
Ah, the bison, that majestic symbol of the American West. Did you know, that to this day, there are still some people who think that buffalo are extinct? They're not, of course, even though they came pretty close once upon a time. Between 1868 and 1881 an estimated 31 million were slaughtered, and by 1889 the vast herd was nearly extinct, falling to a mere 1,100 in the U.S. and Canada.
More recently, efforts have been made to protect the bison, but at the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, home to one of the nation's largest free-roaming herds, all that's about to change.
For the first time in nearly a decade, hunters on Saturday begin tracking and killing buffalo on the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where federal wildlife managers plan to cut the herd from 1,200 to 500 over the next five years.
The hunt aims to cull 300 buffalo -- also called bison -- by December.
Federal wildlife managers!? Doesn't that title sound like someone who'd be dedicated to protecting wildlife? So ironic! And why on earth would they want to cut the herd by nearly half? A couple of the excuses being given by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is that the buffalo on this "refuge" have been "overgrazing" and can carry diseases that might infect domestic livestock.
Well, shoot. We wouldn't want one of the world's oldest, most majestic creatures eating more grass than its fair share! Better just to kill them. And all of those antibiotics that our domestic livestock are dosed with surely wouldn't be a match for the germs carried by such an ancient, filthy beast. Annnyway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of "animal rights" types are pretty pissed off.
"Hunting these bison is like hunting parked cars," said Jonathan Lovvorn, a vice president of the U.S. Humane Society and attorney with the Fund for Animals.
So, how did this happen? What kind of crafy, clever brainwork went into this killer plan?
The Fund for Animals was behind a 1998 lawsuit that suspended a plan to thin the herd significantly through hunting, a moratorium lifted last month by a federal judge. While the refuge approved limited hunting of bison in the years before the lawsuit, no hunt in its history has approximated the magnitude of the season that starts on Saturday.
For decades, wildlife managers have sought to lessen the competition in the winter for forage among wild animals and cattle by feeding elk at the refuge, a practice that began attracting buffalo in 1980 and helped their population soar.
The bison hunt on the refuge comes as species in the American West are vying for food sources made scarce by months of fire, years of drought and by the rapid development of lands that once harbored wildlife.
Okay, cool--so they're killing them to protect them from death. That makes sense.
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