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Comment by y33t | Hacker News Reader

I saw a documentary (PBS? Ken Burns? Something like that) about bison and I'm astonished we have any left today. They had a couple of private herds and a handful of individuals in zoos, and that was just about it. That's after having a population, less than a century previous, that produced regular accounts of covering the land for as far as the eye could see. The only reason we didn't wipe them out completely was because of just a few people working independently of one another who thought it would be a shame to see them disappear.

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It was a deliberate attempt to deprive Native Americans of their historical means of support. You can't besiege a Native American city because they had already been pushed off their historical lands. But if you can eliminate a major source of food for them, it's possibly even more effective.

In general people under-estimate the capability of humanity to eradicate other forms of life. We've managed to eliminates organisms as plentiful as things like rinderpest for example. Large animals are actually easier. Were it not for a last minute change, almost all forms of whales would have been extinct in the 20th century. We've been the most advanced life form on Earth for a long time, possibly even before modern humans arrived. But in the past 1000 years or so we really became the most dominant life form. Our population has exploded and we can pretty much push out any other form of life we choose.

Latest estimates I recall are that humans and our livestock together comprise over 90% of the total mass of land animals globally. All wild animals together are less than 10%.

The mental picture of a wild Earth on which humans live is now outdated. The Earth has become a human place, with essentially some open-air zoos containing the few wild animals we have chosen to not kill.

Insects comprise a total weight to about 1 billion tons.(1) Which is roughly the same as the weight of all people and farm animals on Earth combined. (1) https://www.jpost.com/environment-and-climate-change/article...

xkcd 1338: Land Mammals

https://xkcd.com/1338/

https://explainxkcd.com/1338/

Land insects/terrestrial arthropods might match that

https://phys.org/news/2023-02-global-combined-weight-insects...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9897674/

Bacteria still outweigh us a thousand to one and that's not counting those already in our bodies is a great alt-text as well.

Bacteria aren't really animals though.

I remember a joke posted in a old thread here. Paraphrasing:

> Eukaryotes are the method that Prokaryotes use for space travel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky_Mountain_locust is an interesting example of eradicating an organism. From massive swarms of locusts to none in under 30 years.

Along the same lines is the passenger pigeon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

This is true of macro life forms, but rinderpest is a bad example. It's one of only two diseases we have ever been able to eliminate. Both of them were viruses-we've never stopped a bacterial disease, and with the increasing failure of antibiotics, that's only going to get worse.

> It was a deliberate attempt to deprive Native Americans of their historical means of support.

No, it was not. The bison population collapse was not something expected or planned. One year the bison simply disappeared (1882).

The bison ecosystem in North America was deeply unnatural. Bison are fast-replicating herbivores that don't have any natural predators! This only happened because Natives exterminated almost all the large predators.

Such systems almost always go through boom-bust cycles, and that's exactly what happened. The migration patterns were disturbed by railroads, and that likely led to the spread of the Texas tick fever and anthrax among the bison population. They have around 90% death rate, and that's what caused the population collapse.

However, this time the population did not recover by itself.

> But if you can eliminate a major source of food for them, it's possibly even more effective.

It's the same nonsense as giving smallpox-impregnated blankets used to exterminate populations.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buf...

Do you have any evidence for the claim that it was disease rather than the immense slaughter?

Yes. There are multiple papers written about this, here's a nice overview article: https://www.nacdnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/bisoncoll...

There was overhunting of bison, but normally overhunting leads to a gradual decline of the population (and we've seen that with overfishing). The bison near-extinction happened within _one_ year. The hunters in 1883 were waiting in vain for the bison to come.

from page 108:

Removing 840,000 animals from 4.5 million leaves them a good 3 million short of extinct. But Texas tick fever has an 81% death rate.11 Removing 81% from 4.5 million leaves just 855,000. Shooting b 840,000 of them leaves N 15,000, which is a lot like b 25,177 (Fig. 1)

Their own conclusions was that absent hunting, there would have been around 855,000 bison that year. Hunting reduced the remaining population after tick fever by 99.2%! Ignoring this is the equivalent of suggesting it was not an iceberg that sunk the titanic, but a lack of buoyancy.

Well, yes. Hunting obviously was a part of the issue.

I'm just saying that bison near-extinction was not a result of a directed action to exterminate them.

It's more fair to say that bison went through a normal bust cycle and hunting prevented them from bouncing back.

You’ve shown an interesting insight: hunting could not have been only cause of the near-extinction of the buffalo. However, the way you’ve presented it is extremely misleading. It sounds like you are blaming the natives for the downfall of the buffalo.

I do not believe this is what you intended to get across, since the evidence you have presented doesn’t support it. Please be careful about how you share information. It is as important as the information itself.

The buffalo did not just disappear and the extermination was most definitely planned. Regardless of the logistical impossibility of that goal via hunting alone, this was the goal and the goal was achieved. This is well documented. The technicality between “preventing a bounce back” and “seeking extermination” does not matter, because the goal was extermination.

> It sounds like you are blaming the natives for the downfall of the buffalo.

Well, yeah. They created an unhealthy ecological situation with abysmal biodiversity, where one species dominated an entire ecological niche without natural predators.

And it's not like the North American Natives are special. Humans have been causing large-scale extinctions since the Ice Age: https://ourworldindata.org/quaternary-megafauna-extinction

> this was the goal and the goal was achieved.

Care to provide the proof? Contemporary official documents, large-scale official plans, etc.?

In looking through sources, I'm no longer even convinced that disease was relevant anymore. An encyclopedia article shows a decline from about 15 million in 1865 to 7 million in 1873 - roughly 1 million per year.[1] This sounds like a gradual decline to me. And with some math Buffalo Bill famously killed 4000 over two years. Assuming the average hunter only did a tenth of that, it would only take 5000 hunters over 20 years to get the job done (roughly).

Furthermore, the National Park Service, part of the Department of the Interior, quotes the Secretary of the Interior of 1873 stating that "[t]he civilization of the Indian is impossible while buffalo remain on the plains”.[2] In fact the DOI secretary in 2023 said verbatim that "bison were nearly driven to extinction through uncontrolled hunting and a U.S. policy of eradication tied to intentional harm against and control of Tribes". [3]

This is not hard to believe at al. There were centuries of war between the natives and the settlers. Presidential campaigns slogans focused on defeats over the Indians[4]. The U.S. absolutely hated the Natives from the start. One of the cited grievances in the Declaration of Independence is the fact that Britain would deal with the Natives.

It is both plausible and proven that extermination was the goal. If you still don't believe this here is the most detailed timeline I've ever seen on the subject from the US Fish and Wildlife service. [5]

[1] https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-... [2] https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/what-happened-to-the-bison.... [3] https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-department-announ... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tippecanoe [5] https://web.archive.org/web/20200210033215/https://www.fws.g...

Do you have any source for this being planned to exterminate them to make it more difficult for the natives?

Because it sure sounds like that wouldn’t have happened without the diseases eliminating well over 80% of the population already

> The US Army sanctioned and actively endorsed the wholesale slaughter of bison herds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting#Government_inv...

Grizzly bears hunted bison and were present in the plains states down through Texas and into Mexico. The last Grizzly in Arizona was killed later than the last one in California.

Grizzly bears do not normally hunt healthy adult bison. They will normally hunt weakened or injured individuals, or bison calves.

In general, predators need to be overwhelmingly more powerful than their prey (or use pack tactics, like lions).

There are several examples of this in other species. The Przewalski horse is probably one of the most dramatic examples. The population was reduced to around a dozen individuals, all in captivity. After an intensive breeding and reintroduction program, the population is now around 2,000, with several hundred of those in the wild. There's also the Père David's deer. It's an interesting species: the only semi-aquatic deer species. It has webbing between its hooves and eats aquativ plants (along with grass). They were hunted essentially to extinction in their native territory in China, the only remaining individuals were a handful taken by missionaries (including Père David, their namesake). Today their population is over 8,000, with hundreds reintroduced to the wild.

It's sad to think about, but it's also hopeful in a way. Humanity as a whole nearly killed these species, but a few dedicated individuals were able to save them.

The Black Robin in New Zealand is almost the most extreme example of a recovery from near extinction: Just 1 female and 5 males in the early 1980s have now bred a population of around 300 individuals. There's an interesting story in the wikipedia page [0] of 'edge laying' egg behaviour, and how humans initially corrected the problem but later had to stop to ensure the behaviour wasn't propagated.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_robin

Something similar also happened in Europe. They were eradicated everywhere but a small natural park in Poland. Now they are being reintroduced, although I don't know where they will find the space.

Somewhat curiously, there is another recently extinct animal the "Auroch" which was hunted to extinction as well. As recently as 1000 years ago they were quite plentiful, but completely extinct by the time Europeans started moving to the Americas

There have been some, let's say, 'interesting' attempts to recreate the species via back-breeding [0]. They seem to be having some success.

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nazi-super-cows-e...

Lions were also roaming Europe relatively recently, likely into the middle ages.

Fruska gora, a mountain region in Serbia, has acquired or were gifted 5 European bisons from Poland[0]. It's always heartwarming to see a country working extremely hard to preserve any species. It was devastating news for a lot of people that one of the bisons, Djuka, passed away recently (not to be confused with a Serbian politician Vladimir Djukanovic also known as bison Djuka[1]).

[0] https://www.gov.pl/web/srbija/poljski-bizoni-u-nacionalnom-p...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Đukanović

European Bison?

Yep, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_bison

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo

Wonderful documentary.

Buffalo also feature prominently in The West, another fantastic Ken Burns documentary.

https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/

This is not true. An officer from the US was sent to protect the Yellowstone herd at some point. IIRC he had previously been assigned to fight Indians and had a track record for “effectiveness” aka modern day war crimes. Apparently this was more a personality trait than particular hatred of the tribes of the plains because when he was ordered to protect the bison, he did it with the same energy and “effectiveness”.

Not claiming he was the only one, but possibly the only one with enough guns, soldiers T his command, the backing of an executive order, and a dim enough view of human life to move the needle as much as he did.

I need to go research this again and erase this comment if I’m talking trash or update it if I’m not.

They’ve essentially been replaced with cattle. There are probably more cattle on american and europeans grazing lands today than there were ever bison if I had to guess.

Makes sense. In Zoo tycoon, these fuckers kept breeding like no one's business.

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