Controversial buffalo hunt starts in Wyoming

By Laura Zuckerman

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - For the first time in nearly a decade, hunters on Saturday begin tracking and killing buffalo on the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where federal wildlife managers plan to cut the herd from 1,200 to 500 over the next five years.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say buffalo at the refuge, home to one of the nation's largest free-roaming herds of the symbol of the American West, must be killed because of overgrazing and because they carry diseases that could be transmitted to domestic livestock.

The hunt aims to cull 300 buffalo -- also called bison -- by December.

The move has raised concern in the upscale community of Jackson, where the lure of the jagged peaks of the Teton Range and wildlife-watching draw tens of thousands of tourists each year. It also has alarmed animal groups, which say shooting creatures accustomed to humans is far from sporting.

"Hunting these bison is like hunting parked cars," said Jonathan Lovvorn, a vice president of the U.S. Humane Society and attorney with the Fund for Animals.

Buffalo were hunted nearly to extinction in the United States' westward expansion, by the late 1880s leaving only a few hundred of the huge animals that had numbered more than 60 million and sustained the Great Plains Indians.

The Fund for Animals was behind a 1998 lawsuit that suspended a plan to thin the herd significantly through hunting, a moratorium lifted last month by a federal judge. While the refuge approved limited hunting of bison in the years before the lawsuit, no hunt in its history has approximated the magnitude of the season that starts on Saturday.

COMPETITION FOR FORAGE