Why the Buffalo Roam.
US - Sometimes you have to eat an animal to save it.
16 March 2007
2 minute read
That paradox may disturb vegetarians, but consider the bison: 500 years ago, perhaps 30 million of these enormous mammals inhabited North America. By the late 1800s, several forces--natural climate changes and Buffalo Bill--style mass killings among them--had slashed the bison population to something like 1,000. And yet today North America is home to roughly 450,000 bison, a species recovery that has a lot to do with our having developed an appetite for them.
This year usda-inspected slaughterhouses will kill approximately 50,000 bison for human consumption. In 2000 the figure was just 17,674. Although bison consumption remains minuscule compared to beef eating--Americans ingest the meat of 90,000 cattle every day--bison is by far the fastest-growing sector of the meat business. We like bison because it's much leaner than beef but still satisfies that voluptuary jones for red meat. (Market research shows that men in particular enjoy bison, which Americans have long called buffalo even though the species known zoologically as Bison bison is not a true buffalo.)
An entire restaurant chain, Ted's Montana Grill (named for one of its founders, Ted Turner, former vice chairman of Time's parent, Time Warner Inc.), has largely defined itself through bison offerings, which include burgers and tenderloin that taste stronger, somehow meatier, than beef. Next month the chain plans to open its 48th location, this one in Naperville, Ill. How can any of this be good news for the mythic, native (and rather dim) kings of the American plains? And now that we have revived bison as a species, can we figure a way not to screw it up again--to manage and slaughter them sanely and humanely?
The answers to these questions must begin by correcting a misapprehension: that the 19th century white man's greed for hides and virtual policy of genocide toward Native Americans led to the extermination of tens of millions of bison. Not exactly. As the late bison expert Dale Lott demonstrates in his acclaimed natural history American Bison (2002), the bison population often shrank dramatically in preindustrial times when the jet stream moved south and brought dry air to the plains. In 1841, before William Cody (the most famous of several men known as "Buffalo Bill") was even born, a freak cold snap left a layer of ice over the Wyoming prairie so thick that even the biggest bison bulls--which can weigh a ton--couldn't break through to eat grass. Millions of bison perished, and the species never returned to that state's grasslands.
Source: Time
