Home On the Range

Throwback Thursday brings some nostalgia for these guys. Back in the day, we had buffalo (American Bison). No for real! Buffy and Wilma were the names we gave them. Wilma was the dominant and always stayed at a slight distance, watching, but Buffy was social. Many an afternoon was spent having my hand “exfoliated” by her tongue.

They came to us from a farm that trained barrel racing horses. When they were young calves they would be perfect for training the horses to herd in the tight circles that sport calls for without traumatizing them. Young cattle are too easily spooked and buffalo calves are just a little mellower and seem to just “know” the commands without being trained. Of course as they grow, they become too big to fit the criteria for training so they would be sold off.  

During this time we had a brief foray into breeding beefalo. The meat is excellent in that the protein content is higher and the fat content is lower. These two young girls were brought into the fold with the intent to breed them to a quality bull for beefalo calves. They grew from young calves to awkward young heifers and eventually into almost full size bison. This is where we ran into the problem. This picture is from when they were about a year old. By the time they were two they had some height and the bull had a problem. Logistically speaking it was difficult to make the necessary deliveries to produce beefalo babies.

They were both gentle, and I knew to give them appropriate distance and respect, but as they grew we knew that they were becoming potentially dangerous. They never did, but they literally could have walked through a barbed wire fence unharmed. They were so strong and their coat was so thick that it would not have fazed them at all if they had. Out of the concern for our neighbors who might not think it is so neat to have a buffalo wandering around in their yard, we made the decision for them to go to a conservatory for buffalo.

The lady that came to pick them up was amazing. I missed this part because I was at the paying job but my husband shared the story with me. They had been moved to a corral to make it easier to move them to a trailer. Because of all the people around, they were spooked and agitated. This lady asks if they have names, which my husband tells her, and climbs the corral fence and into the open area with them and using simple hand signals and voice commands got them calmly loaded onto the trailer. It makes me happy knowing that they are on that conservatory and possibly still using those same names I called them by all those afternoons. Maybe one day, with better fencing, buffalo can roam here again.