That matriarchal system is why the Native Americans were able to capture—and, later, the white hunters were able to decimate—the buffalo so handily. First, they'd scout out and kill the lead cows, after which the others would mill around aimlessly, with no idea how to escape the coming slaughter—which was on a formidable scale. In 1871, before the great kill-off, a U.S. Army colonel came across a herd along the Arkansas River in Kansas that covered a swath of ground 25 miles wide and 50 miles long. Twelve years later, it was estimated that only 600 buffalo were left in the entire country.
Today, due largely to ranching activity, the buffalo are back, numbering about 300,000, a figure that, before the onset of the severe drought currently affecting many of the ranching states, was expected to reach more than a million by 2010. About 90 percent are in private hands—30,000 of them grazing on 13 ranches owned by the financier Ted Turner. The balance live mostly in federal and state parks, with some 10,000 owned by various Native American tribes.
Even if it weren't for the drought, this is an unsettling time in the industry. The Shape Ranch, for instance, apart from its owner's penchant for anthropomorphism, represents one side of a bitter argument between ranchers who raise their animals strictly on grass and those—the large majority—who put their bison into feedlots for the last four to six months of their lives and plump them up on grain, like beef cattle.
One part of the debate concerns how healthy the animals are to eat. Cut for cut, any piece of bison, whether raised on grain or grass, is much leaner than beef, which contains four times as much fat and about 30 percent more calories. But, as several studies have shown, grass-fed animals have it over the grain-fed variety in several important respects. Not only do they contain 30 to 40 percent still less fat and a higher content of the cholesterol-reducing agents beta-carotene and omega-3 fatty acids, they also have, respectively, four and five times as much selenium and conjugated linoleic acid, both thought to be big heart-attack and cancer fighters. Grain-feeding ranchers don't dispute the statistics, but they do argue that these distinctions don't matter much unless your whole diet consists of buffalo meat. What's more, according to a study done by North Dakota State University at Fargo, subjects in a blind taste test who said they preferred eating grass-fed buffalo as a matter of ideology ended up going for the meat that came from animals fed on grain—for its juiciness, tenderness, and overall flavor. "In my mind, the consuming public are the biggest liars in the world," says Dennis Sexhus, who tends 1,600 head of buffalo on his ranch outside of Leeds, in north-central North Dakota. "People say they want something that's low-fat and healthy, but they won't trade taste for nutrition."
Taste aside—and in this regard the grass ranchers aren't about to accept a study favorable to grain done by the ag school in a grain state like North Dakota—the purists also criticize grain ranchers for going a precarious distance down the road toward changing the genetic nature of the beast. The situation arises because ranchers also engage in selective breeding to increase the animal's size, particularly its back end, which furnishes the strip and tenderloin—the cuts that command the highest prices. Such a practice, warns Vern Anderson, director of the university's bison research station, could lead to "genetic drifting" in the species, by which he means that if bison become too dependent on grain, they could lose their ability to survive in the wild. The worst-case scenario, says Anderson, would involve a bison rancher who puts his bull calves into a feedlot, finds one that grows especially big, and, instead of sending him off to market, puts him out to the breeding pasture, where he mixes his grain genes with the grass genes of a cow. "People who are raising bison that are true to their heritage," he says, "don't want to see grain-fed animals influence the genetic pool of what is surviving by itself quite nicely on the range right now."
While buffalo are independent and hardy, they're also wild animals by nature and don't acquiesce readily in the business of animal husbandry. A grain diet, for instance, will fatten them a lot faster than one limited to grass—but they don't happen to like it very much. Researchers at North Dakota State have found that a feed mixture "hotter" than 65 percent grain-to-grass would give them acid stomach, upsetting their whole digestive system, whereas beef cattle can tolerate it (with an antacid supplement) at 90 percent grain.
And when it comes to procreating, buffalo bulls don't copulate quite as obsessively as their beef counterparts, who will cruise down a line of a dozen cows servicing one after the other in jig time and with increasing ardor. A buffalo, on the other hand, can take several days to warm to the task. "He's more a lover than a breeder," Sexhus says. "He'll spend days with one cow, just hanging around, licking her and loving her. They're really more into the romance thing."
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