Humble Germ Pits Nature, Ranchers in a ‘Range War’

Nature can kill; it’s supposed to. That’s the way it works. Nature is not Disneyland, says one of Yellowstone’s caretakers.

Yet up here, where the high summer meadows are a haze of blue lupine and bison and elk amble peaceably among the tourists’ rumbling RVs, a battle of sorts is emerging over life and death being meted out by paper and policy rather than by nature alone.

In this cattleman’s corner of the West, where three states border on the nation’s premier park, Yellowstone biologists who want to let nature enforce its own balances without man’s meddling find themselves butting heads with ranchers who say that nature, in the form of a disease called brucellosis, may kill the wrong creatures.

Some bison from Yellowstone’s thriving herds and elk from government herds to the south, near Jackson Hole, at times wander off to graze alongside domestic cattle, sometimes on public land that is leased to private ranches.

Perhaps half of the bison and elk are infected with brucellosis. And, while a disease that causes abortion or infection in newborn animals may be just another population determinant in the wild, like a hard winter or drought, cattlemen say it is a potential economic disaster for them. The difference, they say, is that weather is beyond control. Disease isn’t.

“The park has always been concerned about the influence of the outside on its values,” said Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) “Some of us are starting to worry about the reverse--that policies inside (Yellowstone) will affect the outside.”

Wallop said he is “all for the park being as natural as one can achieve,” but added that the park “is a neighbor, and has certain obligations to the economic concerns of people around it.”

Beef is about the biggest business there is in these parts. Wallop and senators from all three Yellowstone states--Montana, Wyoming and Idaho--are co-sponsoring a bill to have the National Park Service reimburse Montana the $11,000 it cost to test cattle that were in contact with infected Yellowstone bison last year. No cattle fell sick. Another $150,000 would be used if further testing is needed.

John Story, a Dubois, Wyo., cattleman, filed claims of $1.13 million against several federal agencies after brucellosis forced him to sell to slaughter the Simmental herd he had been developing for 24 years. (Cooked meat from infected animals is considered fit for human consumption.) His cattle got brucellosis, he contends, from infected bison or elk that wandered off government land and grazed with his herd. And one of his ranch hands has come down with undulant fever, a human form of the disease that can cause arthritis even if it is treated with antibiotics.

For Wyoming or Montana to forfeit their brucellosis-free status could mean costly limitations on out-of-state cattle shipment. While some ranchers inoculate their herds against wildlife brucellosis, Montana state veterinarian Don Ferlicka said, it is expensive and offers no guarantee.

But tourism is no back-seat business either, and people don’t come here to see cattle. Americans’ new environmental sensibilities translate into public scrutiny, and Yellowstone is everyone’s favorite outdoor lab.

About 20 years ago, after decades of “micromanagement,” the park switched to an almost holistic, hands-off approach to the Yellowstone ecosystem.

“Our theory is to allow natural processes to occur, protect the ecosystem and let nature call the shots,” said Joseph Alston, assistant park superintendent. Elk and bison, for example, are no longer fed during winter months if their numbers are low, nor shot if they are too numerous.

Some environmentalists contend that bison are sacrificed because elk, which also carry brucellosis, are an important part of Montana’s and Wyoming’s hunting economy.

George Wuerthner of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, an environmental advisory group, has written of “a double standard . . . used to the bison’s disadvantage.” By raw numbers instead of percentages, he computed that there are as many infected elk as infected bison in Yellowstone.

From just two dozen animals 80 years ago, the park’s bison herd has grown to about 2,400. Yellowstone has nearly 10 times that many elk, and an estimated 30,000 other elk are under different state and federal management near Jackson Hole. Infection in those elk runs to 50%, compared to under 2% in Yellowstone. Something like 800 Wyoming cattle in eight years, most of them John Story’s, have turned up infected.

Tom Frantz, of the National Wildlife Federation in Montana, said: “What we have here is the livestock industry flexing its muscle.”

The park is considering bringing back the gray wolf as one way of keeping both elk and bison under control, but “ranchers don’t like natural solutions,” Frantz said. “They want their problems solved, and to heck with everyone else.” Danger to domestic herds from brucellosis, he said, is “more emotion than fact. We haven’t really documented that we have a problem; we have concern about the problem.”

Concern can be as catching as disease. This head-on risk to cattle may put Yellowstone’s management techniques to a test even more severe than did the “let-it-burn” policy toward the fire that raged over nearly 1 million of the park’s 2.2 million acres in 1988--and, incidentally, destroyed some of the bisons’ feeding range, one reason they left the park in such numbers.

Politically, the brucellosis fires may flare as hot as the flames of 1988. Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) scathingly likened protecting brucellosis to protecting cancer--a reference to one Yellowstone theory that if brucellosis is an organism native to the park, it has a place in the park ecosystem, as does the bear or the lodgepole pine.

“We are not here to preserve brucellosis in the ecosystem,” park official Alston said, “but we know we’d never fully eradicate it” in park animals.

In John Story’s home, on the desk below his hunting trophies and a mounted, two-headed calf that was born in his barn, he keeps the hundreds of documents he got through the Freedom of Information Act. They refer to the use of brucellosis as a tool of wildlife population control. One 1968 Interior Department letter notes that Yellowstone brucellosis “is a potential hazard to domestic stock,” but called the chance “remote.”

“They’ve known about it,” Story said. “They were just sitting there with their fingers crossed, hoping nothing would happen.”

Park resource management specialist Stu Coleman said: “One of our tenets is to allow God to play God in Yellowstone, no matter whether he or she uses disease or weather. The flip-side is these parks are not islands. We have neighbors, and if the neighbors are not happy we have to respond to that too.”

To that end the park is casting a wide net, inviting public, even laypersons’ ideas on putting together a management plan.

Park watchers, including Wallop, have argued that Yellowstone lost its wilderness purity years ago and that the hands-off management thus is unworkable and being used as much for political reasons as for environmental reasons.

Alston Chase, whose book, “Playing God in Yellowstone,” explores ecological management, says that brucellosis “may be the political Achilles’ heel of natural regulation.”

For brucellosis runs to larger stakes than livestock infection, and those caught up in the process realize it: Like a minor court decision that sets a vast legal precedent, brucellosis could become the fulcrum that tilts a wider philosophy regarding Western park and public lands.

One proposal would set aside park and public lands as an ecological buffer between domestic and wild herds.

Talk like that worries John Story.

For 24 years, he has raised cattle on 17,000 acres between the Wind River and the red Absaroka hills. He worked to build his herd of 700 into genetically sound beef stock of high repute.

Brucellosis changed that. Calves that should have brought $500 each were sold for $14--less $10 shipping costs.

And 15,000 of his neighbors’ cattle had to be tested too. They all turned up negative, but the testing was only half his neighbors’ worries, Story said.

“They’re more concerned about the environmentalists, and pressure to get livestock off federal land,” land that is leased for grazing in summer while ranchers grow winter feed on their own land. Ranchers have long depended on federal grazing rights, and this problem is opening a can of worms they would rather leave closed.

“They’re afraid that it would speed up that (withdrawing of grazing leases) rather than clean the elk up. It’d put everybody out of business.”

Some Forest Service land, posted along these highways as “Land of Many Uses,” is also--controversially--leased to ranchers at what the congressional General Accounting Office has called below-market rates. “We don’t want to be subsidizing the livestock industry at the expense of the wildlife resource, especially on public land,” Frantz said.

An environmentalists’ slogan for public lands, “Cattle-free by ‘93,” gives cattlemen the shivers.

One ranking park service official asked: “Whose land is it? Is it the wildlife’s land or the cattlemen’s? And are they guaranteed a risk-free environment? Are the wildlife intruding on their area, or vice versa?”