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Thanks to Jason for suggesting this week's topic, the bison!\n\nFurther reading:\nNew research documents domestic cattle genetics in modern bison herds\nHiggs Bison: Mysterious Hybrid of Bison and Cattle Hidden in Ice Age Cave Art\n\nA cave painting of steppe bison and other animals:\n\n\n\nAn American bison [photo by Kim Acker, taken from this site]:\n\n\n\nSome European bison [photo by Pryndak Vasyl, taken from this site]:\n\n\n\nThe bison sound in this episode came from this site.\n\nShow transcript:\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\nThis week we\u2019re going to learn about the bison, a suggestion from Jason. There are two species of bison alive today, the American bison and the European bison. Both are sometimes called buffalo while the European bison is sometimes called the wisent. I\u2019m mostly going to call it the wisent too in this episode so I only have to say the word bison 5,000 times instead of 10,000.\nBison are herd animals that can congregate in huge numbers, but these big herds are made up of numerous smaller groups. The smaller groups are made up of a lead female, called a cow, who is usually older, other cows, and all their offspring, called calves. Males, called bulls, live in small bachelor groups. The American bison mostly eats grass while the European bison eats a wider selection of plants in addition to grass.\nThe bison is a big animal with horns, a shaggy dark brown coat, and a humped shoulder. The American bison\u2019s shoulder is especially humped, which allows for the attachment of strong neck muscles. This allows the animal to clear snow from the ground by swinging its head side to side. The European bison\u2019s hump isn\u2019t as pronounced and it carries its head higher. The bison looks slow and clumsy, but it can actually run up to 35 mph, or 55 km/hour, can swim well, and can jump obstacles that are 5 feet tall, or 1.5 meters.\nThe American bison can stand over six and a half feet high at the shoulder, or 2 meters, while the European bison stands almost 7 feet tall at the shoulder, or 2.1 meters. This is massively huge! Bison are definitely ice age megafauna that once lived alongside mammoths and woolly rhinos, so we\u2019re lucky they\u2019re still around. Both species almost went extinct in recent times and were only saved by a coordinated effort by early conservationists.\nThe American bison in particular has a sad story. Before European colonizers arrived, bison were widespread throughout North America. Bison live in herds that migrate sometimes long distances to find food, and many of the North American tribes were also migratory to follow the herds, because the bison was an important part of their diet and they also used its hide and other body parts to make items they needed. The colonizers knew that, and they knew that by killing off the bison, the people who depended on bison to live would starve to death. Since bison were also considered sacred, the emotional and societal impact of colonizers killing the animals was also considerable.\nIn the 19th century, colonizers killed an estimated 50 million bison. A lot of them weren\u2019t even used for anything. People would shoot as many bison as possible from trains and just leave the bodies to rot, and this practice was actually encouraged by the railroads, who advertised these \u201chunting\u201d trips. The United States government also encouraged the mass killing of bison and even had soldiers go out to kill as many bison as possible. Bison that escaped the coordinated slaughter often caught diseases spread by domestic cattle, and the increased plowing and fencing of prairie land reduced the food available to bison. By 1900, the number of American bison in the world was probably only about 300.\nAs early as the 1860s people started to sound the alarm about the bison\u2019s impending extinction. Some ranchers kept bison, partly as meat animals and partly to just help stop them from all dying out. The Yellowstone National Park had been established in 1872,