Burns' buffaloes

[dismalist]

Domesticating the buffalo? Why bother? The American Indians didn't need to -- the animals were abundant and free. The Whites didn't have the incentive either -- no one owned them, so they were shot and parts of their carcasses sold.

[Parasaurolophus]

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.

If they're good at jumping, as Hegemony said upthread, then that's a big problem, because it means you'll struggle to keep them penned in anywhere while you selectively breed them. And if they're liable to charge and break through fences, you're pretty well screwed. Add to that the facts that they run in ginormous herds and that you don't have a large animal of your own to use to herd them, and it's going to be tough to separate the calves from the rest so that you can start the process. You'd need a clear idea of the downstream benefits to start a rough job like that, and you'd need a lot of help, and you'd need people to buy into the idea for a long time for it to work. So even if it's technically possible--and it may not be--the sheer difficulty of the task makes it seem like a rather undesirable undertaking.

I don't know what ancestral aurochs were like, but I expect they were somewhat easier to work with. E.g. they were less aggressive, formed smaller herds, weren't great jumpers, etc. IIRC, they were largely solitary at some points of the year, and otherwise only formed small herds. That would make a big difference to people trying to round some up or separate out the calves on foot. I wouldn't rate my chances with herds of hundreds, thousands, or more.

[Hegemony]

Also, they already had cattle — why go to the effort of trying to domesticate a difficult animal when you already have an animal that fills that niche and is already domesticated? Seems pointless. Which is clearly what people concluded at the time.