Also media, Hello and welcome. It could happen here a very special episode today because I am lucky enough to be joined by Molly Konga.
Hi Molly, Hi James, thanks for having me. I'm excited to hear about today's topic.
Yeah, today's topic is buffalo. If this just came up on your phone without you clicking in, so, I guess, look, buffalo. When people imagine the great planes before European colonization, I think buffalo are the fauna that they particularly imagine being present. Right.
It's such a romantic image, right, and they're gone now, but they were one so many. Like every time we drive through southwest Virginia. I'm in central Virginia, so when we drive through southwestern Virginia, my husband always brings up this account that he read of someone witnessing the buffalo
stampeding through the Cumberland Gap. Like we're oh wow, yeah, right down on the tip of southwestern Virginia and just looking at that place and imagining buffalo there, like you have to romanticize it.
That's incredible.
Yeah, that's sick. One of the coolest like American experiences I've ever had. Maybe seven or eight years ago. Now, I was bike packing in the Colorado Wyoming border up there, and I was with some friends. We've been like maybe we're like three or four days in, you know, like where you kind of hit the sweet spot at that point when you like have it showered for that long and you're just kind of disconnected from the world. That's when it starts to get Molly's making a face you can't see.
Just four days of human stink, it really starts to get good.
That's when it gets good because you're just like, that's how long it takes to disconnect, right, something at your phone and like worrying about not smelling the.
Stuff, becoming a beast of the outdoors.
Yeah, you just returned to your feral self. I'd like to return to my feral self as often as possible. But we're like riding. I get where we're going at Walden. Maybe we're coming off this big plateau dropping into this big kind of like where it gets kind of more plane,
e big big kind of meadow plane. And we're coming down there and it's a few of us and these buffalo just come like from the side of us and they're running alongside us, right, and we're riding you and we're cooking, going twenty twenty five miles an ho or something like that, and these buffalo were just cruising next to us because they're just trying to get like trying
to check out, like what are these weirdos doing? And they're just like why the fuck would you put all your stuff on a bicycle and go ride around like this?
And then we're like, oh, it's a fucking buffalo, And like for like maybe a mile, they just kind of wanted to keep this thing that they just wanted to keep tabs on us as we're going down this dirt road and then like they were getting really close, right, so they're like kicking up all this dust, and you got to feel like you were like almost one of the buffalo. You know, you're like in the herd traversing the planes.
I think you're supposed to keep your distance from them, right, Yeah, they were.
We didn't have many choice at that point.
Yeah, when they're like do not approach, Yeah, they were approaching us. We didn't stop. I was like pretty pretty keen on not stopping. And Molly is right, they look so pettable, but they're really not. They're really Yeah, despite their fluffy appearance, it's it's advised. Like any time in the Yellowstone pretty much, especially in these summer months, you will find a video tourist approaching a buffalo and regretting
that decision. But pretty big. I've been going by a bowl before, and I would like to keep it to a one.
Going for me, one is all most people get.
Yeah, yeah it is. I was pretty let me tell you, I thought that one was all I was going to get. I was I was ready to make my peace with the world. Luckily I got a second chance.
Yeah.
People kind of focus on a buffalo, right, They ignore many of the other species that we lost during dis intent period of ecological destruction, right, And I can see why. Really, you can find images of piles of dead buffalo skulls. There's that like really haunting image of the idea of
killing animals only for their capes or their tongues. Often, this period of genocidal violence is referred to as a buffalo genocide, and I think that encapsulates, right, not just the destruction of the buffalo population, but also of the indigenous cultures that relied on that buffalo population and of the ecology they went with. Obviously, when I say destruction. I'm not saying they're gone very much till here till present, but the attempt by the government in capitalism to remove
those people from that land. But yeah, it is a shame that these other animals don't get a fatcha. Have you ever seen a blackfooted ferret?
When you said there was going to be something about ferrets, I was thinking about it and I realized all domesticated animals were wild animals, and it never occurred to me that a ferret could live outside.
Yeah, a ferret thrives in the outdoors. I really wanted to have ferrets when I was younger, Like, I enjoyed the presence of ferrets. I enjoyed working with ferrets.
Oh he's kind of cute in a way, he's gross.
The ferrets are very sweet. Yeah, we had we had friend with ferrets growing up, so we would use them to They use them to catch rabbits in the UK, right. Oh. Yeah. The reason that these guys struggle to get back on the landscape is because they need massive prairie dog towns to feed of.
Oh do they live in like societies? Do they live like a prairie dog's So the ferrets live in like ferret villages.
The ferrets predate the prairie dogs.
But do they live in like a village.
I don't know if they live in like I don't know what their social structure is. In Colorado, there's a National Blackfooted Ferret Center where you can go and see them. I've cycled past it, but I regret not going in. Maybe I'll make a special trip reach out if you're with the ferret people.
Sorry, I said, he looks gross.
Yeah, please don't counsel us. Because the prairie dog towns can collapse, right, Really, their populations can collapse pretty easily. They get like infectious diseases. So they need like a massive number of prairie dog towns in order to have a sustainable, genetically diverse ferret population.
Oh, I get it.
I get it. And because we don't have those, right, because they are not generally amenable to agriculture, and then the ecosystem is very different from it what it's naturally worse.
That means I don't know if there are any there are when they're not extinct genetically but ecologically in terms of their participation in the ecosystem, I don't think there are any very fair I think there are some in the Charles Russell Wildlife Refuge, but very few blackfooted ferrets, which is a shame because they're cool little guys.
I mean, I guess, given what we did to the landscape of so much of the country, I'm sure there are other animals that just like their niche is gone.
Yeah, and that is exactly what I want to talk about today, right, Like, specifically, I want to talk about buffalo because of the canceling of some public land grazingly since for buffalo, before we do that, Molley, we should talk about the terminology, right, the buffalo bison discussion.
Right, because they're not folow their bison bison.
And as we are, what five minutes into this, someone has already logged onto Reddit.
They have opened, already made the threat already exists. It's already that address. It's too late.
Yeah, we should have moved this to the to the front of the episode again and that if that is you redditing, please stop. I am aware that scientifically we should call them bison. I don't care. English speaking people have been calling these animals buffalo since English speaking people came to this continent. They did so because the animals reminded them of cape buffalo. I actually have had a frame gored by a cape buffalo as well. We're going through most of my goring experience.
You got to leave these big cow type creatures alone.
He was ambushed that my my going was entirely my fault, like you shouldn't be unkind to animals, and I deserved it, and it was a good learning experience for me. It wasn't. I think it's just a bad overall experience. Being God wouldn't recommend it.
I'm avoiding it.
Yeah, you've got this far, you're probably good. I think men in their twenties are probably like Peaple.
I doesn't say. I think once you hit thirty, your odds decreased dramatically.
Yeah, you're out the wind unless you're working with cattle, like my dad got pretty close a couple times when I was a kid. I remember jumping over a fence once, but I think that was more of a professional hazard than like a lifestyle choice. So here's the deal, Right, there are many species in the USA which have names similar to species on other continents that they are not the same European blackbirds and American blackbirds. Right, Robins would
be another example, there is a different sheep's headfish. Almost everywhere I have gone underwater, everyone has a sheep's head. The coolest sheep's head for people wondering is California sheep's head because it undergoes a sex change, making it a pretty cool fish. Also, it gets really cool after it transitions. It gets like these black and red stripes. It's like
one of my favorite fish. If you want to be censurious about buffalo names, I would suggest picking one of the many indigenous words that have been used to refer to this animal for far, far longer than or bison. Also, buffalo is one of the cooler words in English language.
Buffalo, Buffalo, buffalo, buffalo.
Yes, exactly. Yes. It is the longest single word sentence because it's a down and a verb and a proper noun, right.
Right, So it's it's buffalo, the city, buffalo, the animal buffalo, the verb meaning like what like to bully or something to like.
Yeah. I don't know if you've been around them, but they do do this. They sort of bother the push yeah yeah, yeah, I'm making, of course at motion with my neck and shoulders. That not one apart from Molly can see that. Yeah, they're they're they're just kind of aggressive in a sort of pokey and yeah, like it's a good verb. I don't know, hang around what you
watch a buffalo, you'll get it. Yeah, it's buffalo, the proper down buffalo, the down buffalo, the verb buffalo, the proper nown buffalo, the verb no buffalo, the noun.
You're gonna have to diagram this one.
Yeah.
Yeah, bison from upstate New York are bullying other bison from upstate New York.
Yes, that is the the breakdown of the buffalo sentence. Fun trivia for everybody. Yeah, that's yeah, they will do that at the end of the year. Will quitz you? Why are we talking about buffalo today? I can't remember, I can, let me tell you. And it's because the Bureau of Land Management has canceled grazing rights in seven allotments public land in Phillips County, Montana, privately owned bison.
And there's been a bunch of reporting on this, like when this stuff happens, when stuff the Trump administration does with public land the outdoors, they're they're like Democrat blue wave fake news panic accounts really really go kind of wild with it. They did with this one, right, I think people running whatever, like you know, occupy Democrats and suit Nation for change? Yeah whatever, Yeah, ocup by Democrats.
I forgot about pantsuit Nation. Wow, that's a real throwback.
Yeah, I never forget about the pantasuit Nation. They live forever in my mind. What I think, like the people of that tendency have not realized, is that these are not per se wild buffalo. It's not like these buffalo have individually, like or as a population, survived the genocide, been holding out in this land of Phillips County for more than a century. Right. That doesn't mean that we should be like callous about this. We shouldn't, But I
just want to explain a more. I guess there are still thousands of buffalo across the West on federal and private land. Some of them have been raising on public land with permits for more than four decades. Having them on the landscape is a good thing, right, We need the genetic diversity even if they're privately owned.
Right. So it's not just like I don't know knowing very little about this. I think a lot of the discourse around these like permits for grazing on public land it's like, well, why should these farmers get to use our public land for their property for their cattle. Yeah, And I don't know enough about that to care about that at all. But in terms of what buffalo do to the grassland, like just walking around on it and
eating it is part of the maintenance of that grassland. Yes, yeah, Like the eradication of the buffalo in the Midwest caused ecological havoc because we need them walking around and shitting on it.
Yeah. Yeah, Specifically what we need is them coming in, eating everything, trampling around, shitting everywhere, and then leaving, right, because that is what like so many indigenous cultures had these like these like traditions that the buffalo go away in and we do a tradition and they come back. Right. This happens for a lot of migroratory animals. It's not just buffalo, right, because it gave shape to time in people's lives. That's how they impacted the landscape, right. They
didn't stay in one place, They moved through spaces. So like, if we want to restore this short grass prairie ecosystem, which is as it turns out, why people are putting buffalo on this particular land. Then we need a lot of space to do it, and we need the buffalo to be able to move around. Right, So people who own these particular buffalo are an NGO called American Prairie. You head of American Prairie used to be American Prairie Reserve. No American Prairie Foundation. Okay, great?
Are they the villains or the heroes?
Neither? I mean the Trump administration is the villains. Doug Bergham specifically, I guess is always God.
I forgot about Doug burgher Yeah.
Yeah, Fortunately Doug is now Interior Secretary, thanks to ARII for signing a letter endorsing him. Also, fuck you. American prairie is interesting. I guess, like It's not what I would want, but I don't think it's evil.
Sounds like most NGOs.
Yeah, it sounds like most of the world as it exists. Not Yeah, then how I would do it. American prairie is a is a big engine. They've been trying for about a quarter of a century to buy up private land adjacent to public land around the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.
So the goal is to create like by by like bridging these two pieces of public land to create a massive reserve where like one of the things with with bison specifically, right, they need a lot of space and very few bison can cross like political boundaries.
They don't have passports.
They don't. Yeah, this is one of their issues. They're undocumented, you could say. But think about the Yellowstone. People get really mad about the Yellowstone bison leaving the park. This is a big deal. This has been a big deal for it. Yeah yeah, yeah, people like what.
Like they're Disney cast members, Like they're not allowed to leave in costo.
Yeah, exactly, they have to return.
Take that off.
Yeah, take the body off and just wear their head.
They can't be walking in the parking lot.
Yeah, you can't see Mickey Mouse at vonds Like that would really ruin the magic. Yeah, people get mad at them, right for a number of reasons.
The bubble don't know about the park that this is.
A thing, right and Buffalo. So as it turns out, they love to disrespect a fence, which I respect. I like that about them.
If I had shoulders like that, I would disrespect a fence.
Yeah, they so like cattle fencing is generally not sufficient for buffalo fencing, but buffalo fencing can be built. It does exist when people are building it. It's better if they are conscious of other worldlife, right, like another of the megafauna in the megafauna that has existed here for for millenia, but it's now in much much much lower numbers are like prong corn antelope.
We have those here.
Yes, I guess I don't really. I've never really been out west, so you are Molly's out there?
If you would like us to make a podcast where I take Molly camping, yeah, we just look at animals. That would be my ideal job, a podcast where I just talk to someone about an animal every week, Like we go camping, we see an animal, we talk about it.
I didn't know ferret's lived outside, Like, think of all you could show me?
Yeah amazing, Yeah, god, we could have so much fun if we start with the ferrets. Yeah, but prong horn are amazing. You've not seen a prong horn.
They lived in Africa? And what am I thinking of? Like an ibex?
Yeah, I mean I bex does live in Africa. I think some of them live on Okay, we're gonna.
Oh man, everyone's finding out I.
Don't know anything podcast version.
I'm googling prong horn antelope. Yeah, you see them, and these they're just out there.
Yeah, they're just like they live on the landscape. They actually were massively numerous, like before the various extinction events.
So it's like a like a reindeer that lives in Colorado a reindeer.
Reindeer are only reindeer in North America when they're in captivity Cariboo, when they when they are wild Picture of Cariboo.
We don't really have a lot of like wild animals out here.
Really see that. This is yeah, because the East Coast is much more urbanized.
Right, Like every now and again a baby bear will wander into town and it's like big micks.
Okay, Yeah, I like it when a bear there's another animal I have massive respect for. I love how they don't give a shit. I respect any animal that eats in the trash. Yeah. The prong horns actually massive, Like I think antello cap pridie is the genus. And then there are different species. There were tons like we had we at one point had tiny like weien a dog sized antelope.
Oh, like a like a dick dick.
Yeah, yeah, like a dig dig But.
That's a cool guy.
But fast. Oh so, one of the things about prong horns is they can jump, like I've seen them jump.
Yeah, it looks like a jumping guy.
Well, they don't like to jump. A fence is a thing.
Oh so then now you have like a problem. The buffalo are stuck, but so is the antelope.
Yeah, because that speed was always their like defense mechanism right there, they're super that. I think cheetahs are the only land animal that's faster and.
They don't live in the same environment.
No, yeah, I knew that different continents yet. Yeah, there is not a North American cheetah.
I mean at this point, you could think there might have been a one, tell me there is.
I think there might have been at one point, like a like a prehistoric shooter at ten. They headlick ground, slow some things. But yeah, when you're building the buffalo fencing, you have to allow the prong horns to go under if you're trying to build an ecological fence.
Oh, I guess, because they could like bend over in a way the buffalo.
Can't exactly, there's just more bubble.
It's too big.
Yeah, there's a lot of chunk to a buffalo and the way it couldn't get under there. Right. So the other reason people don't like buffalo is because of brucellosis. You know brucellosis.
Is is it a buffalo disease?
Well, it's a disease that buffalo can have. Maybe you know from the Warren Zevon song don't Okay, this is funny. I'm talking to Molly about really American shit to neither there's a British person.
I don't know any of what you're saying.
Okay. Warren's Evon a very good, famous musician, guy sadly dead, but.
He has a song about buffalo disease.
He has a song which in part it talks about brucellosis. It says, the cattle will have brucellosis. What a great journey we're going on.
That's the service I provide, does the podcast, idiot? Because I know nothing you but you have.
You have a very deep, very deep well of knowledge. It just doesn't extend to Warren's Evon.
No listener left behind, Like there's no one sitting here listening wishing that something had been explained more because I'm making you explain what antelope are. Yeah, and what a Warren Yvonn is.
Yeah, we could go off on a tangent Higgs. I don't know. This song is about the fact that Sweet Home Alabama is a deeply, deeply hateful song, but it does that does get mentioned quite a lot. But yeah, the brucellosis.
But I feel like once you're touching a buffalo, you have worse problems than whatever. This is.
Oh well not great.
Yeah, it depends. It depends who you are, right, like, Uh, what brucellosis does is generally it infects heifer's so like young lady cows, it will cause them to abort their first calf.
Sound.
Yeah, it's sad. Also because of the word it's controlled, you're heard can get killed out if you have brucellosis, it.
Would be contagious to people's like cattle.
Yes, and that would be very bad.
So Okay, when you see people don't like buffalo because they're worried about brusilosis, they're not worried that they will get brucellosis. They're worried that it will affect their cattle.
Yes, I do believe people can get brucellosis. I'm not as familiar with.
That Apparently I'm looking here.
Apparently, if you do get it, there's a twenty percent chance that your testicles are going to swell up real bad.
So oh wow, I didn't know that.
I guess that's why they don't want it.
Yeah, but that would also be bad, right, like big bull brucellosis.
Paul that okay, so we're talking about the cattle industry. I'm on board. I'm on board.
Yeah, it's the cattle that they're concerned about, and they can take or leave the testicular swelling like they're tough.
Why are they touching the buffalo in the first place.
They're not, Okay, yeah, they're not. Okay, Yeah, it's it's a buffalo coming out and causing the cattle to get brucellosis. Right, here's the deal. Elk also can get brucellosis.
I know about elk.
We have those okay, yeah, you know. Okay, So an elk also travels widely, right, and elk it's not generally an animal that is kept behind high fences. Sometimes that there probably are high fence like game farms where people paid to go and hunt elkins.
We have someone in Virginia.
Yeah, that's that's kind of gross in my opinion, I don't like that. But elk also carry brucellosis, right, So if we're concerned about brucellosis, we also need to be concerned about elk. But it really doesn't get brought up in the elk discussion. It gets brought up in the in the buffalo discussion. So these are the reasons that some of the reasons that people don't like buffalo.
Right, right, because they carry they carry a cow disease, and they don't like to stay inside the park.
Got it, Yeah, yeah, they don't like to stay inside the park. We've talked for a long time, Molly, talking of things that might cause your testicles to swell. Here is some products and services or maybe it'll help. Yeah, maybe maybe you'll have bought your first calf. Who knows. It's roll the dice. All right, we are back. So let's talk about the area where this is happening. Right, This is happening in kind of northern central Montana around Livingstone.
There lots of the land in this area has actually dropped below the population density that Turner considered to be evidence of the closure of the frontier when he was developing that thesis, Right, I'm not a big fan of the concept of the frontier. If that's another podcast it I'll make one day, but I don't like it.
But there's like no people there.
Yeah, it's yeah, there are. There are very few people there, in part because cattle farming is hard, in part because it's harder in a globalized economy, in part because of
climate change. There's this theory of the Buffalo Commons written by to be called Popper, and they considered like this specific area to be a tragedy of the Commons, where this beautiful plans ecosystem has been destroyed, and they put forward the idea that the presence of buffalo and the landscape could return it to a sort of short grass prairie commons. This isn't a direct link to the American Prairie Reserve, but this is kind of what they're trying
to do. They're not putting Buffalo on the landscape because they are a buffalo organization.
Right, so they're trying to restore the grassland.
Yes, that's the idea, because we don't have a prairie national park. Right when colonization was moving west, as a Department of Homeland Security likes to highlight with its use of that image liberty was floating across the planes there. Sorry, let's just put an image in my head. Remember when the Trump administration is getting very aggressive towards Somali people. I guess it still is.
Yeah.
Yeah, did you see the Ai version of that, where as a Somali woman like crossing the plains? No, okay, it was pretty funny. It was one of there you're.
Doing an opposed like like like the Mermaid on the front of a ship.
Yeah, exactly, yeah, Like yeah, it was like, this is a Somali promised land like they were, like, I guess, parodying American rhetoric towards indigenous people and being.
Like olo, like Somali people can't do manifest destiny. I thought we loved that.
Yeah, yeah, it was very funny. It was. It was kind of amusing to see that American rhetoric reflected back. Somali people have incredible posting abilities that HS was not ready for. So what the what the APR is trying to do is yet use the buffalo here as like a landscape engineer, right, like an animal that will help return this area to I guess natural state is a problematic term, you know, but.
Like to its pre industrial state.
Yeah. Yeah. When we think about like why isn't there a planes national park, we have to consider the role the capitalism plates, right.
Because no one would go visit that.
Yeah, well I think they would. The plan would be beautiful in their in their way, right.
But I guess, like you know, just thinking like, is the role of the national park to preserve this landscape, this ecosystem, or is it to create a place where people could go and buy things?
Yeah, exactly right, Increasingly it's the latter.
Yeah, and I think there is a bias towards preserving Yeah, there's there's like a scenic vista bias. This is an area where people could ranch cattle, and so like that happened instead, you know, and then we got to a point where like no one was going to give up their private land to make a massive park.
Well they didn't want to in any of the other times either, So that the.
Government is to make you Yeah, I think the government could force you back in the day.
I mean, I just can't imagine a new national park ever coming into existence. We just don't have that kind of political will anymore.
Yeah, I mean we might get like the Donald Trump's birthplace National Park or like something similar.
You know, like we would never get Yellowstone again.
Yeah, we wouldn't. And like part of that is because they violently remove the Indigenous people from those places in order to.
I don't want to romanticize that. Like I live near Shenandoa Valley National Park where people were forced out in a pretty brutal way. That's a big part of the history here, So I don't want to romanticize the creation of the national park. I just be like, the government is not going to spend a lot of money on something that's just for everyone to enjoy.
Ever again yeah yeah, and they're not going to say, like, to an extent, we are removing this piece of land from the rapacious capitalism that has destroyed the rest of our natural spaces.
So if somebody's going to eat this grass, it's going to be hamburgers.
We wanted to turn into the cheapest meat possible. Also, like I should point out that like land back and national parks are very, very very different. I like to kind of illustrate this with the idea that during the Nez Perce War, as a Nez person like fighting their way towards the Canadian border. They are having gunfights in Yellowstone National Park as tourists are coming to love Stone to like check out the mountains and see the guysers and stuff.
You know, that's that's America.
Yeah, that is It's just perfectly America, right, Like we'll look at it. Look, we're preserving this for you as we violently remove the indigenous people and just.
Like coming to spend your tourism dollars, never mind that there's a war going on there.
Yeah, just being like just kind of letting that go past.
Whatever the time period equivalent of a visor and a fanny pack was that was cooking.
Yeah, yeah, for sure, probably probably a cigar and I don't know this trousers to stop past your knee. So you'll hear people saying a lot of shit about the API of the America Pray Reserve, right, And so I did what I should do as a responsible journalist, and I pulled their nine nineties.
That's my favorite thing to do. Yeah, where's the money going? Yeah, well, where's the money coming from?
Yeah? Where the money coming from? You'll hear a lot of like anti API stuff, some of it from the cattle industry. Right, if you go through that part of Montana, you'll see signs say like save the cowboys, stop the American Prairie Reserve.
I think we have a different understanding of what a cowboy is me and the sign maker.
Yeah, right, well it is inherently time, I guess, to cattle, right, and the idea being that these bison are displacing cattle. It's not a direct contract with cattle. In fact, the APR has ten times more cattle on its land than it does buys it. Like most ranches, the APR has deeded or private land that they graze on leasing right
to adjacent public land. What the APR is spending its money on, among other things, among like some staffing costs, of its costs, paying consultants, paying fundraisers not to pay consultants. Oh yeah, they're dropping some coin on consultants. Is they buy ranches. The way land ownership works in this area is kind of like a checkerboard, and you've got public land and private land.
So they're trying to make pathways for the bison by buying contiguous plots.
Yeah, they're not all contiguous, but their goal is to have a large contiguous area.
In which right and you just have to buy them when they come up exactly.
Yeah. Yeah, I think the argument is that they're they're pushing up land prices, right, But in reality, this area is depopulating rapidly. It might push up land prices a little bit, but it's not like there's massive bidding wars going on here for each of these ranches.
Right, because are there new like people seeking new cow ranching opportunities who are trying to move in who are being prevented from doing that.
Will be people trying to like either exp I guess, if expand their ranch, or if a family is subdividing its ranch, or if you didn't inherit your family ranch, I guess, and want to buy some land. Generally, how it works here is you buy a certain part of land. It'll be like sixty forty seventy thirty something like that. So you'll buy land, and that would give you the privilege to have like first DIBs on grazing on the
public land that is adjacent to your land. So most of these ranches are checkerboarded, right, It's not like a
big contiguous plot. So not being able to graize the bison on the public land kind of fucks that up in these plots for the American prairie people, right, and like I should say that, like I have some sympathy for people ranching in this area, like my family of farmers, Like it's got to be really fucking hard right now when fuel prices are insanely high to be trying to farm on these especially the way that like American people farm have massive expanses, right, you have to be in
a vehicle a lot. When I was reading about the brucellosis stuff, and it made me think of foot and mouth disease, which happened in the UK when I was a child. I remember how traumatic that was for people having their whole herds killed. Several people who were like within our extended family social circle killed themselves and they're
horrible when they lost all their cattle. Yeah, Like it's really fucked up, Like at least in that part of the world, like you might have it might have been your great grandfather who started bringing these cattle, right, Like it's an intergenerational project that nick joins lying through your family. So I do understand these people like deeply tied to this land. Also not in the same way as Indigenous people I can see that people like you know, don't
want it to change. I understand that, and like consolidation and agriculture climate change, the way our foody consistem works, that is an issue we should address if we want to take care of the land. What the government is doing, it's not how we address that. Sometimes you'll see people saying that the APR is entirely a tax avoidance system for the Mars family.
Like the chocolate people.
Yeah, yeah, big chocolate, you familiar. The Mars family are rich as fuck.
Yeah, I didn't know they were involved in the in the bison industry.
Well, they have donated, I couldn't find an exact figure, right, like with the change of nonprofit like the reporting laws, it's a lot harder now than it used to be.
So they don't own or operate it. They've just made large donations.
They've made larst donations. There's a unit called Mars Vista within the APR which has some private housing on it. But like I think people are fundamentally misunderstanding how they're super wealthy, Like these people are worth more than one hundred billion dollars. Would highly encourage anyone who thinks that an NGO which is going through like in the tens of millions a year, maybe by twenty fifteen. So in the first fourteen years of this project's existence, say donated
twenty million. That's not touching the edges.
I'm sure they have a complicated tax shelter system set up for themselves that doesn't involve bison. It involves bank accounts and countries you haven't heard of.
Yes, exactly, Like the Panama Paper's had zero bison in it for a reason, right, Like you're just being very it's very sweet if you think that. Like the way that they are avoiding paying federal taxes is buying land to put buffalo on.
Like all these families have their own whole foundations that are just about moving money around in opaque ways. Yeah, if you're trying to avoid paying taxes, you don't donate to a real charity that's actually doing something complicated with physical animals and land. You have a foundation that does grants for something obscure.
Yeah, Like it's just not it's just just not it. Like it's just it's not it. That's not how taxes work. That's not how rich people work. So we've talked about Brucelosi is going to move past brucellosis. And I had a diversion on chronic wasting disease and elk feeding, but maybe we'll make that a whole other podcast. So we also talked about this, this checkerboarding of public land. Right, Lots of these ranching operations that they're buying rely heavily
on public land grazing. So in twenty twenty two they applied. In twenty nineteen, the BLM allowed them to graze bison on seven plots in Phillips County. Right, So that's saying that you can put your bison on this public land.
Which is adjacent to the private land which you own, and that's standard practice.
Everybody's doing that.
It depends on the particular plot, right, So they had to apply to the Bureau of Land Management.
It's like pretty common for people to be grazing to get these permits to graze on the public land.
There have been bison on public land for forty years. There remain bison on public land across the West, to include some tribes grazed bison on public land as well as on tribal land.
But like the cattle farm are doing this as well.
Oh yeah, the cat of farmers are all yeah, yeah, that's like.
So I'm saying, like, if you buy this plot of land, it's like kind of common that you would also be grazing on the public land adjacent to it.
Yeah, it's entirely understood, like or not even adjacent to but sometimes like interspersed with Yeah. Like so if you look at like a sometimes you'll see like a de did and a least acreage when you're looking at like a land, like if you were if you were interested in buying a ranch molley.
So like when they so, when they bought this land, it would be reasonable for them to assume that they would be able to use the parcels adjacent and interspersed within it.
Yes, yeah, okay, yes, and they would have known that that would have required in some cases asking the BLM, right, which is what they did. And in twenty twenty two the BLM said, go ahead, put your bison in this on these particular seven plots, right, so they were amended to include bison. They've got environmental impact study done, you know, they did all the things.
Is doing an environmental impact study of the presence of a native animal?
Yeah, on its native range?
What happened if a buffalo lived here. Yeah, we asked ten government scientists.
Yeah, we spent thousands of dollars finding out what happens if buffalo lives in buffalo home. Turned out didn't do massive ecological damage. So BLM said, let the buffalo back. What is interesting about this rule change is the justification the BLM is using, and that is the thing that people should be worried about. In my opinion, that should
be the headline. The headline should be, So the BLM is trying to regulate these leases that have their roots in the nineteen thirty four Taylor Grazing Act.
I'm not unknowingly.
Yeah, yeah, the Tailor Grazing Act a big deal when it comes to public land in the West in farming, right, it is trying to regulate these leases to quote unquote productive purposes. It doesn't say productive purposes anywhere I can find in the tailor grazing net. It does use the term I guess domestic livestock.
Iyson could be a livestock.
Well, they are a livestock.
I've eaten them.
Yeah, they These bison are vaccinated, they are fenced, they are tagged, they'll be handled I'm guessing the way the API does it is like a kind of non invasive handling, like trying to keep them not acclimated to human contact per se.
But like it's hard to ask. It's a livestock advison to human content.
Yeah, you can get like beefalow, right, which is like a like a hybridized bison.
They sell bison that my whole foods. That's livestock.
Yeah, the APR is not raising them to kill them to sell them for meat.
But they could if they wanted to, Like, because I'm I don't think the government is ever going to go to a cattle rancher and say you have to kill X number of these or they're no longer livestock.
Yeah, well that is the question, right, Like what if we choose if you gave me a million dollars today, I would immediately cease making podcasts. I would buy a large plot land, and I would have an ungodly number of rare and endangered domestic livestock species. Right, I'd have Jacob sheep. I'd have polyseric sheep with four horns, you know, like satan looking sheep. I'd be all about it, and.
They would remain legally livestock, even if you had no intention of eating them.
That is the question, right, The productive purposes definition could be extremely broad. What if you're doing practice like restorative ranching, right, what if.
The Bureau of Land Management was concerned with the land being properly managed?
Well, at a point, I guess the BLM was right because there was a rule. This is actually kind of funny. It was called the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, and the BLM rescinded that last week. So previously that was one of the considerations for managing land, for managing public land, And I guess like we should just briefly say that there is no such thing as government land, right, It's all native land. And the land which is currently managed by the government is paid for by me and Molly
and everyone else. Doug berghen doesn't own it. It is there for future generations, right, Like.
It's like, what is what are they going to do with it?
If they kick the buffalo off.
Of it, cattle will be my guest.
The cattle only leases, so they're just going to lease it to someone else.
Yeah, But like, I guess some portions of public land in that part of Montana are entirely landlocked by private land. Like. One of the things that APR did that made people like it there is that the APR bought a ranch and then opened up a gated road which allowed people to access fifty thousand acres of public land that had previously been completely islanded. Right's so like, right, what their plan is to do? They have to sell these ranches now.
So the government is saying, you can't use this public the land anymore in such a way that might negate your ability to use your privately owned land, because we don't think bison our livestock.
Yeah, because bison awoke. More broadly, like, this Conservation of Landscape Health rule with Simpson is worrying, very Amusingly, the BLM has forgotten to take down the website that explains the value of the rule, so at the time of recording, the BLM's website still says quote, the rule recognizes conservation as an essential owned a public lands management on equal footing with other multiple uses of these habitats. Americans rely on public lands to live a food, energy, cleaner and water,
wildlife habitat and places to recreate. The BLM knows the importance of balancing our use of natural resources with protecting public lands and waters for future generations. The rule will safeguard these lands and waters to protect our way of life. Still a bit cringe, But they've now rescinded that rule, So I guess our way of life is now under threat.
Because I just don't understand how this is justifiable at all. But I guess that's not really the point.
For a lot of people. Right Like it sort of flies under the radar because it's not, you know, like a big Washington thing. I can see how like in our major population centers, it can be easily to be like the defudg cares where the cows and buffalo go.
But I think, even aside from an ecological argument, which I think is very important, right the rest storation of these grasslands, this is the government saying, no, we're going to take this public resource away from someone who is rightfully using it and paying to use it, and we're going to sell that right instead to a capitalist concern over a bullshit fake reason.
Yeah, like not that the APR is not I suppose it's not really a capitalist concern. It's like a nonprofit.
But there has to be some sort of big cattle lobbying at play here.
Yeah, I think there are elements of the cattle industry which have been opposed to bison, especially due to that departure of bison from the park is really something that for years has been like a point of tension in Yellowstone. It's worth who is for this and who is against it? I guess it is cattle ranchers who are opposed to the grazing of bison out here.
And who specifically is getting those seven specific plots?
Yeah, well, I think the reason they receded those is because they were the seven most recently approved. Okay, because there are other plots. I think there are tribes in California, for instance, applied for buffalo grazing on public land. And I should point out that like a tribal cultural herd, a food sovereignty herd is a very different thing to the APR. I hope that APR did not exact. I know that tribal and traits would, but.
I guess as far as the government is concerned, it's the same that dancwers just know.
I don't know yet. We don't know yet, right, We don't know if those tribal leases have been approved. What we do know is that like this production standard is a thory of threat to them. The Coalition of large tribes actually wrote a letter opposing this decision. Our quote from it here. It is offensive and unacceptable that the federal government would still seek to keep buffalo off of these lands. Chairmen of the shann River Sioux tribe Ryman Lebau, wrote,
adding that BLM lands are all former buffalo lands. He calls the decision a painful reprise the genocide the federal government attempted could commit against us and our relative to buffalo. They also call it affirmative action for cattle, which is kind of funny. Wow. True, yeah, but yeah it's true.
And it's like saying drink cowdi Yeah.
Yeah. This is one our one ungular is fine than the other one is in I want people to be concerned about this because it could be deeply damaging to the attempts of tribes to recover their buffalo population. It could be deeply damaging to our public lands. I guess I want to talk briefly about the buffalo genocide because I think it's something that people have like a grasp of, but not like a maybe in depth understanding. What I want to briefly say is that the government played a
massive role in wiping out of most of a buffalo. Right, we ended up with fewer than a thousand head of buffalo. Like there were times when a tree falling down, a lightning strike, a bad flood could have significantly altered the future of the species because there were so few. Capitalism also played a role, though. The idea that the buffalo hunters were like just following orders from the government relies in part on books written by former buffalo hunters trying
to absolve themselves. I would suggest that we also look at the incentive right to kill the animals and to not make use of their remains after people did that, right, because like as much as the government did, like the capitalism that the government was ringing with, it killed the majority of the wild buffalo in this country. And that is what's happening again, right we look at public lands management today. The glass year I was in chuck O Kanyon.
Chako Canyon was the site of the biggest building in what is now the United States until the eighteen eighties. Oh chuck O and civilization built these massive, great houses there, really really beautiful amazing place, one of the less visited units in the National park system. Gorgeous, amazing. I saw some out there too.
This is all news to me.
You got to go to Chaka Kanyon.
We have to find something we can record that gets me down to the southwest.
Yeah. I bet there are some biggots, you know there are because they use they appropriate the Zooni sacred Sun symbol in some of their Nazi shit. Because have we not fucking done enough? Well, apparently not right, because there is there is a kind pain to have drilling to like dealist areas of Chaco Canyon. I also spent time last year in Which in Homeland, with which in people they're what's happening is a Trump administration is trying to
grunt drilling permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The which and people, I should say, preferred to use the term Arctic Refuge, So I'm going to try and use that going forward. They don't like anoir just that. So what that will do right is on the on the plane there drilling is the place where the caribou migrate. The Porcupine cariboo herd makes the longest land mammal migration in the world.
So we're just speed running the devastation of every cool big animal we have.
Yeah, Like we're going to do drilling in the place where the caribou carve, right, and if they don't go there to carve, then it's over. Yeah. And there are so few of these animals left, right, they can cross political boundaries, that can travel their great distances unimpeded by capitalism. Largely that's because which in territory is not a reservation,
it's like they own it. So they can go off public land onto gwichinland and without the caribou, like the Gwichin culture cannot be the same as it is right that the caribou is sacred to them, like that culture in the distance of the Cariboo I guess, are tied together, and like the same could be said for bison, right like that it's part of the reason that we don't have bison on the planes anymore because indigenous people on the bison went hand in hand in the genocide of
the indigenous peoples. There was also a genocide of the buffalo, I guess, and those two things weren't separate or distinct. And I think, like there's this idea in the American liberal psyche that like bison being on the land constitutes a return and like that's not it, right, Like, privately owned bison being on the APR is not land back.
I mean it would restore the grassland to some degree, but that's not that doesn't have the same cultural impact as returning the land to its natural stewards.
Yeah, exactly, and allowing Indigenous people to like manage the land for future generations in the way that they did for millennia before this massive extinction event that the European colonization.
I hope nobody thinks they privately owned buffalo flock is the same as land back.
Yeah, I hope not. I really hope not. Like did you see like when the folk Pet tribes were like killing some of their buffalo to feed people during the last shutdown.
I do remember that. Yeah.
Yeah, there's kind of a strange reaction being like, oh, how sad that they have to to kill their buffalo, Like.
But that's what the buffalo for.
Yes, So that's why they the buffalo are there. Sort of sort of culture can exist and.
It's not like a sacred cow situation.
Yeah, yeah, it's sacred to them, but not in that way.
Yeah, like it's sacred to them and that it is sustaining to them, right, And like that's my understanding at least, and having spent a little bit of time with people who have that relationship to other animals like that, when I think about like which inference in their caribou, Like they will fight as hard as they can to preserve their caribou herd. That that doesn't that's not like a different thing from them. They also hunt the caribou and eat it.
Yeah.
Part of the natural relationship with them is sometimes eating them.
Yeah, and like they did in that way. The culture is sustained by the ongoing presence of the animal.
Right, I guess, I guess we just I don't know the Western mind. We can only hunt something to extinction. We can't contemplate, yeah, wanting to coexist with it, a symbiotic coexistence where we eat them sometimes, but we don't want them all to be dead.
Yeah right, We're not just going to be like, Okay, this that was from while it lasted on to the next one. Yeah, just do the next species now. So, like people should be worried about this. This is not the end of bison on public lands. It's not the end of bison on tribal lands, but this productivity standard should really concern people. BLM is the biggest public lands
management agency. Sometimes it gets jokingly called the Bureau of Livestock and Mining, which is pretty much the way it's going, right, Right, So.
Is there a legal definition being used here, like something from a statute or something from a contract, Like what is this?
What is productive use?
That's a productive use? Is a standard that they have derived from the term domestic livestock in the Tailor Grazing Act.
And then how is domestic livestock legally defined any domesticated animal?
Yeah, well they are claiming that it is domestic livestock if it is productive.
But this is circular, right, So productive use means livestock and livestock have to be productive, but what is productive? It's livestock. Livestock is productively.
Like, well, there has to be like a cash exchange, I guess like they're saying that it has to be raised for sale.
But then like, how exactly are we measuring? That doesn't have to be profitable?
Does it have to be extracting the maximum like output out of that given area? Of land.
Do you have to be exporting something like? Do you have to have a government cad?
Like?
What is the threshold here for what's productive?
Yeah, APR has given by some meat to food banks before, so apparently that doesn't meet the standard.
Right, So like without without a hard and fast, like clear written stand this is the government just deciding who does or doesn't get to do business with them?
Yeah, and who who does and doesn't have access. There are issues, big issues with grays and cattle on public land, ecological, social climate change, animal welfare. There are issues, many of them. But the idea that if you wanted to, let's say, if you wanted to raise fewer cattle and do what they call regenerative ranching to something more sustainable, you couldn't because it's not as productive. It's bonkers right on public land.
Like right, so now you lose, you lose your government contract because you tried you try something, try something new, try something sustainable.
You tried to be too nice to the land that supposedly belongs to everyone.
So in order in order to use this land that is supposed to be for you know, public preservation, you have to be as exploitative and destructive as possible. Yeah, a great, thank you, Doug Burgham.
Yeah cool. Are we going to extend this to like not as familiar with mining, but you can stake a claim on public land, right, Lots of most mining claims are amounted a state on public land and you can you can exploit that claim. Is it now going to be the case that like you have to exploit that claim? Like if we don't have this standard of maintaining the land and that it said it's gone now and that the only standard is it has to be as productive as possible.
Then how is that land management? This is the Bureau of Land Exploitation.
Yeah, the BLM is just and I know the BLM has done this for many center negas. This isn't then this isn't new for the BLM.
But having officially rescinded their rule on conserving the land.
Yeah, then this could be really bad, right, Like the massive chunks of the West are managed by the BLM, and like the idea that they're only going to allow it the most productive uses or force the most productive uses, like this is one of the many ways a Trump administration is attacking public lands that people should talk.
About more and again without adequately defining it. I just feel like this is another vector for just handing out government resources to nurse allies.
Yeah, and like without any change in statute. Right, this is the law that Bergham is reinterpreting. Here. You've got the nineteen thirty four Tailor Grazing Act, and then like there's a nineteen seventy six law that that and the statutory language is that the BLM should manage the land for multiple use and sustained yield. That is broad, but like we are not going to get this Congress to pass a better one.
No, And if anybody does try to take this to court, the Supreme Court will just say, no, you have to strip mine the field.
Yeah yeah, yeah, like your only choice.
You have to frack, even whether or not you have to set up tracking.
You're dure like obliged to do feed lands even though you can't. Like, it's just like a really concerning area that I think has been approached kind of almost tokenistically in some of the press. Like this is bad for everyone, right if the government is saying you can only ranch this way on public land, like that's also bad for ranches all over the West. Right, I don't think that like the way that we restore our land to its
custodians and to like its natural state. It's big private parks like APR is like a private national park, right, Like you can walk through lots of it, you can hunt on it, like public land. In some places, you can camp on it. They have dispersed camping. That's nice. I don't believe in the benevolence of the rich, because like, look how we fucking got here.
Right, but that half measure was the best thing we had at this moment, and now it's illegal.
Yeah, now it's And like I'm glad that these rich people are putting buffalo on the landscape because we need more of them. Like, if we're ever going to have truly wild herds, we need that genetic diversity. Right, They've been through horrible genetic bottlenecks in getting up to this half a million number.
Right, It's not like we can just try again later, let the number drop back down. We'll try again in a hundred years, Like at some point we've missed the boat.
Yeah, And as the climate continues to change, for it, we have to think about how land management, food procurement plays a role in our future and like this is the opposite of doing that, and I think people ought to be concerned about that. There's not much you could do about it, Like it's these people who weren't elected ruling on things that are not saturtary. But it is something that I think people ought to add to that many concerns with the Trump administration.
I guess be more worried.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't want you to be more worried. I want you to go outside, like see a buffalo. It would be nice that.
Would at least know that I don't know the future existence of the world as we know it is being intact from all sides, even from directions I wasn't aware of. Yeah, there are attack factors that I just had not considered.
Yeah, this is a new and exciting way that they're making tit worse. So yeah, I hope you enjoyed a little diversion about buffalo. Next week, I want to talk about bears. I want to tear the bears.
I'm excited to learn about because I've seen a bear and I know they live in the United States, unlike they do. I guess I was thinking of.
Like spring Bok.
Maybe they kind of.
Look like that in it.
I don't know what. I've been to a zoo and they of antelope type animals there, so I just I don't know. Everything at the zoo must be from far away.
Now, the prong horn is like it's a there's a there's a cool zoo. I'm not a big zoo guy.
You've got to make sure it's one of one of those ones that's a credited zoo. Yeah.
Yeah, there's one in Palm Springs where you can see I've seen big I've been fortunate enough to see big horn sheep in their natural habitat. But for most people, your best chance again they look at a big horn sheep is to get to that one in Palm Springs. When you see a prong horn just pronging, you know.
Like do they like.
Yeah, they bounce alond. They got those giant tendons right that they a buffalo can go thirty five miles an hour, and they're faster than a buffalo.
So like, I don't want to see a buffalo go thirty five miles an hour. I don't want to see that.
They can be Yeah, it's like seeing a mini van like doing muscle cars. Shit, you know, like they could jump. They could. They have this incredible buffalo can like jump over stuff. They're they're actually very nimble despite looking you know, like a like a cinder block.
They're so cute. I want to touch one so bad, but I don't.
Vice against it. Yeah, bristolosis is going to be a long term issue. It's yeah, it's the trampoline. There'll be a short term issue for you. So uh yeah, don't touch buffalo.
Don't touch them.
Send send Molly pictures of your prong horning counters.
Yeah, if you have seen a wild animal in the United States, let me see it. I don't know we had those.
Yeah, getting Molly's replies with your raccoons in your trash.
Raccoons I know about.
I've seen recy Yeah, yeah it was.
I was in South Korea many years ago at a theme park that had a zoo in it. I don't know, it was a while ago. Perfect in the zoo area, there was this huge display. Everyone was crowded around the very cool zoo animal with raccoons.
Oh really, they don't have them. Yeah, they play such a cultural role in the American cultural hegemony.
I don't want to see a raccoon but I guess, yeah, if you can't see one, that's an intriguing get.
So, yeah, I remember, I like my initial engagement with raccoons was through the movie Pokahontis, which is a whole other ship. So when I first saw a raccoon, I wanted to visit it, right because you know they have biscuits.
Yeah, you thought it was gonna be like a chatty.
Yeah, like a little friend. Yeah, it was very aggressive, be unnecessarily aggressive friend. Yeah, I was approaching in the spirit of kindness. I think, like generally, I also have been victimized by a skunk for several years now, so I think maybe I just that's not a friend. No, it's fine.
Those ladies on TikTok that have pet ones will tell you that is not a friend.
Apparently they're very nice if they like, can be encouraged not to. I don't know, I don't think it. Don't please don't capture a skunk, can bring it home with you, like it skunk wants to live on its own. But yeah, this one skunk will find me every time I'm going through that, like I'll be coming out at night.
He's thinking about you on my head.
It's like a fucking Exocet missile. I see him coming from like two hundred yards away.
It's that fucking guy again.
Yeah, he's pissed at me. I'm pissed at him. He turns around, he squares up.
Did you get cat?
No? No, he'll show his ass to me, and then I'll I'll just kind of give him a wide berth and think, oh, that was unusual, seeing it's going to be that, And then two weeks later, there he is again.
Yeah, he's waiting for you. He does not want you to come back.
No, he doesn't. He's also trying to like exercise control over the public land and in aggressive.
He's doing land management and you're not part of it.
Yeah, he's returning it to its natural state by keeping European people off the land, which I guess is honestly valid, respectable.
He's heard horror stories from his great grandparents.
Yeah, I can respect that night, you know, I think of it in that way. But yeah, I've got some good pictures of the back end of him. Well after he kept doing it, I thought I may as well photograph and document this tendency. So yeah, I have them. I'm going to use them for some kind of greetings card or something they haven't yeat.
Perfect for the family Christmas card, I think.
Yeah, I just keep people on their toes. We've rambled enough. Okay, yeah, please send us your wildlife pictures. We would love to see them.
And next week bears.
Bears, Yeah money before we go? Do you want to plug your podcast about people who probably don't engage with animals very much?
Oh yeah, you can listen to my show A Weird Little Guys. I don't think there's been an animal in the show in a while. Well, I guess eventually I will get around to those guys that occupied that BLM land.
But yeah, yeah, that's it.
But it's that kind of show.
Yeah, I bet they love wolves. I bet I bet they like think a lot about wolves even though they don't see them.
Oh yeah, yeah yeah. There was a guy who had his user name on a Nazi forum was the devis a Wolf, which is incorrect German for the white wolf. Perfectly, they do love wolves.
Yeah, yeah, could I guess. Thank you very much, Molly, thank you James.
It could happen. Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website. Coolzonmedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,