A dozen American bison, targeted in a highly unusual Biden administration-backed trophy hunt in iconic Grand Canyon National Park, could live another day if a group of animal wellness organizations upset with the “culling” gets its way.
In a fight for the national symbol that also drew attention to the administration’s indifference to animals, a Colorado land trust has offered to join the bison with a herd it cares for on 25,000 acres.
It was a deal put together by Washington-based Animal Wellness Action and partner organizations, and it has already been endorsed by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
“We would happily provide permanent refuge for those 12 bison,” said Nicole Rosmarino, executive director of the Southern Plains Land Trust. “We stand ready to allow a win-win solution for the park and for the bison.”
We have a solution to the @NatlParkService “problem” of overpopulated bison in @GrandCanyonNPS that doesn’t involve slaughtering them!
Will @SecDebHaaland cancel the Grand Canyon Bison Hunt? https://t.co/yeiCmWSFnI
— Animal Wellness Action (@AWAction_News) September 21, 2021
The planned National Park Service hunt followed a 2017 report that the buffalo herd was too large despite approved hunting outside the Grand Canyon’s boundaries. This year, the plan was to pick 12 hunters from 45,000 applicants and let them take a bison.
Hunting inside the park has been banned.
Animal Wellness Action and others, including several House Democrats, objected to the trophy hunt. And while they lobbied the Interior Department to back off, they also worked to find another solution.
The land trust, established in 1998, has six prairie preserves covering 32,000 acres in southeastern Colorado across three counties. Since the park service is already relocating 88 bison within Grand Canyon National Park to tribes, translocation is “eminently feasible,” Animal Wellness Action said.
“The National Park Service may euphemistically call this action ‘a cull,’ but the agency has participated in a lottery to select participants, will allow the winners to enter the park with firearms, authorize them to gun down bison, and leave with the carcass and trophy,” said Wayne Pacelle, president of Animal Wellness Action. “This has every imaginable feature of a bison hunt, and that’s a pattern of behavior you just don’t see in America’s national parks.”
Ditto from Polis, who said in a statement, “Our American bison are a majestic and iconic species of wildlife. It is rare for the lethal removal of bison to be allowed on National Park Service land which is owned by all Americans. This decision should be reversed and we would welcome these 12 bison to live and roam free at the Southern Plains Land Trust in Bent County.”
The hunt has been under fire, and the trust’s decision came after an impassioned plea by President George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Matthew Scully, who urged Interior Secretary Deb Haaland to shut it down.
“This ‘pilot lethal removal program’ apparently is the Park Service’s idea of rational, sober-minded conservation,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Outside the world of blood sport and the game-management bureaucracy, it should rightly strike most people as an appalling betrayal of trust in a national park where hunting is prohibited.”
