The Privatization of Wildlife

How Ted Turner Scored Yellowstone’s Bison Herd

A good overview of the buffalo issue and how they continue to be persecuted by Montana’s livestock industry and how the buffalo from the quarantine feasibility study ended up going to Ted Turner.

The Privatization of Wildlife: How Ted Turner Scored Yellowstone’s Bison Herd
AlterNet / By Joshua Frank

Groups File Suit to Protect Quarantined Bison & Public Trust

Lawsuit Seeks to Secure Public Access to Bison and Prevent Privatization of Calves

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – March 23, 2010
Contacts:
Stephany Seay, Buffalo Field Campaign 406-646-0070, bfc-media@wildrockies.org
Summer Nelson, Western Watersheds Project, 406-830-3099, summer@westernwatersheds.org
Glenn Hockett, Gallatin Wildlife Association, 406-586-1729, glhockett@bresnan.net

Buffalo in quarantine - Kim Acheson

GALLATIN COUNTY, MONTANA: Four conservation organizations filed a legal challenge today against the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks’ (FWP) decision to complete one phase of its Quarantine Feasibility Study on a private ranch of Turner Enterprises, Inc. (TEI), and to give TEI a percentage of the public’s bison at the end of the study. The groups assert that this action violates the state’s public trust responsibilities to protect and manage wildlife for public and not private benefit. The decision privatizes a full 75% of any offspring born to the 86 bison now held on TEI’s Green Ranch. Throughout earlier phases of the study, FWP indicated all bison, including offspring, would be managed as public wildlife and could never be privatized. The plaintiffs assert FWP’s final decision goes against these promises, and against FWP’s public trust duties.

Giving bison to Turner isn’t legal

Buffalo Field Campaign and Gallatin Wildlife Association speak

Stephany Seay, media coordinator for the Buffalo Field Campaign, writes a letter in response to the Casper Star Tribune’s poorly researched op-ed of December 30th titled “Turner ranch plan is the best way to save bison“.

Giving bison to Turner isn’t legal
Stephany Seay – Buffalo Field Campaign

It’s not legal: according to the permit from Yellowstone National Park (Permit #YELL-2007-SCI-5506) “Yellowstone National Park bison transferred to quarantine shall not be used for commercial or revenue-generating purposes.”

The Gallatin Wildlife Association speaks out as well.

Wildlife group explains position
JIM BAILEY, Belgrade, Mont.
Gallatin Wildlife Association

Activists call for bison on state land

State of Montana wants to give them to Ted Turner

Buffalo in quarantine - Kim Acheson

As is typical with this issue, the State of Montana has set up a false dichotomy with the bison in the quarantine program. They say that the bison need to be given to billionaire Ted Turner or slaughtered because they have no other options. This is nonsense.

As I have discussed before, there are other options including working with the Fort Belknap Reservation to locate the quarantined buffalo there, placing them back into the Park, or placing them on a state wildlife refuge, all of which would keep these bison in the public domain which was required under the plan. If Ted Turner receives these 78 buffalo he wants 190 of their progeny in return for his own commercial operations which also violates the agreement with the National Park Service to keep them in the public domain.

“There’s land in Montana,” said Stephany Seay with the Buffalo Field Campaign. “The alternatives are not Turner or slaughter. But that’s what we are being fed.”

Activists call for bison on state land
By DANIEL PERSON Chronicle Staff Writer

Homeless on the Range

An article about the ill-conceived bison quarantine program that will likely be turning the majority of the progeny of these bison into privately owned livestock.

Buffalo in quarantine - Kim Acheson

The Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks’ bison quarantine project started several years ago in an attempt to create a brucellosis free heard of Yellowstone bison from captured calves which had been repeatedly tested for the disease. These calves were separated from their mothers who were slaughtered and placed in pastures just north of Gardiner, Montana where they were fed out of troughs. They have no connection to their land and have not been exposed to experienced, older animals so they haven’t learned buffalo social skills. There is a big problem though. The program wasn’t thoroughly thought out, the FWP didn’t have any takers for the bison before the program was started.

The original, and often vaunted, intent was to create herds which would be used to repopulate the western public and tribal lands with genetically pure bison. There is a requirement to keep the bison that leave the quarantined facility fenced away from other animals for an additional 5 years in case brucellosis, a bacterial disease, re-emergerges. That’s expensive and nobody wants to do it so proposals to take the bison have been limited.

Enter Ted Turner. He has offered to keep the bison fenced, at a cost, for five years but he wants 190 of the progeny expected to be produced during those 5 years so that he can improve the genetics of his own commercial buffalo operations. This is the polar opposite of what was originally required of the recipients of the bison. The plans specifically mandated that the bison would not be mixed with hybrid bison and that they would remain in the public trust.

The Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks has said that the other major proposal to take the bison to Fort Belknap is not serious in nature and that they would have to slaughter them if they can’t give them to Ted Turner. They frame the issue as if slaughter is the only other option.