FACING THE STORM: STORY OF THE AMERICAN BISON 🌍 Full Exclusive Nature Documentary 🌍 English HD 2022

foreign [Music] year before we've ever been here and I have an idea they'll be here after work home [Music] the only animal that we don't allow to be wild in North America is the one that was symbolic of the wild sometimes they call this animal faces the storm because that's what it did when that storm comes through that wind starts to howl those snows start to whip turns right into it and starts walking towards that storm because if that storm is coming towards you you're going to be out of it quicker this is a very smart animal very very smart animal we believe that the Buffalo and Indian people were created almost to be as one and one without the other can't survive this grassland is calling out for the Buffalo is it too late is something I ponder about bison are difficult neighbors that's the reality it's just whose land is this who belongs here and who's the intruder which means we gotta eat buffalo at one time we had 50 million in the sons of [ __ ] here on this United States and they killed them all off [Music] this year we wanted to come down and do a hunt sabotage to get in the way of these hunters and frustrate them and and try to prevent them from killing bison and risk our lives and put ourselves between the hunters and the hunters [Music] foreign the work buff is a hard-working member of the English lexicon buff is the name of a color also a synonym for naked to buff up is to clean or polish and aboff is an Ardent fan or Enthusiast as in sports bar for camera buff though the word appears to glance off at schizophrenic angles all the senses of buff Force and that's the abbreviation of Buffalo the term used to refer to the water buffalo of Asia and Africa's cape buffalo this has also been the popular name of the North American Bison since at least the early 1600s [Music] I know that Buffalo come out of the same evolutionary strain that I do and that evolutionary sense there can [Music] to me there's sort of a window into a vanished world [Music] [Music] bison as much as any other icon in the west represents what the West is this animal that evolved on the Great Plains and whether it was a drought or it was Fire or the snow was deep they were able to survive in massive numbers foreign [Music] bison have been in North America somewhere between 200 000 and 800 000 years [Music] bison Evolution goes through a variety of different species some of which became extinct before humans ever arrived there was an animal called Bison priscus which appears in the cave art in Europe but it became extinct 70 000 years ago in North America another species that became extinct before humans got here was bison later fronds and that's the Bison that's got horns with a span of six feet between the tips the next animal in the length bison antiquisites called very definitely was hunted by humans but that animal did become extinct probably as a result of human hunting pressure over the course of three or four thousand years after the extinction of bystanding was this Survivor species becomes a dwarfed animal and that becomes our present species I had gone to Payton Valley on foot I sat down in the open dropped my day pack and was looking at vegetation and I heard this and I looked up and here came my bull and I thought you want to be where I am so I went off on hands and knees until I had enough distance that I thought I could stand up without his objecting to that he walked over and stood exactly where I'd been sitting just stood there present-day people very commonly consider present-day bison stupid they stand and they stare at you to me stupid is a human term I would call them stulled he was simply telling me whose land this was and if you were Silly enough not to read the message you might have a problem if you read that message no problem at all [Music] thank you [Laughter] [Music] I once met an old-time brancher who had to take over a bison herd and I asked him how he heard at the bison and he said well it's quite easy all you do is figure out which way the bison are going heard them in that direction and that's something we haven't quite learned to do not only with bison but all of nature figure out what way nature is going and go in that direction that's why I like the animals so much because they can teach us that fundamental lesson not just about bison but about living in this place Buffalo are not tame and do not make good pets the heavy massive head is backed by 2 000 pounds of power they cannot be trusted because you never know what they will do hold on get out I'm trying to get America's Funniest Home Videos it's important to remember that humans can be very rude and in terms of violating space shoving a camera up against practically an animal's face I call that rude [Music] if you're in the way you're in the way it's just how it is stay behind me behind me and fluctuate okay behind me there you go oh my God behind me right there that's it stay here don't run away [Music] get a Wrangler now I was born in the state of Montana and I've been pretty much all over the goddamn world so there's a hell of a lot that I know up here that I don't go around as splattering it all over the hell and a half acre but I'll try to answer guys questions truthfully the signs are all around here so if the Buffalo are free to walk all over this goddamn place some of the characters killed four right out here in the yard and after they left there were nine Buffalo came in here single filed they made a circle around that Bloody spot and they'd not real loud but they mumbled among themselves and after they spent about 30 minutes there one took off and all the rest of them followed him they never came back they're a wonderful animal and the thing of it is I like to see them around they were in here before the response human beings at least white ones the human relationship with bison is a really old one you'd probably say it's the oldest economic life way that you can find anywhere in North America [Music] bison became the primary big animal in the western part of North America that fueled Indian culture and economy that goes on for at least eight or nine thousand years [Music] we had shot a buffalo up here by East Glacier Park we blessed the guns we best Bless the people that were going to do the shooting we sang some songs and then we began to look at the animal that we were going to shoot immediately the other Buffalo surrounded him and they actually stood between us and him the bigger Buffalo pushed him with his head as to indicating come on get up get up you can you know each one of them take their own turn pushed him butted him and tried to get him out finally they had realized that he was dying and so they circled him once more than a ran to the north and he stopped and they all faced us in a single line looking at us then we approached the bull after it had died as if to say you go ahead and take him down that we've sent him on his way [Music] long ago we were like the buffalo they nourished us we nourished them and we always were equal with them we were no better than them they were no better than us and we got along very well [Music] the Buffalo were lodging our food and just about everything that we existed on it used to be a our main economy okay we're here at the head smashed in Buffalo Jump this Buffalo Jump predates Christ it's a continuum of a long existence that thrived Buffalo Jump is a site where the plains people would hunt Buffalo by luring or driving a herd of buffalo to the top and then stampeding it over the edge of the cliff so that they could get the meat and the hides they needed for survival out here on the plains we have a relationship with the Buffalo the Buffalo represents power represents freedom they represent life to me foreign s are used the bones are used and with that the meat takes us through the hard Winters into the springtime that takes us to the next year thousands of years this is what we did and it brought us to a point where another part in history begins Native Americans started acquiring horses through trade in the middle of the 18th century as they acquired horses which made hunting bison much easier they made themselves into full-time equestrian bison Hunters who would move from place to place follow the bison and inhabit the Great Plains year round in the early part of the 19th century the native groups began to hunt for commercial purposes and are spending a lot of their time trading the Bison robes to European fur Traders foreign if you need rifles if you need ammunition if you need metal for bridal bits or knives the best way to get those goods from the Industrial Revolution if you're a Plains Indian is to kill a bunch of Buffalo and have your women dress out the robes and then trade them to the traders of the global market [Music] by about 1830 the small numbers of bison in the mountain valleys of the Rockies and west of the Rockies are getting hunted out by Indians and by white fur Trappers bison are pretty much confined to their core range the Great Plains that was always the center of the Bison Range the great bison belt foreign about 1870 euro-americans move into the Great Plains and start hunting bison themselves and what you have in the 1870s is this spasm of industrial expansion into the Great Plains when the railroad opened up the Bison hide trade the Kansas Pacific Railroad had buffalo hunting excursions where they drove people out on the tracks sometimes they wouldn't even stop the train they would just go along at five or ten miles an hour and let people Blast Away foreign [Music] took the hides and left them laying rot [Music] history should teach us something does it what was the thinking behind destroying the buffalo why did they do it there was a Feeling that though he had to give way that they had to be erased in order to paint the canvas with something else federal government has no willingness to fight a long campaign against Indians in the Great Plains so we're putting up some pretty Fierce resistance to the United States Conquest so they send a Peace Commission out into the Great Plains and they make a number of treaties now these treaties reserved to the plains groups the right to hunt bison in very large areas so long as the Bison remained in numbers that were sufficient to justify the hunt [Music] commanders in the Great Plains knew that there were lots of private Hunters engaged in killing the Bison they knew native resistance would decline as the Bison numbers decline [Music] the reason that Native Americans ultimately succumbed to the reservation system was not because they were defeated in the field the reason that they succumbed to the reservation system was that there simply were no more bison left for them to subsist outside of the reservation system [Music] so from 30 million animals at the beginning of the 19th century by 1884 there are fewer than a thousand Buffalo left in North America foreign the traditional Indians believe that what had happened was that bison had returned to the ground because in traditional Indian belief bison emerged either from underground and Spilled Out onto the plains out of caves or from beneath a waterfall there's a woman among the kailas her name was old lady horse she was down at a creek one morning and looked up and saw the mountain open up in the last herd of buffalo in the Southern Plains and disappear inside the mountain which the Kaya was referred to still today as hiding Mountain [Music] Edward Sheriff Curtis said when he was on Pine Ridge about 1905 he asked some of those elderly Lakota men so what happened to the buffalo and they said it's walking it's a mystery we don't know what happened to them when Curtis said don't you think we killed them all Indians would still tell him by 1905. oh it's beyond humans couldn't have killed Buffalo it's beyond the ability of humans to have done that buffalo have been here forever they're like the stars it's like they said walking out and looking up at the night sky and suddenly having all the stars erased you think humans can do that [Music] by the early 1880s a lot of Americans and especially people in the conservation Community began to realize that bison were possibly going to go completely extinct and that this was an animal that was such a an iconic creature for North America that it symbolized America to the world this is the Hornady room in Fort Benton Montana and uh this is the last Buffalo from the great herds that were killed out in the 1880s these particular specimens were collected by a man named William Temple hornaday he was the first of the modern taxidermist he was an outstanding individual there are people like William T hornaday of the New York Zoological Park who decided that at the very least they should create a collection of stuffed Buffalo and so hornaday ended up making a hunt into the Badlands country of eastern Montana [Music] it took them two or three weeks to finally get the lead on a small herd of bison and they shot them fairly late in the afternoon and they decided to go back to that camp that night foreign this kill site was visited by some of the local Indians which they discovered when they returned the next morning because several parts of the Buffalo had been taken and the skull and the horns of the big bull were decorated with feathers and ribbons and all sorts of symbols laughs foreign there was evidence that Indians had danced around so there were a lot of mocks and prints all around the dead animals and so they had come tonight and done some kind of ceremony around those animals then had left when they made no attempt to cover their tracks it may have had something to do with their awareness that these were some of the last ones it's kind of interesting that that's the scientific reaction when you think there are only a handful of them left is that you go out and bag them and haul them off to a taxidermist to have them stuffed then you put them in a diorama hornaday built a framework out of wrought iron and wire and laugh and he quoted these things in burlap soaked everything in Arsenic so that there'd be no bugs or anything get into it and then sewed them all together on them the original skulls are inside these particular mounts and to show you how short the Buffalo Supply was the next year the American Museum of Natural History in 1887 sent out a group to collect some bison specimens and found none Tay Roosevelt did the same thing in the Dakotas you know at the point when Roosevelt realized about 1882 that the Buffalo were almost gone his reaction was to hop on a train and get out to North Dakota as fast as he could so he could go kill one the federal government has used this old bullet we have and they designed all the emblems and stationery and stamps for the park service and a lot of the federal organizations so you know this guy's had a lot of artwork done running [Music] the group that was instrumental in bringing Buffalo back from the brink of Extinction was the American Bison Society wemt Hornady assembled a group of people that consisted mostly of well-heeled elite easterners and these men decided that the animals should not be allowed to roam as a wild animal across the plains so it was a deliberate Act of policy bison were singled out a hundred years ago as literally the only one of the big megafauna animals in the west that didn't get to be wild animals in the 20th century we saved them we didn't save them as wild animals we wanted to save them as kind of a fenced in almost Zoo population of animals so tourists could go and see them and say aha that's what a buffalo looked like and if I use my imagination and extrapolate into the millions I can recreate it but we didn't want them to actually spread into the millions and cover the planes again [Music] the grasslands treeless Windswept continent of grass stretching from the broad Texas Panhandle up through the mountain reaches of Montana to the Canadian border country of high winds and sun it wins [Music] one of the very first explorers who was on the Southern Plains was a guy named Stephen long the first thing he says when he looks at these Short Grass prairies as far as the eye can see is this country would be fairly easy to plant in Kentucky bluegrass the first thought is how can I take this place and turn it into something else starting in the 1870s 1880s the home setting Frontier really came to the Great Plains this was the last part of the American West that anybody tried to Homestead the Assumption was with the Louisiana Purchase and everything following that that all open space would someday be diced up and given to Farmers in 40 acre parcels [Music] what you had for about a 50-year period was all of that wonderful Short Grass Buffalo habitat plowed up and turned over and planted in wheat foreign the country started out being de-buffaloed and then it got dewolfed the farmers made every effort they could to de-pray dog the country and finally they pretty much degrassed it and so they took a very old ecological setting and dismantle it [Music] the result of all those changes meant that humans had sort of tripwired the whole Great Planes to fall apart as soon as the weather changed and it got drier and so that's what we call the Dust Bowl a third of the population leaves the region and so all of that effort of dismantling that region and destroying the Ecology of it in a lot of ways came for nod ultimately we Define progress as people coming to live in a place the train comes in they build a white picket fence and the saloon in the church and now it's good well that's not necessarily progress progress is really coming to terms with conditions nature that lays out for us it's completely necessary to do so the land won't tolerate anything else [Music] foreign [Music] about 1902 the Bison population had been reduced to about 25 animals at that time the park managers felt that they'd probably go extinct and so they brought in 23 additional bison and Ranch them in the mammoth area as part of a herd to show the visitors by 1915 they had more bowls than they could deal with and eventually of course they reached a little over a thousand bison Horace Albright who is superintendent in the 20s staged show roundups complete with dressed up for the part Native Americans and TVs and finally there were people who said they didn't think it was particularly Humane to be forcing these big stampedes but the 1930s was much more period of beginning to try to think in range management terms and to maintain a more natural looking population foreign [Music] about the 1940s they began allowing the Bison to more naturally use the Yellowstone Park in the surrounding area and now Yellowstone has one of the largest wild free-ranging bison populations in the world back in the 1880s a lot of people that had bison herds were trying to and were successfully hybridizing them with cattle consequently a lot of the domestic and public herds in the U.S today have cattle genes in them the Yellowstone heard almost miraculously stayed free of the cattle genes the herd and Yellowstone it's some fantastic herd it's one of the most diverse genetics of any of the Bison populations we have today at this point our management plan is to maintain and preserve a wild free-ranging bison population in and around Yellowstone National Park with the objective of allowing some bison in selected areas on public lands outside Yellowstone outside the park though there's other management objectives that have to be addressed along with our neighbors for instance in the state of Montana this is high Cow Country this is summer grazing country some of the best in the west this is the country of big beef herds and vast ranches in many states in the United States and Montana is no exception a large percentage of the land is actually owned by the federal government and that land is available for people to log to mine and in particular to Grace cattle and the more Wildlife we have on the landscape the fewer Acres available for grazing cattle so the range war that continues to rage across the West is a competition between wildlife and Cattle the reason that Montana looks the way that it does today is because Ranchers have been stewards of this land for over 100 years we've been stewards of the water we've been stewards of the riparian areas we've been stewards of the range through managed grazing and I think there's been some conflict in terms of the effects of livestock grazing versus Wildlife grazing you look at the Montana 100 years ago when there were millions of of Buffalo roaming the state of Montana it didn't look like it did today a lot of the range was very overgrazed we didn't have a large healthy population of cottonwood trees on the Yellowstone River they weren't there because they were trampled by the the mismanagement of a free-ranging wildlife or free-ranging Buffalo if it's just kind of a reality that the managed approach that Ranchers have had on this landscape over the last hundred years is a large part of why it looks like it does today [Music] [Applause] [Music] livestock people have a terrific prejudice against Buffalo this Prejudice is rooted in their absolute wildness they suggest something that is very almost offensive to a livestock person they suggest a depth in animals that is unsettling to somebody who raises cattle um we're raising the fifth generation of Myers is on the ranch right now we summer cows here in the West Yellowstone area I've spent my life in and around Yellowstone my great Granddad was a buffalo herder in Yellowstone for the Army before it became Yellowstone Park and my granddad's main job was to sort the herd every fall and clean them up in any old Barren cows and the old bulls or cripples or defects went to a Slaughter plant and processed and given to whoever needed the food at the time now we just let nature take its course and they have to have room in the spring in the fall there's just no place to go in Yellowstone to support that many Buffalo I feel bad for the Buffalo it's not their fault I kind of like Buffalo in terms of how the livestock industry has interacted with the Bison situation we talk about a disease called brucellosis and it's something that the Yellowstone herd has a large infectivity raid in the history of America the livestock industry has played a major role in contributing to the strength of our economy maintaining the two great pillars of our food supply meat and milk means guarding our livestock against infectious disease the main route at transmission of the disease is the female bison that are infected would abort their calf and then the landscape will be contaminated and cattle can subsequently come and be exposed to the bacteria the disease Bruce lowson's itself is on the cdc's list as far as potential organisms that could be used by bioterrorists years of research at the animal disease station of the Bureau of animal industry finally in December 1940 strain 19 an effective vaccine when properly handled was ready for extensive distribution for cathode vaccination against brucellosis foreign Montana since 1934 has spent several million dollars to try to eliminate the brucellosis disease in its domestic cattle herd we don't take a cow home until we run them through this set of facilities here and made sure that they're they're not carrying brucellosis before I take them home we know that it was present in European cattle that were brought over here and most people believe that cattle transmitted brucellosis to bison originally despite the fact that we have yet to have the actual transmission of brucellosis from bison to cattle and in spite of the fact that the elk herd in the Yellowstone Teton area also carries brucellosis livestock interests have targeted the buffalo herd in Yellowstone as being the culprit that would cause the two states to lose their brucellosis-free designation in politics sometimes you have to listen to the rhetoric very closely and if you listen to the rhetoric closely enough you'll find out that they're saying one thing but what they actually meant was something else there are people who just don't want buffalo to compete with the cattle for grass [Music] you know the great wild west of the migrating bison herds I think is a thing of the past there's just no place for that to happen anymore foreign [Music] during the winter time when Yellowstone is hit pretty hard with some snowpack the Bison began to migrate North out of Yellowstone Park and into the state of Montana the Montana Department of livestock is tasked with trying to keep those bison any position where they don't get too far into Montana and pose a risk of exposure that could jeopardize our brucellos's free status it's unfortunate people that enjoy Yellowstone in the summer aren't exposed to what happens to bison in the wintertime because if more people were exposed to what happened in the winter time bison management as is currently practiced would not continue because it would just be this absolute outrage when bison wander out of the Yellowstone those bison are then somewhat hazed back into Yellowstone but any Buffalo that takes a step outside of Yellowstone National Park has no rights and is not even treated as wildlife they're put into the custody of the Montana Department of livestock who have absolutely no background of wildlife management Department of livestock [ __ ] they keep trying to drive them back into the park [Music] those poor simple-minded sons of [ __ ] they go all the way out then we bring them all the way back and they go all the way out we bring them all the way back I'm an agricultural scientist I understand the livestock business this is not going to eradicate brucellosis this is a tool for chasing Buffalo around and slaughtering them if it gets to be too many of them [Music] go brother go brother he is now inside Yellowstone National Park less than 20 feet off the ground it's in a buffalo until they get those same rights as all other Wildlife we will have people coming here from all over the world to stand up and protect these animals [Music] slow down oh [ __ ] he just hit a bison [Music] the majority of bison are managed through removals and what they do is they've got traps that they use to capture bison they put them into trucks they drive them to slaughterhouses in Montana and Idaho and they kill them [Music] I graduated from Montana State University in 1996 with a master's degree in biology after I graduated a job came up working as a biological technician in the slaughterhouses [Music] no woman's ever worked in that slaughterhouse but as a biologist you do need to work and it's not easy finding work my job was to collect tissues from the Bison I wanted to know if these animals were infected with brucellosis and they were all different ages they just took them all [Music] they were frightened I mean that that's not putting human feelings onto an animal they were [Applause] I remember going out into the back of the slaughterhouse and just looking out the mountains and going forgive me and we slaughtered I don't know how many hundreds and hundreds as long as there was enough snow to drive the animals out of the park they were kept slaughtering them I'm kind of embarrassed because it has a biologist one shouldn't kind of lose it and moments like this but um it was really hard at the end of the work day I would take all the tissues that I had to a lab in Bozeman I've always wanted to know why I never got an escort because I had the tissues involved with reproduction they are really that concerned about brucellosis why they didn't care about what I had [Music] [Music] this seemed to be so inappropriate that the park service and the state of Montana would be orchestrating this destruction of This Magnificent animal and I was asked to organize an effort to try to stop the hunters from killing bison we were aware that fun for Animals was involved in West Yellowstone tracking when the next hunt was going to be the movement of the animals there's two good places to shoot one of these if you can imagine being accompanied from your hotel room out into the fields by Fish Wildlife and Parks employees we can lose the Buffalo it'd be hard to tell even which one would hit so it was basically a canned hunt it's kind of like going out and shooting a couch with lots of people to help you find that couch they're hunting for a piece of hunting Lobby that's what this is they want to hunt bison Hunters want to be able to stick a stick a different kind of head on the wall and that's what that's what all this is about on that particular morning a group of us went out some on snowmobiles some on skis there's about 10 or 11 people that are working the Buffalo back up along the bay I don't think they're gonna be out very far but they're trying to work them up we'll be out here as long as it takes we're hoping that they uh based on our presence here they will decide to call off the hunt for a day perhaps call it off for several days you have a perfect legal right to go down there and take your Buffalo if you'd like to do that the three Hunters each started to pursue different bison [Music] and we surrounded the animals we started making noise we started trying to be disruptive [Music] what happened oh we got a whole bunch of people on skis down there this wasn't safe shooting I didn't want to hurt anybody they got in the way me and they'll get tired sooner or later we get snowmobiles we got skis foreign [Music] position himself directly in front of a hunter whose gun was drawn and he prevented that bison from being shot at that point in time that's what resulted in me getting charged with Hunter harassment [Music] Montana's Hunter harassment law prohibits anyone from disturbing a hunter with the intent to discourage or dissuade him from shooting his prey Iris the filler time before the OJ trial when it was aired so while the people were waiting for OJ trial to happen they could they could watch Montana versus Lilburn lilburn's attorney says the statute infringes upon her client's constitutional rights in plain words we cannot limit free speech in a way to say that only dissuading is what's not allowed I believe this whole case is about Mr schlemmer's Right not to be disturbed while he's engaging in a lawful hunt Mr Slimmer after you shot the Bison did you make any statements I did we the jury make the following verdict to the charge of harassment guilty and eventually I was sentenced to 40 hours of community service plus a 15 Court fee and that took about five years I'm not so naive as to think that no bison are going to be killed but that hunt and the way that bison are treated is just extremely disrespectful and it has no real validity in a political ecological spiritual way and that's why that bison was important that is a snack there baby yeah it is if we allow bison to be somewhat free and part of that equation is some sort of hunt that would be something I wouldn't really like but it's something I could live with but the basis for that Common Ground would be respect brought to you by the snack master also known as the whack master whack what a bull this situation is bizarre and there's no reason that these animals should be confined to the park and then cold like livestock [Music] and I for one would love to hunt one but not under the circumstances we have now one wants to think about Yellowstone being an outdoor Zoo but that's what's happening [Music] everybody has spent this enormous amount of energy talking about brucellosis which isn't even the issue the issue is whether we are going to allow Wildlife to Be Wild [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] exist in privately owned commercial propagation herds something in the order of four hundred thousand animals so we've numerically have achieved recovery well the rub is that the Bison isn't necessarily a bison unless you strive to maintain it maintain the wild type it will inevitably become another cow let's go come on [Music] she's bred good the two sorry red good and dry foreign the population of American Bison is bifurcated essentially we have what amounts to a domestic animal which achieved many of those domestic characteristics by hybridization with cattle and then we have a much smaller percentage of Bison which we call the conservation herds which not only do they have a low percentage of cattle genes but those genes in the Bison genome are subjected to a large component of natural selection they are allowed to die they're allowed to be attacked by both diseases and now much more recently by Predators so in order to maintain wild bison you first of all have to have the raw material which is to capture as much as possible of the Bison genome but then you also have to subject those herds to the selection processes which are constantly testing those individuals for fitness foreign [Music] [Music] in general what happens with the domestication of wildlife is a direct selection for traits to make them easier to manage so for example in bison you might select against animals that like to jump fences [Music] crates like that might be selected for in the wild so the ability to jump over obstacles might allow them an edge to escape a predator [Music] the last or rocks are primitive cow died in 1627 in a zoo in Germany [Music] do we want to arrive at that situation where yes we've got lots of bison but the Primitive bison the original wild type bison the last one has died out because we haven't emphasized its conservation what the private commercial breeders do with their herds is ultimately going to be up to them and there will be some individuals who wish to engage in conservation of bison Pam go up on the right here now [Music] I got started on bison in 1993. we have a bison herd that is approximately 50. one thing I've learned is that you can do anything you really want with bison in terms of management if you want to treat them like domestic cattle and pin them into a small area and feed them grain and raise them in feedlot situations that can be done or if you want to turn them loose on large acreages manage them as a semi-wild animal you can do that too bison are just a small segment of the meat industry in the United States what slaughtered in a year in terms of Bison doesn't even make up what slaughtered in one day in terms of cattle oh 10 10 you're nice [Music] got my 13 here I need 14 from you sir knows the bill and 15. half what do you say a 16 and a half where it's all even sixteen hundred dollars there from a number 97's our buyer 96 going to Triple Seven Ranch you guys just buy all five of you 'll get the Buffalo world right now what you need to do is you need to sell them the story of that Buffalo you're not selling with the meat you're selling them that story that you know what this Buffalo raised free range it was born on the Prairie and they know exactly where it's coming from that's the easiest way to push the meat when it all boils down to us the Buffalo are still wild animals [Music] we're running about 1500 head total right now and that includes our Bulls the calves and the cows and everything we don't pick for a single trade if you start picking for traits you take all that good stuff that's been bred into them for the last hundred thousand years out of them now we're starting to meddle with something that's already obviously perfect [Music] you know the Cockroaches of the mammal World they made it to the Ice Age and they're not a cockroach prairie dog to the Cockroaches foreign there's a reason that they've been around for as long as they have they're perfectly suited to their environment [Music] we run buffalo on 20 000 Acres of public ground Buffalo Gap National grasslands 22 000 acres is still a tiny postage stamp experiment in Buffalo restoration but it's an incremental step we Harvest our buffalo in the field which adds to the price it's a lot more difficult it's a lot easier just to put them in trucks and haul them to a Slaughter plant put them in a long Chute where they hit them over the head going through sure that's easier that's what the beef guys do yeah almost suggesting a ghostly symbol of the herds of the old Chisholm Trail an ever-growing stream of cattle are headed in a single direction to Market I don't have anything against cattle but eventually people are going to say let's find a better use for this ground there's going to be a come to Jesus on the Great Plains and what's the big ticket item on the Great Plains takes you about five seconds to figure out it's Buffalo I believe the key to Restoration of buffalo on any kind of a meaningful scale is that somehow or another people are going to have to start eating buffalo foreign we have about 2 000 steady customers and those people who are conscious of what they're eating are looking for grass-fed wild raised if you will Buffalo and I think that it began as a tourist deal on the Great Plains you know eat a buffalo burger see if you can stand it that kind of thing you know but turns out that not only is it great tasting it tastes better than beef but it's really good for you so we really have something you know that we can plug into the old capitalistic model finally you know we've got something on our side here you know there's a Consciousness in food there's a backlash against Brain and corn farming that sort of thing if Buffalo are ever to make it now is the time [Music] you know a lot of the social problems that we have on on reservations the unemployment the alcoholism rate the poor health conditions It's associated with the reservation system Indian people have got the highest rated diabetes of any ethnic racial group in the country we moved from a nomadic way of life going out and Gathering our own food eating buffalo and other wild games to becoming pretty much dormant in one spot and the government providing food for us that's had pretty much dramatic effects on our health over the past 150 years now while the federal government's policy has worked out through contact with the Indians for more than 200 years is stated as helping the red man to live his own life and manage his own Affairs it is obvious there always must be influenced by the majority of inhabitants in the United States to change the habits and customs of the minority such influences intended to be nothing other than helpful to raise the Indian standard of living to make him happier and more comfortable the transformation of thought is underway a lot of changes were put Upon Us Indian people language religion and what's good for us and what's not good for us and I always felt that their thought was to get rid of the Buffalo and consequently you'll get rid of the Indians but uh we're both still here theater tribal bison Cooperative started in 1990 we started out with 19 tribes whose mission was to restore Buffalo to tribal lands and returning healthy meat to the tribes so Mike do we have any idea of who's got Buffalo available now uh right now today we've got 57 tribes in 19 States we've got about 15 000 Buffalo amongst the tribes we want to reintroduce buffalo meat back into the diet of Indian people on a daily basis [Music] we want to replace everything they use on beef with Buffalo eventually some of our tribal people it's hard to convince them to eat buffalo that on that respect that they had for the animal that I've heard it a number of times that this is my brother I can't eat him when I first seen an actual Buffalo I just couldn't stop staring I mean you know this is the real thing to grow up as part of a race that respected a single animal so much than to finally be able to get to work with them it's something that is very hard to describe but it's it's very powerful foreign [Music] took us 150 years to get in the shape we are in now it's not gonna you know be a miracle cure but it's a start gotta start somewhere [Music] it's kind of a big goal of itbc and myself to bring the Buffalo back to Indian country and to one one day I know it's a big dream but the one day seemed like they were that they would be able to roam anywhere that they wanted just the way they did before [Music] foreign [Music] Frank and Deborah popper Our Guest today on the talk of Emporia talking about the history the future of the plane States today our sense is that at some level there's a new frontier struggling to be born that will be very different from the 19th century Frontier which was largely a place for whites to conquer live online the Buffalo Commons is it for real meet Frank and Deborah popper and find out why they think Buffalo might save our economy and our state you both authored an article in planning magazine which outlined a plan for bringing back large herds of free roaming Buffalo to vast areas of what you termed the Deep Plains we have looked at what we see to be the trans and suggested a way of re-envisioning the future in the late 1980s when I was in the governor's offices when the poppers published what now is fairly famous work and that's when they begin to speculate will it go back to some of its former forms including the reintroduction of the Great Plains by significant numbers of American Bison by that time we've made a kind of historical argument about how the 19th century and most of the 20th century expectations that the frontier would be settled never came true never materialized yes people are still out there but fewer and fewer every year and in general there has been a long-term depopulation of the Rural Plains that now goes back more than a century Buffalo Commons was an idea for the ecological and environmental restoration of a lot of the Great Plains that Buffalo and other native animals would in some places replace cattle and we could imagine a buffalo Commons I don't think at the time of course we had the slightest idea that this would be a long-term involvement it was the response that got us hooked I think now we have people such as these two who are saying you know let's give it back to the Buffalo Well ma'am I don't think we said let's give it all back to the Buffalo what we said we can't afford to give any of our Farmland back to you and your Buffalo we expect over time a continued decrease in agricultural acreage and employment the message that you send to other parts of the country is a message we don't like large parts of the Plains will return something like their pre-white condition good gracious alignment a whole bunch of folks lived up through here and makes a heck of a good living to feed his world and I'm the next one to move everybody off just like it no big deal there have been several other theorists who have publicized their views on what's best for society one that comes to mind is Karl Marx their Eastern professors telling people that your grandparents and your great-grandparents were duped people are leaving people are not able to make it here yeah I suppose there aren't many of us in America who like being told that what they did was a mistake on the other hand this century-long experiment with farming the Great Plains in the same fashion say that Indiana and Ohio get farmed is probably without government subsidy not something that was ever going to work to start with you know as a governor you're always optimistic about the future and coming from a very small town from a farm family you never really want to admit that your Town's getting smaller in my lifetime I've seen a very dramatic change of the land of the people it was brought home more than any other time in 1987 when Frank Endeavor published their paper and of course I was as governor of our state kind of you know the Matt Dillon Gunslinger come out and blazing what could a couple Interlopers from Rutgers possibly know about it's not very pleasant to admit that you were wrong you know but the truth is I was not only did what Frank and Deborah predict come true the out migration of the Great Plains has even been stronger in many quarters than they predicted [Music] when they gave their first talk they had to have armed guards well you don't have to have that anymore because a number of us have come to the realization that a lot of things they said have come true and I think it I don't think any of us know for sure what the future of the Great Plains is our logo the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks we have the head of a bison and it's half dark and half light and that's for a reason we have a pretty dark past we have a much better a brighter future the Bison once were here will they flourish here again that's the question and the debate when we first started on this there was standard American rhetoric about bison which was that they'd had a terrible 19th century and a terrible 20th century things may be looking up in the 21st century it may be a good Century for them if you spend enough time say in South Phillips County it is so silent and I don't think it's supposed to be that silent and it's not because it's not enough people or whatever it's because I think that that those Buffalo swept through there every year and it's no longer happening foreign I'm looking forward to the day when at some point in the 21st century we're going to have the kind of vision that we had say with the Wilderness act in the 20th century where we think of a restoration project with the kind of scale and the grandiosity that would actually return Buffalo to a wild State somewhere on the Great Plains and we have wolves and Grizzlies and mountain lions and sort of that true primeval America with big herds of Buffalo everything getting to interact in a natural way this land still has the memory of what the Buffalo means to it our songs our ceremonies is calling out for the Buffalo to return bring them back bring them back here let's take these fences now bring them back [Music] we need them probably we need them more than they need us [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] what have I said that don't have fruit in it [Music]

Channel: WATCHDOCU - THE DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL

Views: 102,025

Keywords: Nature, Documentary, HD, Animals, People, Places, Adventures, Countries, Wildlife, Travel, Portraits, Biography, Science, animals, runner, run, safari, wilderness, plains, lions, chettahs, crocodiles, 2020, full documentaries, full documentary, explore, documentaries, journey, full length documentaries, documentary full, documentary channel, English, wild animals, nature documentary, FACING THE STORM: STORY OF THE AMERICAN BISON, FACING THE STORM, STORY OF THE AMERICAN BISON, American Buffalo, Buffalo, BISON

Id: DakvGo95v9o

Length: 75min 38sec (4538 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 19 2022