
What America Lost When It Lost the Bison - pseudolus
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/11/how-bison-create-spring/602176/
======
crazygringo
> _"...would have been even more powerful in centuries past, when 30 to 60
> million bison roamed North America. “They would have been everywhere,” says
> Matthew Kauffman...”_

Interestingly, current scientific evidence suggests that this was not at all
the "natural state" of North America, and that it was actually a temporary
ecological imbalance lasting for a couple centuries after smallpox and other
diseases wiped out ~95% of Native Americans after contact from the Europeans
-- and suddenly the bison went essentially "unchecked".

Obviously this doesn't change the evil of their almost-extinction or the need
for bison as a proper balance -- just that the gigantic hordes of bison that
Europeans first witnessed likely isn't the right baseline either.

See "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" for a highly
readable account of evidence on both sides from 2006.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-
Colu...](https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-
Columbus/dp/1400032059)

~~~
paulddraper
Presumably they were also unchecked many thousands of years previous, before
the arrival of humans?

~~~
BjorksEgo
The arrival of humans could have also coincided with a reduction of the
population of predators of bison? Just thinking outloud I'm not exactly sure
what the range of wolfs and bears were before the arrival of humans

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GlenTheMachine
My dad was a beef cattle farmer. Beef cows are large animals - 800 pounds
isn’t unusual - and if you accidentally get between a mama cow and her calf
she can kill you. Dad got thrown more than once that way.

He once investigated raising bison. Doing his due diligence, he visited a
bison farm. The fences were telephone poles drilled ten feet in the ground,
and highway guardrail instead of wire. Dad backed away slowly and stuck to
Black Angus.

~~~
protomyth
The tribe here uses regular cattle fences. As far as I know only two juveniles
have gotten out and that was at an entrance.

~~~
mitchty
My godfather has a bison ranch, one of the larger ones.

Regular fences work, as guidance really. If a bison wants to get through,
they're weak as water and won't stop them.

You need telephone post thickness fence preferably cemented into the ground if
you want to really stop a bison from getting out. If they are in stampede
mode, you're screwed, would have to drive I beams into the ground.

Bison treat fences as guidelines really, they'll move around it if they're not
in the mood to care, but if they are in a "screw this" mood, that fence is
going down.

Note, when I say regular cattle fence, I mean 8 foot posts driven into the
ground, with barb wire every foot to 8 inches apart. Anything less and they
tend to work their way through it trying to get at grass on the other side and
then no more fence. And that wire has to be taut, like string on a guitar play
a note tight.

As an anecdote, even with fences like that, he had about 4-5 bison that
escaped. Each one got put down to make sure the rest of the herd didn't get
escape into their blood.

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paulddraper
I didn't realize bison were so rare.

Where I live, there is a race literally called "The Buffalo Run" [1], a few
miles outside Salt Lake City. There are bison everywhere including on the race
path.

One of them nearly killed a runner a few months ago. [2]

[1] [https://www.buffalorunadventures.com/buffalo-
run/](https://www.buffalorunadventures.com/buffalo-run/)

[2] [https://www.theepochtimes.com/man-gored-trampled-by-a-
bison-...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/man-gored-trampled-by-a-bison-while-
on-trail-run-at-utah-state-park_2950858.html)

~~~
nitrogen
That runner was my brother; we used to run the island very frequently, but now
no more. Rare as bison may be, they are incredibly dangerous when too close to
people.

~~~
filoeleven
I think it’s worth mentioning the unexpected follow-up: after recovering from
his injuries, your brother later took a date to the same park, where SHE was
attacked by a bison. I’d stay away after all that too!

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/01/bison-
gores...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/01/bison-gores-utah-
woman-date/)

------
Fezzik
My dream for the United States is that we repopulate everyone to Texas* and
let the rest of the country be wild, in varying degrees, and accessible by
bullet train. That’s my stance as an avid outdoorsman. Then we could see all
this natural majesty flourish.

* I have not looked up the numbers recently, but I recall that we could fit the entire population of the United States in to Texas with a resulting population density less than that of Manhattan. Obviously doing this is not feasible, for a number of reasons.

~~~
thomasahle
Moving everyone in the US to Texas would only result in 0.2% of the population
density of Manhattan (just checked with Wolfram alpha which is great for this
kind of thing)

You might be thinking of moving the entire world's population to Texas, which
would result in 56.7% of the Manhattan density (by 2017 estimates).

Of course we would still need to grow food in fields, which surely is the most
space consumptious part of the population.

~~~
asteli
Apparently 41% of the land in the contiguous US is pasture or grazing land for
livestock (548MM acre). Just staggering.

To compare, land we use to grow crops that we directly eat account for for
~77MM acres.

[[https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-
use/](https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/)]

~~~
rsj_hn
It is staggering only until you realize that the majority of land in the US is
too arid to grow crops and was once called the Great American Desert --
basically most of the land west of the Mississippi. Such land grows primarily
scrub and is ideal for livestock such as Bison and Cattle that are able to eat
the vegetation that grows there naturally as a result of the limited rainfall
available. That we have water intensive agriculture west of the Mississippi is
only because we are depleting aquifers. It's not sustainable, and using this
land for livestock is about the best thing that can be done with it. It's also
what this land was used for prior to being settled -- large open plains on
which Bison roamed.

~~~
codingdave
The gist of your point is correct, but "West of the Mississippi" is the wrong
dividing line. You have about a state and half of excellent land west of the
Mississippi. It is all about the mountains - From when the mountains start
just past the West coast, they cause clouds to dump their moisture on the west
side. The east sides are arid, for a couple hundreds miles or more. And
because we have multiples ranges of mountains, the western third of the nation
is arid... with pockets of agriculture just west of each mountain range.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It's not just "a couple hundred miles past the mountains". It's basically even
with the western edge of the Gulf of Mexico. East of there, there's enough
rain. West of there, there's not.

~~~
rsj_hn
You are right that "West of the Mississippi" is not the actual boundary, which
is why I said "majority of the land". The actual boundary curves, being
farther west in the Gulf and almost touching the Mississippi in the North, but
"Western half of the US" is as good a description as any.

Point being, a lot of people who grow up in the Eastern Half of the US think
the Western half has a similar climate, when it really doesn't. It really is
an arid climate and the difference between East and West is rather stark.

Here you can take a look at a map of precipitation:

[http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap17/rain_usa.ht...](http://www-
das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap17/rain_usa.html)

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gm3dmo
"Lost the Bison". Losing something is unlucky or perhaps careless. The bison
were not "lost", they were systematically exterminated.

~~~
pjc50
Indeed. And the extermination of the Bison was a proxy for the extermination
of the native Americans. [https://www.insidescience.org/news/bison-
slaughter%E2%80%99s...](https://www.insidescience.org/news/bison-
slaughter%E2%80%99s-destructive-legacy-native-americans)

~~~
turk73
I don't subscribe to the "Noble Savage" mythology. I'm not of the mind that
European culture is all that great but somehow the technological leaps
happened and those who stayed low-tech got crushed. The cycle will repeat,
don't worry--we must be close to some tipping point of decadence.

------
carapace
FWIW there are some bison in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

~~~
nitrogen
Do those bison ever do anything? They seem uncharacteristically docile
compared to other herds.

~~~
hadlock
Mostly a historical artifact. They're down to their last five or six, all of
them female.

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wiglaf1979
[https://www.americanprairie.org/](https://www.americanprairie.org/)

Worth going check out what they are doing at trying to reset how the prairie
was. We lost such a treasured natural wonder when we destroyed the flora and
killed the fauna when we "won" the west.

Dan Flores has a great book called the American Serengeti that dives into how
diverse it was. We literally had something on the level of the African Veldt
and all the ecological riches that we've turned into a series of unsusaintable
agricultural deserts punctuated with cities and suburbs. Here is a Joe Rogan
interview with Dan that is worth the listen on this and coyotes in America.
Conversation meanders a bit but really is a great episode.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1RUk1w_xk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH1RUk1w_xk)

------
allworknoplay
“In areas where bison graze, plants contain 50 to 90 percent more nutrients by
the end of the summer.”

How does this work, thermodynamically speaking? Is it that by being culled,
the plants engage in more photosynthesis overall, so there’s a net gain? What
about nitrogen?

~~~
chr1
Some plants have bacteria that can get nitrogen from atmosphere. Animals
digesting those plants return nitrogen and other nutrients to the ground in a
form that can be used by other plants, also by removing dead plants they open
space for new plants to grow.

------
filmgirlcw
Slightly OT so I’m sure I’ll be rightfully downvoted, but my favorite part of
playing The Oregon Trail in first grade was always hunting for bison, even tho
it was often a waste of resources because you couldn’t carry all the meat back
to use.

And I guess from skimming the article, that’s sort of what really happened. We
just lost nearly an entire animal group (I don’t remember the proper taxonomy
ranking, forgive me) because of excessive hunting.

The difference in the ecology with and without the bison is fascinating. I’m
curious what other changes have happened in other parts of the world due to
manmade extinction of an animal or organism group.

~~~
belinder
There's the dodos of mauritius

------
senectus1
There is a taxidermied Bison in the museum of my (Australian) city.

The damned thing is HUGE. I cant imagine how terrifyingly amazing it would be
to witness a herd of the big bastards running across plains.

~~~
BLKNSLVR
I hand-fed one through a fence in New Zealand. The fence seemed feebly
inadequate if the beast was determined to escape. This beautiful, large,
shaggy-headed beast was, however, very gentle, much like a regular cow.

~~~
abraae
Only tangentially related, but we had a funny incident when an American
visitor staying with us told us about his visit that day to a wildlife park
here in NZ.

He and his wife spotted a hole in the wire netting fence enclosing the lions.

They assured each other it couldn't really be a hole - after all, the park
owners would be sued up the wazoo if they actually left a hole in the fence,
such that a lion could potentially escape and maul a visitor.

So they crept closer and closer until they realised that yes, it really was a
hole and no, there was nothing else restraining the lion within.

I explained to him after all this that sueing people was not really a thing
here, and he should assume that any such holes were just that - an actual
hole.

~~~
ceejayoz
Fences at zoos are generally for the visitors.

Modern zoo design largely uses things like moats to contain the animals, as
they can be hidden from visitors and need dramatically less maintenance.

------
mattrp
There’s a really good autobiography called buffalo for the broken heart which
chronicles a ranchers quest to switch from a cattle ranch to a buffalo ranch.
It really lays out the case for these amazing creatures.

~~~
pacifist
Thank you for the recommendation. Probably my next book to read. There is a
little bison operation here in Oregon and I'm a regular customer. Strange to
think that we are saving them by eating them. I like the "move everyone to
Texas" version proposed upthread better.

~~~
mattrp
Well I guess I got downvoted because of the implication that you picked up on
- “saving them by eating them.” One kind of has to read the book. When you
look at efforts to repopulate bison to the prairie, the most famous is
Yellowstone. And indeed it’s been successful. But we are talking about a herd
of a few hundred - not the millions that once roamed the American prairie.
Further, when you consider the prairie is not the Rocky Mountain region but
places like North/Sohth Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, eastern Colorado, etc, one
needs to consider current land use/ownership - most of the land is privately
owned and used to grow feedstock for the cow - An animal that is essentially a
foreign invasive species. So before one gets all high and mighty about not
eating bison, consider that by replacing cows with bison, the prairie
ecosystem gets restored (the bison’s hooves act as natural aerators vital to
an amazing amount of bird species that also have all but disappeared), an
amazing amount of feedstock land gets returned to its native state, etc, all
without resorting to some tyrannical scheme to move everyone to Texas which
despite its landmass could not support anywhere near the population of the US
much less the world without an ecological catastrophe. Am I angry I got
downvoted - not really - everyone is entitled to their opinion. But I do think
we need an ounce of reality in this discussion. anyway read the book - if it
helps the author is a conservationist and his plea/rationale is very humane
and respectful to nature.

~~~
pacifist
Thanks again for turning me onto the book. I just got it and I'm through the
first chapter already. I eat bison for the same reasons alluded to barely in
the first chapter: they graze well[1], and they have evolved together with the
surrounding vegetation and wildlife. Yeah, the Texas thing is silly. Mostly
wishful thinking on my part.

[1] [https://phys.org/news/2019-11-yellowstone-migrating-bison-
sp...](https://phys.org/news/2019-11-yellowstone-migrating-bison-springtime-
green-up.html)

~~~
mattrp
I’m glad you like it. Above article is fascinating - it’s like cows destroy
the ecosystem through grazing while bison “engineer” it to make it better to
the point they can see bison grazed land from space.

------
frankhhhhhhhhh
We're screwed!

------
sunstone
Free lawn mowing?

~~~
Cthulhu_
Is actually being done by herds of sheep over here, especially in harder to
access locations like sound walls and dikes.

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Mikeb85
Saw a wild bison chase a car up here. Pretty terrifying. They're huge and mean
AF.

