Eat Bison to Save Bison

For tens of thousands of years, North America was bison country. Millions of these giant, shaggy animals—also known as buffalo—roamed from the far north to the Gulf and from the east coast to the west. They defined the land and its people: the animals provided food, clothing, and spiritual connection to the continent's Indigenous peoples—while their hooves, wallows, and dung patties shaped the prairie, providing essential habitat for plants, birds, amphibians, and more. But by the late 1800s, the bison had nearly been driven extinct. Today, cattle have largely taken their place, with huge human and ecological repercussions. But could we swap bison for beef in our burgers, and what would happen if we did? This week, we’ve got the story of how a bison-hunting taxidermist helped save the bison and kickstart their recovery, as well as current Indigenous efforts to bring bison back to tribal lands and tables—plus, the scoop on how you can join the movement, and eat bison to save bison! Join us on the range this episode, as we explore the tragic history and inspiring future of America's national mammal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, there they are.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 0:04Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, there are some babies, or little ones, anyway. Nikki and I were in the backseat of a truck in Custer State Park in South Dakota, and this was the moment we spotted our very first bison.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  I'll see if I can get in front of them here, since they're kind of on the move.

• 0:19Nicola Twilley?

  Previously, my only acquaintance with bison was in the form of bison burgers and bison bolognese and other such tasty meals. But we had come to South Dakota to see real, live bison in this place that has been so central to our relationship with them over time, all because we wanted to tell a particular story.

• 0:38Cynthia Graber?

  The story we want to tell, it's how an animal that practically defined the North American landscape and was absolutely critical to indigenous communities, how the bison nearly disappeared, how they were brought back, and whether they can play the same role for the people and the land that once depended on them ever again.

• 0:55Nicola Twilley?

  By the end, we promise you two will be swapping your beef burger for a bison burger, although black bean burgers are also fine with us. This episode is supported in part by the Alpha P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:15Speaker 03

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• 2:28Speaker 05

  She's coming right up.

• 2:29Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, my gosh, she's right here. Is that bad? Is that OK? A youngish bison, maybe the size of a large pony, it had come right up to the back of the truck and was licking the wheels. If we'd have reached our hands out of the window, we'd have been able to touch it.

• 2:45Cynthia Graber?

  Jeff Martin is Assistant Professor of Bison Biology and Management at South Dakota State University Extension, and he explained one of the reasons the bison were so into the truck tires.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  The dust that's on the truck from the road has got minerals in it, so they're going to try and seek that out. And so they'll actually be licking the salt off of the vehicle as well, because they're also seeking salt.

• 3:07Nicola Twilley?

  But apparently, these young bison were after more than just nutrients.

• 3:11Speaker 06

  That's a yearling. She's, she's just curious. Your yearlings and two-year-olds get, they're curious, they're young, wondering what we're doing. So lots of times, they'll come up, they'll be the first ones to come up, just out of curiosity.

• 3:26Nicola Twilley?

  Chad Kramer is the bison herd manager at Custer State Park, as well as a private producer of bison under the name Kramer Buffalo. And although Chad and Jeff were totally cool, we were kind of freaking out about how close we were to the bison. We were right in the middle of a herd of about a couple of dozen, mostly mothers and their cubs.

• 3:46Cynthia Graber?

  I love watching it nurse. There's a little baby nursing as we're sitting here.

• 3:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, the far one out there is actually a pretty young calf. That's, looks like it's probably just a couple of weeks old.

• 3:56Nicola Twilley?

  So they're not threatened by us right now with all the calves? Aren't, aren't, aren't they usually?

• 4:02Speaker 05

  The one young, the one young calf is furthest away. Mom has done that on purpose.

• 4:07Cynthia Graber?

  I know I sounded really anxious, but you see signs everywhere in Custer that bison are dangerous wild animals and you should keep your distance. In fact, literally only weeks before we visited the park, a couple had been slowly following some bison bulls that they saw as they were hiking, and a bull turned, charged at the woman, and killed her.

• 4:24Nicola Twilley?

  We were definitely not about to get out of the truck. And also Chad and Jeff are the bison experts, so that reassured us, but still, we were barely breathing.

• 4:33Cynthia Graber?

  But we were also reveling and being surrounded by all those bison and the landscape itself. The park sprawls over tens of thousands of acres in western South Dakota. The bison near us were wandering on the rolling golden slopes. There were bursts of wildflowers here and there. Nearby, also in Custer, the grasslands give way to the mountains of the Black Hills, where towering gray spires peek out from evergreen spruce and pine trees.

• 4:57Speaker 07

  The Black Hills are a sacred area for the Lakota, and our creation story comes from here as well.

• 5:05Nicola Twilley?

  Zinkala Rivera, she goes by Kala, she's Lakota and she is a range ecologist for the Tonka Fund, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing bison back to native land.

• 5:15Cynthia Graber?

  Custer State Park has played and still plays a key role in the bison story.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  Custer Park started out as the Custer Forest and Game Preserve initially, and the bison were brought back in 1913.

• 5:28Nicola Twilley?

  Chad also told us that Custer is known as the birthplace of the modern bison meat industry. It was the first place to auction bison for meat in modern times, and it still does today.

• 5:38Cynthia Graber?

  But like Kala said, the relationship between bison and humans here goes back thousands of years. Rachel Hunter, she's the Operations Manager for the Tonka Fund, she told us Wind Cave National Park, which is also in Custer County, legend goes that this is where the Lakota people came from and where they first encountered bison.

• 5:55Nicola Twilley?

  Rachel and Kala told us there are a bunch of different stories around how connected the bison and Lakota have been from the beginning.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Our people and the buffalo, we always considered the buffalo our relatives. So we don't think of them as just an animal.

• 6:10Speaker 07

  With native people, our life source was through the buffalo, providing food, clothing, even shelter. So they're very connected for generations and millennia.

• 6:24Cynthia Graber?

  The buffalo meant everything to our people. They were our Walmart, our store. It was like everything, food, clothing, everything revolved around the buffalo. Bam Brewer runs the Charging Buffalo Meat House. It's a bison processing facility, and it's on the Pine Ridge Reservation, which today is the home of the Lakota.

• 6:41Nicola Twilley?

  For millennia in America, native peoples hunted bison to provide for really almost all their needs. This was happening all over North America because there were herds of bison everywhere.

• 6:52Speaker 07

  And so if you were to come across a herd, it would be very, very large, like thousands. And they would move in those groups across the country, over North America, Alaska, Canada, Mexico. They were in the southeast, southwest. And so what people don't realize is how important they were to this land and not just the Great Plains.

• 7:20Cynthia Graber?

  It's hard to imagine, but they really were everywhere, west coast, southeast, everywhere. There are dozens of towns in America named Buffalo. There's one in South Carolina and Alabama and West Virginia. And of course, there's Buffalo in upstate New York.

• 7:32Nicola Twilley?

  And like Kala says, there were lots of bison. Exact estimates vary, but historians agree there were tens of millions of bison moving around the continent in these huge herds.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Someone who has done the math has estimated that's more than enough to circle the equator if they were laid nose to tail.

• 7:50Cynthia Graber?

  Michelle Nihous is the author of the book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  You know, you read historical accounts where they say the hills were just rolling black and brown.

• 8:01Cynthia Graber?

  Explorers and colonists said on cold days, you could see the cloud of their breath rising from the plains before you could even see the animals. The pounding of their hooves was so loud, you could hear it from miles away. People often mistook it for an oncoming thunderstorm.

• 8:14Nicola Twilley?

  Basically, when Europeans first saw the bison, they were pretty gobsmacked. They started calling these big, shaggy creatures buffalo, after the buffaloes they'd seen elsewhere, like the water buffalo that makes mozzarella in Italy and the cape buffalo in Africa. These other buffalo do have a little hump and a little shag going on, not as impressive as the bison, but still.

• 8:35Speaker 05

  They are not very closely related to bison, or modern cattle even. It's quite a distant relationship. However, they do have some characteristics of their skeleton and their features that look kind of like bison.

• 8:51Cynthia Graber?

  So people started to call these North American animals buffalo.

• 8:54Speaker 05

  Even though around 1758 or so, Carl Linnaeus, the Linnaean taxonomic system, he coined the name bison for these animals.

• 9:05Nicola Twilley?

  The word bison is related to the ancient Greek word for ox, and there was, in fact, a European bison already, mostly found in Eastern Europe. Linnaeus recognized that the American shaggy bovine was more closely related to this Eastern European bison than it was to the buffalo side of the family.

• 9:22Cynthia Graber?

  But in any case, the word buffalo had already been used for a couple hundred years or so at that time, and so it stuck. Nikki and I are using the word bison. A lot of people call them buffalo. We're all talking about the same animal. And bison and their cape buffalo and water buffalo cousins are all in the greater bovine family, along with our domesticated cows.

• 9:40Nicola Twilley?

  But for my money and for Jeff's, the bison are by far the coolest of the entire family.

• 9:46Speaker 05

  I mean, they're incredibly unique animals. They look like they're something straight out of the Ice Age.

• 9:52Cynthia Graber?

  They're massive animals. The larger of the males can grow to about six feet tall and about nine feet long.

• 9:58Nicola Twilley?

  The other thing that is a very distinctive feature of bison is their unique hairstyle.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  They're very shaggy in the front half, from the shoulders all the way through their head. The very long hair, they're called a cape, actually. And that cape has kept on most of the year, from the armpit all the way up through the chest. And their neck is going to be very long hairs, probably like somewhere between four and eight inches long, some of these hairs. They're called guard hairs.

• 10:30Cynthia Graber?

  And what are those guard hairs good for? Bison don't sweat very much, but the few sweat glands they have are secreted right into their guard hairs and coat those hairs to help them become waterproof.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  So it becomes a slicker for them. They're always wearing a nice, arable, but waterproof slick. And so it's really helpful in, like today, it's going to be maybe close to 90 degrees today. It can get up to 100, 100-plus here, but then when a storm comes through, it's going to drop that temperature down to 60s and 50s within minutes as it blows through. And getting wet is a quick way to lose a lot of your heat, especially out here when you have nothing to protect you. So this is their protection.

• 11:13Nicola Twilley?

  All of these distinctive aspects of the bison look, they're all to do with how the bison is adapted to its environment. But the other super cool thing about bison is the way they actually shape the landscape around them. We got out of the truck and headed over to see a very clear example of one of the ways that bison affect the land.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we actually have two wallows, three wallows that are right next to us.

• 11:36Nicola Twilley?

  A wallow is a shallow, compacted dirt patch. It's a little bit of a depression in the grassland. Two of the ones we saw were old ones, starting to get grassed over again, but we were lucky enough to see signs of a newish wallow in the process of being created.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  So you can actually see a scrape right here. That was a horn that got horned through here. That's how they're excavating. They put their head down, turn it to the side, get the horn up against it and start to scrape, digging up.

• 12:02Nicola Twilley?

  Bison create these little shallow dirt pools so they can roll around in the dust to get rid of flies. As we watched, one actually started using a wallow that was a bit further away from us.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  And there she goes.

• 12:14Speaker 05

  See all that flying off of her, all that dust? That's the clay and the silt that she's picked up from the ground and the wind took some of it away, but a lot of it's going to be in her coat. And that'll help reduce quite a bit of the fly load.

• 12:29Nicola Twilley?

  The dirt forms a physical barrier to prevent insect bites. So far, so awesome for the bison. Who doesn't love to wallow a little? But the real beneficiaries are grassland birds and frogs. The bottom of the wallow is so compacted, it becomes like a swimming pool liner. And so after the rain, water collects in them.

• 12:46Speaker 05

  In the springtime, these will also be breeding pools for amphibians that have a very short life cycle of breeding and growing. This is their chance to grow up when those now compacted soils are able to hold surface water.

• 13:03Nicola Twilley?

  Bison also literally engineer the plant life on the prairies.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  There's a lot of seeds that will get stuck in their winter coat and then they'll also defecate. So their dung's, they're making a deposit to the seed bank of trying to get something new to grow here.

• 13:17Nicola Twilley?

  But even more important is their grazing, which is like a lawnmower, and their fancy footwork, too.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  That hoof action is helping crimp. Yes, they're trampling a little bit, they're grazing quite a bit, but they're trampling other things. And the edge of their hoof actually has a, like a knife edge to it. So they're crimping a lot of that material down into the soil, which is incredibly helpful and useful for the prairie.

• 13:45Nicola Twilley?

  As their hooves break apart the grass and the soil, they push some organic material into the soil and they help aerate it. And all of that helps the grass grow.

• 13:52Speaker 06

  It's broken that old stem down to where the new growth can come up through. Next time they come by, they can take a bite of that new growth off their.

• 14:00Nicola Twilley?

  This all sounds pretty in the weeds, literally, but it adds up. You can actually see the difference bison make to a grassland from space. The areas they've grazed become green earlier in the spring, they're greener than ungrazed areas, and they stay green for longer, too. All of this makes bison not just awe inspiring to look at, but also awe inspiring from an ecological perspective. The prairie is one of the most endangered and essential landscapes in North America, and it can't thrive without the bison. Jeff almost waxed poetic as he gazed at the animals.

• 14:31Speaker 05

  This incredible majestic mammal and creature is your national mammal. About 10 years ago, it was signed into law designating the bison as a national mammal of the United States of America. They are on, I forget how many state flags and seals. And they are the species that represents us as Americans.

• 15:02Nicola Twilley?

  If bison are so amazing, and if even European colonists loved bison so much that they put them on state seals and flags, why did they try to wipe them out entirely? That story after the break.

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• 16:15Speaker 01

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• 16:38Nicola Twilley?

  So what happened? So, Native Americans had always hunted bison and relied on them. But the Native population wasn't so big that they would need to kill all the animals for food and clothing and shelter. And Native Americans also recognized that they shouldn't, that they needed to conserve the herds.

• 16:54Speaker 07

  Although they were plentiful, Native traditions were not to take more than you need and to be understanding of when there is large supply and not. So that's where some of our traditional foods came from of drying meat and drying berries. And so that when things were not plentiful, everybody still had food.

• 17:17Nicola Twilley?

  Once Europeans came with their horses and guns, it became easier for Native Americans to hunt bison, and they did kill more. And white colonists killed some too, for food and for their hides. But Michelle says it wasn't till railways reached across the country that things went really wrong.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  Suddenly, you know, bison hides could be transported to the East Coast so quickly and as a result, so much more lucratively, that many more people were drawn into the commercial trade. And, you know, people just got much more ambitious in terms of how many bison they were trying to shoot and process at a time.

• 17:52Nicola Twilley?

  The hides were so incredibly valuable, mostly because they were on high demand for factories. This was surprising to me, but the belts that were in the machinery that fueled the Industrial Revolution, those belts were made of leather and there just wasn't enough cow leather, plus bison leather was super strong. In the first three months after reaching Kansas, the Santa Fe Railroad carried more than 43,000 bison hides, which is bananas. The other part of the bison people were quick to cut off for sale was the tongue. They didn't bother with the 300 to 400 pounds of meat on the entire animal. They just cared about the two pound tongue. It could be preserved in brine and barrels and shipped on the trains, and cured bison tongue was a delicacy.

• 18:33Nicola Twilley?

  The market in hides and tongue meant that suddenly hunting was happening on steroids.

• 18:38Speaker 07

  And there's stories of just people shooting on a train, as many buffalo as they could.

• 18:44Nicola Twilley?

  People were shooting 100 bison an hour. The barrels of their rifles would become so hot from constant shooting that they had to plunge their guns in water before they could keep going.

• 18:54Speaker 07

  It wasn't just carcasses across the land, it was full bodies.

• 18:58Nicola Twilley?

  Hunters just literally took the most valuable parts and left the rest. All that meat and hooves and sinew and everything that had made the bison so valuable to Indigenous people, they left it to rot.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  And William Hornaday, who became an important figure in bison restoration in the early 1900s, he traveled in Montana Territory in the late 1860s. And he was prone to pretty purple prose, but I think the situation lent itself to some very vivid descriptions. He talked about, you know, he and his companions riding out under the broiling Montana sun and, and just being surrounded, the trail being surrounded on all sides by bison bones and kind of, you know, sun baked bison flesh.

• 19:47Nicola Twilley?

  This was all happening at the same time that the American government was trying to force Native Americans onto reservations and off their traditional hunting grounds. You've probably heard of the idea of manifest destiny. White Americans wanted the entire continent. They wanted to be able to grow crops and farm cattle and build their quote unquote "superior civilization" on it. They thought the land really rightfully should be theirs, but of course, that involved conquering the people who were already there. And killing the main source of food, clothing, and even spirituality for many Indigenous people, it certainly made it easier to conquer them.

• 20:21Cynthia Graber?

  There were many people in the US government during the Grant administration who saw it as.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  It's very convenient that as they were trying to commit genocide against indigenous people of the plains, that those same people were also losing this central source of food and cultural strength to commercial hunters, to unfettered commercial hunting.

• 20:43Speaker 07

  So when natives were being rounded up, so were buffalo, put behind fences, natives on reservations. Both populations were totally killed to very small percentages of what they used to be. Even natives today are a very small group.

• 20:59Nicola Twilley?

  For a long time, historians exclusively blamed that railway-fueled hunting rampage for wiping out bison. And there's no doubt that commercial hunting did a huge amount of damage. But Jeff told us that recently, researchers learned something interesting when they did some forensic accounting on the number of hides that were shipped.

• 21:18Speaker 05

  And they don't add up to what is the total amount that we lost. Nor does it equate to the number of bullets that were sold.

• 21:27Nicola Twilley?

  So more bison disappeared than can be accounted for in either hides shipped or bullets used, which leaves a mystery. What killed all those extra bison?

• 21:36Speaker 05

  And so what we think were happening is that, yes, there was absolutely a lot of gunfire and shooting bison this way.

• 21:44Cynthia Graber?

  But it turns out that researchers shown that introduced diseases also killed a lot of bison. That explains the difference in the numbers. It was both guns and germs.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  And so there are a few different types of diseases. One of them is Texas fever, which is spread through ticks. In particular, when you have a Texas cattle drive that goes from Texas through Buffalo country into Montana, you're now spreading those ticks everywhere. You have repeated pushes of cattle drives. So you'd be bringing those ticks and those diseases into these areas that would not normally have had those.

• 22:19Nicola Twilley?

  There were other diseases, too, including one carried by sheep that's 100% fatal to bison.

• 22:25Cynthia Graber?

  This is definitely not to let colonists off the hook for virtually wiping out the bison.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  I'm not saying that we're washing our hands. Europeans still brought cattle here. It's still a white Anglo-Saxon European descent problem that we created. It's just that it was a much more complex one than we originally intended and thought about.

• 22:43Cynthia Graber?

  All of that, all the hunting and the diseases, as we said, it reduced the bison numbers to just the tiniest fraction of what they had once been. But still, it was nearly impossible for people at the time to even consider that they could potentially be driving the bison out of existence.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  I mean, it's hard to imagine now, but the idea of extinction had just started to percolate through North American and European society.

• 23:08Cynthia Graber?

  This is because for hundreds and hundreds of years, most Europeans believed the Bible was literal and that all animals were created by God and only could be removed from the planet by God. There's a whole story of how our understanding developed over the centuries. It's in our episode about culinary extinction. But it took until Darwin developed his theories of evolution that we understood that animals evolved and that they could be wiped out by us.

• 23:30Nicola Twilley?

  By the late 1800s, the idea of extinction, that a creature or a plant could just vanish from the planet, that was generally accepted. Still, when it came to bison, people knew that the herds had always ranged widely. And at first, people thought maybe they'd just headed into Canada or gone further west and they'd be back.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  They then, and you see this in newspaper editorials at the time, there was then this move to, well, okay, it is actually happening, but it is the sad price of progress. You know, if we are going to extend the nation from coast to coast, perhaps the disappearance of the bison, of this majestic animal, is one price that we have to pay.

• 24:12Cynthia Graber?

  But not every white American agreed that losing the most iconic and awe-inspiring mammal on the face of North America was a good idea. One of those people was William Hornaday.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, William Hornaday, one of the most complicated conservationists that you'll ever meet in history, was a taxidermist, grew up in the Midwest, had a taste for adventure, traveled the world, spent his 20s traveling the world, killing and preserving animals for commercial sale to museums.

• 24:43Nicola Twilley?

  This was before David Attenborough and National Geographic. And taxidermy was one of the few ways people who lived in cities could get to know creatures they would never see in the wild.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  And by his early 30s, Hornaday was at the top of his profession. He was working for the National Museum in Washington, DC, which later became the Smithsonian. And he discovered that the Smithsonian had very few bison specimens in its archives.

• 25:09Cynthia Graber?

  So in the 1880s, Hornaday wrote to contacts he had out on the plains to find out how he could acquire some bison for the Smithsonian. But they were all like, good luck, there's almost none left.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  And Hornaday, this man who had spent his adult life shooting very charismatic large animals all over the world, received what he later called a hammer blow to the head. And he kind of woke up and said, something must be done about this. And to give him credit, that was a visionary realization.

• 25:38Nicola Twilley?

  But the something Hornaday decided to do was not what you might think.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, one of the ways he decided to take action was deeply ironic, if not completely wrong-headed. But he took it upon himself to travel to Montana Territory with some companions. He mounted two expeditions. And by the end of the second expedition, he had shot 20 bison. And now, this is at a time when Hornaday himself estimated that there were only about 300 bison left in the United States. And for someone who is expressing all this concern and all this determination to save the species, this frankly seems insane to us.

• 26:21Cynthia Graber?

  But here was Hornaday's logic. He thought rich people with power on the East Coast didn't really understand or care that the bison were on the brink of being wiped out. They needed to be convinced. And to be convinced, they had to experience a connection to the animals.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  He felt like, I need to show these people, these people come to the National Museum in Washington, DC. I need to show them how majestic these animals really are.

• 26:45Nicola Twilley?

  And it worked. The people saw the majesty. There were lines around the block to visit his diorama of a bison family in the wilds of Montana. There were rave reviews. It was a sensation. But Hornaday quickly realized he had to do more. Eventually, he came up with the, for then, really radical idea of breeding bison in captivity and restoring them to the land. This was not something people did at the time.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  People were not, you know, restoring animals that they thought were too rare. If anything, they were still persecuting animals that they thought were too abundant.

• 27:19Cynthia Graber?

  Hornaday eventually was able to try to carry out this really outlandish plan. Outlandish at the time, he purchased seven bison from ranchers in Texas and Oklahoma, and he set them up where else, in New York City.

• 27:31Speaker 04

  And there, he started a program where he tried and eventually succeeded in raising a small herd of bison in the Bronx. And luckily for him, bison are similar enough to domestic cattle, to domestic livestock, that they can be raised relatively successfully in captivity. So he was able to do this. The bison were pretty healthy. And he started looking around for a place on the plains where these bison could roam relatively free.

• 28:02Nicola Twilley?

  At this point, we should say that Hornaday's bison revival quest was not just fueled by the pure love of bison. Some of his motivation for trying to stop the bison from going extinct was a little more dubious.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Now, his reasons for wanting to stop it were very complicated and rooted in his ideas about the superiority of white masculinity and his ideas about the superiority of the United States as a nation. However, he did take action for these very complicated, often very dark reasons. He did take action on behalf of the bison when very few other people in his society were doing so.

• 28:41Cynthia Graber?

  Hornaday's actions attracted some powerful supporters, including the President of the United States at the time, Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt became a big fan of trying to keep the bison on the plains. But like Hornaday, his passion didn't have anything to do with the bison's relationship to Native Americans or their ecological role on the prairie. He believed that hunting was incredibly important to create strong masculine citizens, quote, "a vigorous and masterful people."

• 29:06Speaker 04

  However, he had a genuine love for the bison and did support the effort to bring live bison back to the plains.

• 29:14Nicola Twilley?

  So what Hornaday and Roosevelt and their buddies did, obviously, was confiscate some land from Native Americans and take 15 Bronx bison on a train ride.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  They were released on what is today a wildlife refuge in Oklahoma. And they did not exactly roam completely freely, but they were within a very, very large Reserve where they could behave much as they had over previous centuries, and they did very well. They started having calves. The first one was named Hornaday.

• 29:45Cynthia Graber?

  This was such a success that Hornaday and his team did it again in Montana, steal land from native peoples, give it to bison, then in South Dakota, and so on. The bison were purchased from ranchers and moved from other herds around the country where they were more at risk, and they mated and reproduced.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  So by the mid 1930s, there were about 20,000 bison in North America in these large, enclosed reserves, up from an estimated 300 when Hornaday first became aware of their plight.

• 30:15Cynthia Graber?

  There were other bison rescue efforts going on at the same time. The Army began protecting the bison herd that lived in the earliest national park at Yellowstone, and individuals played a role, too.

• 30:25Speaker 07

  There are stories about families that saved buffalo, both American and Native. And the American stories are more well-known and more told. And Native peoples did have a role. And what's neat, too, is that it was a lot of women that were actually leading the efforts and kind of forcing their husbands along.

• 30:48Cynthia Graber?

  In fact, the bison that we saw at Custer State Park, the ancestral bison of that herd had originally been saved by a Lakota woman and her French-Canadian trapper husband.

• 30:56Nicola Twilley?

  Over the years, the herds expanded as the bison had babies. And because the amount of land set aside for bison was really quite limited, some parks, some preserves, some private land, the herds had to be culled every so often.

• 31:09Cynthia Graber?

  This culling, it meant that Custer actually provided a fair amount of bison meat to the troops in World War II. But it wasn't until 1966 that an official annual roundup and sale of excess bison started at Custer. They were the first, and this is considered the start of the modern ranching of bison meat. There was excess meat sold from park herds, but also private ranchers bought overflow bison and started ranching themselves.

• 31:31Nicola Twilley?

  In the 1990s, a Native American effort to bring bison back got going with the formation of the Intertribal Buffalo Council. It's called the ITBC. But for a long time, there weren't a lot of Native folks involved in raising bison, as a couple of Native entrepreneurs based in South Dakota realized when they tried to launch a new bison-based snack bar.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a Tonka bar, so way back in the early, like, mid 2000s, Mark Tilson and Carleen Hunter, they came up as a recipe, a Tonka bar. They based it on wasna.

• 32:07Cynthia Graber?

  In English today, we call this kind of bar pemmican. That's actually from a Cree word, not a Lakota word, but basically it's referring to a similar type of food.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  What that is, is just dried meat and choke cherries. And so the Tonka bar is buffalo meat and cranberries. It's a smoked bar.

• 32:24Nicola Twilley?

  Mark and Carleen and their Tonka bar business were based on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And we really wanted to keep it all locally produced, like, with Native producers. And that's where they found it was lacking, where they couldn't find an individual rancher that just ranched buffalo.

• 32:45Cynthia Graber?

  The Tonka bar doesn't exist anymore, but this is why the Tonka Fund was created. Rachel and Kala are part of the team providing support to Native ranchers who want to learn how to raise bison.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Just reintroducing the animal back to Native lands and bringing our relatives back together.

• 33:01Nicola Twilley?

  So yay, happy ending, am I right? The bison is saved, it's reunited with its relatives. We're all good.

• 33:08Cynthia Graber?

  Are we? Is the story over? Have the bison been saved? Are they helping keep the prairie healthy and keeping Native Americans fed? We'll let you know after the break.

• 33:18Cynthia Graber?

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• 33:30Speaker 04

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• 34:29Nicola Twilley?

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• 34:45Nicola Twilley?

  Learn more at Bloomberg.com. So today, there are about a half a million bison in the US. The vast, vast majority of those are in commercial ranches raised for meat. Half a million sounds like not a lot compared to the 20 or 30 million bison there were at the start of the 1800s. But it's a lot more than the few hundred that was all that was left at the start of the 1900s.

• 35:09Cynthia Graber?

  But that's not to say they've been restored to their rightful place. Take the relationship between bison and Native Americans. Like Kala, Rachel, and Bam said, the bison used to be everything to their people. Losing them had a huge impact.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  It affected our diets. It affected our lifestyles. You know, our ancestors had to rely on rations from the government. They ended up getting fed, like, commodes.

• 35:34Cynthia Graber?

  Commodes is short for commodities. These are similar to food stamps. They're basically government food for lower-income Native Americans. And today, honestly, many Native Americans who live on reservations qualify for food assistance. Rations, that was food the federal government originally provided tribes when it forced them onto reservations as part of the treaty obligations.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  There was stuff in there that our diets weren't familiar with, such as, like, all-purpose flour, things like that, canned beef. And then by our people eating that, you know, the diseases start getting into our systems, like diabetes and heart disease and stuff like that. Our people weren't familiar with.

• 36:14Cynthia Graber?

  And not only did Native Americans not have access to bison meat, but they were taught to actively reject bison.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Growing up, like, in my family, it was kind of, it was kind of weird. I heard some elders saying, like, one time I, there was some buffalo. We received this commodity box, and there was a pound of buffalo in there. And one of the elders said, don't eat that. That's bad meat. They had this taboo about eating buffalo. And I think, like, looking back at that, I think it was something that was put in their heads from maybe the boarding school, because, you know, in the boarding school, they were taught, you know, don't speak the language, because, you know, it's bad. Don't practice your ceremonies. That's, like, worshiping the devil.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And eating your traditional foods, that's bad.

• 37:09Nicola Twilley?

  Bam told us that when the government started distributing surplus bison to the Pine Ridge Reservation where he lives, people didn't want it.

• 37:16Speaker 06

  They did not have the appetite for them. Here we are, buffalo, right in front of Lakota country. We have people, what buffalo meat? We don't eat wild game, our own people.

• 37:29Cynthia Graber?

  This is part of what motivated Bam to create a bison processing facility on reservation land on Pine Ridge. He did have to convince people to try the bison at first.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  So what we did was we bought a concession stand, and we started going to powwows. And then we'd cook in buffalo burgers and all these, these dishes. And we were just kind of getting buffalo back out there. And so, yeah, I went crazy. So in the beginning, our concession stand was just one guy standing there waiting, you know. And nowadays, there's a line, 20 people long. So we had, we were showing them how to eat it, showing them how to cook it.

• 38:09Nicola Twilley?

  Bam created snack bars, and he provided bison for spiritual uses. And gradually, the folks on the reservation started to buy his bison.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  And then, once the word got out, hey, this is a legit spot. They're clean. They take care of the buffalo in a sacred way. Once the word got out that we were tribal members and doing this. Now there's it's there's more of a rolling flood of involvement here with people getting their meat here and stuff.

• 38:38Cynthia Graber?

  In general, native communities have been able to eat more bison lately. There was even a USDA buffalo to school conference about getting more bison meat into the native school systems, though it's still not a major part of their diet.

• 38:49Nicola Twilley?

  For the Tonka Fund, what also matters is restoring live bison to native land.

• 38:54Speaker 07

  It's not just about the meat itself, it's about seeing the buffalo.

• 38:59Nicola Twilley?

  And not just seeing the bison, but seeing it at home on tribal land.

• 39:04Speaker 07

  All ages, from the elders, the unchis, to the takojas, the grandchildren. It may have been their first time they've ever seen a buffalo on the rez.

• 39:15Cynthia Graber?

  As we said, this is the goal of the Tonka Fund. They're helping people who want to raise bison on native land. They work with some people who don't have any ranching experience, no cattle, some people who are cattle ranchers and they want to convert to bison. But there are challenges.

• 39:29Speaker 07

  Even if people want to get into buffalo, there's a lot of people who are scared to transition because the higher cost, you have to get higher fence because buffalo go where they want to go. And that's just part of the instinct. They were migrating. They know where the minerals are, they know where the nutrients are.

• 39:45Nicola Twilley?

  Bison do require different management than cattle, for sure. It's not so much that they're difficult, but they are different. So even for folks who have experience raising cattle, it's a transition.

• 39:55Speaker 07

  And there's a lot of rancher culture still in the Great Plains amongst natives who they've had cattle in their family for generations and that's a sense of pride. And it's hard to set that new mindset of I want more buffalo on the land when this is a survival thing, you know? People needed food and they were trying to do that by getting cattle. So there's just a lot of pros and cons. It may be a huge startup investment to get into buffalo, but it will pay off because they were meant for this land, they'll survive hard times better.

• 40:39Cynthia Graber?

  Jeff told us a story about a blizzard in South Dakota in 2013 that was literally known as the Cattlemen's Blizzard because it was so deadly to cattle.

• 40:47Speaker 05

  I think it was October 2nd and 3rd that it hit and it wiped out 40,000 cattle because they were not ready for winter yet. That's way too soon, they didn't grow out their winter coat. Not a single bison perished in that event. They have that 10,000 hairs per square inch on their body. It's about four times that of cattle. So they have that insulation, ready to go at all times.

• 41:12Cynthia Graber?

  South Dakota has a lot of cattle. There are four cows for every human in the state. And Rachel pointed out, those could all be bison instead. That's her dream.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Just driving down the interstate and you drive past all these cattle ranches and you know, instead of seeing cattle, you'll see buffaloes.

• 41:29Cynthia Graber?

  So is that really a potential future? Could all those cows we saw driving through South Dakota ever be replaced with bison?

• 41:35Nicola Twilley?

  There's good reason to want that, especially ecologically. You might think, well, cows, bison, they're both grazing animals. What's the big diff? But Jeff says the diff is actually big.

• 41:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, ecologically, they are not synonymous.

• 41:48Cynthia Graber?

  For one, cows don't move nearly as much as bison do. They're kind of lazy. They like to hang out by the water where life is pretty chill. Bison, they can get around.

• 41:56Speaker 05

  What we've been learning from putting the GPS collars on bison is that they're walking anywhere between the low time of the year, so wintertime, close to about only seven miles a day. And I say only seven miles a day, but if you compare that to our beef cattle in the area, you're lucky if you get a mile a day. What we're finding is that some of these bison are actually walking closer to 15 miles a day. They're getting their steps in. They really are athletic.

• 42:24Nicola Twilley?

  This matters because a bunch of heavy cows stuck on the same spot will compact the soil as opposed to the aeration that happens when bison graze. The two species just don't graze the same way. And like we said before, the bison grazing pattern is essential to the native plants that make up the prairie.

• 42:42Speaker 07

  You know, all the things that this area has evolved for over time is to have that grazing pattern on the land.

• 42:49Cynthia Graber?

  So in theory, replacing cows with bison would be great, but the humans on the landscape aren't so into the idea. When ranchers in a cattle region transition from cows to bison, well, sometimes the ones who are still raising cows don't like having the bison around.

• 43:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, people are afraid that their cattle will die because of the diseases buffalo have.

• 43:07Cynthia Graber?

  Whereas actually, Kala says it's usually the other way around. Bison often get diseases from cattle.

• 43:11Nicola Twilley?

  There's also just structural issues. We have a whole government funded system of agricultural subsidies and extension agents built around cattle.

• 43:20Cynthia Graber?

  The other thing is cows are domesticated. We've bred cows to grow and gain weight quickly, which means that ranchers can make more money faster. Bison are wild animals still, they're not domesticated and they grow slowly.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  To get to quote unquote, market size, rail size, about 1,000 pounds, give or take for males, maybe a little bit closer to 1,200 in some instances, that is a two year process. For cattle, it is a one year process. And so with our advanced breeding, selective breeding for cattle and the breeds is they've dialed the metabolism up.

• 43:54Nicola Twilley?

  The other bonus of domesticating cattle is that we've made it so that they'll let us milk them so we can have cheese and all kinds of other dairy delights. Bison are mammals, they produce milk. So we asked Jeff, can you milk bison?

• 44:08Speaker 05

  Yes, you can, but they're also quite spicy. Not the flavor, their personality. And so I don't know a lot of people that have, but my dad has.

• 44:18Cynthia Graber?

  Jeff's parents have a bison farm in Wisconsin. There was a calf who had been injured and he couldn't stand up to nurse and so Jeff's dad tried to get the calf some milk.

• 44:26Speaker 05

  And so dad was able to get mom pulled into our squeeze chute and got some logging chains to hold her in place and stop her from kicking him and was able to do a little bit of milking into a bucket. So yeah, just once and he won't do it again.

• 44:44Nicola Twilley?

  So no bison cheese sadly. Still, Chad and Jeff told us they'd love nothing more than to see more bison on the land, living the way bison have for millennia. But the big issue, the thing that seems insurmountable, is that to actually play the role they used to play in the North American ecosystem, you'd have to let bison roam over vast areas. And these days, we have private ownership and fences and roads.

• 45:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, it'd be cool to see a, you know, 100,000 free roaming buffalo, but those days have kind of passed, so.

• 45:18Cynthia Graber?

  Jeff says, sure, there's room to grow. We certainly could have a lot more bison in the US, but all of these reasons are why they're never going to totally replace cows.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  From Canada, US and Mexico, the beef cattle, those are for meat. There's approximately 50 million head, give or take. And yeah, so it's a nearly one to one replacement that has occurred from over 100 and 150 to 200 years ago of bison. We think there were somewhere between 30 and 60 million on the continent. It would have to take every single one of those beef producers to make the switch to bison. I don't think that's going to happen, certainly not in my lifetime. Is it possible? Yes. It is plausible as well, but I'm not much of a betting man, but I wouldn't bet on that.

• 46:06Nicola Twilley?

  So the bison is not extinct, but in a way it is ecologically extinct. And that's a much harder problem to tackle.

• 46:13Cynthia Graber?

  Basically, we've saved enough of the bison so that they're not dead and gone, but they're also still around in such fairly small numbers that they're not doing their full job on the prairie and also they're not threatening to anyone. If the conservation movement had really succeeded in restoring them, everything would look different and we're not ready for that.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, it's a, it's a chronic problem in conservation we still see today. We don't know how to deal with success or abundance.

• 46:37Nicola Twilley?

  But that's not to say that we shouldn't keep pushing. There is plenty of room for more bison and plenty of reasons to want more bison on the land. And there's a delicious way to do your part in making that happen, which is eat more bison. Replace your burger meat or ground beef with bison.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  If you eat one, you're paying for the lives of six others, give or take, depending on how the market is going to be fluctuating.

• 47:00Cynthia Graber?

  Jeff's point is that the money goes back to the ranchers who have all those bison doing all that great stuff on the land and even to native communities who are raising them and feeling a strong connection to them. And everyone is then able to raise more animals, maybe convince other people to convert from cows.

• 47:15Nicola Twilley?

  And the good news, which we saw on the ground in South Dakota, is that more and more people are getting behind bison, eating it, raising it, conserving it.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  I don't know exactly what's causing it, but I think it is just a multifaceted approach to making sure that bison are being seen by people and recognized, reconciling the atrocities of the past, atoning for those and moving forward.

• 47:42Cynthia Graber?

  And we want them to stick around.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  They have been here longer than us, that's for certain. They are the story of us. How their conservation story ends will likely be a harbinger for our story as Americans.

• 48:01Nicola Twilley?

  If you want to do what Jeff suggests and eat a bison to save bison, then you are going to want to get yourself on the list for our special supporters newsletter where we will have all the scoop on how to make bison maximally delicious. Plus, how their super awesome shaggy skulls are inspiring the next big thing in sports.

• 48:20Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks this episode to Chad Kramer, Jeff Martin, Kala Rivera, Rachel Hunter, Bam Brewer and Michelle Nyehouse. We have links to their organizations and research and to Michelle's great book, Beloved Beasts, on our website, gastropod.com.

• 48:31Nicola Twilley?

  A special shout out to supporters Maureen and Lisa on celebrating their 12 year anniversary on September 20th. Congratulations and thank you for helping us keep this show on the road too.

• 48:43Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks as always to our fantastic producer, Claudia Gibe. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then.

• 48:52Speaker 04

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• 49:21Speaker 01

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. While others follow the noise, we follow the money. Learn more at Bloomberg.com.