GAO (congressional agency) report rips the bison slaughter.
By Ralph Maughan On April 3, 2008 · 3 Comments · In Bison, Politics, Yellowstone, Yellowstone National Park

Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
3 Responses to GAO (congressional agency) report rips the bison slaughter.
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Join 972 other subscribersRecent Posts
- The Logging Juggernaut June 6, 2023
- New Bison Video From Yellowstone Voices June 5, 2023
- We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate. May 31, 2023
- Wildfire And California Home Insurance Challenges May 27, 2023
- Grizzlies Get A Win On Upper Green May 26, 2023
Recent Comments
- Ida Lupine on New Bison Video From Yellowstone Voices
- Jeff on The Logging Juggernaut
- Charles Fox on The Logging Juggernaut
- Maximilian Werner on New Bison Video From Yellowstone Voices
- Steve Kohlmann on We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate.
- Ida Lupine on We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate.
- Kevin Bixby on We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate.
- Lyn McCormick on We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate.
- Jannett Heckert on We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate.
- Rick Meis on We Lost Jim Bailey–Wild Bison Advocate.
- Ida Lupine on Save Our Sequoias Act–A Stealth Attack On NEPA, ESA and Our Sequoia Groves
- Mary on Save Our Sequoias Act–A Stealth Attack On NEPA, ESA and Our Sequoia Groves
- Rambling Dave on Wildfire And California Home Insurance Challenges
- Ida Lupine on Wildfire And California Home Insurance Challenges
- Mary on Wildfire And California Home Insurance Challenges
“It’s been clear for some time now that the current (bison-management plan) is not working,” Rahall said in a prepared statement.”
A more accurate statement would be that it is been clear for sometime that the plan has not been implemented–you have to implement the plan in order to judge whether it works.
The main point the GAO report missed is that the agencies have never had any intent to implement the so called “adaptive management” aspects of the plan. The intent all along has been to prevent bison access to Montana and to accomplish this through intensifying bison “management” through hazing, capture, testing (sometimes), slaughter, quarantine, and vaccination. The proposed RB51 vaccination “experiment” with bison inside the Park is simply one more aspect of the determination to keep bison inside the Park and use any tech-vet means to accomplish that.
The Park is claiming that the vaccination program is coming late because of concerns over the effectiveness of RB51, a cattle vaccine, in bison. That’s not wholly true. I’ve talked with the biologists and the main problem with the delay is that the Park lacks adequate quantitative baseline pre-vaccination data on the amount of Brucella abortus organisms shed into the environment with which to compare post-vaccination data. That is, the Park has no scientifically valid basis of comparison for this particular experiment. What that means is that they have no experimentl. The Park has been trying to get around this “little” problem by trying to develop a very complex statistical analysis package to massage what little pre-vaccination data they do have. Would anyone care to predict just how valid that will be?
And in any case, vaccination is a sham from the get-go because the diagnostic tests for brucellosis seroprevalence have never been and still are not and are not likely ever to be adequate for bison, a fact which the scientists all know, so in fact, we actually don’t know the degree of seroprevalence and certainly infectiousness in bison. So how is anyone going to claim that RB51 works?
By lying about it, that’s how.
It doesn’t matter because the intent of the IBMP is bison control, not disease control.
Finally, someone in the Government can see what’s really going on in Yellowstone.
I hope this is just the first step on the road to recovery for the Tatanka Oyate.