Buffalo Field Campaign
THE LAST WILD BUFFALO: NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST
~ Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign ~
Yellowstone National Park - National Park Service
USDA-Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service
Gallatin National Forest – U.S. Forest Service
Montana Department of Livestock
Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife & Parks
These are the Interagency Bison Management Plan cohorts who are clearly conniving to drive wild bison to extinction.
The latest schemes concocted by these state/federal agencies include an additional late-season hunt and sterilization experiments. These proposed actions provide more links in the government’s chain of doom for wild American
buffalo. The agency officials and their so-called scientists are skilled masters of spin; they rule the pulpit, guilefully and condescendingly laying down their Little Red Riding Hood lies that these actions will somehow benefit wild buffalo…. “Trust us, we’re the government.”
We trust that wild bison will vanish at the hands of these monsters.
Current Situation
Shooting down wild bison at the border of Yellowstone National Park under the guise of a “legitimate hunt” has been a Montana tradition since Brian Schweitzer became Governor. It was hailed by Montana officials as a change of course from government capture and slaughter, yet the agencies – and the media – repeatedly fail to convey that the so-called hunt has always been in addition to the chasing, corralling and killing of the gentle giants. They just craftily figured out a way to have hunters do some of the killing for them. After nearly six years of Montana’s “hunt,” wild bison still have no access to year-round habitat; they have yet to be even considered a wildlife species in the state, and continue to be woefully mismanaged with your tax dollars for the sole interests of cattle producers. During the hunt and after, Montana and federal agencies repeatedly chase wild bison out of their native Montana habitat or round them up like livestock, holding them in veritable feed lots or shipping them to slaughter like cattle. Now the bison-blood thirsty government wants to expand the hunt and is – again – spinning the facts in an effort to convince the public that this one will serve as “an alternative” to the indiscriminate nightmare of capture and slaughter. To the buffalo, it is still slaughter. To the government, it is business as usual, and from the mainstream media, it’s the same boilerplate baloney that keeps the people asleep and the status quo cozily in place.
Montana’s current bison “hunt” begins November 15 and ends February 15, the latest and longest running hunt for any big game species. Montana issues state hunters up to 144 tags, while there is additional hunting pressure from at least three First Nations tribes hunting under Treat Right.
Now the IBMP government agencies want to kill (at least) an additional 360 wild buffalo.
More Killing Planned by Government Agencies
Bowing once again to pressure from Montana’s livestock interests and Governor Brian Schweitzer, the IBMP agencies are seeking to enact “selective culls” of the beloved gentle giants in an effort to reduce their already dwindling population. Fewer than 3,700 wild buffalo exist.
So, the agencies are now planning on killing, rather than reacting to the buffalo’s migration. This is pre-meditated murder of wild buffalo by the government. The selective culls would include an extended “hunt” as well as capture and slaughter, and also capture with the intent to transport (eventually, perhaps) to other lands.
Birth Control for Endangered Wild Buffalo?
Couple the proposed selective culling with the most recent plotting by the IBMP’s USDA-Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS): sterilization experiments, using GonaCon chemical injections and performing hysterectomies on cow bison, in added attempts to further reduce the already ecologically extinct population. GonaCon was developed by APHIS -- the federal overseer of the livestock industry -- as a means to control pests and overabundant wildlife. Wild bison fall into neither of these categories. Neither the government agencies nor the media will tell you that bison population control was rejected as an alternative in the Interagency Bison Management Plan Record of Decision and Final Environmental Impact Statement, signed in 2000, because environmental impacts would be "too significant to be within the reasonable range of alternatives." The IBMP agencies clearly rejected population control because of significant harmful impacts to wild buffalo.
Yet, last May, when public pressure forced IBMP officials to release nearly 800 wild buffalo held captive in Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek bison trap, fifty-three of these buffalo watched from behind the double-electric fence of Corwin Springs as their families were let go: Breaking his promise to the public, Yellowstone Superintendent Dan Wenk consigned them to APHIS without any public notice.
APHIS is trying to sneak this plan through under the guise of "research," using wild American bison from the Yellowstone population as test subjects. APHIS has already made its decision without conducting an Environmental Impact Statement and public review. APHIS states that they will be conducting an Environmental Assessment, which under federal law they are required to do, but they have already sequestered wild buffalo with full intention of carrying out their nefarious plans.
Wild bison do not need the government’s “help” in controlling their diminishing population. The Yellowstone herds – the country’s last continuously wild herds – are the last wild buffalo, with fewer than 3,700 individuals in existence as of this writing.
The Quarantine Conundrum & Brucellosis Baloney
Another IBMP agency project, in existence since 2005 and carried out by APHIS and Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, is the ill-conceived Quarantine Feasibility Study, which aims to “create a [brucellosis]-free herd” of buffalo to be placed on public and/or tribal lands. For this scheme, wild bison calves were stolen from their homes and families (who were shipped to slaughter from inside Yellowstone National Park) and sent to a domestication prison where they have been raised as livestock and treated as scientific guinea pigs. This project has failed miserably, in part because it was a bad idea to begin with, and also because the responsible agencies failed to plan ahead, and when the first group of buffalo from this missionary-type study were ready to be moved to public or tribal lands, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks balked at any reasonable proposal and instead sent the buffalo to billionaire Ted Turner. Turner, in exchange for “housing” these once-wild buffalo gets to keep 75% of their offspring as compensation!
Brucellosis – the European livestock disease introduced to North America with cattle – has always been the “reason” for such harsh treatment of native wild buffalo. Numerous wildlife species carry brucellosis, and livestock officials have repeatedly blamed elk for transmitting it to cattle, yet elk are free to roam. Outside of laboratory settings, there’s never been a bison-to-cattle brucellosis transmission! Brucellosis itself poses no threat to wild buffalo, as they have developed immunity to the disease; but the politics are killing them. Livestock interests have craftily used the brucellosis excuse to maintain control over land use and wildlife, driving multiple and despicable mismanagement schemes that rule over this sacred animal, and so many others.
Buffalo Field Campaign and other wild buffalo advocates have been calling foul on the brucellosis argument for years, and ranchers have recently exposed this truth themselves. Over the summer, Montana attempted to again move some quarantined buffalo to public lands in Montana. But, not even these “certified brucellosis-free” buffalo are welcomed by cattle interests. Ranchers thought up all kinds of new excuses – including the fear that buffalo may eat your children! -- to oppose the native bovines’ chaperoned return to their habitats. The issue driving the buffalo wars has never been about brucellosis; it is a centuries-old range war over the grass and who gets to eat it.
Sadly, many who support the quarantine (domestication) of wild buffalo do so because they believe it is the only way that buffalo will be accepted on the landscape again. Tribes are also being force fed the government propaganda that this is the only way that buffalo from Yellowstone can return to Native lands. Some also believe that quarantine is critical because the genetic purity of the Yellowstone population is so important to preserve, and falsely believe by quarantine will safeguard this somehow. While the Yellowstone population is blessedly free of cattle genes, “genetic purity” is not the only thing that makes a wild buffalo a wild buffalo, and quarantine is definitely not the answer to wild buffalo restoration.
Quarantine snuffs out the wild integrity of these prehistoric giants, robbing wild buffalo from their habitat and families, of their timeless, ancestral wisdom passed down from elder to youth, generation after generation. It prevents buffalo from following their migratory instincts, alters their behavior, and stops them from fulfilling their critical ecological role. In essence, quarantine prevents buffalo from being buffalo.
The WILD – self-willed – aspect of buffalo is equally as important as their genetic makeup, and it is the combination of these things – the holistic buffalo - that make the Yellowstone population so unique, and crowns them as the only buffalo population to hold their identity as a wildlife species.
Endangered, Ecologically Extinct Wild Buffalo Need Your Help!
The wild American buffalo (Bison bison) is ecologically extinct throughout their native habitat, living in less than 1% of their historic range. By all measures, wild buffalo are endangered and not to be treated like overpopulated 'pests' and chemically neutered or culled.
The Yellowstone bison population includes America's last continuously wild herds, and is the last population that still follows its migratory instincts. As unique native herbivores that evolved across the North American continent, bison can help restore the native grasslands, sagebrush steppes, and prairie ecosystems that are considered to be some of the most endangered habitats in the world. At the dawn of 7 BILLION human beings swarming the Earth in reckless abandon, it is not the last remaining herds of wild American buffalo who need population control.
Buffalo Field Campaign Working in Defense of Wild Buffalo – Join Us!
Buffalo Field Campaign has been working in the field and the policy arena for fifteen years, in defense of America’s last wild buffalo. BFC urges you to join with us in our efforts to protect and naturally restore wild buffalo to their native homelands, on the buffalos’ own terms. Holding government agencies accountable, dismantling the IBMP and changing the status quo, protecting wild buffalo so that they may flourish and realize their evolutionary potential, opening up habitat where there is plenty of room for buffalo to roam, creating wildlife migration corridors that will allow for the natural movements of these nomadic mammoths to return to all areas of their historic range, restoring the sacred relationship between buffalo and First Nations buffalo cultures, and, ultimately, learning to co-exist with the rightful roamers of North America: these are some of the visions that, with your help, we can realize together. BFC urges you join us on the front lines and to help spread the word to save these sacred herds!
Please visit www.BuffaloFieldCampaign.org or email bfc-media@wildrockies.org for more information, updates and ways you can help defend and protect America’s last wild buffalo. ROAM FREE!
