HELENA – Nearly 50 of the 88 bison that have been held in a quarantine compound outside Yellowstone National Park were loaded in large stock trailers Wednesday morning for the two-hour ride to their new home on Ted Turner’s ranch.
“The first three trailers just left,” Turner’s ranch manager, Russ Miller, said in a phone interview shortly before noon Wednesday. “This is exciting. It’s a big step toward conservation of Yellowstone bison.”
The remaining 40 head were to be loaded onto three more trailers Wednesday, Miller said.
The Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks and Turner Enterprises Inc. reached an agreement late Tuesday for Turner to care for the bison and their offspring for the next five years on a 12,000-acre fenced section of his Flying D ranch south of Bozeman, said spokesman Ron Aasheim.
Under the agreement, Turner Enterprises will return the surviving original bison and 25 percent of their offspring to the state. Turner Enterprises will be allowed to keep 75 percent of the offspring in exchange for caring for the animals. Montana would get an estimated 150 bison back in 2015.
The bison were spared several years ago from a periodic slaughter of the bison leaving Yellowstone because of concerns over animal disease. The bison being moved to Turner’s ranch have repeatedly tested negative for brucellosis, a disease that can cause cattle to abort.
The initial plan was for the brucellosis-free bison to be moved to public or tribal lands, but Montana turned down requests from a Wyoming state park and at least two American Indian reservations that wanted some or all of the bison.
Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer invited Turner to submit an offer to care for the animals last fall, after an earlier plan to move them onto a Wyoming reservation fell through.
Turner, founder of CNN and former owner of the Atlanta Braves, already owns more than 50,000 bison at sites across the country, including 4,500 at the Flying D. The menu at his restaurant chain, Ted’s Montana Grill, includes bison burgers, ribs and meatloaf.
Conservation groups, a coalition of tribes and U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinarians opposed the proposal as privatization of public wildlife.
“There are other alternatives that could have kept all of the bison, including the offspring, in public or tribal herds, rather than trading some of them away to a private corporation,” said Summer Nelson of Missoula, an attorney for the Western Watersheds Project.
State and federal agencies have spent up to $250,000 annually on the quarantine program since 2005. Nelson argued that there may be some organizations willing to compensate Turner Enterprises for caring for the bison, rather than giving him 75 percent of the offspring.
“There were a lot of people that wanted them on public lands. We’re not ready,” Montana wildlife chief David Risley said earlier this month. “The Turner option, all it does is buy us time to come up with a long term solution.”