Denny Rehberg: “the last speaker and the sponsor of this amendment act like nothing has been done over the last few years to try and…”

“the last speaker and the sponsor of this amendment act like nothing has been done over the last few years to try and manage the herds within Yellowstone Park. I can say that that is the farthest thing from the truth. This is 10 years of hard work. We have had agencies that disagreed, we have had States that disagreed, we have gone to court and sued each other and finally through the good sense of the Clinton administration and Bruce Babbitt, they signed a memorandum of understanding on the management of the park bison and they took it out of the court. In fact, they took it to court, and the court agreed with this memorandum of understanding. To make the statement that it has never been passed in the wild, that is ludicrous. You cannot manage something like that because you would have to see the cow lick the aborted fetus of the bison and then immediately kill the cow and test it. We do have proof that brucellosis has been passed from bison to elk. We do have proof that in captivity brucellosis has been passed from bison to cattle. This is also a human health issue. There are people all over this country and in the State of Montana that carry undulant fever, brucellosis; and they get it from these animals.”