Viewpoint: Yellowstone National Park betrays wild bison
Stephany Seay
Yellowstone National Park recently announced that they intend to remove — mostly kill — nearly 1,400 of the country’s last continuously wild, migratory buffalo. That’s 25% of the population.
The mission of the National Park Service (NPS) is to “preserve unimpaired the natural and cultural resources” of the National Park System for this and future generations. Capturing buffalo for slaughter and quarantine (domestication), and encouraging excessive “hunting” outside park boundaries is in stark contrast to that mission and should be considered illegal. The park betrays their mission by betraying the buffalo.
Wild buffalo are ecologically extinct throughout their native range and the Yellowstone herds are currently being considered for Endangered Species Act protection by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Yet every year, going against public opinion and ecological soundness, Yellowstone officials play a fatalistic numbers game with these endangered buffalo.
Yellowstone had a chance to end capture-for-slaughter when they released their new bison management plan. Out of three alternatives, one would have put a halt on shipping buffalo to slaughterhouses and would have allowed for natural regulation. This alternative — Alternative 3 — was supported by 75% of the people and organizations who participated in the public process.
Instead, they chose Alternative 2, which keeps buffalo slaughter in place, and greenwashes it by calling it the “Tribal Food Transfer Program”. Huh? It’s slaughter. It also increases the quarantine (domestication) program, which also has a new pretty name, the “Bison Conservation Transfer Program”. A lot of people wrongly believe that quarantine is an alternative to slaughter. The fact is, many buffalo who go through that domestication program are slaughtered in the process or die from human handling.
In both cases, wild buffalo are lured into Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek buffalo trap, where they are moved into smaller and smaller pens, and then pushed into the guts of the trap where they are run through a squeeze chute where their blood is drawn to test for the livestock disease brucellosis.
Buffalo who test “positive” are shipped to slaughter. Buffalo who test negative may be put through the quarantine program. A “positive” test result DOES NOT mean that the buffalo has brucellosis. Actual infection can only be determined by culture tests, after a buffalo is already dead. Nine times out of ten a “positive” test result means the buffalo has antibodies to brucellosis.
Yellowstone is killing buffalo who have resistance to brucellosis. In the squeeze chute, buffalo are so terrified they buck, kick, and jump, so when the park employees attempt to close the chute, they often break off the buffalo’s horns. After the squeeze chute, they are put into pens with buffalo of similar age. Torn from their families. Calves cry out for their mothers.
Adults – many pregnant females – are so afraid they sometimes gore each other. Then the stock trailers come and buffalo are crammed into these metal coffins and driven for hours until they reach their the ultimate final destination – the slaughterhouse. Or they are trucked over to the quarantine pens where they say good-bye to freedom and family for the rest of their lives.
The Montana Department of Livestock doesn’t even have to do a thing anymore. They’ve got Yellowstone and various Tribes doing their dirty work for them.
Stephany Seay is the co-founder of the Montana-based Roam Free Nation. Learn more at www.RoamFreeNation.org