As wildlife advocates push to restore new herds of wild, free-roaming buffalo across the West, they have been held back in Montana by the presence of the cattle disease brucellosis in Yellowstone bison, the only large, genetically pure, free-roaming herd remaining on its historic lands from a territory that once ranged from Canada to Mexico.
Enter billionaire Ted Turner, the largest private landowner in the U.S. and, with 55,000 bison of his own, the owner of the largest private buffalo herd in the world. Under an experimental program getting underway this spring, Turner is housing a quarantined test group of 87 Yellowstone bison at his ranch near Bozeman, Mont.
The program, under sponsorship by the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, is an attempt to see whether a brucellosis-free stock of Yellowstone bison can be nurtured, a landmark step toward repopulating the West with truly wild buffalo — not the bison mixed with cattle genes that are typical of the many fenced herds around the country.
Full story: U.S. Bison: Experiment aims to rebuild wild bison herds – latimes.com