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."
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."
Neither do they take well to being pushed around like cattle. "In moving them, we try to give them a choice and make the choice they want to take the one we want, too," says Sexhus, who is also chief executive officer of the North American Bison Cooperative, a slaughtering plant in nearby New Rockford that processes some 12,000 buffalo a year, half the output of the U.S. industry. They're much quicker on their feet than cattle, and tremendously strong. Sexhus says he's seen a buffalo bull hook into a 1,500-pound hay bale with his horns and toss it up as if it were filled with air. And any rancher trying to move them against their will does so at his own peril. A few years ago, his partner on the ranch, Keith Kakela, left the safety of the corral fence to get a recalcitrant bull to come out of the pen. Without warning, the bull went for him, throwing him into the air twice, like the rag doll at a rodeo, then goring him under his rib cage with his horn and stomping him into the mud. It took him three weeks and 76 stitches to recover. Should something like that happen again, Sexhus now keeps a heavy .45-70 Winchester at the ready in the barn.
Buffalo also exhibit a notoriously low tolerance for stress and can throw a fit that is without equal in the animal kingdom. "No one can appreciate the level of pitch these buffalo can get to," says Sexhus. "They can absolutely lose it, and when you think they can't get any crazier, you discover they've just started. I mean, these animals will reach a point where they absolutely don't care, and they'll destroy themselves, run right into a wall, break their neck, smash their head. Some animals, if they're scared enough, will actually die of fright." Whatever effect these episodes have on an animal's psyche, they certainly don't do much for the meat. When his adrenaline gets flowing, a bison halts production of glycogen, which in turn works to raise the pH level in the muscle tissue. Should the explosion happen on the way to the slaughterhouse—which occasionally occurs, since being loaded into a stock trailer seems to tip them off about what's in store—the carcass becomes infused with a blackish red color (a "dark cutter," it's called in the trade), signaling that the meat has become tough and off-tasting and must be ground into hamburger or even thrown away. One day last February, a 934-pound cow that had been herded into the last chute at the New Rockford slaughter plant lost control just before being sent through the roll-up door into the killing station. She spent the last minutes of her life in a frenzy, kicking and bucking so desperately in the narrow confines that she almost knocked herself off her feet. Nothing unusual there, noted an attendant, who said that the steel bars on the chutes need to be rewelded about every month. What with North Dakota's brutal winters, short growing season, and vulnerability to drought, Sexhus's experience of raising buffalo is quite different from that of the ranchers in southwest Texas. Like Shape Ranch's Fitzsimons, he had his land passed down to him by his grandfather, a Norwegian who immigrated in 1894 and began farming a 160-acre area under provisions of the Homestead Act. "He obviously had it tough back in Norway to think this was good," says Sexhus, whose newly built brick ranch house sits in the middle of 3,000 superflat acres, offering a magical vista on a winter's morning of a sea of pure white bordered by towering elms sparkling with hoarfrost.
Whereas the Shape Ranch is waist high in broad-leafed buffle grass all year round, in North Dakota the grass is generally gone by the end of August and doesn't reappear until the following June. Grain, on the other hand, costs so little in the Plains states that it's generally cheaper to buy than to raise, which is one of the reasons why Sexhus puts his bull calves in a grain pen as soon as they're weaned and leaves them there until they're slaughtered at 15 to 18 months old. To get fat, lucrative hindquarters, he breeds large bulls to large cows, an approach that won him the $5,000 first prize last winter in the carcass contest at the stock show in Rapid City, South Dakota. But to ensure that his herd stays free of those drifting genes, he's scrupulous about keeping his breeding bulls in the grain pen so they won't adulterate his grass-fed cows.
Still, an element of defensiveness creeps in when Sexhus discusses his reliance on feedlots. "If I didn't have to make money off bison, would I have them in a feedlot? Probably not," he says. "But inevitably the people who criticize the guy taking them from cows and putting them into confinement are people who've got a lot of money and a lot of land. And I don't mean I'm against that, but the thing I object to is their holier-than-thou attitude where they feel somehow we're doing something morally wrong. It's always easier to sit there and say, "Here's how it should be done," when you don't have to worry about putting tennis shoes on the kids." However you do it, making money in the buffalo business is virtually impossible these days. Over the past two years, prices have dropped into the basement. Whereas in 2000 a buffalo cow bred by a high-quality bull would have sold for upwards of $5,000, today she'd be lucky to bring $500. As for the meat, there's a lot more of that around than people seem to want to eat. Sexhus's co-op alone is holding some 4 million pounds of unsold buffalo meat stacked up in freezers, and he's been asking farmers to accept delayed payment for their animals until prices begin to stabilize.
The problem began in the 1990s, when many ranchers in the northern Plains switched over from raising cattle because buffalo fetched higher prices and were easier to raise: Buffalo drop calves unassisted, require no shelter in harsh winters, and are healthier.
But as supply outstripped demand, which was mainly from local restaurants in the West and Midwest, no one looked seriously into how to sell it more widely. Or sell it at all, for that matter. When Sexhus was begged by local ranchers to take over the flagging New Rockford co-op (before returning to the family farm in the early '90s, he'd worked in Paris as director of European operations for the International Harvester Company), he walked into the plant one day and found the manager slamming down the phone on a customer. "He was yelling, 'It'll be a cold day in hell before I sell to that son of a bitch.'
"'But Brad!' I said. 'That's the guy who's paying all our salaries.'"
To get out of the slump, buffalo ranchers are looking hopefully these days to Ted Turner, who last winter opened the first Ted's Montana Grill, in Columbus, Ohio. The restaurant, along with two others that have since debuted in Atlanta, serves nine-ounce bison burgers, along with chicken and beef dishes to lure in the more tentative customers. Nine additional branches will open up around the country by the end of next year, possibly more after that. "It's not the answer to our problem right now, but it could be in a year or two," says Sexhus, whose co-op does all of Turner's slaughtering. "If he decides to do something like this on a big scale, and I think he will, this could be really huge."
Maybe get huge, others concede, but along the way to achieving success, the buffalo industry could end up losing its soul. One who feels strongly in this regard is Alvin Jones, the foreman down on the Shape Ranch. In his lifetime a rodeo rider, a rancher, a livestock auctioneer, and an infantryman in the Korean War ("Not my choice," he says), Jones was raised in a sharecropper's household on the Little Colorado River near San Angelo. At 68 years old, he's got a droopy white mustache, carries a Colt single-action revolver while riding his horse around the ranch, and offers up his many opinions in a soft, West Texas drawl that contrasts sharply with the twang of, say, men in the Bush family. Jones was introduced to the creature back in 1963, when a restaurant owner in Tucson asked him to saddle-break a buffalo so patrons could sit on it and have their pictures taken. After considerable effort, he broke the animal, an endeavor he likened to being tossed around by a tornado. "But what the restaurant fellow didn't realize," he says, "was, 'Once a buffalo, always a buffalo.' Even though he was saddle-broke, when he looked around and found out he wasn't tied down anymore, just held by someone with a rope, why, he just left. End of story."
But if the buffalo should ultimately have its very nature changed by being force-fed, force-bred, and treated simply as a beef cow with a furry head, that could result in as great a tragedy as the great kill-off at the end of the 19th century. In Jones's opinion, "the buffalo doesn't mind being shot, doesn't mind dying, doesn't mind being in a commercial meat market, because he's an animal that realizes his destiny is to be used for some purpose, like he's always been. To me, that's just like being a good person. As I always tell my kids, that's what I'm here for. If I'm not any good to help somebody else, then I'm just not any good at all, and that's one of the things I feel I have in common with that animal.
"But if we change him, just because we can and because we think he can do something better than he's been doing for years and years, we're going to wind up with basically nothing. There's not anything else that's real. If we ruin the buffalo, make the same mistakes we've made with everything else, then that will be the end of it. Because we won't have anything else to ruin. Buffalo are the last thing left."