Buffalo are nice and everything, if you’re into hippy-dippy liberal woo-woo Crying Indian nostalgia. But all things considered, the plains bison (Bos bison athabascae). But in reality, wild buffalo don’t provide jobs, don’t put food on the American table (at least for most families), and hurt Montana’s cattle industry. This hasn’t stopped the Big Sky State’s liberal transplants from lobbying to hurt the cattle industry for what most native Montanans call a “giant prairie rodent.”
Writing a guest-post on Don Pogreba’s Democrat junk-blog, the Montana Post, a “former recording artist” and full-time animal rights activist named Douglas Balmain has written a stirring plea to keep cattle out of the 20,900 acres of grazing allotments in the Gallatin National Forest. The title of his flood of leftist-tears Immediate Action Needed: Say No to Cattle Grazing in the Territory of Wild Buffalo. One wonders – other than for the sake of typical liberal catastrophization, while the issue of cattle grazing Montana grass requires “Immediate Action.”
Cattle have been grazing most of the allotments for more than hundred years. But to leftists, the sky is always falling.
Balmain is no common-sense Montanan whose ears happen to be tender to calls of the bleating buffalo. He’s a radical animal rights activist who lobbies around the United States for the most insanely anti-human policies that put the needs of four-legged pieces of meat above people. And Balmain writes at the Democrat blog, “wild bison, and the modern awareness of their species, have the capacity to accelerate the public’s shift in awareness from cattle production and meat consumption to ecological restoration.”
Make no mistake; when Balrain writes of “ecological restoration” contra meat-consumption he’s talking about veganism in the name of the environment, our economy and protein access be damned.
Balrain’s vegan advocacy can be seen lobbying Hawaiians to ban the trade or export or import of fur, articles advocating a ban on trapping in Montana (and against killing wolves), and is a part of the Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting.
So just to be clear, the guy sub-writing at Pogreba’s Democrat blog doesn’t believe in meat consumption or game hunting. And one wonders why Democrats keep losing election in Big Sky Country, right?
Oh, and the fellow seeks to overthrow the foundations of our culture and the destruction of our institutions, which is what animal rights advocacy is really about. See the lyrics below.
Using the term “Indigenous” to describe the plains bison at least half-a-dozen times (“Indian Buffalo” doesn’t roll off the tongue, but it could work in a pinch), Balmain claims that somehow keeping cattle from eating in the Gallatin Forest will help restore the balance of the world. His chief concern seems to be that nearly 900 buffalo will be harvested outside Yellowstone so they don’t wander into grazing territory and infect cattle with brucellosis and compete for grass with delicious animals that Americans eat.
The greenies seem to be soliciting public comment up and until Thursday, December 17th, to ask the Yellowstone Ranger District to shut off public land to cattle and leave it instead for a largely worthless public parasite.
In the meantime, responsible Montanans who like to have some semblance of an economy recognize that beef production is the state’s third-largest industry. There are currently 2.55 million head of cattle in the state, or roughly 2.5 times the number of people. The industry produces 1.7 billion dollars in cash receipts each year and amounts to millions of dollars for the public treasury.
Montana ranks 11 for cattle production in the United States and its beef production feeds millions upon millions of Americans and world-citizens quality, affordable protein.
Buffalo, on the other hand, forms the basis of a subsistence diet of virtually no one, being relegated to exotic and novelty meat sales (but if you’re interested, here are some buffalo recipes). Buffalo feed almost no one, provide the state zero revenue dollars, and do not, in fact, somehow magically restore the natural order. Even buffalo have natural predators, and not all of them walk on four legs.
Although the news issue itself probably won’t make the front page of the newspaper, this is a good case-in-point for how Montana’s leftists are woefully out-of-touch with the people they claim to represent.
