An animal-rights group's request for a court order preventing the shooting of bison wandering outside Yellowstone National Park should be thrown out because killing the animals does not endanger the species, a state lawyer says.
In court papers filed with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Assistant Attorney General Will Hutchison argued the shooting of more than 800 bison over the last seven years has not jeopardized the park herds.Yellowstone bison number more than 3,000, a historic high, and the population needed only three years to recover the killing of 569 animals in the winter of 1987-88, he added.
"The killing of these bison does not, in and of itself, constitute irreparable injury," Hutchison wrote.
For such harm to occur, the species would have to be irretrievably damaged and that has not happened according to National Park Service biologists, he said. Without proof of irreparable injury, the Fund for Animals cannot obtain a court order blocking the shooting.
The organization sued the state and federal government a year ago, asking a federal judge for an injunction against a joint bison management plan that uses Montana game wardens or park rangers to shoot animals that wander from the park in search of winter food.
By the end of December, 127 bison had been killed this winter as they left the snowy park.
Some of the animals carry brucellosis, a disease that can cause cows to abort their calves when spread through mingling of livestock and bison.
U.S. District Judge Charles C. Lovell of Helena refused the Fund for Animals' request for an injunction last Jan. 27 and the group appealed to the circuit court in San Francisco.
Last month, the fund asked the appeals court to expedite the case and issue an emergency order against further killing of bison.
Hutchison said Thursday the court had not yet ruled on the requests.
Without evidence of irreparable harm to the bison herd, the appeals court must uphold Lovell, he said in his brief filed with the court.
"It can hardly be logically argued that the continued viability of bison in (the park) has been or will be irreparably injured when the bison herd population is at an all-time high and the herd has demonstrated its ability to more than repopulate whatever of its numbers are reduced by Montana's control actions," he wrote.