Activist: "Your cattle are heating the planet. It's the methane."
Rancher: "What was standing on this ground in 1800?"
Activist: "Grass."
Rancher: "And on the grass."
Activist: "Buffalo, I suppose."
Rancher: "How many?"
Activist: "A lot."
Rancher: "Thirty to sixty million. Four stomachs apiece, same as mine. Same belch."
Activist: "That was natural."
Rancher: "Does the methane know that?"
Activist: "There are far more cattle now than there ever were bison."
Rancher: "Alexander Hristov at Penn State did the sum in 2012. Buffalo, elk and deer, before the settlers, came to 86% of what every cow, sheep and goat in America belches today."
Activist: "So it's gone up."
Rancher: "By a sixth. In two hundred years. You flew here."
Activist: "That's beside the point."
Rancher: "This continent carried that herd for ten thousand years and the weather held. Then somebody dug up the coal, and now you're at my fence with a clipboard."
Activist: "We have to cut somewhere."
Rancher: "You did. You cut sixty million buffalo. We fed a country off the same grass with cattle, and now you'd like those gone too. What's the plan for the grass?"
Activist: "Rewilding."
Rancher: "With what?"
Activist: "...Bison."
Rancher: "I'll get the gate."