Bison hunt not worth the trouble

Representatives of the Fund for Animals and the Buffalo Field Campaign have flat-out promised to raise a ruckus if the state proceeds with the bison hunt this winter.

It's entirely predictable that the state of Montana will get a lot of bad publicity with its reintroduction of a legal bison hunt north of Yellowstone National Park this winter.

The question is whether state wildlife managers should or should not be swayed by advocacy groups that have made Yellowstone bison celebrity animals, worthy of a nationwide defense campaign and outlandish antics, such as throwing animal guts at former Gov. Marc Racicot in 1997.

Representatives of the Fund for Animals and the Buffalo Field Campaign have flat-out promised to raise a ruckus if the state proceeds with the bison hunt this winter.

Apparently, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission is not entirely intimidated.

"I personally do not care if somebody from New York City doesn't like our hunting," snorted commission member John Brenden of Scobey.

The commission voted last week to reinstitute a hunt that was canceled in 1991, largely because of all the ugly publicity it generated for Montana and the state's sizable population of hunters.

Since then, the task of killing bison, or herding them back into the park where there is limited mid-winter feed, has been left to state and park officials. Those efforts, aimed at preventing bison from spreading brucellosis to domestic cattle north of the park, have also generated controversy.

The thinking behind this winter's hunt is that there are able hunters willing to pay for a part in the task of bison containment.

So the commission seems committed to a sort of kinder, gentler hunt with a limit of 25 animals to be taken, with no state wardens serving as guides. Back in 1990, wardens took hunters into the field and pointed them directly to bison that had wandered out of the park. It was indeed distasteful, because there was no semblance of "fair chase" ethics involved with this kind of point-and-shoot "hunt."

This time around, hunters who get the limited number of tags are on their own, and they must hunt in areas where there are no efforts to haze bison back into Yellowstone Park. The bison rights groups aren't impressed and neither are some commission members, who don't think the planned hunt will be effective in managing bison outside the park.

"I personally think this idea for one to 25 permits is ludicrous. This isn't going to make a dent on an elephant's posterior to managing the buffalo problem," said Commissioner Brenden.

So the commission's majority has taken what may be considered a middle-of-the-road stand. Something tells us it's just not going to be worth the trouble.