Burns' buffaloes

[kaysixteen]

Anyone else watch Ken Burns' American buffalo show this week?   I would be especially interested in any comments from American historians and biologists/ naturalists... one thought that came to my mind was to ask why, apparently, did no one in the 19th c think of trying to domesticate them?

[dismalist]

No one owned the buffalo. Cheaper to kill than to try to domesticate. And then, kill as soon as possible, before somebody else comes along to kill. The buffalo slaughtering was just an example of overfishing.

[Parasaurolophus]

No one owned the buffalo. Cheaper to kill than to try to domesticate. And then, kill as soon as possible, before somebody else comes along to kill. The buffalo slaughtering was just an example of overfishing.

Actually, my understanding is that it was part of a campaign to force Indigenous peoples to vacate desirable land.


I could be wrong, but I think buffalo are generally ill-tempered and not great at following the leader, which makes them bad candidates for domestication.

[dismalist]

No one owned the buffalo. Cheaper to kill than to try to domesticate. And then, kill as soon as possible, before somebody else comes along to kill. The buffalo slaughtering was just an example of overfishing.

Actually, my understanding is that it was part of a campaign to force Indigenous peoples to vacate desirable land.


I could be wrong, but I think buffalo are generally ill-tempered and not great at following the leader, which makes them bad candidates for domestication.

Now, now, we don't have to get too deeply into conspiracy theories! :-)

The hunters were hunting to feed the railroad builders. It wasn't to nail the natives, it was to feed the Irish navvies building the railroads to the west. Very thin slices of land desirable for a single purpose.

 

[Parasaurolophus]

As I recall it, Ulysses S. Grant was pretty explicit in his instructions to Sherman and Sheridan on the subject. It wasn't a big secret.

But I'm not a historian, of course.

[dismalist]

As I recall it, Ulysses S. Grant was pretty explicit in his instructions to Sherman and Sheridan on the subject. It wasn't a big secret.

But I'm not a historian, of course.

No, Grant was a good guy. Takings of Indian lands came because of gold discoveries and such during and after his administration, not all of which he was able to prevent.

Grant has a bad name on account US historians were mostly Southerners.

[Hegemony]

Yes, an advantageous side effect of wiping out buffalo, as they saw it then, was that the plains tribes would be dependent on the U.S. government for food.

Buffalo are bad prospects for domestication because they are huge and can kill you very quickly. Kind of like trying to domesticate a grizzly. They can also jump 6 feet or more from a standstill. I remember talking to a rural tavern owner out west who decided to have a buffalo in a field next to his restaurant as a tourist attraction. He finally had to build a high concrete wall to keep the darn thing in, because it kept jumping over any fence he put up. And where cows can run around 25 miles per hour, buffalo clock in at 40 miles per hour. They're huge, fast, and single-minded. You'd need many generations to breed them to be tame-ish, and even so, such a large and heavy animal is going to be dangerous to handle. Even cattle can be quite dangerous. In more recent decades there was a movement to breed buffalo-cattle hybrids, called beefalo, but apparently those were difficult to work with too.

[apl68]

Yes, an advantageous side effect of wiping out buffalo, as they saw it then, was that the plains tribes would be dependent on the U.S. government for food.

Buffalo are bad prospects for domestication because they are huge and can kill you very quickly. Kind of like trying to domesticate a grizzly. They can also jump 6 feet or more from a standstill. I remember talking to a rural tavern owner out west who decided to have a buffalo in a field next to his restaurant as a tourist attraction. He finally had to build a high concrete wall to keep the darn thing in, because it kept jumping over any fence he put up. And where cows can run around 25 miles per hour, buffalo clock in at 40 miles per hour. They're huge, fast, and single-minded. You'd need many generations to breed them to be tame-ish, and even so, such a large and heavy animal is going to be dangerous to handle. Even cattle can be quite dangerous. In more recent decades there was a movement to breed buffalo-cattle hybrids, called beefalo, but apparently those were difficult to work with too.

I believe there was at least one effort to create "beefalo" hybrids in the late 1800s.  It worked about as well then as it did a century or so later.

The destruction of the buffalo was mainly a product of the 19th-century's typical recklessness with natural resources.  The term "sustainable" just wasn't part of most people's vocabulary back then.  Whether it was minerals, wildlife, forests, or even agricultural soils, the usual thinking was to harvest and sell as much of it as possible until it ran out. 

If you look at history (and prehistory), humans beings have had a tendency to do things like this any time they move into a new land, or at least one that's new to them.  To name just one example, the ancestors of the Native Americans wiped out whole ecosystems' worth of fauna after they came over to the Americas.  The difference was that there were far fewer of them and they had far less technology, and so the process took much longer.  And they were able eventually to gain a measure of equilibrium with their environment, which contemporary global civilization has conspicuously failed to do.  What we see happening in our world today has been happening around the world for a very, very long time.  It's just escalated to terrifyingly high levels.

[marshwiggle]

If you look at history (and prehistory), humans beings have had a tendency to do things like this any time they move into a new land, or at least one that's new to them.  To name just one example, the ancestors of the Native Americans wiped out whole ecosystems' worth of fauna after they came over to the Americas.  The difference was that there were far fewer of them and they had far less technology, and so the process took much longer.  And they were able eventually to gain a measure of equilibrium with their environment, which contemporary global civilization has conspicuously failed to do.  What we see happening in our world today has been happening around the world for a very, very long time.  It's just escalated to terrifyingly high levels.

nd prehistory), humans beings have had a tendency to do things like this any time they move into a new land, or at least one that's new to them.  To name just one example, the ancestors of the Native Americans wiped out whole ecosystems' worth of fauna after they came over to the Americas.  The difference was that there were far fewer of them and they had far less technology, and so the process took much longer.  And they were able eventually to gain a measure of equilibrium with their environment, which contemporary global civilization has conspicuously failed to do.  What we see happening in our world today has been happening around the world for a very, very long time.  It's just escalated to terrifyingly high levels.
[/quote]

Pretty much the lesson of human history and the Bible is that humans, individually and collectively, are basically driven by the urge to do what "seems like a good idea at the time" with long term consequences that are tragic for humanity and/or the rest of the planet. Every generation berates previous generations for their short-sightedness while going ahead and making their own huge changes without the slightest insight that they're doing exactly the same thing....

[secundem_artem]

Jared Diamond covers a lot of this kind of thing in "Collapse".  Which I find the prospect of reading infinitely more appealing than another 32 part Ken Burns series on the history of ping pong balls or something.

[Parasaurolophus]

Jared Diamond covers a lot of this kind of thing in "Collapse".  Which I find the prospect of reading infinitely more appealing than another 32 part Ken Burns series on the history of ping pong balls or something.

Guns, Germs, and Steel also has a chapter on domestication. I read it ages ago, but found it informative.

[jimbogumbo]

No one owned the buffalo. Cheaper to kill than to try to domesticate. And then, kill as soon as possible, before somebody else comes along to kill. The buffalo slaughtering was just an example of overfishing.

Actually, my understanding is that it was part of a campaign to force Indigenous peoples to vacate desirable land.


I could be wrong, but I think buffalo are generally ill-tempered and not great at following the leader, which makes them bad candidates for domestication.

Now, now, we don't have to get too deeply into conspiracy theories! :-)

The hunters were hunting to feed the railroad builders. It wasn't to nail the natives, it was to feed the Irish navvies building the railroads to the west. Very thin slices of land desirable for a single purpose.

 

This states it is not a conspiracy theory: https://www.libertarianism.org/everything-wrong-presidents/everything-wrong-grant-administration

[dismalist]

Interesting about Grant. But Grant got in the way. I was thinking mostly about the buffalo. :-)

From the article

Grant pocket-�vetoed a law that would have protected the bison and allowed the continuation of the policy of killing the buffalo to force the Plains Indians to surrender and give up their hunting lifestyle.

There was not a "policy" of killing buffalo, whatever Grant and others may have wished to further their own ends with respect to American Indians. The buffalo were killed because they could be killed for free and then profited from by selling meat and fur. A whole industry grew up around it -- buffalo processing.

What one can fault Grant for is the refusal to give even limited property rights to the American Indians. Perhaps he should have understood that. After all, there were range wars throughout the 19^th and even into the 20^th century between Whites and Whites. This was about open range versus private property, and they were violent.

Had American Indians had claim to the buffalo, they would have been treated like any other American Indian property by the more powerful Whites-- badly. [Perhaps as good as mezzo e  mezzo by Grant, in accord with the article.] But the buffalo would not have neared extinction. Had white ranchers owned the buffalo they would they would also not have neared extinction. Either way would have led to preservation of more buffalo than the non-ownership regime.

Who owns what affects well-being of course, but if nobody owns it we get overfishing. Just another case here.

[hmaria1609]

WETA, the local affiliate of PBS for the DC area, hosted Ken Burns for a preview and discussion of the new documentary last month.

[kaysixteen]

Burns did mention on the show that there was a parallel agenda in the US govt, of using reduction of buffalo herds as a way of trying to turn the Plains Indians into agriculturalists, yes.   He also did not shy away from saying that that whole semi-nomadic PI culture is a creation of Europeans, because the Euros had introduced horses and guns to N.A.  And he did mention that, back in the day, the rest of the various N.A. megafauna more or less went extinct after the Paleoindians arrived.

WRT domesticating American buffalo, I get that they are large, ornery, strong, etc.,... but so were the aurochs.  Our ancestors did manage, somehow, to domesticate them, and given how short generations of bovids are, it would not necessarily have taken more than say 25-30 years of effort to do something significant.