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Sacred Cows, slaughter, and silence: The tragedy on Yellowstone’s northern border – Daily Montanan [1]

['More From Author', 'August', 'Maximilian Werner']

Date: 2023-08-02  

Last month, the Montana-based nonprofit organization Yellowstone Voices released a video documenting the unmitigated slaughter of bison that migrate out of Yellowstone National Park each winter to find forage.

Early in the video, a small herd of bison—bulls, pregnant cows, and year-old calves—walk unimpeded through the sagebrush, grazing as they go. Then the camera pans right 25 yards and reveals a group of about 15 men—some clad in orange, all carrying high-powered rifles—advancing on the herd. Having enjoyed the relative safety of the park, which does not permit humans to kill wildlife within park boundaries, the bison seem unconcerned by the men’s presence. But that changes when, after using sticks to beat the bushes and goad the bison over the park border and into the kill zone, the men level their guns and start blasting away.

As a wildlife advocate, I’ve seen my share of disgusting and unethical treatment of animals (especially predators), but the massacre of Yellowstone bison, which this year claimed more than 1,100 animals from an already endangered herd, represents a new low, and not just because of the abhorrent nature of the killing and its impact on the bison, but because of the conservation community’s unwillingness to denounce it as well as its equally troubling ostracization of anyone who does.

While the carnage featured in the video is described by its proponents as a hunt, let’s be clear: What’s happening north of Yellowstone in the Gardiner Basin of Montana is not hunting by any definition. Ethical hunters abide by the concept of fair chase, which prohibits an improper or unfair advantage over their prey. And yet that is exactly what the firing squad has over the bison, which, like grizzly bears, do not fear humans and therefore do not run from them until after the gunfire starts and the chaos and clamor of wounding and death ensues.

This disadvantage is compounded by the geography of Gardiner Basin, which offers almost no chance of escape. The area already functions as a natural bottleneck with mountains on either side. Add the roads, trails, residences, river, and highway and the width of that bottleneck is reduced by about two-thirds, which further limits the herd’s ability to evade hunters. The result—as the co-founder of Roam Free Nation, a native-led, Montana-based wildlife and wild lands advocacy group, Stephany Seay aptly put it in the Daily Montanan—is “gut piles spread thickly over the land; a grotesque sea of stomachs, intestines, cut off legs, unborn calves in the womb.”

According to ecologist and wildlife biologist George Wuerthner, the slaughter has serious evolutionary and ecological impacts on the herd. The long-term viability of any species depends on the genetic variability created by breeding between geographically distinct populations, but the slaughter “selects against those individuals who tend to migrate by eliminating them from the population.” As is true with other herd animals, older bison possess valuable knowledge about where to find forage. When these animals are indiscriminately removed, the loss of that knowledge threatens the herd’s survival, which is exacerbated by the corresponding destruction of social bonds. Other animals, such as wolves and grizzlies, are negatively affected by the slaughter as well when biomass that would otherwise support them is removed from the ecosystem.

“Despite these ecological and evolutionary impacts to the bison and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” Wuerthner wrote this past April, also in the Daily Montanan, “many conservation groups, including the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Buffalo Field Campaign, Sierra Club, and National Parks and Conservation, among many others, are willing to ignore this bloodbath.” And yet these same groups, according to Wuerthner, have fiercely opposed the killing of wolves that venture beyond the park boundaries.

So why do Wuerthner and others think conservation groups, including some with wildlife in their names, refuse to condemn this butchery? “Because the folks slaughtering bison are Native Americans.”

This bizarre explanation makes sense only in the context of the prevailing view of critical social justice and identity politics, which divides and (dis)empowers people according to their status as oppressed or oppressor, colonized or colonizer.

Unfortunately, bison aren’t the only animals that have been slaughtered with impunity. Last August Andy Walgamott from the Northwest Sportsman interviewed Wuerthner to talk about an article he had published about the mass killing of Washington wolves by tribal members. After lamenting the lack of condemnation by conservation groups, Wuerthner told Walgamott that he “interviewed several wolf advocates for (his) article who refused to be quoted or identified for fear of being called out by woke advocates as racist. ‘No one,’ according to one individual I spoke with, ‘wants to condemn Indians for anything. They are now like the sacred cows of the (conservation community)– immune from any discussion or criticism.’”

Woke ideology’s prominence in and effects on higher education, corporate America, and medicine is well-established, but its appearance in the conservation community has caught many people, including long-time activists like Wuerthner, off guard, particularly in terms of how it has shifted the focus from wildlands and wildlife to social justice and people, which some would argue has little to do with advocating for non-human nature.

According to Brooks Fahy, the Executive Director of Predator Defense, these organizations, which accept millions of dollars in donations to ostensibly advocate for wildlife, are defrauding the public.

“No one disagrees with the principles of social justice,” he said. “It’s how they are being enacted. This uncritical obsession with rectifying past wrongs is a distraction from the work of these organizations.”

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, Jerry Coyne, and his co-author Luana S. Maroja, an evolutionary biologist and professor at Williams College, just published an essay titled “The Ideological Subversion of Biology” that helps to explain the origins of and consequences of this rectification. In their discussion of how biology “has been impeded or misrepresented” by the belief that Indigenous ways of knowing are equivalent to modern science, the authors write: “The promotion of these other ways of knowing comes from a desire to valorize oppressed groups by holding up much of their culture as having the same epistemic authority as science, a view that philosopher Molly McGrath called ‘the authority of the sacred victim.’”

Consequently, like their ideas, groups of people who are valorized are beyond critique, and anyone who says otherwise is deemed racist and colonialist.

“Is it any wonder,” Coyne and Maroja ask, “that teachers, researchers, and professors censor themselves on these issues?”

Unfortunately for Yellowstone’s bison and nonhuman nature more generally, many conservation organizations have been infected by what Wuerthner calls the “Anthropocene Booster mindset, which puts human desires, in this case, tribal hunters, ahead of the ecological, evolutionary, and natural rights of wildlife and landscapes.”

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/08/02/sacred-cows-slaughter-and-silence-the-tragedy-on-yellowstones-northern-border/

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