Credit Andy Singer 2024

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[–] 206 points 2 years ago (22 children)

fun fact.

The US army gave people ammunition for free if it was used to kill bison for a period of time.

Bison almost went extinct.

Bison were a source of food for the natives.

I love american history!

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  • [–] 68 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Every 50 bison they killed they celebrated a bisontennial.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    The official reason was the Bison herds were capable of destroying the fields of entire farms. We never stopped to ask if we should have been farming there in the first place.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    were bison known for like, destroying fences or something? Or did we just not think of building fences lmao.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Farmers don't usually fence in their fields. You're thinking of live stock farming.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    well i mean that would make sense but like...

    In terms of the chain of logic here.

    bison are trampling your field:

    • make them extinct
    • build a fence

    i feel like building a fence would probably make sense here.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Yes but that would -

    Involve effort

    Not get them some actually pretty tasty meat. (sorry vegans it's true, they're tasty.)

    Not give them an excuse to cause suffering among the natives, whose land they were farming on anyways.

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  • i mean, have you ever tried killing an animal? They sort of tend to uh. Move around.

    Like you would need to essentially pay thousands of people over the period of years to cull the population of bison, and they did.

    And to be clear, they didn't even really kill them for meat, im sure some did, but a lot of it was just to kill them.

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  • [+] -49 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Correlation, causation, too many big words.

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  • [–] 29 points 2 years ago

    Killing off the Buffalo, which was a source of food, clothing and other vital cultural resources for many indigenous cultures, was an official government policy to destroy those cultures. Couple more words; ecocide, genocide.

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