FORT WORTH, Texas (dpa) – The North American bison, or buffalo, is enjoying a renaissance in the United States, where it once influenced life like no other animal.
The continent’s native inhabitants, the Indians, have contributed a great deal to the comeback of the bison. A national organisation based in South Dakota is lobbying for the return of the animals to the reservations and the lands owned by individual tribes.
The buffalo is a symbol of our strength and unity,” says Fred DuBray, a Cheyenne who belongs to the Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative.
If we bring back healthy herds, then our people will become healthy again,” DuBray adds.
The Indians are hoping that the buffalo herds will help to strengthen their identity and culture. The bison cooperative is helping reservations to build up and manage herds, and in the slaughter and sale of the buffalo meat.
Long ago, before the white settlers arrived, the Indians of the vast prairies would kill only so many buffaloes as they needed – meat for their table, the hides for their tents, clothes and shoes, and bones to make tools from.
The bison was regarded and respected as a spiritual ally and as a giver of life. The Lakota-Sioux tribe for example speaks of the “Buffalo Nation” when describing the animals.
Today, 42 tribes are now keeping buffaloes on their reservations. Indian youngsters are now able to learn the rituals of their ancestors at festivities and in hunting and slaughtering the animals.
The once-mighty herds of buffalo were almost wiped out by the white settlers, and the last remaining animals found a haven around 100 years ago in the national parks of the West. Today, there are now more than 200,000 buffaloes, and wild herds are roaming inside Yellowstone Park and in places in Oklahoma.
Many cities, nature centres and even private persons are now keeping bison, while clever ranchers have discovered that buffalo meat, rich in iron and proteins and low on fat, sells well.
The country’s biggest buffalo rancher is billionaire businessman Ted Turner, who owns more than 20,000 of the animals. Turner, who founded the cable TV network CNN, also is the largest private landowner in the United States, with 690,000 hectares of lands in the Montana, South Dakota and other states.
Bison are easy to keep and sturdy, but they are also more independent-minded than cattle, as many a cowboy has found out the hard way. It is no wonder, since a bull can weigh up to nearly a ton and, at the shoulders, stand almost two metres tall.
Experts estimate that at one time there were almost 60 million buffaloes in America. The vast stretches of prairie between the Mississippi River to the east and, some 1,500 kilometres away, the Rocky Mountains to the west, provided ideal living conditions.
The prairie grass benefitted from the buffaloes, being kept short from grazing, and being naturally fertilised. Settlers would describe the awesome spectacle of huge herds stretching for many kilometres. Sometimes it would take days for a herd to pass by.
But the settlers’ conquest of the West nearly wiped out the creatures, which were ruthlessly hunted. The U.S. Army carried out large-scale massacres of the buffaloes in order to rob the Indians of their sustenance.
Drunken tourists, riding in trains, simply killed the big animals for fun. A man from Kansas set a record by killing 120 bison in just 40 minutes, while cowboy hero Buffalo Bill Cody boasted of having killed more than 4,000 bison in his time.
The prairies were soon marked by huge piles of bones. At the end of the 19th Century, the once-mighty buffalo was on the brink of extinction, with only a few hundred animals left.
Rescue came in the form of the first U.S. National Park, Yellowstone. A few dozen buffaloes were given a habitat there in 1894, setting the stage for a slow recovery. Today, with more than 2,200 animals, Yellowstone has America’s largest herd of wild buffaloes.
In Fort Worth, Texas, a small herd of 13 buffaloes is feasting on the lush winter grass of a pasture of the local Nature Center. The animals by nature are gentle, but it is better anyway for people to be careful around them.
Bison are wonderful animals and they belong to America, to our culture and our past,” says Susan Tuttle of the Nature Center. “They must be protected and preserved.”
