900 Yellowstone Buffalo Slaughtered

Yellowstone National Park is closed to visitors right now due to virus fears. That hasn’t stopping park officials from the annual capture, quarantine and slaughter of hundreds of wild buffalo. The entire buffalo management program is built on lies and the unsubstantiated belief that brucellosis can be transmitted from buffalo to livestock.  The irrefutable fact is that transmission from buffalo to livestock has never happened in the wild. 

This year, over 900 wild Yellowstone buffalo have been removed.  Some were shot by “hunters” as they stepped outside the protection of the park boundary onto adjacent USFS-USDA land. The majority are being captured in a pen inside the North end of the park.  Once captured, many will be sent to slaughter. Others are sent to a quarantine facility to be tested for the disease brucellosis.  This year’s culling has a set goal of up to 900 individuals out of an estimated population of 4,500 to 5,000.  These magnificent animals have done absolutely nothing wrong in their annual migration looking for grass after a long winter inside the park. 

A big congratulatory pat on the back to state and federal bureaucrats who have surpassed the upper limit of the “agree-upon kill quota.”  The last wild buffalo herds have been decimated by 20% in one winter. Sick SOBs.  

Yellowstone National Park policy is based on an outdated (2000) management plan fabricated around the false premise that brucellosis transmitted from buffalo is a serious threat to cattle. Of course, this has never happened in the wild.  The agenda is driven by APHIS (Animal and Plant Inspection Service), a division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture.  The policy is bad for grizzlies, moose, elk and other ungulates, all trending downward in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. 

Few are aware of the structure and broad role and scope of USDA-APHIS.  Within the USDA is a division of Marketing and Regulatory Program (MRP).  MRP facilitates all domestic and international marketing of U.S. agricultural products and ensures the health and care of animals and plants. Yes, MRP oversees competitive marketing, not just in the U.S. but internationally. 

Under the MRP is where the lethal marketing competition takes place.  All 3 divisions, the AMS, GIPSA and APHIS are working in unison to improve agricultural productivity and competitiveness – cutthroat competitive, Mafia-style. APHIS is the most lethal division, which receives almost 90% of the annual MRP budget. So, how do you market brucellosis, or the absence of brucellosis?  MRP dishes out the “Brucellosis Class Status” for each state.  Internationally, U.S. beef is marketed as U.S. Brucellosis Class Free, a status conferred by the OIE (World Organization for Animal Health – Office International des Epizooties). 

Some brucellosis outbreaks in 2007 and 2008 in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, identified as associated with unnatural congregating of elk on 23 feed grounds in Wyoming, caused the U.S. to lose its marketing edge of Brucellosis Class Free. At his point, the genetic testing had advanced, linking the Brucella abortus genotype coming from elk, not bison, as everyone had assumed before. The killing machine that had focused on Yellowstone bison for decades began to turn its lethal strategies toward elk.  By creating a regional, Greater Yellowstone Area (GYA) DSA (Designated Surveillance Area) in each GYA state, the APHIS “cooked the (national) books,” which allowed brucellosis outbreaks in the Yellowstone area without losing the national competitive marketing edge and U.S. Brucellosis Class Free Status.

So, you can see now that this is not about controlling animal disease, it’s about marketing cattle.

Not only did APHIS work around its own objective of “eradication of brucellosis in wildlife sectors,” it leveraged control over state wildlife agencies in exchange for Brucellosis Class Free Status for states that acquiesced (classic shakedown) to APHIS control over the states’ cattle exports in the international markets, and control of wildlife populations in the Designated Surveillance Area.  Each state in the GYA caved, sacrificing untold numbers of elk, bison and other ungulates to APHIS’s lethal slaughter program. The marketing advantage is paid for with U.S. government subsidies, and buckets of blood.

Good to know just how ruthless government agencies can be, especially in this contentious time of herd management and culling of the human population in the latest fear campaign worldwide. Life is cheap for those who worship the almighty dollar.