Bruce
I agree this has been a very civil discussion and probally the most civil I have ever seen on this subject.
On the Buffalo thing. There is a huge misconception that "hunting" was the cause of their almost extinction. This is not the case, it was not sport hunting, settlers feeding themselves or ever true market hunting that almost eliminated all the bison.
It was wholesale killing like no species has ever experienced before. There were so many bison there was no way to use all the meat or hides on market. So why were they all killed?
Government subsudies! One of the very first of these things that mispend tax dollars. You see we were still fighting wars with the Native Americans when the buffs still roamed. Bison meant food for the Indians and much of what was left of the resistance was being fed off mostly bison.
With no bison the mid west was a hard place to live for the Indians. So hard it was the biggest thing that led them to taking treaties and moving to reservations for the promise of some land and BEEF!
As sport and meat hunting pushed the buffs to smaller more scattered heards the Native Americans began to fold in some areas. So our government decided to wipe out the buffs to break the Indians everywhere. It worked! It may be a very sad part of US History and something we can wish never happened but it is what happened and why.
Even market hunting alone would never have pushed the bison to the edge alone. Also have you noticed there are deer, elk, etc all through the same ranges the bison used to live in but still to this day there are very few heards of true free range bison.
Why? Cattle ranches, bison in numbers are competitors for the cattle to graze.
So the desire to win the Indian Wars cause the bison to be culled to next to nothing and cattle ranches have kept them low in true wild populations.
If we just started dumping bison from breeding operations in the great plains at random and did so for 10-20 years it would only be perhaps 3 full decades before there would be MILLIONS of them again.
