"Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Let the buffalo roam!"
Around 20 people marched from City Hall to the Higgins Avenue bridge Tuesday afternoon in a rally to support listing wild buffalo as a species of conservation concern in the Custer Gallatin National Forest.
The Buffalo Field Campaign, an advocacy group that opposes killing bison, objects to a proposal by the Custer Gallatin National Forest to let the state of Montana determine where buffalo can and cannot roam on national forest lands.
Darrell Geist, the group's habitat coordinator, says listing the bison as a species of conservation concern is the only standard in the forest plan that will lead to more habitat.
Such a listing would trigger efforts to provide the habitat that would enable bison to persist.
When bison in Yellowstone stray from park boundaries onto national forest lands, they're captured for an annual cull to maintain population limits and also as a preventive measure aimed at reducing the spread of brucellosis, a disease that can cause livestock to miscarry. Brucellosis is thought to infect half the bison in Yellowstone National Park.
"There's a lot of people that don't want to see these wild buffalo reduced to captivity. That's the bottom line," said Geist, whose organization prepared a report for Region 1 of the U.S. Forest Service.
Although no specific numbers are available, it is estimated between 30 million and 75 million wild buffalo once roamed North America. Today, there are fewer than 5,000.
Tuesday's march was led by Jimmy St. Goddard, a charismatic and energetic Blackfeet man who sang a ceremonial song upon reaching the bridge. Participants in the rally held signs as cars drove by, one proclaiming, "They survived the ice age ... but can they survive the U.S. government?" Another read, "Buffalo Slaughter is Bad Science!"
Before the march began, St. Goddard gave an impassioned speech as the group slowly gathered.
"This being kept my people alive for 45,000 years," St. Goddard said. "There's a spiritual connection and we need to put them in their natural habitat, the so called public lands, the national forests."
One man in the crowd traveled all the way from Portland, Oregon, just for the event.
Leon Aliski said he's been following this issue for many years and it's a tragedy that buffalo continue to be killed.
"Will the buffalo still be around three generations from now? Will they still be wild?" Aliski wondered. "Not just fenced in zoos, but wild animals."
The Custer Gallatin National Forest encompasses more than 3 million acres, yet Geist says the wild Yellowstone herd has access to only 75,000 acres of it and that more than 670,000 acres of prime range land remain off limits to bison.
"The narrative that we've told ourselves that the bison is a conservation success story and we should jump up and down about it is not true," Geist said. "We saved domestic bison for commercial exploitation. We did not save the wild ones."
He added that the Yellowstone herd is the last indigenous bison herd in its original habitat.
In a December letter, Regional Forester Leanne Marten stated that the identification of species for conservation concern is a dynamic process and that new scientific information and public changes may prompt changes in the list.
Thus far, the greater sage grouse, white-tailed prairie dog and the western pearlshell, a freshwater mollusk, are the only three creatures on the list for the revised forest plan.
At the conclusion of the march, the group gathered under the Caras Park Pavilion, where St. Goddard addressed the crowd again after singing "Amazing Grace" in his native language.
"Either we save mother Earth or go down with her, and the buffalo is going to lead us."
