It gives us great pleasure to share some incredibly positive news with you. Two days after the heartbreaking media tour of Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek capture facility, where one hundred and fifty wild buffalo were “processed” and shipped to slaughter or otherwise condemned, the bulk of the trap was empty and Yellowstone was hungry to capture more bison. Haunted by what we had witnessed there, our hearts sank as large groups of buffalo approached the trap. As expected, Yellowstone park wranglers — those who work at the trap — attempted to capture these buffalo families. First they went after a group of seventy-two buffalo, then another group of thirty. But in a beautiful twist of fate, the buffalo sensed the danger and were determined to save themselves from slaughter. Watch this video to see what happens.
BFC patrols are busy day and night, in every kind of weather, helping buffalo and motorists stay safe on the highway as spring migration brings the buffalo to their traditional calving grounds. Photo by Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign.
As of this writing, there have been no other captures at Stephens Creek. Fifty-seven orphaned calves and yearlings remain captive, with Yellowstone telling us they don’t know how long they will be held or what their fate will be. There are currently no other buffalo near the trap, though the Park Service intends to keep it open through the end of March. Thankfully, the majority of buffalo have left the Gardiner Basin.
West of Yellowstone, in the Hebgen Basin, spring migration is beginning. BFC patrols have been extremely busy from early in the morning through late at night, warning traffic of buffalo along the highways. They are attempting to migrate to their favored, traditional calving grounds on Horse Butte, but there is still a lot of snow to negotiate. We’ve had some very warm days and extremely cold nights, so the snow is like concrete and difficult for the buffalo to navigate or forage through. Their best chances for food are along the south-facing slopes and the river and creek beds, where grass is slowly starting to become exposed. It’s a very difficult time for the buffalo and all wildlife, having survived one of the harshest winters in the lower-48 states and having all their fat stores used up and with the Earth providing very little nutrition as of yet. But buffalo are strong survivors and they will come, bringing the next generation. Wild buffalo should be safe on Horse Butte, thanks to Governor Steve Bullock’s decision to grant some year-round habitat. But, we will not know for sure until the decision is accepted or not at the next Interagency Bison Management Plan meeting on April 6, in West Yellowstone and until we see how the Department of Livestock interprets the decision.
Food choices in the early spring are slim, but this pregnant mama makes due. Photo by Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign.
The buffalo and BFC need you right now. Many of the volunteers who have been with us all winter will be leaving soon due to spring commitments. We are losing a fair number of people just as our busy season begins. If you have the time and desire, please consider volunteering with us. BFC provides room, board, gear, and training to our volunteers — all you need to do is get here. Please check out our volunteer page to learn more. We hope to see you on the front lines in the land of the last wild buffalo!
Last month, the Journal of Sex Research published “Is Pornography Really About ‘Making Hate to Women?’” a paper claiming to find a positive correlation between pornography consumption and feminist attitudes. In its abstract, the Canadian researchers behind the study waste no time making their disdain for radical feminism clear:
“According to radical feminist theory, pornography serves to further the subordination of women by training its users, males and females alike, to view women as little more than sex objects over whom men should have complete control. Composite variables from the General Social Survey were used to test the hypothesis that pornography users would hold attitudes that were more supportive of gender nonegalitarianism than nonusers of pornography. Results did not support hypotheses derived from radical feminist theory. Pornography users held more egalitarian attitudes—toward women in positions of power, toward women working outside the home, and toward abortion—than nonusers of pornography. Further, pornography users and pornography nonusers did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist. The results of this study suggest that pornography use may not be associated with gender nonegalitarian attitudes in a manner that is consistent with radical feminist theory.”
Of course, news outlets have already jumped on the study as proof of radical feminism’s pearl-clutching prudery. But these smug liberals, like the researchers themselves, are mistaken about basic feminist theory. The radical anti-pornography position doesn’t claim men who watch porn are necessarily more misogynistic than men who don’t — only that pornography is a common and effective way men are indoctrinated into misogyny.
Other, equally effective methods for cultivating woman-hate still exist, and most men who don’t watch porn happen to be under the influence of the biggest one around: Religious conservatism. When you take a look at the thousand different ways men might learn to hate women, it becomes obvious that “Men who use porn are less sexist than men who don’t” and “Porn doesn’t make men sexist” are two completely different statements. Drug addicts who use cocaine probably live longer than drug addicts that use heroin. That doesn’t make cocaine good for you.
But this study doesn’t even ask its stupid question well. For one thing, they define a porn user as anyone who has “viewed an X-rated film in the preceding year.” What does that even mean? The vast majority of porn today is watched in short clips online, and most people don’t use either “X-rated” or “film” to describe them. There’s no way of knowing how men taking the survey interpreted the question; I can imagine quite a few porn users wouldn’t consider their fifteen minutes spent on Porn Hub as constituting an “X-rated film.”
It’s also an unacceptably broad standard for declaring people porn users. Under this metric, someone who masturbates to Facial Abuse twice a day is counted as equal with a dude who clicked a sidebar ad for Girls Gone Wild nine months ago. Both are unequivocally wrong, but it’s ridiculous to put them in the same category when you’re doing a study like this. The far more reasonable approach would be to measure frequency of porn use against sexist attitudes and look for a correlation.
This vague language and deceptive grouping are problems, but the study moves from flawed to futile when you look at their measure for sexism. The researchers used four data points as criteria: Support for women in positions of power, support for women working outside the home, support for abortion, and self-identification as a feminist. Really, researchers? That’s your definition of sexism?
If this were 1960, sure, it would be reasonable to gauge misogyny by asking about women having careers and abortions. It would also be reasonable to gauge racism by asking about segregated lunch counters. But neither set of questions would say anything about the world in 2015, when misogyny (and racism, for that matter) have been proudly wed to a rudderless liberalism that embraces those supposed markers of progress.
It’s very, very easy to hate women while still believing they should work outside the home (because Jesus Christ, get off your asses and do something, ladies!) or get abortions (because raising kids is a drag, but who wants to wear a condom?). Even women in positions of power get a stamp of approval from plenty of patriarchs, so long as they pledge to keep the same woman-hating laws in place. Remember Sarah Palin, anybody?
Questions about women working outside the home or holding office might screen for cartoonish patriarchs, but they give a free pass to the average misogynist. The only people who really reject these basic rights are hardcore religious conservatives — who also make up the large majority of men who never watch porn! This reflects a fundamental flaw in this study that borders on unethical: The researchers selectively defined sexism with standards that were most likely to be fulfilled by those in the category of non-porn users. Dozens of other criteria that might catch equally sexist liberal dudes in the porn-using camp were completely ignored.
With all this in mind, the actual thrust of the study is fairly weak. All it purports to show is that men who consume pornography often hold “egalitarian attitudes.” Shaky methodology aside, I don’t doubt that’s true. It’s not shocking to hear that the average porn user, when asked, will tell you he has an “egalitarian attitude” towards the women he uses as masturbation aids. It’s just shocking that these researchers think such an insipid declaration has anything to do with feminism.
Egalitarianism and misogyny aren’t incompatible. In fact, with the exception of some conservative holdouts, the vast majority of anti-feminism today comes from this supposedly worthwhile “egalitarian attitude” — you know, the one that excuses a woman’s sexual exploitation because, hey, she consented; laughs off domestic violence because, if women are equal, that means men can hit them; and eliminates women’s health and social services because you don’t want anyone getting special treatment, do you?
Developing a real understanding of the relationship between pornography, male power, misogyny, and violence requires more than a few yes or no questions. Asking men to self-report if they think women are human beings is not a good way to understand misogyny, and measuring “egalitarian attitudes” is not a good way to gauge a commitment to aiding women’s liberation. This study does have something to teach us, but it’s not that men who watch porn are more likely to be feminists — it’s that a definition of feminism based in “egalitarianism” is so meaningless, even porn-sick men can claim it.
Jonah Mix is a member of Deep Green Resistance and an anti-pornography activist. He runs the blog Gender Detective at Jonahmix.com.
In the time after, the buffalo come home. At first only a few, shaking snow off their shoulders as they pass from mountain to plain. Big bulls sweep away snowpack from the soft grass beneath; big cows attend to and protect their young. The young themselves delight, like the young everywhere, in the newness of everything they see, smell, taste, touch, and feel.
Wolves follow the buffalo, as do mallards, gadwalls, blue-winged teal, northern shovelers, northern pintails, redheads, canvasbacks, and tundra swans. Prairie dogs come home, bringing with them the rain, and bringing with them ferrets, foxes, hawks, eagles, snakes, and badgers. With all of these come meadowlarks and red-winged blackbirds. With all of these come the tall and short grasses. With these come the prairies.
In the time after, the salmon come home, swimming over broken dams to forests who have never forgotten the feeling of millions of fish turning their rivers black and roiling, filling the rivers so full that sunlight does not reach the bottom of even shallow streams. In the time after, the forests remember a feeling they’ve never forgotten, of embracing these fish that are as much a part of these forests as are cedars and spruce and bobcats and bears.
In the time after, the beavers come home, bringing with them caddisflies and dragonflies, bringing with them ponds and pools and wetlands, bringing home frogs, newts, and fish. Beavers build and build, and restore and restore, working hard to unmake the damage that was done, and to remake forests and rivers and streams and marshes into who they once were, into who they need to be, into who they will be again..
In the time after, plants save the world.
In the time after, the oceans are filled with fish, with forests of kelp and communities of coral. In the time after, the air is full with the steamy breath of whales, and the shores are laden with the hard shells and patient, ageless eyes of sea turtles. Seals haul out on sea ice, and polar bears hunt them.
In the time after, buffalo bring back prairies by being buffalo, and prairies bring back buffalo by being prairies. Salmon bring back forests by being salmon, and forests bring back salmon by being forests. Cell by cell, leaf by leaf, limb by limb, prairie and forest and marsh and ocean; they bring the carbon home, burying it in the ground, holding it in their bodies. They do what they have done before and what they will do again.
The time after is a time of magic. Not the magic of parlor tricks, not the magic of smoke and mirrors, distractions that point one’s attention away from the real action. No, this magic is the real action. This magic is the embodied intelligence of the world and its members. This magic is the rough skin of sharks without which they would not swim so fast, so powerfully. This magic is the long tongues of butterflies and the flowers who welcome them. This magic is the brilliance of fruits and berries who grow to be eaten by those who then distribute their seeds along with the nutrients necessary for new growth. This magic is the work of fungi who join trees and mammals and bacteria to create a forest. This magic is the billions of beings in a handful of soil. This magic is the billions of beings who live inside you, who make it possible for you to live.
In the time before, the world was resilient, beautiful, and strong. It happened through the magic of blood flowing through capillaries, and the magic of tiny seeds turning into giant redwoods, and the magic of long relationships between rivers and mountains, and the magic of complex dances between all members of natural communities. It took life and death, and the gifts of the dead, forfeited to the living, to make the world strong.
In the time after, this is understood.
In the time after, there is sorrow for those who did not make it: passenger pigeons, great auks, dodos, striped rocksnails, Charles Island tortoises, Steller’s sea cows, Darling Downs hopping mice, Guam flying foxes, Saudi gazelle, sea mink, Caspian tigers, quaggas, laughing owls, St. Helena olives, Cape Verde giant skinks, silver trout, Galapagos amaranths.
But in those humans and non-humans who survive, there is another feeling, emerging from below and beyond and around and through this sorrow. In the time after, those still alive begin to feel something almost none have felt before, something that everyone felt long, long ago. What those who come in the time after feel is a sense of realistic optimism, a sense that things will turn out all right, a sense that life, which so desperately wants to continue, will endure, will thrive.
We, living now, in the time before, have choices. We can remember what it is to be animals on this planet and remember and understand what it is to live and die such that our lives and deaths help make the world stronger. We can live and die such that we make possible a time after where life flourishes, where buffalo can come home, and the same for salmon and prairie dogs and prairies and forests and carbon and rivers and mountains.
Originally published in the Spring 2016 issue of YES! Magazine.
Let me say upfront: I like fun, and I like sex. But I’m sick to death of hearing that we need to make environmentalism fun and sexy. The notion is wrongheaded, disrespectful to the human and nonhuman victims of this culture, an enormous distraction that wastes time and energy we don’t have and undermines whatever slight chance we do have of developing the effective resistance required to stop this culture from killing the planet. The fact that so many people routinely call for environmentalism to be more fun and more sexy reveals not only the weakness of our movement but also the utter lack of seriousness with which even many activists approach the problems we face. When it comes to stopping the murder of the planet, too many environmentalists act more like they’re planning a party than building a movement.
For instance, there’s a video on YouTube of supermodels stripping, allegedly to warn us about global warming. How better to warn us than for a supermodel to shimmy out of her clothes to the accompaniment of a driving rock beat? The tagline beneath the video says, “No matter what your politics are, I think we can all get behind the notion of supermodels stripping.”
Well, not me. The video reinforces the values of a deeply misogynistic culture, where women’s bodies are routinely displayed for consumption by men, where pornography is a 90 billion dollar industry and the single largest commercial use of the internet. And in a movement that already loses women in droves because they’re objectified, harassed, raped, and silenced by men they’d considered comrades, do we really want to use recruiting tools that further this objectification?
Contrast the supermodel strippers with the Message from Sheyla Juruna, also on YouTube. A spokesperson for the indigenous Juruna peoples of the Xingu River in Brazil, Sheyla Juruna stares straight into the camera and says: “The Belo Monte dam is a project of death and destruction. It will decimate our populations and all of our biodiversity . . . We’ve already attempted various forms of dialogue with the government, doing everything we can to block this project, but we have not been heard. I think that it is now time for us to go to war against Belo Monte. No more dialogue. Now is the time to make more resolute and serious acts of resistance against this project.”
I guarantee that Sheyla Juruna did not become an activist for the fun and sex.
What’s more, the “fun and sexy” approach to environmentalism attempts to mobilize techniques that were developed for selling products toward building a movement. Showing a woman’s orgasmic face as she picks up a bottle of fabric softener may influence some people to purchase that brand. But becoming an activist is an entirely different process from buying fabric softener. The former requires fortitude, discipline, and dedication, while the latter requires four dollars to purchase the “natural brand that makes your laundry fluffy, cuddly, and static-free.”
In the arena of public relations, the U.S. military understands all too well something that environmentalists completely fail to grasp: How many recruiting ads have you seen selling the military as fun and sexy? None. An adventure, yes. Service to the community, yes. The few, the proud, yes. All of which, by the way, could and should be said about activism. Recruitment based on fun and sex will attract those who are in it for the fun and sex. Which means that either there will be a very high rate of attrition among such recruits or, far worse, the activism itself will become superficial enough to retain them. It ought to be obvious but in case it’s not: You can’t build a serious movement on superficiality.
The problems themselves are neither fun nor sexy, and the work of resolving these problems is anything but superficial. Organizing is hard work, sometimes tedious, often enraging, and, at this point in the ongoing murder of the planet, nearly always heartbreaking. Sheyla Juruna’s message isn’t about fun and games. Her message is about life and death — her own, that of her people, and that of the land without whom her people are no longer themselves.
Unfortunately, the notion that activism (they never dare call it resistance) has to be fun and sexy pervades the entire environmental movement, from the most self-styled radical to the most mainstream reformist. I have in my hands the most recent issue of the Earth First! Journal, which includes a photo from the most recent Earth First! Rendezvous (events that have a well-deserved reputation for drunken debauchery) depicting young men and women making a naked human pyramid. Remind me what this has to do with stopping this culture from killing the planet? Can you imagine Freedom Riders making coed naked human pyramids, painting their faces, or bringing papier-mâché puppets to sit-ins?
Or consider a recent campaign involving college students stripping to their underwear (do you see a theme?) and running around their campuses. A promotional article titled “Expose Coal Company Lies — With Your Underwear” begins, “Who doesn’t love a good cause that you can support by taking off your pants?” The “project” is a partnership between the Sierra Club and a “stylish underwear brand” called PACT. The Sierra Club, we are told, reports: “Over the past few weeks, students from coal-powered campuses have already used the underwear line in conjunction with organized events such as flash mobs, where students spontaneously [sic] strip down to their ‘Beyond Coal’ underwear, and a race to renewables, a cross-campus underwear run to advocate for the use of cleaner fuel sources.” An embedded video of the “underwear flash mob” is so thoroughly embarrassing (and depressing) that I truly hope you don’t look it up. Beneath the video, the text reads, “Hats Pants off to the Sierra Club and PACT!”
Do I really need to explore what’s wrong with (and creepy about) Sierra Club leaders and underwear makers encouraging young people to take off their clothes, much less pretending this is activism? I’m thinking about a recent global warming campaign where “3,000 people in New Delhi formed an enormous elephant threatened by rising seas — a plea to world leaders not to ignore the ‘elephant in the room.’” I’m thinking about face painting, and I’m thinking about puppets. And I’m thinking how spectacle supplants reality.
I’m also thinking about a conversation I had with some First Nations people in Vancouver, British Columbia, who described how, during the anti-Olympics protests, some Indian warriors were standing firm, alongside some of their nonindigenous allies, facing down police over the desecration of their lands. And they looked behind them and saw a physical separation between themselves on the one hand, and a big cohort of mostly white protesters on the other. But the separation was far more than physical, because the people in front were all dead serious, and behind them were any number of people wearing bunny costumes or running around in cardboard models of bobsleds.
When and why and how did partying and spectacle and debauchery become a substitute for serious political organizing and resistance? How did taking off one’s pants and running around become a political act? And where does dignity fit into any of this? There is, of course, a role for absurdity in political discourse. But the role of absurdity in political discourse is to ridicule and humiliate those in power, not ourselves.
The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took up arms in defense of their lives. The Shawnee war chief Tecumseh took up arms in defense of his people and his land. Harriet Tubman risked her own life to free her people. We, on the other hand, have a long way to go to form a serious resistance movement.
Originally published in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion.
First published online here.
Wild Bison are an icon of what has been destroyed by civilization, and this species is now on the brink in the wild. Almost all bison left today are cross-breeds held in confinement. There are only a few wild, free ranging bison herds left on the planet, and their numbers are small. Every year, the Park Service — at the behest of ranchers — round up, quarantine, harass, and kill many of the wild bison who live in and around Yellowstone National Park. We stand with grassroots land defenders such as the Buffalo Field Campaign in calling for an immediate end to this atrocious treatment of wild bison. Instead of quarantine, these creatures need room to roam. Instead of harassment, they need our assistance in growing once again to their historical numbers.
Yellowstone National Park has released an Environmental Assessment (EA) for a fifty-year quarantine program which seriously threatens America’s last wild, migratory bison population. Unfortunately there is very little in this EA for bison advocates to support, as even the “no action” alternative maintains the Park’s ongoing capture-for-slaughter program. Comments are due by midnight MDT February 29, 2016. (This is a new, extended deadline.)
Quarantine domesticates wild bison, subjects them to artificial selection and commercial management practices and treats them like livestock. Quarantine is an insult to First Nations buffalo cultures with strong cultural, spiritual, and traditional ties to wild, migratory buffalo in and around Yellowstone. Quarantining wild, migratory bison and dooming them to a life behind fences ignores the critical keystone relationship between wild bison and their natural prairie and grassland communities. Migration is one of the buffalo’s strongest, most significant gifts to a healthy landscape. Quarantine reduces buffalo to a domesticated state, and is not appropriate for wildlife. Quarantine, which imposes a state of control and surveillance over wild bison, is the direct result of the livestock industry’s intolerance. Quarantine is a toxic mimic of natural restoration, a program in which humans manipulate the wild and free to suit their own selfish agendas. Quarantine does not end slaughter, it begins with it, ripping buffalo families apart and orphaning calves who spend the rest of their lives behind fences.
Yellowstone’s ongoing capture-for-slaughter and fifty-year quarantine plan will result in extremely adverse cumulative impacts, and we need to force the agency to seriously and honestly review the best available scientific information in a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).
Recent history has already shown that quarantine does not work for wild bison. The Quarantine Feasibility Study that began in 2005 resulted in wild Yellowstone buffalo being commercially owned for profit, while some of the buffalo who went to Ft. Peck died in a horrible fire because they could not escape their enclosure, and half of the herd that was transferred to Ft. Belknap died because they could not escape their enclosure to find fresh water. Wild bison do not belong behind fences, they are a nation unto themselves who evolved to migrate, wild and free!
TAKE ACTION!Please use the sample letter below only as an example, and in your own words, address the adverse impacts of quarantining wild bison and the Park’s ongoing capture for slaughter mismanagement scheme. Don’t allow Yellowstone National Park to domesticate wild, migratory bison!
HOW TO SEND YOUR COMMENTS: Respondents are encouraged to submit their comments online through the Planning, Environment and Public Comment (PEPC) website at www.parkplanning.nps.gov/BisonQuarantine. Comments may also be hand-delivered to the park administration building, or mailed to: Superintendent, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 82190. Comments will NOT be accepted by fax, e-mail, or in any manner other than those specified above.
SAMPLE LETTER – Please edit with your own remarks! See above for instructions on how to submit your comments. Due by February 29, 2016.
Superintendent Dan Wenk
Yellowstone National Park
Attn: Bison Quarantine EA
P.O. Box 168
Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming 82190
RE: Comments on Yellowstone Bison Quarantine Program EA
Dear Superintendent Wenk,
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on Yellowstone’s quarantine environmental assessment (EA). I am strongly opposed to Yellowstone’s proposed fifty-year quarantine plan as well as the Park’s ongoing capture-for slaughter operations. As an advocate for wild, migratory bison, I find it impossible to support quarantine in Yellowstone or elsewhere, or your no-action alternative to continue capturing wild buffalo for slaughter.
Yellowstone’s proposed fifty-year quarantine plan, as well as the Park’s ongoing capture-for-slaughter operations have significant cumulative negative impacts, which requires your agency to seriously and thoroughly review the best available information in a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement.
The U.S. Congress never intended for wild buffalo in Yellowstone to be declared “surplus” and did not authorize the Secretary of the Interior to remove wild buffalo as “surplus” for quarantine. By regulation, Yellowstone National Park is prohibited from removing “surplus” wild buffalo from the population in Yellowstone “when the animals are to be slaughtered, or are to be released without adequate protection from premature hunting.” 36 C.F.R. § 10.3(d) (2015).
Yellowstone’s fifty-year quarantine program is in direct violation of the Organic Act and National Park Service policies, as it includes capturing wild bison for quarantine with potential recipients including agricultural or commercial producers, reducing ecologically extinct wild bison to livestock.
Wild bison are further adversely impacted by Yellowstone’s proposed quarantine plan and ongoing capture-for-slaughter operations, which aim to reduce America’s last continuously wild herds to a mere 3,000 animals, and maintain this low population, making wild bison extremely vulnerable by threatening their natural immunity to introduced diseases from cattle and elsewhere, including brucellosis. Such poor management practices increase the risk of wild bison becoming more vulnerable to various diseases as strains become more virulent and persistent. Further, the population target of 3,000 is based on livestock industry politics and lacks scientific or ecological basis.
In recent history, Yellowstone’s participation in the state-federal Quarantine Feasibility Study resulted in the commercialization and privatization of wild bison, making a commodity of our nation’s valued wildlife. It resulted in the domestication of wild bison originating from Yellowstone. All of the wild bison who survived the quarantine feasibility study have been reduced to private livestock or meat behind fences, many of which died throughout the process, through transport to other quarantine facilities, or who suffered horrible deaths by fire and dehydration as a result of their confinement.
The recent quarantine program has been a failure. There is no indication that quarantine with the costly, restrictive, and burdensome requirements of the U.S. Department of Agriculture will in any way lead to the recovery of ecologically extinct wild bison as a wildlife species anywhere in the country. Quarantine domesticates. It harms and degrades the wild integrity of America’s last wild bison population and subjects wild bison to commercial management practices and artificial selection.
Indigenous people of North America have held strong cultural and spiritual ties to wild, migratory buffalo for tens of millennia. Some of these relationships are so deep that the people consider the buffalo to be actual relatives. “Offering” indigenous buffalo cultures the return of their relatives through quarantine and capture-for-slaughter can be viewed as a continuation of the U.S. government’s assimilation program, which aims to make cattle out of wild, migratory bison, and livestock producers out of traditionally nomadic indigenous buffalo cultures.
Ongoing capture-for-slaughter operations and the proposed quarantine program are a violation of the treaty rights held by more than twenty-five sovereign, indigenous nations. The harmful programs of hazing, quarantine, and slaughter prevent wild, migratory bison from restoring themselves on their native landscape, including open and unclaimed public lands. These nation-to-nation treaties, which the federal government has a legal obligation to honor, hold that these indigenous cultures have a sovereign right to hunt, gather, and hold ceremony on open and unclaimed lands. Sadly, wild, migratory bison are absent and unavailable on many of these lands due to these bison management practices.
Yellowstone’s fifty-year quarantine plan further harms wild, migratory bison because quarantine has adverse impacts on herd dynamics, social structure, and collective wisdom handed down through generations. Quarantine negatively modifies wild bison behavior in ways that are unnatural and harmful, including continuing pressures of domestication, conditioning to human manipulation, and artificial selection — all tools for managing livestock, not wildlife. Wild, migratory bison are able to take care of themselves, with no cost or need of interference from humans. Wild bison are able to create and manage their own habitat, while bison behind fences invoke restrictive, costly, and burdensome requirements by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Yellowstone National Park’s voluntary agreement to adhere to the highly controversial Interagency Bison Management Plan contradicts the mission of the National Park Service. The Park Service and other IBMP member agencies fail to operate using the best available science and information, falling back instead on expired information and misguided assumptions, in direct violation of the Park Service’s mandate.
Nearly 6,000 ecologically extinct, wild, migratory bison have been killed or eliminated from America’s last continuously wild population with direct and indirect participation from Yellowstone National Park, through capture-for-slaughter, quarantine, hazing fatalities, and the surrender of wild bison for scientific experiment. An independent population viability analysis must be conducted (and funded) by Yellowstone National Park to determine how management actions and consequent cumulative impacts threaten the long-term viability, diversity, integrity, and evolutionary potential of wild, migratory bison. It is also required that an impairment review be undertaken to determine the long-term and cumulative impacts of capture-for-slaughter operations and the proposed fifty-year quarantine program.
There is a win-win situation for wild, migratory bison and indigenous buffalo cultures that does not include the mass killing or domestication of wild bison: natural restoration through the simple and ancient natural phenomenon of migration. Migration corridors must be protected and made available to wild bison by federal, state, and public trust land management agencies, working with private landowners and tribal governments. The migration corridors in and around Yellowstone are a first priority, along with the protection of the bison themselves — both of which are denied under current management. When wild bison are protected and allowed to restore themselves throughout their native range, they will naturally return to the lands that are their birthright, lands they have been forcibly and lethally removed from, where indigenous buffalo cultures are ready to welcome them home.
