Wild Yellowstone Buffalo Death Rattle
Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Listen carefully. Can you hear that low-pitched sound? A death rattle is descending upon Yellowstone National Park’s remnant wild buffalo population.
In the winter of 2025, death approaches Yellowstone’s at risk buffalo herds with the stealth of a hungry mountain lion wearing a Taylor Swift mask. State and federal government agencies, Indian nations, and wealthy so-called conservation NGOs are lurking, salivating with plunder in their eyes. These perennial looters relish the annual buffalo killing spree. Bulls, full-term pregnant cows, and newborns, all must die to meet Yellowstone Park’s arbitrary population cap. Euphemistically dubbed the Yellowstone Bison Conservation Transfer Program, dominion, colonization, domestication, and death aims to extinguish any wildness that hasn’t already been excised. Putting lipstick on this pig can’t hide the bloodlust for a good massacre.
The Transfer Program (A.K.A. culling) operates as a gaslighting tool to manipulate the public’s perception of buffalo management in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Buffalo genocide is shapeshifting. The risk of wild buffalo transmitting brucellosis to livestock is 0%. A new name and fancy public image campaign can’t hide The Big Lie. The story about brucellosis is 100% fabricated to conceal the ongoing range war over who controls the land and grass in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Under the authoritarian direction of Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service’s (APHIS-USDA) surveillance-capture-detention (“quarantine”) and extra-territorial abduction and rendition program (prison “transfer”), wild Yellowstone buffalo are being farmed (domesticated), commodified and traded on a burgeoning interstate wild meat market.
More capital means more corrals inside Yellowstone Park to imprison more kidnapped wild buffalo, break up tight-knit family groups, and condemn isolated individuals to years of quarantine and torture. From the Park penitentiary, wild buffalo are stuffed like sardines into trailers and trucked to another quarantinefacility at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation located 500 miles North of their ancestral homeland in Yellowstone National Park.
Huge injections of capital are streaming in from multiple (private and public) funding sources. Various Indian nations are being courted and bribed by multiple federal management agencies and NGOs to do the government’s deadly dirty work. If the $100 million in federal Farm Bill and Inflation Reduction Act money passes through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) the 2025 capture-quarantine-transfer (truck and trailer) program may pose the greatest threat to free-roaming buffalo since the 1800s.
Many buffalo subjected to the domestication program die in captivity or en route to fenced pastures on Indian Reservations or are slaughtered for meat. Inbreeding in captivity destroys their family structure and natural migration instinct.Last fall, Yellowstone National Park estimated a population of 5,449 animals.
The Park’s goal is to maintain a population between 3,500 to 6,000 individuals. Park biologists recently estimated the carrying capacity at close to 11,000 individuals. This year’s “magic” herd reduction number is 1,375. Go figure! Where is the compassion for America’s last wild buffalo? They are wildlife, not livestock.
Yellowstone National Park’s 2024 Bison Management Plan degrades the natural evolutionary processes foundational to the preservation of Yellowstone’s wild bison genome and the natural landscape upon which all wildlife depend.
Take action to protect habitats for all sacred lifeforms now facing the real risk of extermination – even inside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. Domestication and genocide of wild buffalo underscores just how indifferent and violent our government and culture has become. Surely, we can all dream into existence a world where greed, competition and division give way to a higher consciousness of inseparable cooperation and compassion for all life.
Help silence the death-rattle threatening Yellowstone buffalo.
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