Patrick Kelly wants to know how people feel about bison.
"I try to better understand how people get along with big, fuzzy animals," he says.
He’s a PhD candidate at Utah State University studying the “social tolerance” people have for Yellowstone bison. He’s now launched a survey to learn what people living in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming think about their Yellowstone bison neighbors.
Kelly says better understanding people’s tolerance for these large, fluffy creatures, will help managers promote coexistence. He plans to compare his findings here with his work on European bison in Poland.
"I think there's a lot we can learn from the Polish experience, and a lot that Poland can learn from the American experience."
Kelly is looking at these two areas because they have some of the only large bison herds in the world.
Both North American and European bison populations were nearly wiped out over a century ago. Mass hunting, and intentional slaughter by the U.S. federal government left just 23 bison in Yellowstone. Similarly, in Poland, European bison numbers fell to 12 animals at the turn of the century.
"We've coexisted for just hundreds of thousands of years, and there was this blip and period of time where, essentially from like 1900 to right around the turn of the 21st Century, we just didn't interact a whole lot, because bison numbers were way down and have slowly been recovering."
Now, with conservation successes, bison have returned to some of their historic range.
Kelly says having bison as neighbors can be challenging. The massive mammals can smash fences, transmit diseases to livestock, and damage crops. He’s interested in understanding what drives people’s tolerance for living with bison and how their distance from herds affects that.
"If you are, for all intents and purposes, overlapping with habitat with a bison, you're going to have very different experiences that are driving those different metrics of tolerance, than say, you live in Bozeman, your experiences with bison might be very different," Kelly says.
