Dueling columns re: Turner bison deal

High Country News yesterday posted dueling Writers on the Range columns concerning the decision to place 88 brucellosis-free Yellowstone bison on Turner’s ranch.

In support of the plan is Jeff Welsch, with the Greater Yellowstone coalition. After many years of seeing bison loaded up and shipped to slaughter, he writes,

for the first time…these first of 88 Yellowstone bison will be destined for a long-overdue date with freedom.

After two years in quarantine pens north of the park, they are to be turned loose to roam across 12,000 acres of remote sagebrush and forest southwest of Bozeman, Mont.

That’s historic, he says. It “isn’t ideal,” he writes, but under the current bison management scheme, seeing bison roaming free is a great relief.

Strangly, though, Welsch’s column suggests that some people are against the plan “because media mogul Ted Turner owns these 12,000 acres.”  Welsch notes, rightly, that bison don’t care who owns the grass they’re munching on.

But who owns the land the bison are grazing on isn’t the rub in this debate. It’s who will own the offspring of the bison, as Greg Peters says in his opposing column.

To help cover the costs of housing the bison, Turner Enterprises will get to keep 75 percent of the bison’s offspring. The fate of those bison is unclear at this point, though Turner Enterprises general manager Russ Miller suggested to me that they could be added to a herd in New Mexico that isn’t used for commercial purposes. (In other words, they aren’t destined to become bison meatloaf at Ted’s Montana Grill.

But Peters and many others are upset by the idea that public wildlife is becoming private:

The whole plan stinks. Federal officials, tribes and many conservationists have all criticized the Turner solution. Opponents point out, for example, that the language permitting the program stipulated that the quarantined buffalo would “remain wild and noncommercial.”

The Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, which is the agency that struck the deal with Turner Enterprises, has noted that state policy already allows other species to become private, namely peregrine falcons (hunters take them from the wild then train them to hunt game. The link lays out the rules and regs).

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It is noteworthy that Turner’s position as an avid conservationist and major donor to conservation groups is playing into the debate (again). Here’s a comment left under Welsch’s column:

Is it any wonder that the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC) speaks so glowingly of this terrible precedent to privatize wildlife belonging to the public when Ted Turner is a member of the GYC board of directors?

Turner is not a member of the board any longer, but still donates to the group.

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