Shooting Bison in a Barrel

I wish I could tell all the people who milled around terrifying the loose bison yesterday that they probably contributed to the problem. Bison are wild animals.They wouldn't run up to a lion or tiger waving cell phones and taking selfies would they? 

Maybe they would.

Liz actually saw a post from a  news channel urging people to go get photos and selfies. It has since been taken down....

But maybe if people had stayed home and not run around chasing them waving cell phones they might have calmed down enough to be captured. Or maybe not.

Meanwhile, reading the comments on various news stories raised my blood pressure beyond the safe point. All those instant experts damning the family that owned the animals, the police, and anyone who dared make an intelligent comment. 

Wow. Do they talk to their mothers that way?

I saw suggestions that the owners should be shot too. That they were Nazis. Monsters. Bad business people. Liz went to school with some of the family members and none of those awful things are true, but all of them are hurtful.

There were lots of urban fencing experts too. Obviously in the utopia where they live, trees never fall on fences. Animals never panic and run through fences that would normally stop a train. I have seen a German Shepherd dog eat through the wall of a HOUSE!. It weighed a lot less than a bison. 

I had to stop reading. I mean, who you gonna trust? Cornell experts? Farmers? People who work with bison? Or people who never stepped in manure, but sure know how to pile it?

We once had a valuable, but overly nervous....kinda crazy really...Holstein heifer, jump a fence and head for the Thruway in the middle of the night. The same Interstate the buffalo were on. Call us monsters and/or Nazis if you will, but we consulted with the state police and together decided that if she got on the Interstate she would have to be shot.

The officers went out on the road to look for her and do the deed if necessary.

Luckily she was found and brought home before she got on the highway, but it could have ended very differently.

I don't care how good you build your fences. Trees fall in storms. People open gates. Stuff happens.

However, I fear that social media will soon remove our ability to keep animals at all, no matter what our motives, no matter what our methods. When the people who equate uninformed opinions and cliches with actual knowledge use comments as a courtroom, much damage is done. Common sense isn't going to help. It is too hard to find. 

Oh, and in NY, if someone had been injured by those animals, the farmer would have been liable......so preventing that from happening was probably a good business decision.