Tuesday, February 10, 2026

”Market-Based” Environmentalism = Yellowstone Buffalo Genocide

February 10, 2026

Bison in Yellowstone National Park. Photo: Jim Pearce, National Park Service.

Yellowstone bison have flourished for more than 10,000 years. In the 1830s settler-colonialists and other two-legged parasites nearly wiped them out.  Now, almost 200 years later, the old cognitive model, Manifest Destiny, possesses a new plundering herd of uber-wealthy, neo-colonialists engaged in what can best be described as slow-motion domestication, or in other words, buffalo genocide.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), National Park Service, APHIS-USDA (Animal Plant Health Inspection Service), and U.S. Forest Service-USDA are working in lockstep to seize/plunder grass and land that sustains wild Yellowstone bison. Their aim is to boost domestic livestock production on private and tribal lands in Montana and ‘juice’ commercial North American buffalo-meat markets.

The scene in 2026 is ridiculously unreasonable, highly dubious, and sorrowful.  The federal government’s insistence that it’s “…following the law and putting Montanans first” is on its face is laughable and miserably inadequate.  Laugh out loud?  Or you can fight back tears and grieve for the last wild buffalo herds being systematically slaughtered throughout Yellowstone National Park and the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Again!  We have all watched this tragic spaghetti western rerun before, ad nauseum. Government bureaucrats talk in riddles and tongues.

Example #1: Abduction, Quarantine, Extraordinary Rendition

Yellowstone National Park’s Bison Conservation Transfer Program operates like the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program following 9/11. Wild buffalo are snatched from Yellowstone Park, families are torn apart, individuals are tortured in federal prison (quarantine pens) for years and disappeared from their ancestral homelands forever.

Apparently, the government’s aim is to objectify (convert public wildlife and habitat into marketable private property) and tame wild Yellowstone bison and the ecosystem upon which they depend. Once domesticated from years of physical and mental abuse in captivity, separated from their homeland and families, these highly intelligent, sentient beings are converted into a cold-blooded commodity, or things to be marketed like cattle, sheep, or human sex slaves – to meet man’s demand for red meat.

This government program is all about political and social appearances and market-based faux environmentalism.  “Big Green” groups provide greenwash (smoke screen) for a fee in exchange for political cover for greedy individuals and corporations who manipulate the masses, exploit public land and wildlife, and Congress for profit and power.

Recently, seventy-three (73) wild bison – 35 adult females, 36 calves, and two adult male detainees – were abducted from Yellowstone and trucked over 500 miles from quarantine (held captive at a ‘black site’ for years) near Gardiner, Montana to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Eastern Montana. In this final phase their free-roaming instincts (purpose) to migrate and defend the herd have been suppressed, murdered.

This latest bison transfer brings the total to 487 animals abducted and transported to the Fort Peck Tribes for their final year of quarantine and brucellosis testing before being redistributed as domestic livestock or slaughtered to supply the fledgling international buffalo-meat trade.

Montana press has reported that the 500-mile trip for wild bison is being funded and promoted by Defenders of Wildlife who hire the trucks and drivers and assist with disease testing once the animals are detained at the Fort Peck reservation.

These traumatized wild animals were originally captured in the winter of 2022-23 and held at Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS-USDA) pens to ensure they could not transmit brucellosis, a disease originally imported to Montana by domestic cattle.  One should consider APHIS as the forerunner of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), enforcers of ‘white man’s’ plant and animal world simulation. Both manifest the same rabid behavior as quasi-military ‘word-spinners’ and violent anti-lifers.

Fact: The actual risk of brucellosis transmission from Yellowstone bison to domestic livestock is 0%.  Not a single case in 200 years, not one.  Elk, yes, buffalo, no.

What’s ‘Greenwashing’ worth?  Qui bono?  

All this seems to benefit an incestuous colony of government bureaucrats, government agents and political hacks working at faux-environmental organizations, Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council member groups, and billionaire ‘wannabe cowboy’ tax dodgers and their heavily subsidized livestock herds.

Defenders of Wildlife is now partnering with the feds, the tribes, cattle ranchers. Defenders supplies the trucks and drivers and assists with brucellosis testing and torture of once-wild Yellowstone buffalo while they’re in lockdown at the Fort Peck reservation.

The Bison Conservation Transfer Program is a partnership that includes Yellowstone National Park, the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, APHIS, Montana Department of Livestock, the State of Montana, Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council, Yellowstone Forever, Defenders of Wildlife and Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Example #2:  American Prairie is Buffalo Game-Farming

Outside Yellowstone National Park, there is almost always a fence keeping kidnapped buffalo from wandering off, migrating, or behaving like all other wildlife species. There are no actual wild, free-roaming bison (wildlife) within the fenced perimeter of American Prairie’s privately-owned game farm – all 900 animals are managed as livestock.

According to the Montana State Veterinary Lab in Bozeman…

American Prairie’s bison herd is actively managed as livestock.  They are regularly handled, herded, ear tagged, PIT tagged, and have been branded when required.

These bison are corralled and put into a squeeze chute to undergo vaccinations as per regulations, screened for disease…

Very few people singing the praises of American Prairie’s operations today are aware of the origin of this market-based (classic neoliberal economic model), privatized ‘conservation’ planning prototype, initiated, and coordinated in 2001 by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

In March 2001, the Montana Prairie Foundation, a non-profit foundation, was formed.  WWF provided critical research, inventories, migration studies, monitoring and began reintroducing bison to the American Prairie Reserve, now called American Prairie.

More Sentimental Greenwash

Moreover, an aggressive propaganda campaign is re-framing the narrative on national TV and social media feeds, luring eyes away from the reality of buffalo abduction, torture, and genocide.  What appears instead to the unsuspecting public is a “win-win” human-interest lullaby dripping with buffalo bliss, interagency cooperation and interracial peace and harmony. These pseudo-events (perennial propaganda campaigns) spread high-volume Greenwash through a firehose to gaslight voters before the next election.  Shamelessly, Defenders is “Johnny-on-the-spot” providing Greenwash and manpower to cover up all the buffalo blood, and the Democratic Party’s extreme indifference to the atrocities and pathological mistreatment of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo herds – all for a few votes in 2026.

Faux environmentalism is the raison d’être (purpose) for “Big Green,” Washington, D.C.-based organizations, who talk the talk in public, but always act with laser focus to elect Democrats. Strengthening environmental protection laws to benefit America’s declining wildlife populations is the false front employed to dupe the public.

The buffalo transfer program established a programmatic conduit and monetized, government-subsidized market for the liquidation of wild Yellowstone buffalo into a steady flow of red meat offered up to hunters willing to pay, and tribes willing to accept live animals and free butchered meat from the federal government.  Cleverly, the program exploits a Montana State legal loophole around the law which prohibits ‘game farms.’

Tribal and state hunters kill wild Yellowstone buffalo relocated onto fenced-in pastureland (there is always a fence) i.e., ‘game farms’ outside Yellowstone National Park.  Others are handed over to participating tribes for slaughter.

Likewise, American Prairie has marketed, ‘hunted’ and slaughtered hundreds of its bison herd for private consumption regardless of its non-profit tax status.

Free meat buys votes, generates revenues, and enriches a handful of useful faux-green puppets who help organize and perpetuate the subterfuge.  Think of it as money laundering, but instead of currency, buffalo meat, sourced in Yellowstone National Park is the medium of exchange.

From a wild bison’s perspective this represents the ultimate objectification, commercialization, and commodification of free-roaming, migratory Yellowstone buffalo. An abducted, transferred, fenced wild buffalo is a dead buffalo!  Now, can we all see more clearly similarities to international human trafficking, the sex-slave industry and links to off-shore banking (money laundering)?

Under the current political system, the American people have no control over what their government does.  Historically, voters switch periodically from one oligarchic puppet herd to another oligarchic puppet herd, seldom, if ever, becoming fully aware of the fundamental power structure under which we all live.  This is plutocracy/oligarchy, not democracy, or a constitutional republic.

As the bourgeois, dancing-puppet herds rock on, bedazzled by AI-induced hallucinations, mired in deep denial and gross mass indifference, won’t somebody, please, give me a buffalo cheeseburger?

Steve (“guitar”) Miller’s 1968 classic tune, Livin’ in the U.S.A., lives on.

Steve Kelly is a an artist and environmental activist. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.  

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