Eat Bison to Save Bison

In the back of a truck in Custer State Park, South Dakota, a young bison the size of a large pony walked up and started licking the tires. It was after salt from the road dust, but also just curious—yearlings and two-year-olds, the herd manager explained, are the ones who come up first to see what you're doing. For the Gastropod hosts, it was their first encounter with live bison, and they were barely breathing. They had come to tell a specific story: how an animal that once defined the North American landscape and was essential to indigenous communities nearly vanished, how it was brought back, and whether it can ever play the same role again.

The Animal That Shaped a Continent

Before Europeans arrived, tens of millions of bison roamed North America—from the Southeast to the West Coast, from Alaska to Mexico. Historians estimate there were enough to circle the equator nose-to-tail. Explorers described hills "rolling black and brown" with them; on cold days, the cloud of their breath rose from the plains before you could see the animals, and the pounding of their hooves sounded like an oncoming thunderstorm. For the Lakota and other Plains peoples, the bison was everything. "They were our Walmart," said Bam Brewer, who runs a bison processing facility on the Pine Ridge Reservation. "Food, clothing, shelter—everything revolved around the buffalo."