Dozens of bison have been slaughtered in the mountains of south central Colorado in what police described Thursday as a possible illegal hunt.
Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener said officers received reports Wednesday of several armed men indiscriminately shooting the bison, commonly called buffalo, near a high-country reservoir about 85 miles southwest of Denver.
Deputies were still counting the number of dead animals, as carcasses were strewn across hundreds of acres, Wegener said.
"We're looking at the possibility that this took place on someone's private land, but with someone else's buffalo," Wegener said.
Dave Carter, executive director of the Colorado-based National Bison Association, said the word from his members is that at least 30 buffalo were killed.
Carter said bison ranchers will sometimes do field slaughters of the shaggy creatures, but a wholesale killing is an inhumane practice that no legitimate rancher would undertake.
"Those types of harvests are very controlled — with one or two animals at a time — and this sounds like a random shooting that is completely egregious," Carter said.
Colorado is home to about 14,000 bison, of which about 95 percent are privately owned, Carter said.
Sacred to American Indians and a symbol of the American West, bison herds once numbered in the millions before they were hunted to near extinction in the 19th century.
The buffalo were hunted to make room for railroads, farms and for fur that was sold in the eastern United States and Europe.
