Word: bison
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ranchers care for bison because they can make money selling their meat. And so bison are flourishing again because they have the evolutionary advantage of tasting good and having survived to a time when we all need to eat leaner. We win, and bison win. Of course, the individual bison we eat lose, but the nature of the paradox is that most never would have a chance at life at all if we didn't provide a reason for their husbandry. Vegetarians may argue that no life is better than one cut short at slaughter, but in terms of maximizing...
Plus, there's another reason to eat bison: doing so is good for the planet. Bison are leaner than cattle because they are still wild animals who range and eat grass; they do not tolerate confinement well, and so they cannot be fattened the way we do cattle, which we have bred to eat rich corn mixtures their entire adult lives. Growing corn to feed cattle costs the nation dearly in terms of pesticide and fertilizer runoff. The pollution and inhumanity of the confinement-feedlot beef system make it one of postwar America's biggest ecological blunders...
...Bison, on the other hand, eat grass that grows freely, and the manure they produce is a natural fertilizer. True, some bison ranchers are irresponsibly corralling and then "finishing" their animals with a fattier diet of grain just before slaughter. This makes the meat richer, more like beef. Ted's Montana Grill serves grain-finished bison, for instance, although CEO George McKerrow Jr. says the chain is testing grass-finished meat for consistency and quality...
...Eating bison may have helped save the animals, but it does raise the danger that managed herds will become domesticated and lose their distinct bison-ness. Ranchers have a financial incentive to cull herd members who are cantankerous (as older bulls are), who break fences, who fight other bulls. But removing these animals is a form of unnatural selection: it will eventually remove wild traits from the bison gene pool, making them docile like cattle...
...best thing we can do to let bison be bison is to end their lives in the wild, not in captivity. Today, John and Wright Mooar, the prodigious bison hunting brothers who helped lead the "Great Slaughter" in the late 1800s, are reviled for shooting so many bison on the open range. But, ironically, theirs was a more humane way of killing bison than ours. Last summer, I watched a bison heifer be led into the chute at the North American Bison Cooperative, a slaughterhouse in New Rockford, N.D. She became agitated, and she fought violently against the tight steel...