| Yellowstone Bison Slaughter
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News
Article - 3/24/01 |
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| Potter
Column: Whine with breakfast, walleye and wolves
By John Potter, Billings Gazette
3/24/01
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Today’s
topic is: whiners.
But before I begin, here’s an indication of how
MY day is going. I wake up at 6:30 to the clock-radio
alarm blaring some “hit” song by another twelve-year-old
girl pathetically crooning on and on about some boy-toy
dat be dissin’ her.
What a whiner.
This alone is enough to make me get up ... and hurl.
So I head to the bathroom for my morning ritual, you know.
I flush the thingy, and the darn toilet overflows all
over the place! This is not funny! How does a toilet mysteriously
plug itself in the middle of the night?
After saying goodbye to the nice men from the Yellowstone
County Department of Disasters, Emergencies and Really
Horrible Toxic Spills, I’m ready for breakfast!
So I dump some kibble into the bowl, open up the milk,
and my poor nostrils are assailed with what could only
be described as the elegant bouquet of baby woof. Somehow,
overnight, my milk went from smooth to chunky-style.
Okay, yeah, I’m a whiner, too.
But, I think that having had two hazardous waste “events”
in my house in less than an hour makes my whining well-founded.
Some whiners seem to whine just for the sake of hearing
their own whining.
Take Montana’s cattle industry, for example, whining
about the supposed threat of brucellosis being passed
to their sacred cows by Yellowstone Park buffalo. What
a crock o’ hooey.
Everyone knows that, even if the disease COULD be transmitted
to cattle (which has never been proven in the wild), it
could only be passed by adult female buffalo because of
the nature of the virus. Yet the Department of Livestock
(aka “God”) has seen fit over the years to
slaughter hundreds of bull buffalo and calves as well.
Has anyone ever asked the buffalo’s opinion?
Yellowstone’s buffalo, proven to be direct DNA descendants
of the last wild, free-roaming herds of the Great Plains,
are still held as sacred by Indian people. Obviously,
the beef cow is MORE sacred because it makes more money.
So, thousands of our buffalo have been killed, and continue
to be killed, because some whiners have more money and
thus more political influence.
This policy is pathetic.
Here’s another bunch of whiners for you: the Friends
of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd. Lately this group
is whining about Yellowstone’s wolves killing too
many elk, thus depressing cow-calf ratios in the northern
herd. Actually their REAL concern is that the big bad
wolf is taking elk — friends of theirs — that
rightfully belong stuffed into THEIR freezers.
Scientific studies done by actual government scientists
(the same folks that brought you duct tape, Hostess Ding-Dongs
and the television remote control) show that the elk herd
is healthy and that their numbers are well within the
long term average. In lay terms, this means that there
are still plenty of animals left for the precious late-season
“elk slaughter” by “hunters.”
Wolves, too busy conducting census research on Yellowstone’s
coyotes, could not be reached for comment.
Whiners have been around for years. Back in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, there were two large whiner groups in
northern Wisconsin who complained about us Chippewa Indians
spearing walleye from off-reservation lakes. Their biggest
whine was that we were “depleting the resource.”
That is, in lay terms, we were taking all the walleye
— friends of theirs — that rightfully belonged
in THEIR freezers.
Cry me a river.
The irony of it all is that many of the walleye in these
off-reservation lakes came from the fish hatchery on the
Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Indian Reservation. Yep, Indian-raised.
Walleye did not return phone calls by press time.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of Indian whiners,
too. In fact, some Indians can be the biggest whiners
around. The difference is, nobody listens to them.
It’s funny — buffalo, wolves and Indians all
suffered pretty much the same fate in the wake of the
westward expansion of “civilization” during
the 19th century. Our populations were decimated and we
were all systematically, forcibly removed from our home
ranges.
And nowadays, some people have to whine about us, I guess,
just because we’re still here at all.
But we might as well all try to get used to each other
and get along. Because, like whiners, buffalo, wolves,
twelve-year-old crooners and spoiled milk are all here
to stay.
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