The Running of the Buffalo
Hanging out at Bisons du Nord
by Brit Griffin March/April 2001
It was right out of Jaws. Sort of. The scene where the shark lunges up out of the water and sends everyone scrambling. It was just like that. But instead of a pointy headed fish, it was the humongous, shaggy noggin of a very irate buffalo.
The buffalo belonged to a herd of about 200 at Pierre Belanger's Bisons du Nord ranch near Earlton. A couple of fellas from a buffalo ranch down around Essex county wanted to take the bull home with them. But the bull was having nothing to do with it.
He was below us in a small metal enclosure. Having been herded through a a maze of green corrals, pens and chutes he was now as the end of the line.
We were standing on a metal perch that ran around the outside of the pen. We were making various efforts to coax the buffalo into the narrow chute leading to the trailer.
He wasn't budging. The electric prod and broom handle had no effect. Neither was pushing the walls inward in a kind of vise-action.
Bert, the buffalo handler for Bisons Du Nord, took to hanging over the edge of the pen and dragging his coat along the ground in front of the big guy. Nothing was working. He was snuffling and huffing, ice along his nostrils, letting off great, foggy gulps of breath that hung in the air.
"How much does he weigh?" I asked.
"Oh, probably in the range of 1800 pounds."
And that 1800 pounds had no intention of going anywhere. At least not without taking some prisoners. And then suddenly he reared straight up, his massive head lunging towards one of the Essex county boys. The way we all scrambled back along the ledge, it was like that scene when Richard Dreyfus and Roy Schneider almost fall over each other to get to the other side of the boat.
And then, when we least expected it, he charged into the trailer, following Bert's coat. We relaxed, until we realized that the transition wasn't going to be smooth. He was half way in when he decided the trailer wasn't what he wanted after all and he was going to do some damage. His stomping and the clanging of the metal in the sharp cold sounded cataclysmic. For a few tense minutes it seemed like the quiet Francophone farming community of Earlton was going to be home to the running of the bulls.
But finally, after more panic, cajoling and good luck, the bent trailer and rocking cargo headed out in the snow for southern parts.

Buffalo Rancher
Despite his thermal garage-mechanic's suit, Pierre Belanger seems just a little too dapper to be a buffalo farmer. But he's been into the buffalo business since 1972. Way back then he was one lone buffalo rancher. Since then buffalo ranching is becoming positively trendy. There are now 745 farms in Canada with 45,000 buffalo, about half of which are on the plains of Alberta.
Most herds average around 60 animals but Belanger runs some 200 bison, with a base herd of 135 cows on his 480 acres. Granted, 200 bison are hardly in league with the tens of thousands that must have stormed across the great plains, but let me to tell you that the sight of this herd storming by in a field is a sight to behold.
I'd been invited to take part in their annual winter round-up . The round-up is the only time of the year that the herd is treated more like a domestic herd than a wild one. Each buffalo is de-wormed, given vaccinations and the young bulls are de-horned.
The job at hand was to head out to the fields (on foot) and convince North America's largest mammal to head on up to the barns and the labyrinth of pens.
"Stick close to the fence," Pierre said, "If they start running out there you don't want to get in the way."
I headed out with Bert and Rene "Coucoune" Jubinville. The bison looked pretty big out there in the wild, just like they should. A big bull could top six feet. But they looked closer to 10 feet tall, snorting and eying us across the snow.
"Get away from the fence," said Rene, "you don't want to get in their way as they come down there."
I've always hated conflicting advice. I decided to stick to Rene like glue. I trundled along behind him in the snow, stranded out there in the middle of the field, as the bison charged around the edges pounding out a well-travelled figure eight in the deep snow. After a few stampedes around the field, they turned up towards the barns.
The tasks for the day were divvied out. As the greenhorn on the team, I as given the job of deworming. They fitted me out with a garish plastic contraption that slung over my shoulder with a long nozzle to douse the back of the animals. Definitely more Ghostbusters than wild west.
The de-horning wasn't pretty, but it never is. I have to do it for my small goat herd -the horns are burned off just as they are pushing through the skin. Buffalo horn is tougher, and takes a large pair of pliers to do the job. Sometimes they use a wire to saw through really thick horn. It didn't take long for the snow to get mucked up by the bits of blood spouting from the horn. Belanger says he de-horns the buffalo so they won't wound or even kill each other. And it's safer for the handlers.
Given that the buffalo are essentially a wild animal, Belanger has given a fair bit of thought about how much management to employ.
"I've been thinking about it a lot lately," he says. "At one end of the pendulum you have issues like the BSE scare and the safety of food. On the other end there are efforts, for example in places like Germany, that promote very traditional farming approaches. I favour less intervention, but I'm not a purist."

Great Plains Buffalo
Sam Hurst wrestles with the issue as well. Eight years ago he gave up his job as a producer for NBC in Los Angeles and headed out to a buffalo ranch in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Hurst had originally gone out to the Great Plains to do a story on rural-depopulation. One of the ideas being floated at the time was a vision of restoring the once majestic buffalo herds to the plains. He fell in love with the place and the vision.
"We weren't simply looking for a way to escape the pressures of the 21st century, but an innovative way to address those pressures. We didn't want to restore the ecosystems of the Great Plains just so people could come and look at it. We wanted to explore ways to live on the land so people could stay on the land."
His family moved to an 800 acre ranch and started the Wild Idea Buffalo Co., marketing buffalo meat to high-end niche markets. But the core of the dream is not simply marketing alternative meat - its to help restore the buffalo's natural place on the plains..
"There are three kinds of buffalo," says Hurst. "The foundation of the restoration movement are the public parks, places like Yellowstone or Custer State Park, with free-roaming herds. The second, and most dynamic and creative force, are the Indian tribes, who are combining a wild life for the buffalo with huge tracts of land that are basically hidden away. And the third category are the private ranchers. It is within this community that the argument has broken out over how best to interact with buffalo while at the same time making a living off them."
Hurst opts for as natural a course as possible. But, he says, over 90% of the buffalo ranches in the US follow a traditional, feed-lot approach to raising buffalo. As far as Hurst is concerned, doing the cattle thing with buffalo is crazy.
"Take, for instance, genetic marking for superior animals. Right now they are doing sonar testing to examine the amount of rib-eye steak a bull will produce. If they find one that will produce two more rib-eye steaks, they slap a superior marking on him, and he'll produce bigger calves and two more rib-eye steaks. But that doesn't say anything about his survivability, about how he'll survive out in a blizzard in February. So you have to ask, what is genetically superior?"
He says part of the problem is that the almost all buffalo meat is processed between mid-November and mid-January. In an era of mass consumerism it is hard to build an industry on a three month marketing cycle. The market place demands uniform quality and year-round supply.
Hurst speculates that this could partly be addressed by improved methods of processing and freezing, where the freshness of the product could be preserved for a longer period. But there is also a need to simply respect the nature of wild animals.
"Buffalo aren't on an industrial rhythm where you can just build another machine and crank out more widgets. They are on their own biological rhythm."
Hurst is the first to admit that the prospect of ranching a wild animal is a slippery slope and his experiences have often left him frustrated. But he says in the end what matters is that he, and others like him, are trying and are making their efforts as principled as possible. But restoring the bison, and enlivening the Great Plains culture, will take more than a handful of committed ranchers.
"I believe our biggest problem in running large herds is that we cannot even begin to imagine the scale of movement in the wild."
Hurst says that even if one had a 6,000 acre ranch, a buffalo herd could cross the expanse in no time at all.
What's needed, says Hurst is a buffalo "commons" in the range of 200 miles by 400 miles.
"What we are looking at is an alliance between the tribes, the private ranches and the public parks. That makes it a political problem."

The disappearance of the buffalo has become the ultimate symbol of the European impact on traditional North American culture. In his book, The Destruction of the Bison, Andrew Isenberg says that over the course of the 19th century, the North American bison was decimated from numbers upwards of 30-60 million to only a few hundred. A small group of people, mostly western ranchers and eastern romantics, managed to lobby the government to create bison reserves to keep the animals from being completely eradicated.
Isenberg says the pressures on the buffalo started when the traditional balanced economies of the natives were disrupted.
"As the utility of the horse, the lure of the fur trade, and the fear of disease, drove the Indians to the grasslands, they came to rely primarily on one resource, the bison."
By the mid 1800s, the bison population was already in serious decline from a rapacious trade in hides. But when the industrial expansion of the 1870s kicked into high gear, the demand for leather sky-rocketed. The already beleaguered herds took a beating. "Euroamerican hide hunters poured into the region and within a decade had nearly exterminated the herds."
At the same time, the Federal government was facing down a powder keg of simmering Indian wars. The Feds saw the demise of the bison herds as a means of subjugating any native resistance. They would starve them onto reserves. As an 1875 editorial in the New York Times put it, "the red man will be driven out, and the white man will take possession. This is not justice, but it is destiny."

Tony Willman thinks justice may finally be catching up with destiny. Willman is with the InterTribal Bison Cooperative in Rapid City, South Dakota. The Co-operative started in 1991, premised on the belief that by restoring healthy bison herds to their rightful range, the spirit of both the buffalo and Native Americans can be healed. To date, some 50 tribes have joined the cooperative and have started buffalo herds on reservation lands.
The Co-operative supports the re-emergence of the traditional relationship between buffalo and Native peoples. This means that some tribes are involved in commercial production.
"Some of our tribes are trying to utilize the buffalo for the sustenance of their tribe. Traditionally, the buffalo had what we would call today 'economic value' to some tribes. But it isn't what is meant by the term commercial these days, it is something much more in-depth than that, something beyond having the dollar as the bottom-line. It's a significant and spiritual relationship."
Willman points out that reservations are among the most poverty stricken communities in America. He says the re-emergence of the buffalo herds with their strong social and family structures, is an inspiration to the tribal communities. It is also a way back to self-reliance. Willman says some tribes are beginning to feed their own people on buffalo meat.
"You probably know, this modern diet of pizza hut fast-food is devastating to our people. So now we can have buffalo meat. We are trying to get it into the Federal food assistance programs. And if you're diabetic, in some places you can even get it for free. It's happening."
Buffalo meat is very lean, with less fat that turkey. It is a perfect tonic for the over-processed food most of us find, says Willman, at the 'wiggly piggity' grocery stores.
The expectations may seem high for the bison and its return to the Great Plains, but as Willman says, the bison is a powerful symbol.
"Lots of people, when they look the buffalo, they just see a big animal and think about the meat production. Me, I see respect and power. I see beauty. I see balance."
We could all use a little more balance. Maybe the bison is as good a bet as any.

This article may be downloaded but any reprints require prior permission.
Back