Posted: Thursday, November 08, 2012 8:35 AM
Montana considers elk reductions to curb disease
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- Montana wildlife commissioners will weigh in for the first time Monday on a broad plan to protect against animal disease around Yellowstone by reducing the size of some elk herds, hazing them away from livestock and building elk-proof fences.
Those are some of the proposals to curb the spread of the disease brucellosis offered by a state-sponsored citizens working group.
If wildlife commissioners adopt the group's recommendations it would open the plan to public comment.
Brucellosis has been eliminated elsewhere in the country but persists in wildlife in and around Yellowstone National Park.
Bison leaving the park are periodically slaughtered to prevent infections in cattle.
But the region's approximately 100,000 elk are more loosely managed, and numerous elk-to-cattle transmissions occurred over the last decade in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Copyright 2012 The AP.
Comments made about this article
Posted By: Randy Wagner On: 11/13/2012
Title:
Would it not be better to have a better managed plan for livestock roaming free, unchecked on public lands. This will only cause more issues with predation from wolves, whom actually have the right to be there. The wolves take the sick, the weak of the elk herd, the wolf, unlike the human, care not for horns, point counts, they hunt for food, not bragging rights. Reduce the size of the cattle herds, move them back on the ranches, ban the use of public lands for grazing. Seems some backwards thinking there for sure.