How are these buffalo not like the others?
Unlike most buffalo that you've ever seen in your life, in roadside pens and on farms and ranches (or on your plate if you've ever ordered a bison burger), these are real bison -- genetically pure and not mixed with cattle DNA.
They're refugees from Yellowstone National Park -- where about 3,300 bison hold the distinction of being the largest genetically pure herd left in the country, and the only one that has remained continuously wild.
Being wild means they're not particularly good at following human-made maps and boundaries, and Yellowstone bison frequently wander out of the park. When they do, they're either forced back in by armed men on horseback and in helicopters, or slaughtered to make sure they don't spread a disease to cattle (even though there's no hard evidence of wild bison ever transmitting the feared disease, known as brucellosis, to domestic livestock).
But this particular group of Yellowstone bison, currently being held in a Montana quarantine pen, was spared as part of a scientific study. One intention of that study was to find them a new home on public land or a tribal reservation, to help repopulate genetically pure bison throughout the West.
For a group of bison this special, that's turned out to be a lot harder than you'd think.
Hillary Rosner tells the story of the homeless herd -- and why they're likely to wind up on Ted Turner's private ranch instead of public land -- in a new article for NRDC's OnEarth magazine.
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So, the Turner plan smacks of government collusion with private industry. Turner profits off a public resource to take a problem momentarily off of the hands of government (the bureaucracy has never known what to do with these quarantined buffalo, and most bison advocates don't think they should have been quarantined in the first place). Turner will greatly benefit by improving the genetic stock of his herd; the state gets virtually nothing but time to kick this problem down the road. There are other quarantined buffalo as well ... and supposedly plans for more ... instead of letting the buffalo onto public lands that are available right in Greater Yellowstone, they farm buffalo, and then ship them off to groups either ill-suited to handle them (somewhat dysfunctional tribal governments) or to private entrepreneurs like Turner.
In the end, the only thing to do is to leave them alone and put the onus on the livestock industry to take care of their own cows.
Originally, the first bids for these animals - I call them les miserables - went to the Northern Arapahos, who live on Wind River alongside the Eastern Shoshone. However, at the last second for mysterious reasons, they backed out. So, Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, who run this ridiculous program, said that they would take new bids or have to kill the animals. A couple zoos and a couple tribes sent in applications, and then Ted Turner made this proposal to take them onto a portion of his Flying D Ranch.
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I want to share an email to my dad, who asked me from Ohio about the Turner proposal. Before I paste that in, I want to let your readers know that two winters ago, more wild buffalo were killed by the federal government (esp. National Park Service) and the state of Montana than at any time since the 19th century, when more than 1,600 buffalo were killed. Another 100+ calves were put into this quarantine program. Volunteers on the ground with Buffalo Field Campaign - see http://www.buffalofieldcampaign.org - have for more than a dozen years been on the ground working for the buffalo and documenting their struggle and the brutality against them.
Anyhow, there's so much to say about this, but to the quarantine in particular, here is what I wrote my dad - and it fills in some of the factual details missing here ...
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