‘Why would somebody want to do something so malicious?’: Bison rancher

Diane Pastoor and her husband were devastated Sunday when they discovered someone had cut a fence several times, allowing all 52 of their bison to run loose from their ranch near Dalmeny.

Pastoor told Saskatchewan Afternoon that nine of the bison are now at home, one is still on the loose, and two large groups are contained in other pastures. She said one of the groups turned up at a friend’s house.

“They’re about six or eight miles away, but they’re happy. They’ve been hanging out and are starting to calm down,” said Pastoor. “Once they’ve calmed down, my husband is going to take some equipment there to make a makeshift loading system with panels and corrals, so it will likely take two or three weeks to get them home.”

Pastoor says two of the animals didn’t survive. One of them died of exhaustion.

“He ran and ran. They’ll run until they die. We pulled him out of a ditch and he just couldn’t walk anymore,” said Pastoor. “We put him in the trailer, gave him some water and when we took him home, we tried to feed him but he died within the hour.”

The other bison that died had wandered into Osler and couldn’t be contained, so the animal had to be put down.

Pastoor says bison aren’t like cattle and are much more difficult to round up.

“You have to give bison time to do their own thing and make them think that it’s their idea, so it takes some time to round them up and you have to have your own handling system, so it’s pretty tough,” she said.

Pastoor says there’s a chance they could lose even more of the animals, because the Pastoors aren’t sure what kind of condition the bison are in after being on the loose this long.

“We don’t know what condition they’re in. What are their legs like? How many fences have they been running through? We did find a piece of hide, a piece of skin, ripped off one of them. This isn’t over yet for their well-being,” said Pastoor.

She says she can’t understand why someone would cut a fence and let the animals run loose. She says it poses a danger for everyone around the perpetrators as well as the bison.

“If it was an animal activist letting them out, they didn’t help them at all. We’re not in the old days where they can roam the range. There’s a lot of fences and people, things that are in the way that they’re not used to,” said Pastoor.

And if the motive was more sinister, Pastoor says that’s also an issue.

“If it’s somebody with a personal vendetta, that’s kind of a bad way to go about working on a relationship issue if that’s what it is,” said Pastoor. “Why would somebody want to do something so malicious?”

Pastoor says she and her husband have been working with the RCMP and the Corman Park Police, as well as going through all their security footage from the weekend.