Buffalo (almost) officially wildlife on some 2M new acres of Wyoming, a step toward roaming free

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In late April, Jason Baldes sat at a table at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative’s headquarters processing a setback to his vision of restoring free-roaming bison to the Wind River Indian Reservation.

Baldes, the initiative’s executive director, is a member of the Eastern Shoshone Tribe, which had recently voted to reclassify buffalo as wildlife. They had been deemed livestock before. But he hit an impasse in persuading the Northern Arapaho Tribe, which shares the reservation, to do the same.

“It’s a bump in the road — it’s not anything in stone — but it’s a challenge,” Baldes said in the spring.

Nevertheless, Baldes remained sanguine that he could bring