Saying brucellosis "does not belong in our future," Suzanne Lewis, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park pledged Monday to work with Montana's Board of Livestock to eradicate the disease.

Lewis also said the issue is complicated and must not boil down to "livestock versus wildlife." She said eliminating the disease is so complex, both ranchers and conservationists must work in concert to expunge it.

"Just as wildlife is not more important than livestock, livestock is not more important than wildlife," she said.

Lewis' remarks to the board came almost two months after a second case of the disease appeared in Montana livestock. That incident will cost Montana its official brucellosis-free status, making it more difficult to export Montana cattle to out-of-state markets.

Brucellosis is a disease of cattle, bison and elk. It causes cows to abort calves. The disease has largely been eliminated from the American cattle herd, but remains in bison and elk in and around the park, where the wildlife contracted it from neighboring cattle.

Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, along with the National Park Service and other agencies, have long managed bison in the park to decrease the odds the animals will spread the disease to domestic animals. Those efforts cost Yellowstone more than $1 million a year, Lewis told the Montana Board of Livestock Monday, and have resulted in the slaughter of more than 6,000 wild bison who roamed outside the park.

Recent outbreaks in Montana and Wyoming, however, point to elk as the most likely source of the disease. Currently, there are no formal plans for dealing with elk and brucellosis, although federal officials earlier this month announced they are considering capturing or killing infected elk within the park.

An estimated 95,000 elk live within the Greater Yellowstone area.

Lewis said federal researchers are expected to unveil later this year a new study looking at ways of remotely vaccinating bison against the disease. She said all entities in the debate should rally around developing better vaccines and better ways of administering them to wildlife. She said all sides should find places outside the park where bison can be welcome when they roam beyond Yellowstone's borders, as they've been doing for generations.

Lewis also said all sides must banish the rhetoric and myths that currently polarize the debate over brucellosis. She said bison are never going to repopulate the Great Plains, as some might like, but neither are they going to be rounded up and eliminated.

She specifically quashed several well-circulated myths about Yellowstone and bison: that the park is "overgrazed" and bison leave the park because they have nothing to eat and that Yellowstone ought to keep its bison herd to 3,000 animals. Currently, about 2,400 bison live around and in the park.

"Just like other wildlife, bison migrate beyond the park boundary in the winter because food is easier to get in the low country," Lewis said. "Our nation's highest scientific court has found no evidence to support claims of catastrophic overgrazing."

Later in a question-and-answer period with members of the board and audience, Lewis said she is not trying to keep the population of bison at 3,000 animals -- a number written about in the current bison management plan. Lewis said that number merely sets out how the animals will be managed; it does not require the park to limit the number of wild bison.

As for elk, Lewis said "we're going to cooperate with the state in figuring out what (the next step) will be."

Lewis said her appearance at the meeting was set well before Montana's second brucellosis case.