President Theodore Roosevelt lamented the demise of the American buffalo.
Teddy Roosevelt in hunting attire in 1885, two years after he went to Yellowstone to shoot buffalo."The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world."
So said Theodore Roosevelt years after he traveled to Yellowstone National Park as a 24-year-old hunter in 1883 to bag a buffalo. It took him more than a week to find and shoot a buffalo, so tiny was the herd already decimated by hunters. This incident and others was said to help mold Roosevelt's conservation efforts later. "Its toughness and hardy endurance," Roosevelt said of the buffalo, "fitted it to contend with purely natural forces . . . to resist cold and wintry blasts or the heat of the thirsty summer, to wander away to new pastures, to plunge over the broken ground, and to plow its way through snow drifts or quagmires." Yes, the magnificent bison could take what nature dealt it, but not the bullets of relentless hunters. And THESE latest news releases from the Buffalo Field Campaign about the needless slaughter of today's Yellowstone buffalo is a sad commentary on the mismanagement of America's herd. Just more tragedy.
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