Take Action: Protect Yellowstone's Wild Buffalo

Urge the chief of the Forest Service to end the policy of hazing and killing buffalo.

Chief Thomas Tidwell, Forest Service

Subject:

Dear Chief Tidwell,

I urge you to provide more year-round habitat in the State of Montana for Yellowstone National Park's buffalo. I am dismayed by policies that have produced years and years of needless hazing, slaughter and unnatural confinement of buffalo to Yellowstone. The time for change is now.

As the new head of the Forest Service -- one of five agencies that manage Yellowstone's buffalo under the Interagency Bison Management Plan -- you are in a unique position to ensure a better future for Yellowstone's buffalo.

While millions of wild buffalo once roamed North America, the Yellowstone herd is now down to 3,000 animals -- the only continuously wild, free-roaming herd in America. In the spring, some of these buffalo leave snow-covered Yellowstone in search of fresh forage at lower elevations in Montana or to give birth.

But they are, with few exceptions, not welcome in Montana outside the Park. The justification for this intolerance is supposedly concern that wild buffalo may spread brucellosis to domestic cattle in Montana, but there has never been a documented case of transmission of brucellosis from buffalo to cattle in the wild.

Federal and state agencies have cruelly hazed buffalo back into Yellowstone with helicopters, ATVs, snowmobiles and horses. Just last year, more than 1,600 of Yellowstone's buffalo were killed.

This past spring, hundreds of buffalo -- including a newborn calf with a broken leg -- were hazed back into the Park. And the Montana Department of Livestock wasted time and taxpayer dollars hazing buffalo off Horse Butte even though Horse Butte is cattle-free year-round.

Enough is enough, Chief Tidwell.

Yellowstone's buffalo are an iconic symbol of America. It's time to start protecting them instead of letting them be hazed and killed on Forest Service lands.

Please designate suitable Forest Service land outside the Park -- like Horse Butte -- as year-round buffalo habitat. Let the buffalo roam free outside Yellowstone once again!