Thy Glorious Bison Herds

 Trump's penchant for slaughter and mass-death seems to be concentrated right now in his ongoing boat strikes in the Caribbean and his war in the Middle East. But recent events also prove that his desire to destroy is not limited to human kind—but extends as well to the animal kingdom.

He has also sought to circumvent endangered species protections for the Rice's whale in the Gulf of Mexico, in order to promote more oil and gas drilling, for instance. And now he is reportedly even trying to evict bison herds from federal land in the West—per a recent New York Times article. 

Trump is enamored of the turn-of-the-century age of imperialism, and frequently invokes figures from that era like McKinley and Roosevelt. His latest desire to clear the Western prairies of the bison herds that have only just begun to recover their populations seems all too evocative of the same period. 

In his immortal 1899 poem Satan Absolved: A Victorian Mystery, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt drew the connection between the imperialism of war that destroys peoples and that of commerce that destroys animal populations—both of which he saw as all-too characteristic of the politics of his time. 

It is clear what Scawen Blunt would make of Trump's latest plans for the Rice's whale in the Gulf of Mexico: 

From the deep Central Seas

To the white Poles, Man ruleth pitiless Lord of these,

And daily he destroyeth. The great whales he driveth

Beneath the northern ice, and quarter none he giveth,

Who perish there of wounds in their huge agony.

And what he would make of Trump's bid to evict the bison herds from the prairies as well: 

Where, Lord God, are they now,

Thy glorious bison herds, Thy ariels white as snow,

Thy antelopes in troops, the zebras of Thy plain?

Behold their whitened bones on the dull track of men.

The remarkable thing about both bison and whales is how gentle and tolerate they remain toward human kind—despite the ruthless destruction we have visited upon them. They look upon us still without hate or fear. "Man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven," as Byron once wrote—and in their eyes it seems for a moment we have been.

Some whales, as Heathcote Williams notes, have even been known to save the lives of their human attackers (only to restore them to the effort to slaughter these innocent cetaceans). "Who hath charity?" as Hardy asked of the blinded bird; "Who suffereth long and is kind [...] Who hopeth, endureth all things?" These creatures, far more than man.