Since the start of the spring and peak national park visitor season, the National Park Service (NPS) has been seeing the same type of behavior often enough to put out multiple warnings.
Back in April, a 40-year-old Idaho man named Clarence Yoder was caught kicking a bison near the park's western entrance while a video of man and woman coming within just a few feet of a herd of them from behind later went viral on the Instagram (META) account @touronsofyellowstone.
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"Bison have injured more people in Yellowstone than any other animal," the NPS wrote in an update on its Yellowstone safety website. "Bison are not aggressive animals but will defend their space when threatened. They are unpredictable and can run three times faster than humans."
TikToker goes viral for touching bison, telling driver to get her closer
The latest Yellowstone incident to go viral on social media occurred when a TikTok influencer under the @im.over.covid.maylee username posted a video of herself coming close to a bison and instructing another driver to "get [her] close enough so that I can touch him" before leaning out of the car to try to touch the animal while posing for the camera.
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"Whyyy?!? He loves me!!! Let him love me!!" Maylee writes in the caption to the video that received more than 9,500 upvotes but also a large number of outraged comments about disregarding the park's wildlife safety rules and inadvertently encouraging followers to do the same. The car then proceeds to tailgate the bison for a long stretch of the road as they follow him and try to get a reaction for the video.
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Internet reacts: 'A new scoreboard for buffalo versus tourists'
"We literally every year have a new scoreboard for buffalo versus tourists. This is why," wrote one commenter
"As a local it's not spring until a tourist gets gored by a bison," reads another.
The official NPS recommendation is to keep a distance of 25 yards, or 23 meters, from large wildlife such as bison and elk. Yellowstone, which spans Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming and is home to over 6,000 buffalo, attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists looking to see the closest descendant of the buffalo in the wild.
That said, instances of both disregard for the rules and accidental encounters gone wrong occur periodically. At the start of June, an 83-year-old woman was gored when a bison snuck up behind her on a hike through Storm Point Trail and lifted her up more than a foot from the ground with its horns.
In many cases, parkgoers exacerbate the situation by panicking and making sudden movements instead of backing away slowly; bison will then see this as a threat and feel the need to defend their territory.
"[Bison] also exhibit wild behavior like their ancient ancestors, congregating during the breeding season to compete for mates, as well as migration and exploration that result in the use of new habitat areas," the NPS writes further. "These behaviors have enabled the successful restoration of a population that was on the brink of extinction just over a century ago."
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