Photo: Cindy Rosin.
Gardiner, Montana. Shortly after capturing over 300 wild bison at the Stephen’s Creek Capture facility, Yellowstone has sent two trailer loads to a slaughterhouse in Helena. As of Monday night, the trailers have returned to Gardiner, presumably for another load. Beginning on March 4th, Yellowstone started trapping wild buffalo at the northern end of the Park outside of Gardiner. At first, they simply baited the trap with hay, waited for buffalo to enter, and then closed the gate. On March 8th, they also went into the area surrounding the trap on horseback, hazing, or aggressively chasing, the bison into the trap.
Yellowstone and the other partners of the Interagency Bison Management Plan are not providing information this year on their bison management operations, and are not sharing how many they have captured. Our volunteers in the area, though, estimate that over 300 buffalo have been captured.
“On Saturday morning there were over three hundred buffalo wandering freely between the Roosevelt Arch at the actual northern border of the park,” said Cindy Rosin, a Roam Free Nation volunteer who has been monitoring the area. “By Sunday morning, there were less than fifty. It’s like the Park came out and rounded up every buffalo in the area.”
All this is happening while members of multiple treaty hunting tribes are waiting at the Park boundary to kill any buffalo that happen to make it past the trap. They have not managed to do so.
Yellowstone and Montana Department of Livestock employees could be seen yesterday pushing buffalo through the sorting areas of the trap, and by the evening the trucks and trailers arrived in town that would take them to slaughter.
The transportation to slaughter is done by the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, with security along the way provided by the National Park Service, the US Forest Service and APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service). The slaughtering was done in the past at White’s Meats in Ronan, MT, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, but this year the buffalo met their end at Tizer Meats in Helena.
It is unknown how many of the rest of the bison in the trap will head for the slaughterhouse, and how many will end up prisoners of the quarantine program that sentences buffalo to be shipped off to a life as livestock, far from their home in Yellowstone.
On the “choice” between slaughter or quarantine, Roam Free Nation co-founder Jaedin Medicine Elk had this to say, “There is no ‘lesser’ evil. Government and Tribes are manipulating the buffalo, serving only human needs. The buffalo are being denied their perspective, their freedom. Die at the boundary by gunfire, or get rounded up and captured for slaughter or domestication. All of it serves the human, not the buffalo. The buffalo need more protection, more room to roam, not this disservice by a conglomerate of selfish humans. Dead or in jail is no way to live.”
Roam Free Nation is a Montana-based wild buffalo, wildlife, and wild lands advocacy group who speaks from and represents the perspective of wild nature. Their representatives have over fifty years of combined experience in the field monitoring wild bison migration, documenting actions against them, and advocating on their behalf. Learn more at www.RoamFreeNation.org.
