Range War - Dan Rather documentary on bison restoration in Montana

[katqanna]

http://vimeo.com/101450943
the password is danrather

Covers a large segment of the issues, except bison on Montana public lands as wildlife, though it is referenced in passing. As controversial as Schweitzer is, I have to say, he was blunt and to the point.

 

[mtmiller]

Schweitzer comes in around minute 50.

 

[MThuntr]

They just acquired an additional 22,000 acres

 

[mtmiller]

Lots of public land in core sage-grouse habitat.

 

[katqanna]

Heres one of the tricky issues not covered in this documentary. Having read through Turners efforts to get bison restored to Montana, he finally gave up with all the gridlock, red tape and got his own bison - which are considered private property, livestock. The American Prairie Reserve did the same thing - private herd, livestock designation.

One of the ideas expressed by Ginny Tribe, the FWP bison working group facilitator and Ron Moody at the Billings bison meeting was the concept of giving away your power. Moody brought it up in the context of wolves, saying that if Montana had developed their own plan early on, it could have been a different scenario than the one forced on Montana. I wasnt here and have not delved into all that history yet, so I cant say. But seeing the efforts of Turner and the APR left with privatization to try and achieve bison conservation in Montana, that means those bison are no longer counted as wildlife. So in the debate about a wild bison population and genetics, those private bison may not count. The more YNP bison are slaughtered and genetics becomes a factor, some groups are discussing federal listing to preserve that gene pool. If federal listing takes place, Montana could be in the same boat as with the wolves.

Just out of curiosity I looked up some of the larger, well known ranches in MT for land comparison. The Wilks have 278,000 acres, APR has 274,000, Koch has 250,000 and Turner has 154,000. There are others.