Kill Bison Herd? Wildlife Dispute Erupts in Canada

Residents of this Northwest Territories town of 2,000 like to call the spruce forests and salt plains spreading out around them “the cradle of bison recovery in Canada.” For about 4,000 bison roam the meadows near Ft. Smith, and virtually every wood bison in the world today can trace its ancestry back to this herd.

This year, however, the so-called cradle of bison is slated to become a bison graveyard. Veterinary pathologists want to track down each and every one and shoot them dead.

The proposal, made in the interest of animal health and genetic integrity, has led to one of the most contentious wildlife-management disputes in North America.

“I don’t think you take a herd of bison that have been there for a long time and just wipe them out,” said Walter Freund, a cattle rancher who also runs a lumberyard on the road leading into Ft. Smith. “Hitler tried to do that with the Jews.”

Ft. Smith is the headquarters of Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park, a Switzerland-sized tract of exotic topography set aside in 1922 as a preserve for a tiny remnant of the 40 million to 60 million buffalo--bison, to give them their proper name--that once roamed North America from Mexico to the sub-Arctic.

The save-the-bison intentions of the day were sound, but since the park was founded, it has become a sort of dumping-ground for other bison that got in the way of expansionist cattle ranchers elsewhere in Canada. When the new bison were shipped to the park, they muddied the local gene pool and brought in tuberculosis and brucellosis, a chronic inflammation of the reproductive organs that causes females to miscarry. The diseases have been traveling from beast to beast ever since.

Today, Wood Buffalo Park’s bison are not only the world’s largest free-roaming herd but also the sickest. And their illnesses are contagious.

Stacy Tessaro of Agriculture Canada, the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, thinks it ironic that the very herd established to save the species from extinction now poses what he calls “the greatest single threat to the survival of the wood bison.”

Tessaro and other animal scientists figure that if all these infected bison were killed, then a small number of healthy--and genetically pure--bison could be brought in to multiply and repopulate the park, disease-free. The threat would be gone.

A panel of bison experts has been studying the plans and is expected to announce a verdict this spring.

Park rangers say Agriculture Canada’s idea is like pledging to kill every cow in Switzerland. But Tessaro, who spent four years autopsying bison in the field, is standing by his guns.

“I don’t think we have a choice,” he said, quoting a Chinese proverb to make his point: “You sometimes have to cut off the finger to save the hand.”

This line of thinking does not sit well with Frank LaViolette, a retired bulldozer operator living in Ft. Smith. “I’m a diabetic,” he said. “(Therefore) I should be shot.”

Ft. Smith, a one-time capital of the Northwest Territories that now gets by mainly on tourism, is crowded with opponents of the bison kill-off. They paint ghastly verbal pictures of bison hunters marauding by helicopter above their wild, unspoiled landscape. They call Agriculture Canada’s proposal “the Armageddon option.”

If any animal has suffered at the bungling hand of the white man, it is the bison. From about 1840 to 1890, millions upon millions of these animals were killed by white men, some for food, some for hides, some just for fun. Thrill-seeking sportsmen were encouraged to roll across the prairies by train, blasting the beasts from open windows and leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun.

Government officials did little to stop the slaughter, since it had a useful side effect: By killing the bison, hunters brought into line the troublesome Plains Indians who relied on the animals’ meat and hides for food and shelter.

By 1890, the U.S. population of bison had been reduced from millions to about 280. Canada had an estimated 550 left.

It was an Indian, a Montana native named Walking Coyote, who unwittingly kept the near-extinct bison on the map. Historians say he cheated on his wife, and then, on the way home, got the idea of bringing her not a dozen roses or a box of bonbons, but six bison calves as a peace offering. His angry in-laws were unimpressed and threw him out, calves and all, but Walking Coyote kept the bison, tended them and eventually sold them to an animal lover.

In the United States, conservationist instincts had been growing as the bison population shrank. But all the same, white men never seemed able to reconcile their pangs of conscience with their urge to raise beef cattle on the bison’s stomping grounds. Cattle ranchers moved out across the great grasslands, and by 1907 even Walking Coyote’s little clutch of bison, which by then numbered 700, was in the way. It was sold to the Canadian government, whose agents shipped the animals to southern Alberta.

In Canada, government researchers pressed the bison into the service of the beef industry. They tried to breed the bison with cattle, in a futile quest for a sturdy steer that could be left on the range throughout Canada’s harsh winter. All the breeders could come up with were some strange-looking, infertile animals, and the project was dropped.

But the bison, historians say, had caught tuberculosis and brucellosis from the cattle. And they had incurred the wrath of Canada’s ranchers who, like their counterparts to the south, felt that the bison were grazing away good, productive rangeland.

According to Clayton Burke, a part-time college ecology instructor in Ft. Smith, the farmers were saying: “Hell, why should we have those damned buffalo there? We should have Holstein cattle.”

In 1925, to mollify the ranchers, the government began loading the southern Alberta bison onto barges and floating them up the Athabasca River to Wood Buffalo Park, where they were to share the forests and salt flats with the existing wood bison herd. Zoologists warned that in solving one problem, the transplant would create others.

The bison from the cattle country of southern Alberta were Plains bison, they said, known to specialists as Bison bison bison . They are generally smaller and lighter in color than the full-blooded wood bison in Wood Buffalo Park, which are known as Bison bison athabascae .

The zoologists argued, as they do to this day, that the two types of bison make up distinct subspecies. They forecast that after the transplant, Plains bison would breed with the wood bison, give birth to hybrids and pollute the world’s only pool of pure wood-bison genes.

They said further that the Plains bison would pass on to the Wood Buffalo Park herd the diseases they had caught from the cattle. Their pleas were ignored and, in the end, all their predictions came true.

“Dumb!” said Agriculture Canada’s Tessaro. “It was really a stupid thing.”

To make matters worse, the cattle ranchers who had pressed so vigorously for the bison’s eviction would end up leaving the area too. Today it is a military base.

Zoologists thought the pure wood bison had been hybridized into oblivion, but in 1957 rangers discovered 200 of them hidden in a remote corner of the park. Their excitement turned to delight when tests showed that not only were the beasts true wood bison, seemingly brought back from extinction, but they were free of tuberculosis and brucellosis. Eighteen of the purebreds were bundled out of the park, and a new preserve, the Mackenzie Bison Sanctuary, was established for them about 60 miles to the north.

While all this was transpiring up on the 60th Parallel, veterinarians to the south went to work on Canada’s cattle. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and killed nearly 400,000 steers, and in 1985 they declared Canada’s cattle brucellosis-free. This year, they hope, tuberculosis will disappear as well. That will leave only the bison sick.

Meanwhile, drought has come to southern Alberta. Descendants of the cattle ranchers who had lobbied to have the bison banished to the north in the 1920s looked around for greener pastures, literally. They found them at Ft. Vermilion, a flat, lightly forested area just 60 miles southwest of Wood Buffalo Park’s boundary.

“We have virtually 24 hours of daylight here in the summer, and the grass is lush,” said Burke, the Ft. Smith ecologist. “The cattle far outgrow anything from southern Alberta. When these cattle hit the market, they’re choice animals.”

With just one problem: They are perilously close to Wood Buffalo Park’s sick bison. Now cattle ranchers fear that just one bison, roaming outside the park, could undo all those years of costly veterinary work and bring back bovine brucellosis. And worse, said Tessaro: If the sick hybrids of Wood Buffalo Park were to wander on up to the Mackenzie Sanctuary, they might corrupt the last pure gene pool of wood buffalo left in the world.

“If diseases break out in the Ft. Vermilion area, it will cost us millions and millions of dollars, but we’ve wiped out brucellosis before and I think we can do it again,” Tessaro said. “But if disease breaks out in the Mackenzie Sanctuary, we’re sunk. There’s no amount of money, nothing we could do, to save that herd.”

Wild animals, he explained, cannot be isolated, vaccinated and treated the way cattle can.

Such concern for bison on the part of an agriculturist comes across as crocodile tears in Ft. Smith, where opponents of the “Armageddon option” point out that the bison have been sick for 60 years, and no one seemed to care until cattle got within range.

All sorts of theories fly in Ft. Smith today. A common one has it that Agriculture Canada’s plan to kill all the buffalo is merely the first stage of a scheme to roll back the park boundaries and bring in cattle.

“Ridiculous,” Tessaro said.

All of which leaves Freund, the lumberyard owner and rancher whose cattle graze just across the frozen Slave River from the diseased bison, square in the middle.

Standing out in bright, sub-Arctic sunshine on a recent afternoon, he said that while he knew the disease was a threat to the Canadian cattle market, he could not imagine the bison crossing the ice to mix with his steers.

“It’s not their beaten path,” he said. “Might be instinct to stay off the ice. My heart tells me one thing, and my head tells me another, so I’m a very confused guy.”