A viral video of a young girl who was attacked and thrown into the air by a bison in Yellowstone National Park began circulating on Wednesday morning. Hailey Dayton, who was also visiting the national park at the time, caught the incident on camera. The girl, who is 9-years-old and a Florida native, is recovering from the scary charge.
The video, which has been shared by a number of news outlets including WDIV and The Today Show, shows a bison charging at a group of people as they run away. The girl, whose name has not been released, was unfortunately caught in the bison’s path and violently thrown, spinning several feet into the air before landing on the ground. Dayton identified the two people seen running as the child’s parents.
Though the brief encounter is scary to watch, park officials said in a statement that the girl was “assessed and treated by park emergency medical providers, and later taken to and released from the Old Faithful Clinic,” which suggests she was not badly injured from the attack. Details regarding the extent or nature of her injuries were not disclosed.
NBC News talked to Dayton after she first posted the video. She said “My brother and I were looking at the hot springs, and we saw a bunch of people running down the path to the bridge. We saw through the trees some people petting the bison, super close.” Dayton said there were about 50-60 people near the bison before it charged.
As the video spread online and through social media, viewers took to Twitter to comment on the incident. Many were critical of the child’s parents, both for leaving her to fend for herself and for letting her get so close to the animal in the first place. Others pointed out that the bison did not attack the girl, but was rather defending its territory which had been invaded. Derrell Burdette explained why being that close to a wild bison is so dangerous, writing “Bison have poor eyesight. So when you get within 20-30 feet of them they see you CLOSE. This startles them as all of a sudden you are there and they attack. This is how they were killed off. The hunters stayed just out of their eye perception and slaughter them.” According to NBC News, park service cautions visitors to stay at least 25 feet away from the Yellowstone’s wild animals including bison, elk, deer, and moose. The statement said that people were only 5-10 feet from the bison.
According to BuffaloFieldCampaign.org, there were an estimated 5,000 bison left in Yellowstone National Park as of fall 2016. Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported in May 2018 that that number depleted by about 1,100 due to hunting or slaughter. The Interagency Bison Management Plan wants the Yellowstone population at around 3,000 bison “to prevent the spread of brucellosis, a disease that can cause animals to abort,” to cattle. The current number of bison is estimated at around 4,200, a population which, while more manageable in terms of preventing the spread of disease, is way lower than the tens of millions that once roamed freely.