Yellowstone National Park Releases Record of Decision

Wild Bison Advocates Angered By New Bison Management Plan

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 29, 2024

MAMMOTH HOT SPRINGS, WY:  Late last week, Yellowstone National Park released their Record of Decision on their new Bison Management Plan, frustrating wild bison advocates by choosing Alternative 2. Alternative 2 places emphasis on the domestication (quarantine) and excessive tribal hunting of the country’s last wild buffalo.

In an earlier press release, Roam Free Nation addressed these grave concerns. 

“According to Yellowstone’s bison biologist, Chris Geremia, three quarters of the people who participated in this public process asked Yellowstone to choose Alternative 3,” said Stephany Seay, cofounder of Roam Free Nation. “Alternative 3 would have placed an emphasis on natural selection and bison dispersal on the landscape, and would have increased the population to up to 8,000 buffalo. Now it’s just business as usual.”

Alternative 2 also continues Yellowstone’s nefarious capture-for-slaughter program. 

“By now, we expect Yellowstone to be no friend to wild buffalo. But the renaming of the capture-for-slaughter program is so ridiculous it seems to be satire,” says Roam Free Nation board member Cindy Rosin. “Yellowstone has decided that rounding up wild bison inside the park, trapping them in a livestock facility, and then loading them on trailers to be sent to the slaughterhouse will be called the ‘Tribal Food Transfer Program’. With this ridiculous greenwash title, Yellowstone reduces the last wild buffalo to a resource for humans to consume, and continues to try to hide their dirty deeds behind the tribes.” 

Yellowstone’s new bison management plan offers no benefits to the country’s last wild buffalo. While it is true that the new plan increases the target population by a few thousand, that means more buffalo will be captured, quarantined, and shipped away, or gunned down in a slaughter-like “hunt.”

“Wild buffalo are ecologically extinct throughout their native range,” said Seay. “They have been grossly mismanaged for decades and this plan does nothing to change that. The solution is to manage wild buffalo like elk and other wildlife, or better yet, don’t manage them at all. They will take care of and restore themselves if humans would step out of the way.”

“The wild buffalo will always keep giving, the problem they’re facing is the way they’re being treated and taken,” said Jaedin Medicine Elk, cofounder of Roam Free Nation. “Just leaving in the back of trucks, dead, or on trailers heading to a slaughterhouse. Our people convinced ourselves it’s right or okay for us to remove a sacred relative from it’s home. But the buffalo need us there for them now.”

Roam Free Nation is a Native-led, Montana-based wild buffalo, wildlife, and wild lands advocacy group who speaks from and represents the perspective of wild nature. Their representatives have over fifty years of combined experience in the field, monitoring wild bison migration, documenting actions against them, and advocating on their behalf. Learn more at RoamFreeNation.org. 

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