The buffalo can roam, at least on Kodiak Island, the Alaska Supreme Court said Friday in a stern rebuke to the state Board of Game.
The board had previously deemed "feral" any free-ranging bison that strayed from state or federal grazing leases, and in 2007 it authorized a hunt of escapees on Kodiak.
But one of the ranchers sued to stop the hunt, and on Friday -- five months after the rancher's death at the age of 78 -- the Supreme Court overturned a lower-court ruling against him, saying that the Board of Game's definition of feral was arbitrary and had been reached through an unreasonable process.
"It's sort of bittersweet," said Tom Meacham, the attorney for rancher Charles Dorman. "He is not around to savor the victory."
Bison ranching on Kodiak is a relatively recent development in the centuries-long history of livestock rearing on the island. Russians brought the first cattle to Kodiak in the late 1700s, but ranchers lost dozens each year to the island's hungry, gargantuan bears. At one point, latter-day ranchers even resorted to plane-mounted rifles to pick off the bears.
In the 1990s, the ranchers turned to bison as an alternative, according to Larry Van Daele, a regional supervisor for the state Department of Fish and Game. Dorman brought 40 to the island in a barge from mainland Alaska, according to his obituary.
"They're a lot hardier than cattle, and they're more of a herd animal," said Kathy Burton, whose family raises some 500 bison on the other ranch on Kodiak. "My husband used to say there was nothing dumber than anybody except for those that take care of cows."
There was one problem, according to Van Daele: "Bison are not just bear-resistant. They're fence-resistant."
Dorman's state grazing leases included tidal flats, which couldn't be fenced, and sometimes, when driven off higher ground in winter, as many as 150 of the bison would roam off the lease -- allegedly destroying wetlands, and stoking fears that they could wander onto the nearby Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge or infect deer with communicable diseases.
In 2007, the Board of Game fielded a proposal from a member of the public to allow a hunt of Kodiak's "feral, free ranging bison," which Van Daele, in his prior role as a wildlife biologist, called a "surgical strike."
After "lengthy deliberations," according to the Supreme Court decision, the board changed a state rule so that any bison wandering off a state or federal grazing lease was deemed feral. It gave the two Kodiak bison ranchers a two-year grace period to retrieve their animals, and when the Department of Fish and Game prepared to authorize the hunt in early 2010, Dorman filed suit.
In its ruling Friday, the Supreme Court said that the board had erred in deeming Dorman's bison feral in part because it hadn't properly considered that, with only two ranches on Kodiak located far apart, it was clear the roaming animals belonged to him.
The court also said the board failed to consider the circumstances in which it had previously declared another herd of bison as feral, on a remote Aleutian island -- those bison had been roaming free for at least 25 years and weren't under a state grazing lease, and there was no evidence anyone had a valid title to them.
The future of Dorman's bison remains unclear, said Meacham, the attorney, who estimated the herd's current size at about 200.
Whether Dorman's children continue raising them, Meacham said, is "still an open question."
But Van Daele, the Fish and Game supervisor, said that the bison remain a problem, roaming "way off lease" close to nearby homes. And the Supreme Court, in its ruling, didn't rule out a future scenario in which loose domesticated mammals like bison -- even lawfully owned ones -- could be deemed feral.
For now, Van Daele said, "we really hope that whoever owns these animals does the responsible thing and brings them back" -- though he added that wildlife managers still endorse their grazing on state land.
"Bison's darn good meat," he said. "We would encourage this to continue. But like everything else, there have to be some boundaries on it."