The Trump administration has some well-known enemies: wind turbines, electric cars, and climate scientists, among others. Now the iconic American buffalo has joined their ranks.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has proposed canceling leases for buffalo grazing on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM has played a key role in preventing the extinction of buffalo for more than a century. Buffalo were killed by the tens of millions during the settlement of the West. The Interior Department still has a buffalo on its official seal.
The BLM has traditionally prioritized leasing the rangelands it oversees for cattle grazing and mining but the previous administration considered conservation to be a use of federal land on par with grazing and resource extraction. Secretary Burgum has ruled that since bison in north-central Montana are not being raised for "production-oriented purposes," they have no legal right to roam, wallow or munch grass on land leased from the bureau.
The goal is to evict buffalo from federal land and make the hugely discounted grazing leases available from the BLM for grazing conventional livestock.
The nonprofit environmental foundation American Prairie has long been buying ranches in eastern Montana seeking to revive the grassland ecosystem full of sage grouse, prairie dogs, bison, and other megafauna.
The anti-buffalo rhetoric from Interior is raising alarm and outrage from the Great Plains to California, where half a million bison are raised for both conservation and human consumption. BLM allotments for buffalo are in Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas, and on scores of Native American reservations.
