STEPHENS CREEK, Montana — The annual bison harvest is happening just outside Yellowstone National Park’s north entrance.
The process of trapping, shipping and slaughtering hundreds of wild bison is viewed by some Montana tribal members and park biologists as a triumph in wildlife management, while bison advocacy groups decry the annual culling as a “disservice.”
“All of it serves the human, not the buffalo,” Jaedin Medicine Elk, co-founder of Roam Free Nation, said in a statement.
Roam Free Nation and other groups like the Buffalo Field Campaign advocate for allowing bison to follow the species’ natural migrating instincts and roam free outside Yellowstone.
“The buffalo need more protection, more room to roam, not this disservice by a conglomerate of selfish humans,” added Medicine Elk. “Dead or in jail is no way to live.”
Roam Free Nation’s statement went on to accuse Yellowstone of withholding information about the annual harvest, stating that bison managers, “are not sharing how many they have captured. Our volunteers in the area, though, estimate that over 300 buffalo have been captured.”
Some are “in jail,” which refers to a quarantine protocol designed to prevent the spread of brucellosis. Others are shipped to Tizer’s Meats in Helena, where owner Matt Elvbakken leads a butchering team hired by the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes.
Montana tribes hold treaty hunting and harvesting rights, and Elvbakken said from what he can tell, the Salish & Kootenai Tribes in Northwest Montana have the most sophisticated harvesting program.
“They've got a pretty good deal, a pretty good bunch of logistics going to where they got the trucking down. And they got the distribution down and all of that,” Elvbakken told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday. The day before, Elvbakken and his team processed 26 Yellowstone bison. It was hard work.
“I felt like a tank ran over me this morning when I got up,” said Elvbakken, describing how his 9-person team breaks down a bison.
“I mean not all of those guys are wielding knives,” said Elvbakken. “Some are washing the carcasses. Some are weighing the carcasses. Some are pulling out heads and hides that the tribe wants saved. One guy's outside wrangling, running them in, and we’ve got 4-5 guys with knives that are working.”
A 600-pound bull bison breaks down to about 300 pounds of meat, which Elvbakken said is then distributed to tribal members at cost.
“They pay our fee and then they pay for the trucking,” said Elvbakken. “But it's significantly less than if they have them processed.”
This year, the animals arriving at Tizer Meats appear well fed and healthy, said Elvbakken, but that’s not always the case.
“These buffalo are in the best shape of any I've seen in all the years we've been doing it,” said Elvbakken. “Usually they're very emaciated. There's not one bit of fat on them, and you can count their ribs or you can just about play the xylophone on their ribs.”
Bison move through the facility at Stephens Creek. (National Park Service) 
Wild Yellowstone bison are trailered off by the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, with security along the way provided by the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service), according to the group Roam Free Nation. “This year the buffalo met their end at Tizer Meats in Helena,” reported the group in a Mar. 10, 2025, statement. (Photo by Cindy Rosin) 
Bison move through the facility at Stephens Creek. (National Park Service)
Sustainable Sweet Spot?
The 2024 Yellowstone National Park Bison Management Plan, which sets the ideal population level for buffalo migrating in and out of the park at 3,500-6,000 animals, currently faces lawsuits from the state of Montana and conservation groups.
In the state’s lawsuit, attorneys representing Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte’s administration assert that maintaining a bison population over 3,000, the park is violating its “Year-round Habitat for Yellowstone Bison Environmental Assessment (2015 Expansion Decision)” that, “Did say, multiple times, that the population target of 3,000 would not be changed, regardless of the spatial expansion.”
Groups like the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, the Cottonwood Law Center and the Council on Wildlife and Fish take a maximalist approach to “spatial expansion.”
They criticize Yellowstone’s brucellosis quarantine program as outdated and ineffective.
“After 20 years of implementation, the most aggressive and controversial tool ‘capture and slaughter’ has failed to reduce the percentage of Yellowstone bison that annually tests positive for brucellosis antibodies,” Steve Kelly of the Council on Wildlife and Fish said in a January press release.
The release went on to note that tens of millions of wild bison once roamed across western North America. Today, wild bison occupy less than 1% of their former range.
Protest Continues
The Buffalo Field Campaign is a nonprofit group based in West Yellowstone, Montana. But this time of year, the Field Campaign stakes out the open meadows and slopes around Stephens Creek north of Yellowstone between Gardiner and Corwin Springs, Montana.
A two-person Field Campaign team is now monitoring the bison roundup at Stephens Creek, just outside the YNP boundary.
“Every buffalo that migrates out is being rounded up,” Justine Sanchez, president of the Field Campaign, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.
Sanchez said the Field Campaign observers use binoculars to monitor the roundup and described what they see.
“Right now at Stephens Creek, we see close to 400 buffalo. You see park rangers on horseback, the buffalo rounded up and hazed into the capture facility,” said Sanchez. “In the trap. That's what we call the capture facility.”
“It's the conundrum of buffalo wanting to migrate out of the higher elevations just like every other wildlife species,” said Sanchez, adding that she expected more shipments out for slaughter.
Tizer’s Meats told Cowboy State Daily it anticipates more YNP bison soon.
“It’s astounding to me that blindly continuing the failed status quo management structure of Yellowstone wild buffalo is the best we can do to preserve and restore our buffalo,” said Dallas Gudgell, vice-president of the Buffalo Field Campaign in a Tuesday statement. “Tribal co-stewardship has proven successful in other federal land and species initiatives.
“Rather than continually teetering on the brink of extinction we could allow tribes to bring traditional ideas of managing for abundance.”
Yellowstone park bison program coordinator Chris Geremia offers a more optimistic take on the status quo and vision for the future spelled out in the 2024 Bison Management Plan.
“That’s the model that was generally developed for buffalo conservation,” said Geremia in a video produced by YNP. “That’s not the model we use for wolves or elk or trout or eagles. Yellowstone still represents that leading edge of, ‘Is it possible to put big numbers of buffalo back on big wide open landscapes… and have them move back and forth across boundaries?”
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
