Living in a country of such incredible beauty as
ours, every one of us has a bucket list of things to see and do in these United
States.
Ranking high on many people’s lists is one day
visiting Yellowstone National Park. Those of us who want to visit the park hope
to see the things that make it so special – like Old Faithful and the vast
subalpine forests, and the incredible wildlife such as wolves, elk, antelope,
grizzlies, and bison.
It’s that last animal that intrigues me the most.
Seeing Yellowstone’s healthy herds would transport
my thoughts to the days of yore and certainly improve my understanding of their
former greatness.
In the early-1800s and before, populations of this
magnificent animal numbered 30 million or more across North America. It had to
be a sight to see and something to feel – the ground actually shook when vast
herds, like a sea of brown, traversed the grasslands.
Now, the bison population is only at a half-million,
with just 30,000 available for viewing on public land. Of them, 5,500 can be
found at Yellowstone. Those buffalo are special, too: they are genetically
perfect, the largest remaining band of wild, pure-bred bison.
Even so, they are marked beasts.
For years, state and federal officials have worked
together to cull the Yellowstone herd. Since the 1980s, their programs have killed
a total of 8,800 Yellowstone buffalo. This year, they plan to undertake the largest
killing of the bison since 2008’s massacre of 1,700 animals. Over the winter
months, wildlife officials plan on eliminating 900 of them between licensed
hunts and government-run capture and slaughter.
They conduct these kills every year to keep
Yellowstone’s heard at so-called manageable numbers. It is believed that were
the bison numbers to grow too much past the goal of 3,000 animals, they would
adversely affect the profits of local ranchers who, by the way, are using adjacent
public – not private -- lands on which the buffalo herd migrates to and from.
For starters, it is believed that the wild animals
would overgraze, taking away precious grasses from the cattle. Secondly, it is
assumed that larger bison herds would roam into that ranchland and stay, in
turn afflicting cattle with brucellosis…although no occurrence of a
bison-to-cattle transmission has ever been recorded.
This has to stop. But, it’s difficult to make an
impact in a state where the cattle industry has greater lobbying power and
influence than its citizens. Various conservation organizations have tried to
change public policy to no avail. Lawmakers have turned a deaf ear to those
who’d like to see the bison prosper. Lawsuits against the cull have gone
nowhere.
Usually this column staunchly defends farmers and ranchers,
but I can’t in a case like this where profit ranks higher than wild animals
that were supposed to be protected at Yellowstone and the vast tracts of public
land that the cattlemen are using.
This isn’t a practice that’s abnormal to American
history, either. In the 1800s, profit was also placed above the natural value
of the bison (and the health of Man) when railroad barons and our own federal
government ordered the mass execution (even extinction) of the beasts to make
good on Manifest Destiny by starving out the Native Americans and/or changing
their culture until it was totally unrecognizable.
By 1884, only 25 bison remained in Yellowstone and
just 325 in all of what are now the United States.
Have we not learned from that lesson of
government-sponsored population control?
From the 19 December 2016 Greater Niagara Newspapers
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