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Livestock Agents Slaughter America's Last Buffalo

© Connie Troutman

Buffalo Field Campaign
P.O. Box 957
West Yellowstone, Montana  59758
406-646-0070

Livestock Agents Slaughter America's Last Wild Buffalo

For Immediate Release, March 30, 2005
Contact Stephany Seay, 406-646-0070

West Yellowstone, Montana.  Early this morning, two horse trailers driven by the Montana Department of Livestock (DOL) carried eight of America's last wild genetically pure buffalo to a slaughterhouse after leaving the private residence of Dale Koelzer, while three yearlings were taken to a quarantine facility, and three others were released at Horse Butte, according to a U.S. Forest Service law enforcement agent.  DOL spokesperson Karen Cooper delayed releasing the information from her department.  BFC field volunteers documented agents who shot and killed an injured, pregnant lead buffalo that had been holding her own for nearly a month, during a hazing operation on Horse Butte today.  Her body was dragged behind an agent riding a snowmobile to a flatbed truck where she was then dropped at the local dump to be incinerated like trash.

Late Easter Sunday, under the cover of darkness, Department of Livestock agents captured fourteen wild buffalo that had been attempting to migrate towards the Horse Butte peninsula, national forest land surrounded by water and devoid of active grazing allotments.  The livestock agents made only a single effort to haze the buffalo back into Yellowstone National Park.  Buffalo are migratory animals and after being chased back into the Park, they resumed their migration along the Duck Creek drainage.

For the past three weeks DOL agents have been disrupting the migration of wild buffalo by baiting them out of Yellowstone National Park with fresh hay into a buffalo trap they operate on private land only a few hundred yards from the park border.  Last week the DOL baited and captured six bull buffalo - that pose zero risk of transmitting brucellosis - and sent half to slaughter. The actions of the past two weeks portend a bleak future for the hundreds of buffalo that will attempt to reach their calving grounds at Horse Butte in the coming months.  

Inhumane Treatment
BFC volunteers witnessed the livestock agents jabbing the buffalo in the trap with long sticks, poking them with electric cattle prods, and turning around to laugh at BFC volunteers documenting the treatment of the buffalo.  Livestock agents routinely use electric cattle prods and sticks, chase the buffalo with Bobcat tractors inside the trap, hoot, holler and taunt the frightened buffalo while walking above them; all typical behavior.  The Interagency Bison Management Plan explicitly lists various standards of humane treatment that the agents are recommended to follow, but they don't.   The techniques of the Department of Livestock agents indicate a blatant disregard for the well being of the buffalo.