Unfortunately many bison on various national wildlife refuges are polluted with cattle genes. This program will help eliminate that.
Ralph Maughan
Dr. Ralph Maughan is professor emeritus of political science at Idaho State University. He was a Western Watersheds Project Board Member off and on for many years, and was also its President for several years. For a long time he produced Ralph Maughan's Wolf Report. He was a founder of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition. He and Jackie Johnson Maughan wrote three editions of "Hiking Idaho." He also wrote "Beyond the Tetons" and "Backpacking Wyoming's Teton and Washakie Wilderness." He created and is the administrator of The Wildlife News.
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This is a good sign, if they are really serious about trying to cull and breed out the cattle contamination and are careful about avoiding genetic bottlenecking in the process. This is also a problem with longhorn cattle, which I raise. Longhorns are highly unevolved, unselected left as nature intended in somewhat the same manner as bison, and their grazing and other behaviors are still similar. They were dropped to roughly the same or slightly lower numbers as bison by the early 20th century, are at roughly the same total numbers as bison today, and have about the same percentage of contamination with more domesticated cattle genes as bison. It is a bit of a challenge to get competent reliable information on blood and DNA to be able to manage your herd to cull those contaminated specimens while still sustaining as much bandwidth as possible in the remaining population. Any contamination is undesired and any loss of ancient bandwidth is tragic.
I’m glad you are laboring to conserve the longhorn, a magnificent animal.
I think there are a lot of efforts underway, but not enough, to conserve domestic plants and animals that were largely abandoned by agri-business went it went to something new, leaving us with a dangerously depleted genetic base for food.
I understand the Idaho and other states depend dangerously on cultivars of the russet potato. 40 per cent of U.S. production is from russet potatoes.