2000s Archive

The Nature of the Beast

Originally Published November 2002
Hardier and more self-sufficient than cattle, buffalo are good for the earth and good for us. Or at least that was the case before big business got involved.

Ted Herrera stood out among the ranch hands for his dressy black Stetson and billowy white shirt, not to mention the American bald eagle feather tied into his hair and dangling down the left side of his face. At the time, he was taking instruction in how to cock an old .30-06 Springfield from the foreman, Alvin Jones, who let it be known that he had personally bore-sighted the weapon just yesterday—meaning that if Herrera missed with this gun, he'd have no one to blame but himself.

It was "harvest" day on the 13,000-acre Shape Ranch, outside of Carrizo Springs, in southwest Texas, about 10 miles from the Rio Grande. Along with doing some of the harvesting, Herrera was on hand to provide a spiritual dimension to the proceedings. A Coahuiltecan Indian with broad features and a graying ponytail, he'd begun the praying five days earlier, entreating the Great Spirit to assure the five animals slated to make an exit that day of "a graceful crossing" to the next life. He'd also sent up some words to his father, a migrant worker gone three years now to cancer. "My dad was a hunter, and I wanted to let him know these animals were coming. So I spoke to him and brought his spirit into me and he helped me tell the buffalo that we were sending them off in a respectful way."

The two dozen buffalo inside the corral seemed pretty riled nonetheless, racing round and round in a tight circle, aware that something was up, probably nothing good. Herrera aimed the rifle into the middle of the bunch and ... BLAAM!

While Herrera sprinkled the dying animal with purifying water from a gourd, Jones chugged the John Deere into the corral and got the cow hoisted up with a chain onto the hay spike, whereupon one of the men slit into her jugular and about a gallon of blood gushed onto the sandy soil. Once the killing begins, the USDA allows two hours before the animals have to arrive at the slaughterhouse in Uvalde, 90 miles away. There, the carcasses are cut up and packaged for distribution to a Texas chain market that contracts with the ranch for some 900 pounds of buffalo steaks and hamburger a week. "Normally," says Herrera, "I'd have done some special things to purify the area before sending off the spirit. But I had to kind of adjust that because we were working against a tight timeline here."

When it comes to dispatching animals in the buffalo business, the praying and shooting at the Shape Ranch in no way reflect the norm. As with beef cattle, the killing usually takes place in a slaughtering plant, where the initial procedure entails driving a three-inch spike into the base of the animal's skull. Indeed, a lot goes on at the Shape that the 1,800 or so ranchers in the National Bison Association, the trade group for the industry, would regard as a little out of the ordinary.

In the deferential way they're treated, the Shape's 600 head of buffalo seem more like guests than the principal assets of a meat business. Unless it's harvest time, the animals are never penned up in feedlots, as they are on most ranches; instead, they're free to roam over the whole 20 square miles, which means it can take a week to round them up. "The way I live my life and run the ranch," says the 48-year-old owner, Hugh Fitzsimons, "I think of myself more as a hunter-gatherer than as someone in agriculture."

A look-alike for the actor Tim Robbins, Fitzsimons inherited the ranch from his grandfather and father. When he took over, in 1994, he felt loath to continue in the family cattle business, largely because of a sense he got that the animals didn't enjoy it. "Cows always seemed detached and unhappy to me, like they didn't really want to be there," says Fitzsimons, who was raised in San Antonio and spent weekends on the ranch before being sent off to prep school in Connecticut. "The reason I brought the bison in was to try to take the ranch back to the way it was two hundred years ago."

At the Shape—its name is an acronym encompassing the initials of Fitzsimons and his wife and three children-the policy is to support the buffalo's predisposition to organize into family groups of 20 to 40 animals, with the younger bulls doing the breeding and the older ones taking charge of security and fighting off predators. The herd as a whole is run by the females, with the lead cow selecting the grazing area. While the calves on many buffalo ranches are taken away at six to eight months to be fattened for slaughter, on the Shape they stay with their mothers for two years and more. Again, says Fitzsimons, it's that look in their eye. "The effect that losing her calf has on a cow, it's like a prisoner when he's incarcerated—somehow the light goes out, and she loses her will to really live."

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