One
thing that very much impressed me when I was working as a journalist was the
fragile, indeed, minimal, knowledge that the human race had compiled about the
workings of nature. I found this ignorance to be in really startling contrast
to the depths of our detailed knowledge of specific stuff, relentlessly uncovered
by science and its practitioners: for
example (to mention a few off the top of my head) such as how is the blood
transferred through the human body, what is an atom, or a molecule for that
matter, how your eye works, and how, having split the atom, you can, using that
information, create a bomb that is capable of destroying whole cities and hundreds
of thousands of people ( and other creatures) at a single stroke.
Since all of this knowledge has been
accumulated through our education system, using the huge global network of
universities especially created to be the centre of knowledge-creation, one
would have imagined that an essential part of the whole system would have been
to ensure that whatever knowledge we accumulated, it should be measured by its
broadest effects, just to make sure it doesn’t destroy the air, water and soil
on which all life depends.
My attention has been drawn to this
subject by an article I read this week about a gigantic failure created by none
other than that highly-educated, deeply moral group of human beings who inhabit
The Netherlands, more commonly known as Dutchmen. In 1968 an inland sea was
drained to make way for two new cities, a Dutch specialty as everybody knows.
An area slated for industrial use turned into a marshy area as it lay
undeveloped, and a Dutch ecologist developed a scheme for using cattle and
horses living in the wild, to mimic the grazing of now-extinct herbivores in
what became known as a re-wilding scheme. The idea was to allow natural
processes to determine herbivore populations. Although the experiment was still being lauded as recently
as 2013, it fell prey to what can now be seen to be a rookie mistake: without
predators, the population grew every summer until they “ate themselves out of
house and home,” to coin a phrase. So many
animals died of starvation that they had to be culled, and the resulting scenes
of starved animals lying over the land have since prompted 125,000 people to
sign a petition pleading for a stop to animal cruelty at this noble experiment.
Before we start to chortle over the
Dutch and their simplicity, we have made exactly the same rookie mistake right here in Canada, one that
I came across while researching a film about the fate of the bison after it was
reduced to almost extinction in the nineteenth century, much of the killing
across the American prairies having been purpose-built, as it were, to deprive
recalcitrant Indian tribes of their primary food source, and make them more
vulnerable to settler control.
Anyway, lets get back to the latter
decades of the nineteenth century when an Indian by the name of Walking Coyote
walked four bison calves cross the Continental divide, and settled down to
raise them in the Flathead reserve, of which he was a member. Walking Coyote fell
victim to the demon drink, and was eventually found dead under the bridge in
Missoula, but he had already sold his bison to a Mexican rancher called Michel
Pablo, who raised them on the reserve along with his cattle, from which they
caught various diseases, such as brucellosis and bovine tuberculosis. When in
1905 the reserve was opened for homesteading, Pablo had to sell his herd, and a
Canadian government agent in nearby Great Falls managed to persuade his bosses
that they should buy Pablo’s herd, so they did, snatching this almost-last existent bison herd from
under the noses of furious American conservationists.
They had no idea how many animals
they had bought, but they began to round them up every summer, finding them
scattered all through the hills of this beautiful country. After five summers, they had not only rounded
up 700 animals, but had managed to load them into rail wagons, and transport
them north to Canada, where they had established a special reserve for them near
Wainwright, Alberta. I wouldn’t be surprised to find, although I have no basis
for saying this, that this was probably
the biggest animal conservation effort ever undertaken in the world to that
time, and it was completed by a team of cowboys “who just loved bison”, as they
said, without a single loss. Furthermore the operation was filmed in each of
the five summers, and I discovered the glass plates bearing those photos in the
University of Montana in Missoula, so in our NFB film, called The Great Buffalo Saga, we were able to
reconstruct the capture and loading of the animals in some detail, using these
glass plates.
Now we come on to the part of the
story relevant to the incident with which I opened this piece. The last of the
700 animals arrived in Wainwright in 1912: by the early 1920s, they had
multiplied to around 4,500 or more, so successfully that, to use the same phrase as before, they were
“eating themselves out of house and home,” increasing their population 25 per
cent as year, to such a point that a significant cull had to be instituted
every year, much to the dismay of many animal-lovers. By 1925, the population
was up to 10,000.
So much for our simplistic knowledge
of the balance that nature keeps among animals between predators and prey. Not to keep you in suspense, I’ll finish the story
of the purchased herd, and deal with other aspects of this subject in a later
Chronicle. A great debate as to their
future was undertaken among wildlife experts in the West. Some favoured transferring
the herd to Wood Buffalo National Park, which straddles the border between
Alberta and the Northwest Territories, and which, at 44,807 square kilometres,
is considerably larger than Belgium. Of course, Wood Buffalo Park had its own
herd of Wood Buffalo, recognized as being a different species from Pablo’s Plains
Buffalo (in North America, Buffalo and Bison are used interchangeably). The fear was that they might not only
interbreed, but that in doing so, the introduced herd might impregnate the
resident herd with its diseases.
This in fact is what happened. For
many years an effort was made to inoculate all of the buffalo in the southern
part of the park against these diseases, but they never succeeded in rounding
up enough at any one time to provide an effective deterrent to the diseases,
and the programme was abandoned.
Eventually, however, the rangers
discovered a herd of Wood Buffalo that was clear of these diseases in the far
north of the park. Bingo! It might still be possible to preserve after all a pure
herd of Wood Buffalo, the taller, slenderer, and much bigger version of the prairie
animal.
The way I heard the story when we
were making the film in 1984, 77 of these bison were loaded on trucks and
transported north by the wildlife scientists in 1963: by the time they arrived,
only 17 were still alive. In some research papers I have read this week, the
writers have carefully not mentioned that en route loss (if, indeed it ever happened.) But they do
confirm that 18 bison were established in a free-ranging area north of Great
Slave Lake, and they do confirm a considerable success. By 1989 the 18 had grown
to 2,400. They fluctuated between 1,800 and 2,000 in the next ten years, then
declined to the estimated population of 851 in 2016 --- a slight recovery from
the 2013 population of 706. (These
fluctuations are attributed to several factors, one of which has recently been
claimed to have been climate change, as lakes in that area of the country have
grown larger and flooded good grazing grounds).
It is impressive, reading these reports,
how thorough is this programme to save these huge and impressive animals from
extinction. A great deal of money has been spent on trying to establish up to
five free-ranging herds, in essence running in the face of the fact that this
huge animal really cannot co-exist with the presence on the same land of people
and our many and varied works. The Mackenzie Sanctuary, north of Great Slave
Lake, is reckoned successful; a similar
effort to establish a herd in Jasper National Park failed, because the bison
travelled so far, 150 miles in the first month, through habitat that did not
make it easy for them to survive; 28 animals released in the Nahanni district
of the North-west Territories had variable success, especially when some
travelled south into agricultural lands in B.C; but the effort that has most warmed the hearts of the people
running the programme, has been the successful attempt to establish a herd in
Northern Manitoba, where no bison were ever spotted, historically. The place
chosen lies in the northern part between Lakes Manitoba and Winnipeg, but the
determinant in this case was the enthusiastic support granted the project by
the Waterhen First Nation, which undertook management of the animals, their
rearing, growth and release into the wild.
So, this is a story that began back
in 1905, and has continued with unabated attention of both scientific community,
small public groups, and governments, in a fashion that, if you ask me,
Canadians should really be proud of.
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