Participant in illegal bison hunt in western Manitoba says she regrets falling for scam
A woman who says she was duped into believing a hunt for bison inside a western Manitoba rancher’s property was legitimate says she regrets not noticing the signs that it was all a scam.
Jolene Mitchler was one of four people who took part in the killing of six bisons at the Buffalo Valley Ranch in the rural municipality of Russell-Binscarth — about 300 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg — over the Thanksgiving long weekend.
Mitchler, from Riding Mountain, said it all began when her boyfriend’s cousin answered a post on social media promoting the hunt.
“It turned into that [the organizer] wanted more people to come,” she said. “I’m actually an Indigenous person and the opportunity to hunt a bison was extremely significant to me and my culture. So I told [my boyfriend’s cousin], ‘Yeah, sure, we’ll come along.'”
On Thursday, Russell RCMP announced a 52-year-old man from Portage la Prairie was charged after organizing and leading a hunt for the animals inside another man’s property, advertising it on social media.
Police said the three people who responded to the ad were co-operating in the investigation, and that they said they had been under the impression the hunt was legitimate.
Mitchler said the organizer kept saying these were his bison, which had escaped and eventually roamed into the farmland, but that the owner had given him permission to shoot them.
“So we all got our guns ready … and we watched him unlock and open the gate,” she said.
“He kept telling us that we had to be very quiet and careful because these bison would scare, which we know is absolutely not true because these bison were tamed. And he made us go down through the valley to approach them, which we now know too is because he wanted us to avoid the game cameras.”
‘There’s blood everywhere’
Brendan Liske, owner of the Buffalo Valley Ranch, said he was out hunting when the farmhand who feeds his pigs let him know he couldn’t get into the ranch because the gates’ locks had been changed.
“Instantly I was like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t change the locks here,'” he said. “That’s when we figured we would check all our trail cameras.”
The RCMP said video shows four people, with a pickup and off-road vehicles, driving into the farm and shooting the bisons, then taking their carcasses with them.
Liske said the bisons killed were pregnant cows.
“Out by my tire feeders … that was the where the kill spot was,” he said. “There is various locations where [there’s] blood puddles on the ground.… It kind of looks like a war zone. There’s blood everywhere.”
Mitchler said they loaded five of the carcasses on the man’s trailer and took one with them. She said that while he’d advertised $1,000 per bison, the man asked for more money the second the animals were down.
“The only point at which I think I should have known that it could have been [a scam] was when we approached the bison, I did notice that there were young bison there,” she said.
“We really stretched our pockets to buy this bison.… This meant a lot to us, and we were going to put a lot of work in to get this done. So it really hurts that it was all a lie.”
Further charges possible, RCMP says
The 52-year-old man has been charged with mischief over $5,000 and theft over $5,000, but Manitoba RCMP said the Crown is reviewing the matter and that other charges are possible.
Sgt. Paul Manaigre said in an email this is the first report he’s seen of this nature.
“It’s obviously a unique case. I would hope it doesn’t happen to anybody else,” Liske said. “Obviously … the hunters, they thought, ‘Oh, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.'”
The rancher said all three of the people who came to the hunt have reached out to him.
Mitchler said that he told the owners that if they wanted the meat back, they would return it.
“I’ve been going through a very stressful time in my life,” she said. “I saw this bison hunt as a way to get away from life stresses at the time, and I think I did ignore the signs because I was going through a hard time.”
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