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Stop Slaughtering Our National Animal
February 20, 2023
by Tom Woodbury
It’s time to end the practice of sending wild Yellowstone bison, our National Mammal, to slaughterhouses for rendering.
Slaughterhouses are barbaric even where cows are concerned. According to a 2021 poll, 49% of Americans are in favor of banning slaughterhouses entirely.
Here’s what typically happens to cows in a slaughterhouse:
As the slaughter process begins, livestock are restrained in a chute that limits physical movement of the animal. Once restrained, the animal is stunned. Mechanical stunning involves firing a bolt through the skull of the animal. Electrical stunning passes a current of electricity through the brain. CO2 stunning exposes the animal to deadly gas… After stunning, the animals are hung by their legs on a pulley… (t)heir throats are cut… and they die from blood loss…
Given the intentional genocidal history of bison extermination, central to the genocide of Native Americans, how ironic is it that we are still capable of treating the American Buffalo like factory-farmed livestock.
Wild bison have been hunted since time immemorial. They’re the aboriginal food source for Indigenous Tribes. Hunting bison is considered an inherent right, the preservation of which was the primary motivation for Tribes to enter treaties, due to the centrality of the buffalo to Tribal identity, culture, and diet. But that spiritual relationship was then violently denied by gold-fevered genocide, followed by locking Tribes out of Yellowstone National Park.
To its credit, the Park Service has recently begun righting this historic wrong. But there’s still much more that needs to be done.
When historic traumas like genocide are not resolved, the perpetrators tend to act them out in other ways, knowingly and/or unknowingly perpetuating historic wrongs until there is actual reconciliation and reparations. We are long overdue in this country for Tribal reconciliation, and wild, free-roaming bison will be the starting point for true cultural reparations.
