The Baiga tribespeople have been repeatedly harassed and told that they will have to move from their villages to a muddy clearing outside the reserve, even though there is no evidence their presence in the reserve is harming tigers. Such evidence is required if the tribe’s eviction is to be lawful, but in fact the number of tigers in the reserve reportedly rose from 12 to 28 between 2011 and 2015.
One Baiga man from Rajak village said: “We don’t want to go, we can’t go. What should we do?”
A local witness told Survival: “There is nothing around the new site for them, nothing will grow in the land, there is no water and they won’t be able to take anything from the forest. That’s why they are so adamant that they won’t leave, because if they go they will just die out.”
Some have been told that if they don’t leave their ancestral land, guards will release bears and snakes into their villages. Others have been arrested and harassed – in 2009 one man was jailed for three months for eating a squirrel he had found dead on the forest floor.
Those who have already been evicted from Achanakmar now live in inadequate government camps and face lives of poverty on the fringes of mainstream Indian society.
One Baiga person from Chirahatta village, which is facing eviction, said: “They’ve been placing restrictions on us for two or three years. They don’t let us live. They take us to jail and threaten us. They are harsh and strict. They put us in jail for nothing. If we say anything they threaten to put us in jail. They are making it difficult for us to live.”
Across India, tribespeople are being illegally evicted from tiger reserves, despite there being no evidence that their presence harms tigers. They face arrest and, in some places, beatings, torture and even summary execution for trying to re-enter their ancestral land, while large-scale tiger-spotting tourism is encouraged.
Last year, Survival learned that tiger numbers had increased at well above the Indian national average in BRT, the one reserve in India where tribes have been formally allowed to stay on their land, demonstrating that tribal villages within wildlife reserves do not pose a substantial threat to tigers or their habitat.
Survival has written to WWF, the world’s largest conservation organization, which equips and trains the forest guards in the region.
Evidence proves that tribal peoples are better at looking after their environment than anyone else. Despite this, they are being illegally evicted from their ancestral homelands in the name of conservation. The big conservation organizations are guilty of supporting this. They never speak out against evictions.
Survival’s director Stephen Corry said: “It’s illegal and immoral to target tribes, who have coexisted with the tiger for centuries, when industrialization and mass-scale colonial-era hunting are the real reason the tiger became endangered. It’s also ineffective, because targeting tribespeople diverts action away from tackling the true poachers – criminal gangs. Big conservation organisations should be partnering with tribal peoples, not propping up the Forest Departments that are guilty of brutalizing them. Targeting tribal people harms conservation.”
Last week’s report and photos about what we, and the buffalo, experienced during the two-day media tour of Yellowstone’s bison trap could barely scratch the surface of the horrible things we witnessed. This brief video footage will bring you much closer.
On March 8th and 9th, Yellowstone National Park organized a media tour of their Stephens Creek bison trap, where 150 wild buffalo were being held captive for slaughter and potentially quarantine. All of what you see taking place here is paid for with your federal tax dollars. Some of the footage was shot by BFC’s Mike Mease and some was captured by the Park Service’s GoPro cameras. One hundred fifty of America’s last wild buffalo were run through the gauntlet of Yellowstone’s Stephens Creek capture facility; 93 buffalo were shipped to slaughter by the InterTribal Buffalo Council and the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, both of which are signatories to the Interagency Bison Management Plan. Another 57 buffalo — all orphaned calves and yearlings — are still being held in the trap.
Every person working at the trap is employed by Yellowstone National Park. The Montana Department of Livestock has Yellowstone trained so well, that the Department isn’t even present except when escorting buffalo to the slaughterhouses. These acts by Yellowstone National Park are horrific and criminal. There should not even be such a facility inside the world’s first national park, much less anywhere else. There is no justification for the Park Service to commit these atrocities. Yellowstone justifies its actions under the banner of the Interagency Bison Management Plan, which it could pull out of anytime. They may face a lawsuit by livestock interests if they did so, but, so what? So much new information has come to light, so much change has come to the landscape, and such a groundswell of public support has emerged for wild, migratory buffalo, that a lawsuit might be hugely beneficial. The callous behavior of Yellowstone Park Rangers and biologists who are harming the buffalo reveals the gross disconnect that these people have from the sacred beings whom they are charged with protecting, and how wantonly they are willing to betray, not only their mission, but the sacred buffalo that the whole world expects them to protect.
This video will break your heart. After watching, you will want to do something. Here are a few suggestions:Share this video with everyone you know, send it your local and regional media, and share it with the White House and your members of Congress. Tell them all to visit Buffalo Field Campaign and learn more.
Many thanks to the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the rest of our stellar legal team who made this media tour possible by representing BFC’s media coordinator Stephany Seay and journalist Christopher Ketcham in a lawsuit to gain full access to the trap. Showing the world even this brief glimpse of what Yellowstone is doing to the beloved buffalo — in service of Montana cattle ranchers — will bring us that much closer to putting an end to this madness, and bringing this trap down.
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.
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.
Featured image:A young bull buffalo walks the hills in the Gardiner Basin. Photo by Stephany Seay
Based on what we witness in the field everyday, the killing taking place near Gardiner could more accurately be described as a slaughter than a hunt. The tribal game wardens we have spoken with agree, and they recognize that Montana’s livestock interests have organized the circumstances to shift blame away from themselves to the tribes. There is obviously something terribly wrong when every last buffalo to migrate through Beattie Gulch ends up dead, or when hunters feel so desperate to kill every buffalo they see. Whether or not tribal hunters view their hunts as supporting the larger management scheme, the Interagency Bison Management Plan (IBMP) government agencies and affiliated tribal entities certainly do. There is no moral or scientific justification to the idea, perpetuated by the management agencies, of “surplus buffalo” and safeguards allowing buffalo safe passage between Yellowstone and Montana are sorely needed.
We have never and will never stand against treaty rights, but we maintain a steadfast opposition to the current management that uses hunting as a means to eradicate the buffalo. As currently practiced, the hunt is an extermination plan set up by livestock interests to ensure that buffalo never reclaim the lands that are their ancestral home and birthright. It is fundamentally wrong and immoral for hunters to be led to believe that if they don’t kill the buffalo in this way, that they will just be slaughtered anyway.
This little buffalo calf was shot in the leg by hunters at Beattie Gulch. He survived and somehow managed to run off, escaping through nearby private land; but his leg was shattered. A Montana game warden shot him to end his suffering, then with assistance from a Montana Department of Livestock stock inspector and U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer, he was hauled out from his resting place along the Yellowstone river. As if to reward this unethical hunting behavior, the agents ended up giving him to the hunter who wounded him. Photos by Stephany Seay (above) and Deleana Baker (below), Buffalo Field Campaign.
So long as buffalo die, the livestock industry and the governments don’t care who does the killing or how. Contrast this to the tens of thousands of elk in the region who have been implicated in the transmission of brucellosis, and yet no one is claiming that there are “surplus” elk and no one is targeting them for transmitting disease to cattle. The welfare ranchers don’t want to lose their foothold on control of the grass, so the buffalo, whom they view as competitors, must die. Hunters are in fact serving livestock interests no matter an individual hunter’s intentions.
The buffalo death toll is quickly rising. More than fifty of the country’s last wild buffalo have been killed by hunters since we last wrote. Mid-week, over five-hundred buffalo migrated into Montana, nearly all at once, through Beattie Gulch at Yellowstone’s north boundary. Being in the midst of this ancient phenomenon is at once one of the most beautiful and most heartbreaking experiences. The migration of hundreds of buffalo is such a beautiful sight, a flow that has purpose and integrity, so simple in its power, timeless and perfect, seemingly unstoppable; but this ancient march is also heartbreaking because it leads so many buffalo straight to their deaths.
As we expected, word of this migration spread quickly, and hunters arrived en masse that night, the following day, and through the weekend. We expected a massacre, but through the course of days, the majority of the buffalo threatened to cross various lines, edging towards areas where they could be hunted, only to retreat in the nick of time. Frustrated hunters were driving all over the Basin, even through the Park, following us, glaring at us, wanting to blame us, looking for buffalo that they could kill, but finding few. Those few were gunned down rapidly at the Park boundary, in acts of haste and desperation. Many have been shot and wounded, fleeing into Yellowstone where hunters cannot pursue them, left to die slowly or walk forever with bullets in their flesh.
By Sunday, frustrated and determined to get their buffalo meat, hunters in pick-ups and on foot crowded around the park boundary, watching a family group of about thirty buffalo slowly make their way towards Beattie Gulch. The firefight that ensued that morning ended life for twenty-eight of those buffalo; the eight survivors, two of them shot and wounded, fled up the mountain and away with their lives.
Images from the slaughter at Beattie Gulch, described above. Photos by Deleana Baker, Buffalo Field Campaign.
Make no mistake: BFC fully supports treaty rights and tribal sovereignty, yet our first priority is to the buffalo. What is taking place here is an extermination plan, and hunters are being used. We have to work in solidarity to demonstrate this, to end livestock control, and to get the buffalo — through migration — back on the landscape, in great numbers so that the proper, respectful relationships can be restored. Buffalo will take care of the people, but the people need to take care of them first. They need our help.
This whole Plan — which treaty hunting is certainly a part of from the government’s viewpoint, and all the discussions and decisions that happen within the IBMP — is in place to harm the buffalo and to keep them from restoring themselves across the landscape. We need to put our collective energy into fighting the IBMP and the law that places the Montana Department of Livestock in charge of buffalo in Montana. We must acknowledge that wild buffalo are ecologically extinct, and the IBMP is using hunting as well as slaughter and hazing to facilitate their destruction, to prevent their restoration.
Catcher Cuts the Rope, Gros Ventre (A’aninin), looks into the formidable enclosure where quarantined Yellowstone buffalo now reside on the Ft. Belknap Indian Reservation. Photo by Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign.
The same can be said of quarantine, which is a management tool for livestock, not wildlife. Again, livestock interests present “choices”: dead buffalo or buffalo behind fences. Yellowstone National Park is aiming to develop a fifty-year plan for operational quarantine, making the process of domesticating wild, migratory buffalo an entrenched aspect of bison management. To be free or caged in is not an option in the wild world, it is a human option. Quarantine is something to satisfy the human; an easy way out, a toxic mimic of true wildlife restoration. It is a means to control what should be free. Quarantine is also part of the brucellosis lie, the premise being that bison pose a brucellosis threat, which we know to be untrue. Should elk be quarantined also? Elk have brucellosis but roam free.
The quarantine process begins with buffalo families being torn apart, adults shipped to slaughter, calves orphaned and raised in domestication. Then, those who survive the human-handling and testing of the quarantine process will live behind fences for the rest of their lives. We have seen the buffalo who suffered “living” in quarantine; they were not happy, they looked to get out of those pens. They were humiliated and afraid. Many of them have died horrible deaths because they could not escape their enclosures. Quarantine is part of the culture of death, this “civilized” system that systematically destroys life on the planet. Quarantine asks us to accept an “easy fix” that will give the human ego gratification.
Migration is free and alive; it is having the ability to make choices, being self-willed. Buffalo behind fences to be food for humans is a view that reduces them to meat. They have strong relationships with more than humans. The compromise should be in standing aside and respecting how a creature places one foot in front of the other — and we fight those things that get in the way of that. Quarantine removes the buffalo from their natural community, from life and their gift to life. Who is asking the buffalo’s perspective, asking them what they want? The buffalo will tell you that migration is they key to restoration. They know the way.
So many feel stuck in the “choices” that the government and industry have put before us. People believe that they are doing the buffalo a “favor” by hunting them, or by supporting quarantine, because otherwise they would be captured and shipped to slaughter. They are shipped to slaughter anyway. Having to pick hunt, quarantine, or slaughter is being forced to make artificial and unnecessary choices. So long as this Plan is in place, so long as Montana is in control, so long as wild buffalo numbers are driven down to serve livestock industry politics, and so long as wild buffalo are prevented from restoring themselves on the landscape, the problems will persist. We must fight this Plan and livestock control in all it’s guises. We must demand an end to livestock control, demand that wild buffalo walk the earth, demand an end to this management scheme.
One industry’s intolerance is driving a national treasure towards the brink of extinction. We must put an end to livestock industry control over wild buffalo, and to do so we must repeal the law — MCA 81-2-120 — that places them in charge. As evidenced by his decision to grant year-round habitat on Horse Butte, Montana Governor Steve Bullock is listening, but the livestock industry is trying to undermine his citizen-supported decision. He must hear from us all, frequently. Please contact Governor Bullock today, even if you have already, thank him for granting year-round habitat on Horse Butte and urge him to help repeal MCA 81-2-120. With endless pressure, endlessly applied, we can end livestock industry control and gain more of the buffalo’s Montana home for them to roam.
Thank you so very much for being with us for wild buffalo!
