Eat Bison to Save Bison

0:00Oh, there are some babies or little ones anyway. Nick and I were in the backseat of a truck in Custard State Park in South Dakota, and this was the moment we spotted our very first bison. 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. 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 in the land that once depended on them ever again. By the end, we promise you too will be swapping your beef burger for a bison burger, although

1:00black bean burgers are also fine with us. This episode is spotted in part by the Alpha Piece Lone Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Sponsored by DeepGrim, the leader in voice AI, so you can use voices like mine. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every 5 seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and awareable. So your vital zap, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Here the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required, based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy August 2026. Is it Apple dot com slash Apple Watch Series 12? A young-ish bison? Maybe the size of a large pony? It had come right up to the back of the truck and was licking the wheels.

2:03If we'd have reached our hands out of the window, we'd have been able to touch it. Jeff Martin is assistant professor of bison biology and management at South Dakota State University Extension. He explained one of the reasons the bison were so into the truck tires. 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. But apparently these young bison were after more than just nutrients. That's a year when she's just curious. Your yearlings and two year olds get their curious, their young, wonder 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. Chad Kramer is the bison herd manager at Custard 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.

3:04We were right in the middle of a herd of about a couple of dozen, mostly mothers in their coves. I love watching it nurse. There's a little baby nursing as we're sitting here. Yeah, there's the far one out there is actually pretty young calf. That looks like it's probably just a couple weeks old. So they're not threatened by us right now with all the calves aren't they usually the one young the one young calf is furthest away. Mom has done that on purpose. I know I sounded really anxious, but you see signs everywhere in Custard 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. 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. 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.

4:06The bison near us were wandering on the rolling golden slopes. They were bursts of wildflowers here and there. Nearby also in Custard, the grasslands give way to the mountains of the black hills where towering gray spires peek out from evergreen spruce and pine trees. The black hills are a sacred area for the Lakota and our creation story comes from here as well. Zincala Rivera, she goes by color. She's Lakota and she is a range ecologist for the Tonka fund, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing bison back to native land. Another state park has played and still plays a key role in the bison story. Custard Park started out as the Custard Forest and Game Preserve initially and the bison were brought back in 1913. Chad also told us that Custard 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. But like Kala said, the relationship between bison and humans here goes back thousands of years.

5:06The hunter, she's the operations manager for the Tonka fund, she told us Wind Cave National Park, which is also in Custard County, legend goes that this is where the Lakota people came from and where they first encountered bison. Rachel and Kala told us there are a bunch of different stories around how connected the bison and Lakota have been from the beginning. Our people and the buffalo, we always consider the buffalo are relatives so we don't think of them as just an animal. Just native people, our life source was through the buffalo providing food, clothing, even shelters so they're very connected for generations and millennia. The buffalo met everything to our people, they were Walmart or 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. For millennia in America, native peoples hunted bison to provide for really almost all their

6:10needs. This was happening all over North America because there were herds of bison everywhere. 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. 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 and upstate New York. And like Collis says, there were lots of bison. Most estimates vary but historians agree there were tens of millions of bison moving around the continent in these huge herds. Someone who has done the math has estimated that it's more than enough to circle the equator

7:11if they were laid nose to tail. Michelle Nyhouse is the author of the book Beloved Beasts, fighting for life in an age of extinction. You know, you read historical accounts where they say the hills were just rolling black and brown. 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. Basically when Europeans first saw the bison, they were pretty gopsmacked. They started calling these big, shaggy creatures Buffalo. After the buffalo 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. 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

8:12look kind of like bison. So people started to call these North American animals Buffalo. Even though around 1758 or so Carl Linnaeus, the Linnaean taxonomic system, he coined the name bison for these animals. 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. 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. But for my money and for Jeff's, the bison are by far the coolest of the entire family. I mean, they're incredibly unique animals.

9:12They look like they're something straight out of the ice age. They're massive animals. The larger of the males can grow to about six feet tall and about nine feet long. The other thing that is a very distinctive feature of bison is their unique hairstyle. They're very shaggy in the front half from the shoulders all the way through their head. They're very long hair. They're called a cape actually. And that cape is 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 are called guard hairs. 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. So it becomes a slicker for them. They're always wearing a nice, airable, but waterproof slick. And so it's really helpful.

10:13And like today it's going to be maybe close to 90 degrees today. It can get up to 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. 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. Yeah, so we actually have two waltz. Three waltz that are right next to us. A wolo 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 new-ish wolo in the process of being created. So you can actually see a scrape right here.

11:16That 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. 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 wolo that was a bit further away from us. And there she goes. We all that fine 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. The dirt forms a physical barrier to prevent insect bites. Silt far so awesome for the bison, who doesn't love to wolo a little. But the real beneficiaries are grassland birds and frogs. The bottom of the wolo is so compacted, it becomes like a swimming pool liner. And so after the rain, water collects in them. In the springtime, these will also be breeding pools for amphibians that have a very short life cycle of breeding and growing.

12:19This is their chance to grow up when those now compacted soils are able to hold surface water. Bison also literally engineered the plant life on the prairies. There's a lot of seeds that will get stuck in their winter coat and then they'll also defecate so they're dung, they're making a deposit to the seed bank of trying to get something new to grow here. But even more important is their grazing, which is like a lawn mower and their fancy footwork too. That hoof action is helping crimp. Yes, they're trampling a little bit. They're grazing quite a bit for the trampling other things. And the edge of their hoof actually has a like a knife edge to it. After they're crimping a lot of that material down into the soil, which is incredibly helpful and useful for the prairie. As their hooves break apart the grass in the soil, they push some organic material into the soil and they help aerate it. And all of that helps the grass grow. It's broken that old stem down to where the new growth can come up through.

13:19Next time they come by, they can take a bite of that new growth off there. 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. This incredible majestic mammal and creature is your national mammal. About ten 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.

14:25It 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. Support for this episode comes in part from NetSuite. We hear a lot about how AI can help your business stay ahead of the curve. Next can help you figure out what that actually looks like for you. NetSuite is the AI-powered business management suite that securely connects all of your data. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR, and CRM into a single source of truth trusted by more than 44,000 customers. NetSuite next is the next big leap in how business gets done, because AI is built into everything you do. It can automatically surface custom insights throughout your day. AI agents work alongside you, helping solve problems and handle routine work. And anytime you have a question about anything you can simply ask it. Whether your business earns millions or even hundreds of millions, it's time for NetSuite next where your business meets AI.

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17:29I heard a T-Mobile. You can get it on them. Pass it on. For limited time at T-Mobile, give the amazing iPhone 18 Pro on us. With up to 36 monthy build credits, the Nutritian Intelligent Device Example iPhone 16, I call it fine plan. Example $100 plus a month, fine without a pay plus taxes and fees. For well qualified customers plus tax and $35 of high-skinection charge, credit send in balance to if you pay over a near cancel finance agreement $11.9999, iPhone 18 Pro 256GB to acquire. Best and fastest mobile network in the US based on analysis by Uclips, Speed Test and Dullgid State of 18 to 2026 is a T-Mobile.com. There was millions of them and by time the 1900s rolled around, there was about a thousand left. 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, clothing, and shelter, and Native Americans also recognized that they shouldn't, that they needed to conserve the herds. Although they were plentiful, Native traditions were not to take more than you need and to

18:30be 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 one, things were not plentiful. Everybody still had food. 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 until railways reached across the country that things went really wrong. Suddenly, bison hides could be transported to the east coast so quickly and as a result, so much more lucrative that many more people were drawn into the commercial trade. And people just got much more ambitious in terms of how many bison they were trying to shoot and process at a time. 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

19:30revolution, those belts were made of leather and their 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 three to four hundred 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. The market in hides and tongue meant that suddenly hunting was happening on steroids. And their stories of just people shooting on a train as many buffalo as they could. People were shooting a hundred 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. It wasn't just carcasses across the land, it was full bodies. Hunters just literally took the most valuable parts and left the rest, all that meat and

20:33hooves and sinew and everything that had made the bison so valuable to indigenous people. They left it to rot. And William Hornetay 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 just being surrounded. The trail being surrounded on all sides by bison bones and kind of, you know, sun-baked bison flesh. 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

21:36civilization 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. There were many people in the US government during the grant administration who saw it as 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. So when natives were being rounded up, so we're 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 very small. Group. 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.

22:40The Jeff told us that recently researchers learned something interesting when they did some forensic accounting on the number of hides that were shipped. And they don't add up to what is the total amount that we lost. Nor does it equate it to the number of bullets that were sold. 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? And so what we think were happening is that yes, there was absolutely a lot of gunfire in shooting bison this way. 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. 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.

23:40You have repeated pushes of cattle drives. So you'd be bringing those ticks and those diseases into these areas that wouldn't not normally have had those. There were other diseases too, including one carried by sheep that's 100% fatal to bison. This is definitely not to let colonists off the hook for virtually wiping out the bison. I'm not saying that we're washing our hands. European 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. 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. I mean, it's hard to imagine now, but the idea of extinction had just started to percolate through North American and European society. This is because for hundreds and hundreds of years, most Europeans believed the Bible was

24:42literal 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. 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. They then, and you see this in newspaper editorials of the time, there was then this move to, well, okay, it is actually happening, but it is the sad price of progress. 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. But not every white American agreed that losing the most iconic and awe-inspiring mammal on

25:46the face of North America was a good idea. One of those people was William Horniday. William Horniday, 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. This was before David Attenborough, 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. And by his early 30s Horniday 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. So in the 1880s, Horniday wrote to contacts he had out on the plans to find out how we could acquire some bison for the Smithsonian, but they were all like, good luck. There's almost none left.

26:47And Horniday, 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. But the something Horniday decided to do was not what you might think. 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 Horniday 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 say this

27:48piece, he's this frankly seems insane to us. But here was Horniday'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. He felt like I need to show these people, these people come to the National Museum in Washington, you see I need to show them how majestic these animals really are. 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 Horniday quickly realized he had to do more. Eventually he came up with the further than really radical idea of breeding bison in captivity and restoring them to the land. This was not something people did at the time. People were not restoring animals that they thought were too rare. If anything, they were still persecuting animals that they thought were too abundant.

28:49Horniday 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. And the air 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 grow relatively free. At this point, we should say that Horniday'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. Now his reasons for wanting to stop it were very complicated and rooted in his ideas about

29:49the 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. Horniday'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 Horniday, his passion didn't have anything to do with the bison's relationship to Native Americans or their ecological role in the prairie. He believed that hunting was incredibly important to create strong masculine citizens. He had to quote a vigorous and masterful people. However, he had a genuine love for the bison and did support the effort to bring life bison back to the plains. So what Horniday and Roosevelt and their buddies did, obviously, was confiscate some land from Native Americans and take 15 Bronx bison on a train ride.

30:53They 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 Horniday. This was such a success that Horniday 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 made it and reproduced. So by the mid-1930s, there were about 20,000 bison in North America, and these large, enclosed reserves up from an estimated 300 when Horniday first became aware of their play. 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 Yellow Stone, and individuals played a role too.

31:55There 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. In fact, the bison that we saw at Custard State Park, the ancestral bison of that herd, had originally been saved by a Lakota woman and her French Canadian trepour husband. 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 and preserves and private land. The herds had to be cold every so often. This calling meant that Custard 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 Custard State Park. They were the first, and this is considered the start of the modern ranching of bison meat.

32:55There was excess meat sold from park herds, but also private ranchers bought overflow bison and started ranching themselves. 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. Yes, so a Tonka bar, so way back in the early, like, mid-2000s, Mark, Tilsen and Carly and Hunter, they came up as a recipe with a Tonka bar. They based it on wasna. In English today, we call this kind of bar pemican, that's actually from a Cree word, not a Lakota word, but basically it's referring to a similar type of food. What that is is just dried meat and choke cherries. And so the Tonka bar is as buffalo meat and cranberries, it's a smoked bar. Mark and Carly and their Tonka bar business were based on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South

33:58Dakota. 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 kind of find an individual rancher that just ranched buffalo. The Tonka bar doesn't exist anymore, but this is why the Tonka Fund was created. Rachel and Carla are part of the team providing support to native ranchers who want to learn how to raise bison. Just reintroducing the animal back to native lands and bringing our relatives back together. So yeah, happy ending, am I right? The bison is saved, it's reunited with its relatives, we're all good. Are we? Are we 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. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and awareable. So your vital zap now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off.

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37:07The vast vast majority of those are in commercial branches 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. But that's not to say they've been restored to their rightful place. Like the relationship between bison and Native Americans, like Kala, Rachel and Bams said, the bison used to be everything to their people, losing them had a huge impact. It affected our diet, it affected our lifestyles, you know, our ancestors had to rely on rations from the government. They ended up getting fed like, commodities. Commods 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.

38:07There was stuff in there that our diets weren't familiar with, such as like all purpose flour, things like that can be. And 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. And not only did Native Americans not have access to bison meat, but they were taught to actively reject bison. 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 Commod box and there was a pound of buffalo in there. And one of the elders said, don't eat that, that's bad being. 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

39:10taught, you know, don't speak the language because, you know, it's bad. Don't practice your ceremonies. That's like worshiping the devil and eating your traditional foods. That's bad. Bam told us that when the government started distributing surplus bison to the Pine Ridge reservation where he lives, people didn't want it. They did not have the appetite for them. Here we are buffalo right in front of the court of country. We have people, what buffalo meat? We don't eat wild game. Our own people. 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. So what we did was we water concession stand and we started going to pow-owls and then we had cooking buffalo burgers and all these dishes and we were just kind of getting buffalo back out there. And so yeah, it went crazy. So now in the beginning our concession stand was just one guy standing there waiting.

40:16And nowadays there's a line 20 people long. So we were showing them how to eat it, showing them how to cook it. Bam created snack bars and he provided bison for spiritual uses. And gradually the folks on the reservation started to buy his bison. 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 more of a rolling flood of involvement here with people getting their meat here and stuff. 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. For the Tonka Fund, what also matters is restoring live bison to native land. It's not just about the meat itself, it's about seeing the buffalo. And not just seeing the bison, but seeing it at home on tribal land.

41:18All ages from the elders, the unchise to the Takoja's, the grandchildren, it may have been their first time they've ever seen a buffalo on the res. 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. Even if people want to get into a buffalo, there's a lot of people who are scared to transition because the higher costs, you have to get higher funds 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. And 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. And there's a lot of brancher 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.

42:25And 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 start-up investment to get into buffalo, but it will pay off because they were meant for this land. They'll survive hard times better. Jeff told us a story about a blizzard in South Dakota in 2013 that was literally known as the cattleman's blizzard because it was so deadly to cattle. 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.

43:26South 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. Just driving down the inner state and you've passed all these cattle ranches and you know instead of seeing cattle, you'll see buffaloes. So is that really a potential future? Could all those cows we saw driving through South Dakota ever be replaced with bison? 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 deaf says the diff is actually big. Yeah, ecologically they are not synonymous. 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. 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 winter time, 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 to get a mile a day.

44:30What 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. 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. You know, all the things that this area has evolved for over time is to have that grazing pattern on the land. 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. Yeah, people are afraid that their cattle will die because of the diseases buffalo have. Whereas actually, calluses, it's usually the other way around. Bison often get diseases from cattle. There's also just structural issues. We have a whole government-funded system of agricultural subsidies and extension agents

45:33built around cattle. 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. To get to, quote unquote, market-sized, rail size, about a thousand pounds give or take for males, maybe a little bit closer to 1200 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. 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 ask Jeff, can you milk bison? Yes, you can, but they're also quite spicy. Not the flavor, they're personality. And so I don't know a lot of people that have, but my dad has. Jeff's parents have a bison farm in Wisconsin.

46:35There 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. And so dad was able to get mom pulled into our squee shoot 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. So no bison, jeez, 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 use 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. Yeah, it'd be cool to see a, you know, a hundred thousand free roam and buffalo, but those days have kind of passed. So Jeff says sure there's room to grow. We certainly could have a lot more bison in the U.S., but all of these reasons are why

47:38they're never going to totally replace cows. From Canada, U.S. 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 150 to 200 years ago bison. We think there was 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 baton man, but I wouldn't bet on that. So the bison is not extinct, but in a way it is ecologically extinct. And that's a much harder problem to tackle. 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 their prairie, and also they're not threatening to anyone.

48:39If the conservation movement had really succeeded in restoring them, everything would look different, and we're not ready for that. Yeah, and I mean, it's a chronic problem in conservation we still see today. We don't know how to deal with success or abundance. 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. 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 flexing. 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. 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. I don't know exactly what's causing it, but I think it is just a multi-faceted approach

49:45to making sure that bison are being seen by people and recognized, reconciling the atrocities of the past, atoning for those and moving forward. And we want them to stick around. 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 stories Americans. 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. Thanks this episode to Chad Kramer, Jeff Martin, Collar Rivera, Rachel Hunter, Bambrue and Michelle Nyhouse. We have links to their organizations and research and to Michelle's great book, Beloved Beasts, on our website Gastropod.com.

50:46The 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. Thanks as always to our fantastic producer, Claudia Guib. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with a brand new episode. Till then. The world of business is constantly evolving. And Comcast Business keeps you totally in step, with secure AI-backed networking in more than 100 countries. We're powering over 90% of the Fortune 500 and millions of small businesses. That's a lot of muscle. And behind it all, thousands of experts answering your call at 2am like it's 2pm. One partner powering how business gets done for companies around the globe. When you add it all up, no one does business like Comcast Business. Go to ComcastBusiness.com slash Enterprise to learn more. The short for the show comes from Engine.

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