Are game-proofing fences the answer?

Ranchers in Paradise Valley say they need a fence to keep the elk out.

They fear brucellosis, a disease elk carry, will threaten their herds.

Brucellosis has been documented in elk and bison in the greater Yellowstone area since the 1930s.

Ranchers have run cattle in the valley longer than that.

So what’s changed now?

The valley is certainly different than the first time I saw it in 1970. I was working that summer for an outfitter in Cooke City and drove into Livingston in early September to drop off a friend at the Murray Hotel.

We arrived in town late in the evening and by the time I headed the truck back toward Cooke dark was falling. I still remember how few lights there were in the valley and how vast and remote it felt as I drove south.

It was mostly sprawling ranches then. Now it’s mostly sprawling subdivisions of ranchettes and summer homes from one end to the other.

There are still cattle, but I suspect there were more then.

And the elk have always been there.

Now ranchers want the state to put up game-proof fencing, paid for with sportsman dollars, and extend management hunts into May. If not, they say, it will spell the end of the cattle business as they know it.

Cattlemen have been preaching gloom and doom ever since the 1980s when disease-carrying buffalo began wandering out of Yellowstone National Park.

Although there has never been a documented case of wild bison spreading brucellosis to cattle in a natural setting, the argument remains the one ranchers hang their hats on.

Then in 2011, six animals in a Park County cattle herd tested positive for the disease. Since they had not been exposed to bison, it was suspected that elk were the culprits.

So I suppose that’s what’s changed.

But that’s not all.

Here’s another possibility.

The reintroduction of wolves may be part of the problem. Elk didn’t used to spend as much time as they do now in the valley. They’d winter on the lower slopes and follow the snow line back up into the mountains as spring progressed. Then wolves were added to the mix and they apparently “redistributed” the elk. Now elk avoid the wolves by spending more time among cows and people.

This of course is simply my speculation, totally unscientific in scope and probably far off base.

It’s just that when there were no wolves, fewer people and a lot more cattle and elk in the valley, this wasn’t a problem.

Parker Heinlein is at

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