the bison defenders' case for Earthjustice in Bozeman, Mont.
Gallatin County District Judge John C. Brown does not dismiss the case of the rancher as well which will be heard later but it does leave the new strategy of allowing bisons to graze a few miles outside the park.
Ranchers are apprehensive that allowing the bison outside the park can have devastating consequences. Many fear that opening the door will somewhere also expand to wild bison deep into the park.
"We're obviously disappointed in the preliminary outcome," said Errol Rice, executive vice president of the stock growers association.
But the management plan is "only one piece of this very complex brucellosis puzzles," Rice said, "and we're going to continue to work toward finding a solution."
Ranchers are also hoping for easing in regulations that will require the cattle owners to slaughter their entire herds. Conservation groups say that the emerging science shows that there is limited threat from bison to cattle near horse butte.
Keith Aune, senior conservationist for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said,"If we can't recover things like prairie dogs and burrowing owls and black-footed ferrets, it might be because we don’t have this other species sculpting the land.
Prairie birds are in the steepest decline of all other birds, partly because the species that sculpted the land is gone. And cattle can't replace that," Aune said.
Matthew Skoglund, wildlife advocate for the NRDC, said that the plan to free up land outside the park to establish once again free roaming herds of wild bison which are unconfined by the fences.
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