Source: Buffalo Field Campaign
Putting it mildly. A female buffalo expresses her people’s sentiment towards the USDA Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service.
Buffalo Field Campaign’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit continues to divulge more evidence of how unfit the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service is in having any role managing our National Mammal, the wild buffalo. Thank you to attorney Daniel Snyder and our legal team at the Charlie Tebbutt law firm who have been of tremendous help in disclosing the public’s business.
APHIS’s offensive statements (provided here, APHIS’s Bastard Bison, PDF, excerpted below) show a callous disregard for buffalo. At the same time APHIS sought Yellowstone National Park’s help in taking more buffalo for their birth control study using GonaCon, a chemical sterilant, they didn’t want any obligation placed on them to get rid of the “bastard” buffalo under their care.
APHIS’s GonaCon study was shut down by their higher ups in the bureaucracy for running afoul of agency rules (See our article Good news for wild buffalo in Gardiner basin.). The buffalo taken from the wild under permit from Yellowstone National Park were killed or shipped to Colorado for more “study.”
However, APHIS remains entrenched in buffalo management through the taxpayer moneys they annually dole out to the Montana Dept. of Livestock. APHIS Funding MDOL Bison Operations 2018 (PDF).
We can and must take action for the buffalo. Contact your representative in the U.S. House.
Ask them to cut-off taxpayer moneys and axe APHIS’s on-going cooperative agreement with the Montana Dept. of Livestock to fund their buffalo management scheme.
APHIS has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to the Montana Dept. of Livestock to remove all wild buffalo that migrate into the state. The spigot of American taxpayer funding has been running nonstop for two decades.
There’s an action we can take to stop it! The U.S. Congress has the power to cut-off the free taxpayer funding pipeline that is destroying our last wild buffalo in Montana. Please contact the U.S. Congress today!
Thank you for taking action on behalf of our National Mammal, the buffalo.
From: Rhyan, Jack C – APHIS
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 3:21 PM
To: Clarke, Patrick R. – APHIS
Subject: RE: Conference call about GonaCon (2nd rendition) ? Elk study at Brogan’s?
Off the top of my bald head:
I like the bastard question best. I think with those we donate their little bastard carcasses to the food bank, as they have no special value for conservation.
Jack
PS: we might should delete these emails.
READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE HERE.
Categories: Uncategorized
Straight from the Horse's Heart 
The Deleted Animal-Welfare Documents from APHIS
http://thememoryhole2.org/blog/aphis
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Meet the watchdog who posted USDA’s animal welfare records
By HELENA BOTTEMILLER EVICH (HBottemiller@politico.com; @hbottemiller)
02/08/2017
With help from Catherine Boudreau, Ian Kullgren, Anthony Adragna, Nancy Cook and Jason Huffman
THE STRANGE CASE OF USDA’S ANIMAL WELFARE RECORDS: They’re back — well, sort of. Thousands of pages of animal welfare documents from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service that were scrubbed from USDA’s website late last week resurfaced on an obscure online site on Tuesday as the Humane Society of the United States went to court in a bid to get them permanently restored to their original digital digs, Pro Agriculture’s Ian Kullgren reports.
The Kick-er: The document trove — or many of the records, anyway — can be accessed at memoryhole2.org, a website run by Russ Kick, a government transparency watchdog based in Tucson, Ariz. Kick, a guru of government records, said he’d collected most of the APHIS records himself before the portal went bye-bye, and got another batch from an animal welfare activist. “If the document was taken down, it’s inherently important,” Kick said. “If they go through the trouble of taking it down, it’s not something we’re supposed to see.”
https://www.politico.com/tipsheets/morning-agriculture/2017/02/meet-the-watchdog-who-posted-usdas-animal-welfare-records-218643
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The Corporate Community, Nonprofit Organizations, and Federal Advisory Committees: A Study in Linkages
by G. William Domhoff
Federal advisory committees are a little-known, little-studied, but often important link between the corporate community and the federal government.
Not much was known about these committees until the early 1970s, when Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana turned his attention to them.
More recently, Balla and Wright (2001) conclude that “interest groups” are able to place their members on relevant federal advisory committees, which for these political scientists means that the government receives good information on the “true preferences” of private interests. Well, that’s one way of putting it, I guess.
The comparison of committees with open and closed meetings, using sophisticated quantitative analyses, provided support for the idea that some advisory committees are “captured” by one or another industry.
More generally, Dreiling’s study is one of the most sophisticated and detailed quantitative analyses ever produced of the overall tight relationships among corporations, policy groups, Political Action Committees (PACs), federal advisory committees, and Congress. It shows how the policy groups work through the advisory committees to develop the policy initiatives they want presented to Congress, then form temporary lobbying groups to make sure their plans get through Congress. The donations from the PACs come into the picture by reminding the legislators of the source of most of their campaign funding, the corporate community.
https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/federal_advisory_committees.html
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Deconstructing the Big Lies
It would be easy to conclude that if you catch a politician, a community leader, or anyone else repeating one of these Big Lies, that makes them a liar. While that’s often true, it’s not always so simple. There are plenty of people out there who aren’t in a position to know any better, but are vocal with their opinions nonetheless. Repetition is the way the big lies are adopted as truths: Tell the same falsehood 26 times, according to advertising industry research, and the audience will accept it as common knowledge. Beware the Big Lie in western political discourse. Everyone in the West – and every owner of western public lands (in effect, each American citizen) – should do their part to bring daylight to these falsehoods and to ensure that political decisions that affect us all are driven by realities rather than distortions.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/18/the-ten-big-lies-of-traditional-western-politics/
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It’s a little off-topic but I found the 7 points of “Putin’s Playbook” shown here helpful in the context of government wild horse management concerns.
ACTIVE MEASURES
1. Find A Crack (and work on it to make it bigger)
2. The Big Lie (repeat, repeat, repeat)
3. A Kernel Of Truth (wrapped in lies, see #2)
4. Conceal Your Hand (never let anyone know what you are really up to)
5. The Useful Idiot (find one to haplessly propogate your message)
6. Deny Everything (no explanation needed, all too familiar!)
7. The Long Game (play chess, not checkers
source:
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How can a Buffalo be legitimately called a “bastard?”
BASTARD
ORIGIN Middle English: via Old French from medieval Latin bastardus .
usage: In the past, the word bastard was the standard term in both legal and nonlegal use for ‘an illegitimate child.’ Today, however, it has little importance as a legal term and is retained today in this older sense only as a term of abuse.
Also chilling some of the emails refer to ovariectomies as part of “research” echoes yet again of pointless use of taxpayer dollars to produce nothing of value while causing harm and suffering.
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My apologies R.T., for my rather dark ‘snark’ on some of these issues. I suppose you could say that it has a mind of it’s own at times, lol. While my outrage at the dangerous idiocy of most of these politicians and administrators (that perpetuate the destruction of our wild ones) always simmers, I will try to rein in my more graphic comments out of respect for this site.
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Deborah – I’m sure I’m not the only one to wish you luck on that one!! Not easy to rein in these days.
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