“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
~Jane Goodall
In the late 1800’s, the US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds. Historians tell us that the US Federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons not least of which included allowing ranchers to range their cattle without competition from other bovines. Although unspoken, many indigenous peoples believe that hunting was permitted to weaken the North American Indian population by removing their main food source and to pressure them onto the reservations. Tragically, without the bison, native people of the plains were forced to leave the land or starve to death.
Motivated by greed and hubris, Bison were hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and were reduced to a few hundred by the mid-1880s. Most appalling was the fact that they were only hunted for their skins, with the rest of the animal left behind to decay on the ground. After the animals rotted, their bones were collected and shipped back east in large quantities.
Of the remaining 350,000 Bison in the U.S today, two-thirds are being raised for human consumption.
A Bison calf attempts to avoid detection in the tall grass of the Great Plains, Western SD.
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