If you see a wildlife critter on the road in Yellowstone National Park, do not put it in your car.
That was the message that managers of the park had for tourists on Monday after an unfortunate incident involving a baby bison and two visitors resulted in the park putting the animal down.
What happened was that visitors who were only identified as having come from “outside the United States” were driving in the park last week when they “came across the baby bison alone … and decided to drive the calf to a park facility.”
They did so “unaware that interference with newborn animals could cause their mothers to reject them,” Reuters reported.
Tourists ‘rescue’ bison calf from the cold of Yellowstonehttps://t.co/xKIhN89CYq (pic: Karen Olsen Richardson) pic.twitter.com/h6M7XeJwRe
— NBC DFW (@NBCDFW) May 16, 2016
And that, tragically, is exactly what happened here.
“Yellowstone rangers,” the newswire reported, “repeatedly tried to reunite the calf with the herd but those efforts failed.”
They made the decision to put the baby bison down because, after being rejected by its own, “it repeatedly approached people and cars along the roadway, raising safety concerns.”
Park rangers are especially sensitive about human safety concerns after one tourist was gored last year when she attempted to snap a selfie with a bison.
“Approaching wild animals can drastically affect their well-being and, in this case their survival,” a park spokeswoman lamented.
