A few months ago I wrote about the absurd justification for hunting in that it taught you a respect for life. In the latest Harpers‘, Christopher Ketcham writes about the culling of the Yellowstone bison herds because they might impact on the marginal profitability of the cattle herds which by the way are being supported by free access to government (read public) lands, supported by American taxpayers to the tune of about 120 million dollars a year (the most conservative estimate).
The cattleman associations around Yellowstone complain about the possibility of interspecies infection despite that according to the Trade Environment Database “there has never been a verified case of brucellosis transmission in free ranging bison to grazing cattle.”
I won’t go into too much detail here, get a copy of the magazine and read the rest (as with every issue, there’s plenty more in there worth reading as well). It has one of those passages that is both wondrous and tragic, reminiscent of those descriptions of passenger pigeons blotting out the sun for hours as they passed overhead. And then the next year none.
Between 1870 and 1880, at least 10 million buffalo, and possibly as many as 20 million, were killed. Two hundred thousand hides were sold in Fort Worth in a single day. West of Fort Dodge, Kansas, it was said, one could walk a hundred miles along the Santa Fe line hopscotching the dead. Army Colonel Richard Dodge, stationed in Kansas in 1873, wrote that “the air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.
Once again, we never seem to run out of reasons for saddling up, grabbing a rifle, and taking out a few of a population that really cannot afford to lose any members.
1 comment so far ↓
Thanks for writing this - it’s even MORE absurd than what you write. More than 1,600 were killed this winter; well over half the herd died when you count winter kill. Then, many more were kept (hundreds) in a capture facility and fed hay for months while others starved to death. Hundreds just last week were forced off a peninsula with absolutely no bison along Hebgen Lake, hazed even off of private property AGAINST the wishes of the property owners (who want bison there) and back 10 miles into the park.
Then, the government spent millions of dollars on a deal north of the park with the Church Universal and Triumphant for grazing rights on land for only 25 buffalo that are going to be tested for brucellosis, marked, the females fitted with vaginal transponders, and then forced back into the park after April 15 for access to an area with already a public right of access. This has been hailed as a “huge step forward” by large environmental organizations who have sold out buffalo in order to protect Gov. Schweitzer of Montana whom they strongly support - though he oversees the mass murder of these buffalo.
West of the Park, as I mentioned, buffalo are killed and hazed from an area where there are no cows ever at any times of the year and where the locals want the buffalo. It’s crazy.
This is not about brucellosis and never has been - it only becomes more clear every year that it’s about land use ideology, making sure that bison never compete for grass that might one day be used by the cattle industry.
So, thank you for writing about this.
Jim Macdonald
Buffalo Allies of Bozeman
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