How Hunters Wiped out the American Buffalo - and Brought Them Back (with Steven Rinella)

one of the best ways to understand the impact hunting made on our country both to the habitat and the animals is to look at the story of the American Buffalo it's a complicated one full of tremendous losses but it also shows what can happen when mankind takes responsibility for protecting the world around him here at the National Bison Range in Montana Steven Rinella from the Netflix series meat-eater reveals the history between hunters and these iconic animals like just watching this right you can imagine people observing groups you couldn't understand the width so instead of a band you couldn't see the other end of it but then it took two days to pass I mean I don't think it didn't happen all the time but like there were times when people would describe that and they would only understand how many there were when they later talk to someone who happened to be over there and was like oh I saw that too Wow and then you'd be like oh and you were 20 miles that way how many Buffalo about two days worth two days worth but when you look in old history books and when I was a kid you'd always see 60 million that was the number I go there once upon a time there was 60 million and that came from observations like that we're like well I saw him and Bob saw the same group and he was 10 miles away and it took two days to pass so therefore there's that many here and there must be like that many there and that many there and so we had 60 million now the fashionable number that gets thrown around is somewhere in the vicinity of 30 to 40 million but it has helpful for people to hear about the tens of millions yeah because you can't understand it it gets beyond human comprehension tell us about that part of the history like going like what did that look like going from tens of millions of Buffalo to hundreds you might understand it if you look at it in phases if you go back to the time of European colonization when you had pioneers and settlers like gradually moving in ok so there were accounts of them as far east as Washington DC Nashville there are accounts of people seeing thousands around Nashville okay those scattered smaller populations were largely wiped out by by what we would now call like pot hunters like people just you established a settlement and everyone's living off wild meat and there's a finite resource and they're good at killing and they kill it Daniel Boone who we know was he was among other things he was a Buffalo hunter George Washington killed them and his travels in the east okay so people shoot him and eat him Yeah right shoot him in used the hides for stuff and then later we there became a industrial-grade slaughter where it took maybe a hundred years right to eliminate certain longitudinal bands of habitat but then the industrial slaughter that came in in the 1860s and 1870s was like nothing we've ever seen the railroads had reached the Great Plains so you had a way to move mass quantities of things you had well-developed Eastern markets with urban people who needed resources and had money to buy it and he wanted meat they wanted hides and other things particularly hides and there was applications for all manner of things from blankets and coach robes to industrial belting and you had a means to move it all because the railroads hit Dodge City the minute railroads hit Dodge City we emptied the southern plains the minute the Northern Pacific moved across and like hit mile city we emptied the northern plains and it just took on an industrial scale that's really the only word to describe it was a systematic industrialized slaughter of the animals because no one could understand the finiteness of the resource by around 1882 east of here in Miles City Montana was the last big kill and it took about that long to remove 15 million from the landscape and by the end of the 1800s when people were trying to gather up how many were left they were literally trading letters people were writing letters around the country I've got three he has two I hear that this where we're standing now there's some number here and you could count them up you could count them up people knew and there were whistleblowers right there were whistleblowers and people knew but generally like people couldn't comprehend it they couldn't see what they were doing they would commented on how wasteful it was and people commented how destructive it was but the overall grand picture was no one really understood what they had done until it's too late and then people in a popular sense knew that like wow we really blew this and there were a handful of individuals who had some proximity to that process right famous buffalo hunters who killed thousands of the animals develop some strange love for them in some way because in the end they grabbed a couple and kept them it's hard it's hard to understand so the same people that are going out and hunting them are also the ones that say like I've grown to have an appreciation for this we can't just a handful of key there were a handful of key individuals that did that and there were a handful of key individuals who had been crying out for decades to stop so if you were in that time and I era what do you mean what would you have been do I have little doubt that I would have probably have engaged in the hunt in the slaughter I'd like to be outside I like to hunt I was too young to comprehend finiteness of resources I wasn't raised with a conservation ethic we behaved as though Wildlife Resources fell from the sky yeah and they were just here god-given right right take all you want it´ll there always be more and I imagine if someone had told me that we could go out and make a bunch of money shooting Buffalo out of Miles City Montana I would have been like that sounds like a great idea yeah I just have a feeling I have a feeling that I'd been drawn to that with the same lack of lack of context probably that a lot of the people that participated in it it's helpful to look and find evil but when you get down to the details of people's lives who are involved in it it's not as comforting right it's oftentimes it's like people who they came out and they made a living doing one that dried up and they made a living doing the next thing and the Civil War ended and you had all of these people who were yet the defeated Confederates you had Union soldiers you'd come into the military you fought this war you've been roving around you were a great shooter you were great at camping and all sudden like wars over and a lot of these guys just naturally drifted toward opportunity in the West they didn't have anything you're like poor kids illiterate people that would like I don't know I heard you can make money doing this so you want to find that like those least evil people doing evil thing and there was evil there were evil players but on whole it was just people making mistakes we're making them right now right we're making right now and in a hundred years they'll look at us you and me and they'll laugh about how stupid we were about something right and we'll be like yeah kind of new single-use plastics like I kind of was aware there was a problem and 100 years of like what were those evil people doing it you think I was thirsty I needed a drink I didn't know try to do but then these these same hunters or at least a few of them became part of the solution no like what did that look like how do we regain the amount that we have today I think let's say we take a key figure like Theodore Roosevelt it was like a very key figure in preservation of the animal okay here's a person who he's a city slicker this like asthmatic sickly city slicker child who is always very serve embarrassed about his his frailty and where he was from and he wanted to have this the swashbuckling western lifestyle he discovered big-game hunting and his discovery of big-game hunting fostered an end this like deep concern for wildlife that then he preserved about 50,000 acres for every day he was an office when he's a president so it created in him an understanding an admiration and love for wildlife and he played a part in the restoration and preservation of this animal and he also killed a couple of them but something about the activity inspired in him a desire to keep it going people will often ask like like when I wrote my book American Buffalo you love Buffalo like but you killed one I'm eject the premise of your question I reject the wording of your question I wouldn't say but I would say and yeah it's not you loved it bought you love too and you did because my view on it is like there's a writer I admire a lot of his work Jim Harris and he's like he said about the predator husbands is prey right so if you grow up around animals and you eat animals and you live around animals and they become like your lifeblood you develop a spiritual connection to wine them to be around you could just put it a purely pragmatic terms if they're not there we can't hunt yeah and I'm like a hunter through and through so in my view is I want something that strikes people as being complicated but it's not complicated I want tons of animals everywhere and I want regulated access to them yeah maybe the same thing as someone saying like um I want there to be beautiful beaches and I want to go to him right okay it's like it's it strikes me as very simple but that's what I'm after that's the end goal and we want to have access as a regulated resource because I think like that level of public buy-in and that level of advocate advocacy I'll tell you wild turkeys that's a very popular thing to hunt okay three million people hunt wild turkeys yeah you don't mess wild turkeys you don't mess them you don't mess with deer you don't mess with elk right you don't hell we'll come on you for messing with those things because there is enormous public support and they have cultural and economic value yeah and the things that don't have cultural and economic value you can get away with messing with them so you mentioned like regulation regulated honing I assume that cost dollars like how does that who's providing these funds to make these regulations possible if you were to look historically no user group nor user group has even approached the hunting and angling community in terms of conservation dollars spent on creating habitat and fueling our refuge system and feeling wildlife restoration so in a way we in a way it was our responsibility to do it because like the legacy I'm not talking like individuals like you know my most I had relatives they're still over in Italy when all this was going on but culturally right like as a culture hunters we decimated American wildlife you know everybody now is always celebrating deregulation operating in a deregulated atmosphere when you could market stuff and sell it we destroyed American wildlife everything K we went from having turkeys and perhaps 39 states at the time of European contact to turkeys in nineteen states now we harvest like hunters kill more turkeys in Wisconsin every year then you probably had in the entire Midwest by the early 1900's it was rebuilt by hunters and I'm not saying like you you know hooray for us were so great we caused the problem we caused the problem and then as a group created mechanisms to rectify the situation and we built funding structures around it so when you buy guns ammunition and boat gas fishing equipment archery equipment there's a built-in tax on that stuff thirteen to fourteen percent excise tax which goes to the wildlife Restoration Act okay that money specifically goes when you want to hunt ducks you buy a federal license and a state license the federal license is now twenty five bucks that money is earmarked every year you buy it for twenty five bucks everyone that hunts ducks and geese all of that money goes to wetlands habitat restoration and purchasing and preservation of wetlands habitat so we hunters caused enormous destruction and then we hunters said if we want to keep doing this and wanna be hunters and remain hunters we have a lot of work to do and we basically put hunting on hold for decades and rebuilt the things to the point where we in some cases over rebuilt okay we now have turkey hunting seasons remember I said earlier at the time of European contact we had turkeys in 39 states there's turkey hunting seasons in 49 states we went overboard yeah and put them where they had never even been we were so committed to rebuilding turkeys was procured by Tom all this animal is this animal has a different history because this animal stopped existing his wild life and so we stopped perceiving as wildlife it's not perceiving it as like a resource to individuals had access to and I want to oversimplify it but I just went on its own history American wildlife has this path say and this animal this particular animal has this weird little isolated journey as quasi lives quasi wild life sort of livestock II sort of wildlife here and but it's as good as we can do so hundreds were a part of the problem and a part of the solution um people largely men walk around with guns killed a lot of wildlife a lot of it a lot of it and then put motion some pretty extraordinary things to turn it around it's III I really try to not view it in terms of villains and heroes I think those largely people kind of doing what they needed to do or had the luxury to do you know this video is inspired by our PBS series reconnecting roots visit reconnect new roots calm to watch the full episodes or to check out our music and podcast give us a thumbs up and subscribe so we can keep making more thanks for watching

Channel: Reconnecting Roots

Views: 121,861

Keywords: Reconnecting Roots, Americana, America, PBS, tv, television, tv show, series, tv series, show, history, culture, historical, historia, historic, heritage, MeatEater, Steve Rinella, Hunting, Buffalo, Hunters, lunch, meateaters hunts, hunting videos 2020, meateater podcast, public televison, traditions, endangered species, public land hunting, netflix, food source, eating buffalo delicious, bison, bison hunting, back 40, steven rinella, wild game, wild foods

Id: n2tSK0pBAfA

Length: 14min 15sec (855 seconds)

Published: Fri May 15 2020