Sometimes you have to eat an animal to
save it. 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
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.
But climate changes alone weren't enough
to wipe out 30 million bison. Humans played a big role.
By 1700 Native Americans were riding horses, which allowed
them to kill prey much more efficiently than by approaching
on foot, as they had done for the previous 9,000 years.
Steam power allowed for the cheap transport of bison
hides, and in the 1870s tanners learned to make useful
leather from them. Demand soared, and the new Sharps
"buffalo rifle" allowed hunters to meet that
demand. The last significant bison hunt ended in 1883,
when there were almost none left.
Conservationists saved a few--there were
probably more bison at the Bronx Zoo in 1900 than there
were in all of Oklahoma--and gradually bison were reintroduced
to natural habitats like the Wichita Mountains Wildlife
Refuge. But it wasn't until the '70s, when ranchers
began acquiring bison with an eye toward encouraging
a boutique meat market (Native Americans, Old West enthusiasts,
health nuts), that the species rebounded in numbers
significant enough to ensure genetic diversity and protection
against disasters like that 1841 freeze. Today private
owners care for 97% of the world's bison population,
according to Cormack Gates, who chairs the World Conservation
Union's North American Bison Specialist Group.
The ranchers care for bison because they
can make money selling their meat. And so bison are
flourishing again because they have the evolutionary
advantage of tasting good and having survived to a time
when we all need to eat leaner. We win, and bison win.
Of course, the individual bison we eat lose, but the
nature of the paradox is that most never would have
a chance at life at all if we didn't provide a reason
for their husbandry. Vegetarians may argue that no life
is better than one cut short at slaughter, but in terms
of maximizing their genetic expression, Bison
would have to disagree.
Plus, there's another reason to eat bison:
doing so is good for the planet. Bison are leaner than
cattle because they are still wild animals who range
and eat grass; they do not tolerate confinement well,
and so they cannot be fattened the way we do cattle,
which we have bred to eat rich corn mixtures their entire
adult lives. Growing corn to feed cattle costs the nation
dearly in terms of pesticide and fertilizer runoff.
The pollution and inhumanity of the confinement-feedlot
beef system make it one of postwar America's biggest
ecological blunders.
Bison, on the other hand, eat grass that
grows freely, and the manure they produce is a natural
fertilizer. True, some bison ranchers are irresponsibly
corralling and then "finishing" their animals
with a fattier diet of grain just before slaughter.
This makes the meat richer, more like beef. Ted's Montana
Grill serves grain-finished bison, for instance, although
CEO George McKerrow Jr. says the chain is testing grass-finished
meat for consistency and quality.
Eating bison may have helped save the
animals, but it does raise the danger that managed herds
will become domesticated and lose their distinct bison-ness.
Ranchers have a financial incentive to
cull herd members who are cantankerous (as older bulls
are), who break fences, who fight other bulls. But removing
these animals is a form of unnatural selection: it will
eventually remove wild traits from the bison gene pool,
making them docile like cattle.
The best thing we can do to let bison
be bison is to end their lives in the wild, not in captivity.
Today, John and Wright Mooar, the prodigious bison hunting
brothers who helped lead the "Great Slaughter"
in the late 1800s, are reviled for shooting so many
bison on the open range. But, ironically, theirs was
a more humane way of killing bison than ours. Last summer,
I watched a bison heifer be led into the chute at the
North American Bison Cooperative, a slaughterhouse in
New Rockford, N.D. She became agitated, and she fought
violently against the tight steel walls. It was painful
to watch. Ahead of her, a door opened, and the heifer
ran forward--into the waiting arms of a "V-conveyor
restrainer," which held her on both sides and immobilized
her legs. A metal clamp descended to restrain her head,
and then a man walked forward, shot her with a pneumatic
gun and sliced her open.
I had trouble eating bison for a while
after seeing the heifer die. There's a better way: the
USDA has developed regulations for shooting bison in
the field. When shot from a distance, the animals don't
know what hit them--bison famously don't even run when
their herd mates start falling from gunshot. Under the
regulations, an inspector must attend the kill and the
animal must be transported to a USDA butchering facility
within the day. Your bison burger would cost more if
it came from an animal killed this way. But it would
be a small price to pay not only to save a species but
to finally respect it too.