Domesticated animals question.

[Dinner]

OK, so I am remembering back to when I read the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond

PBS page on it: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Ste.../dp/0393317552

and I have a question about why the bison was never domesticated by native Americans. I remember that Jared Diamond did an excellent job explaining why Eurasia ended up ahead of the rest of the world just due to geography and the availability of domesticates (that is plants/animals which were suitable to be domesticated) and I also recall that Jared believed that some where along the line someone had already tried to domestic every possible animal at one time or another.

I am curious why the American Bison was never domesticated since it has done so well as a domesticated Animal over the last 100 years and ranchers in the northwest and mountain states now routinely ranch Bison and sell the meat on the market. Bison would have been by far the largest animal to be domesticated in the Americas and would have been a major food source just as cattle, yaks, camels, and other large animals were in the old world.

We know that native Americans did domesticate the Turkey, the Muscovy duck, the Llama, the Alpaca, and they brought the dog with them from Asia but that was about it. Jared Diamond's thesis was that by the time native American societies started domesticating plants and animals they had already killed most of the possible contenders, which is true, but that still leaves the bison which was indeed later domesticated successfully. It also seems like the Musk Ox and the Carrabou could have been domesticated since musk ox are herb animals which follow one leader as are Carrabou (which Siberian ntives have domesticated).

So what gives?

[SlowwHand]

That's an interesting question. One I'd never considered.

Spain introduced horses into the U.S. and Comanches were the first to make use of horses, greatly aiding their mobility and allowing them to hunt and move easier.
This was around 1700.

The smallpox outbreak of 1817 and 1848, along with the cholera striking in 1849, killed many Comanche. It is said their numbers reduced from nearly 20,000 to just a few thousand in under 50 years. With the near extinction of buffalo, the Comanche way of life was coming to an end. http://www.native-languages.org/comp...e-indians.html

Comanche Indians were never too domesticated themselves. They didn't farm, per se, and they didn't really keep domesticated animals.
They were hunters that just killed what they needed for immediate concerns.

That's all I have on it so far, but I may look at this more.

[Zkribbler]

I think Sloww has spotted to reason.

The plains Indians were hunter-gathers, not farmers. It doesn't make a lot of sense to domesticate animals if you don't have a farm or ranch.

[MichaeltheGreat]

The main northern plains Indian groups (Lakhota, Tsitsista, Absaroka, Siksika, Inuna-ina, Ga-i-gwu) had neither any means nor any reason to attempt domestication of the bison.

Bison are domesticable now, in relatively small numbers, with modern ranching technology. If you didn't have the means for fencing and harvest/transport of winter forage, there was simply no way to domesticate them.

Nobody in their right minds would want to stay put year round in the northern plains, unless you had industrial era amenities. White settlers bypassed the area in the early move west, and not just because of hostile Indians.

In the relevant time before whites had slaughtered the bison to near-extinction, there were many millions of them, virtually all seasonal migrators except for some small basin-isolated herds, compared to a few tens of thousands of plains Indians of all groups.

Culling individual members out of those herds, setting up confinement, and transporting feed to them over the winter would just have been ridiculously ineffiecient compared with following the general movement of the herds over the seasons.

Water and waste disposal was a problem - the largest plains Indian groups had camps which were just too large to maintain permanently. Winter camps were rank and grossly unhealthy places by the beginning of spring, so one obvious solution was to move around.

Smaller groups would have been better able to sustain themselves permanently on one site, but would have been more vulnerable to raiding by other groups. Virtually every plains Indian group was originally displaced from somewhere else by warfare and resource competition, and the new arrivals typically displaced previous residents. Mutual defensive considerations were a huge factor in keeping larger camps together.

(for example, Gu-i-gwa [Kiowa] are traced back initially to the head of the Missouri river in Montana, whereas they were displaced to the far southern plains before the time of Lewis and Clark. All Lakhota were originally woodland Indians in the Minnesota-Wisconsin area, and Inuna-ina, Siksika and Tsitsista are all Algic languages, which evidences a likely origin well east of the Mississippi river for these groups) These waves of displacements led to complex layers of traditional alliances, acceptance or hostility between all the various groups in the plains regions, and kept defensive and fighting considerations at the forefront of the factors that dictated what lifestyles would be viable.

There was just no reason and no potential benefit to consider ranching and domestication of prey animals.

[Impaler[WrG]]

MtG nailed in IMHO, that basicly settles the Bison question but I'd like to ask why setled agricultural tribes of the East didn't domesticate animal like deer. Was it perhaps just too easy to catch them wild for anyone to bother?

[SlowwHand]

MtG took reams of paper to say what I said.

Damn Michael. Look up the word succinct. You're like the North American Pekka.

[Jon Miller]

Except he doesn't ramble, rarely rants, and his posts actually have lucidity.

JM

[Pekka]

Hey JM, stfu.

How's that for lucidity?

[Jon Miller]

lol

I love you pekka

but you do post nonsense fairly often

JM

[Pekka]

Just because you might not get my posts doesn't mean they make no sense. They make sense to many people. This is a fact. What? Are you arguing that you can refute _facts_? Facts can't be refuted when they are facts and what I said is a fact so... sorry, you're out of luck.

[Harry Tuttle]

Since I eat Bison meat once a month and have read up on the domestication of the animal here's an answer to your question:

1. Bisons grow very slowly. The big hump is composed of tough meay and fat, so the actual good meat on the animal is not all that large.

2. Bisons like to beat the hell out of each other when young adults and when breeding. Modern day fences have trouble keeping them in pens.

So there you are. Low yield per year and they're hard to keep in one place. It's easier to mind large herds out in the open rather than fighting with the animal. The American Indians could have domesticated the animal, but it would have required a large investment of manpower and time, something the Indians didn't need to do as other means were easier to come by.

In short, the animal wasn't domesticated because of basic economics, the same reason why cattle has dominated the protein market for so long. Bison is only coming into use today because of the quality of its meat, a luxury that we can afford in this day and age.

On that last part: Bison meat is the healthiest meat of all domesticated animals. It has a very low fat content and a high protein content. More healthy than chicken or even ostrich. Plus it tastes great too when cooked rare.

[Harry Tuttle]

We even have a restaurant chain near us called The Hairy Buffalo. Most of the meat dishes are comprised of bison. The chain is doing great and has expanded all over Northerm Ohio. I highly recommend trying Bison meat. Make sure it's cooked rare or medium rare as the absence of fat makes the meat cook faster than beef. The meat is sweet to taste and has absolutely no aftertaste. Trust me, I know. I can't get enough of it.

[Datajack Franit]

They forgot to beeline Agriculture after Hunting

[Provost Harrison]

...and discovered Democracy without Liberalism

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Impaler[WrG]
MtG nailed in IMHO, that basicly settles the Bison question but I'd like to ask why setled agricultural tribes of the East didn't domesticate animal like deer. Was it perhaps just too easy to catch them wild for anyone to bother?

Jared Diamond wrote that most successful domesticated animals are herd or flock animals. Those animals are used to following the alpha male and in their mind the shepard is nothing more then the alpha male so they follow him around.

Deer tend to be solitary animals which don't follow an alpha male like cows, sheep, dogs, or flocks of chickens do. Carribou, bison, and musk oxen do though.