The Human Role in the Extinction of Large Game Animals
Two articles on large animal extinction. The first ("Historians Revisit Slaughter on the Plains") deals with the near extinction of the American bison and makes the following points (1) multiple factors were responsible for near-extinction; (2) there are competing images of Native Americans as "ecologically noble savages" and short-sighted hunters; and (3) political posturing masquerading as informed critique (Deloria quote).
The second (abstract from the Journal of Mammalogy followed by a BBC report on the article) suggests that humans world wide have seriously endangered large game and large game persists only in areas that are difficult for human settlement. In a sense, the first article is a specific example of the general point made in the second.November 16, 1999
New York TimesHistorians Revisit Slaughter on the Plains
By JIM ROBBINS
MISSOULA, Mont. -- The wanton slaughter of millions of bison in the 19th century by white hide hunters, abetted by a military intent on subjugating Indians, is probably the most famous conservation horror story in United States history.The problem with this tale, a growing number of scholars and historians say, is that it is not true. As portrayed in a number of new books, the real story of the decline of the buffalo involves a significant change in climate, competition for forage and cattle-borne disease. Another major factor, the authors say, were Indian tribes, empowered by the horse and gun and driven to hunt buffaloes for the profits that came from hides and meat.
"What most people don't consider in their 'Dances With Wolves' version of history is that Indians were involved in the market," said Dr. Dan Flores, the A.B. Hammond professor of Western history at the University of Montana. "They were cashing in on buffalo in the 1840s as their principal entree into the market economy, and very few species are able to survive when they become a commodity."
White hunters who killed buffaloes by the millions in the 1870s and 1880s played a major role in the demise, said Flores, but only as the coup de grace. "The hide hunters are not off the hook," he said. "They share the burden of the final mop-up. But without their involvement, the buffalo would probably have only lasted another 30 years." That is because their numbers had been so greatly reduced by the other factors.
The buffalo studies are part of a continuing debate about the role of Indians in Western history. In "The Ecological Indian" (W.W. Norton, 1999), for example, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, argues against the romantic image of the Indian as the first environmentalist. When Indians had had the means and the motive, he says, they abused nature for profit.
Flores, whose work on buffalo has appeared in The Journal of American History and elsewhere, is writing a book on bison under contract with Yale University Press. And Dr. Drew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, has a book called "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920," which will be published by Cambridge University Press in April.
Not everyone subscribes to the new wave. Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, finds the revisionism preposterous. "It's nonsense," he said. "The Indians did not make any appreciable dent in buffalo numbers in the Northern Plains. It's anti-Indian stuff."
Indians were involved in the buffalo market, scholars generally agree. Their acquisition of horses and guns made buffalo hunting much easier. As steamboats started plying the Missouri River into the heart of buffalo country in the 1840s, hide hunting by the Kiowa, Blackfeet, Sioux and other Plains tribes soared.
For the first time, there was a way to haul the bulky robes back East, where they became popular as a covering during cold weather travel and for leather goods. Indians found they could trade the robes for firearms, lead balls, gunpowder, blankets, textiles, pots and pans and whiskey.
Isenberg estimates that before the 1840s, 60,000 Plains Indians were killing half a million bison a year for sustenance. After the robe trade began in the 1840s, that total went over 600,000 a year, "clearly into unsustainable range," he said.
While white hunters killed more buffaloes (their total throughout the West is estimated at four million), Flores argues that Indians concentrated their killing on buffalo cows, which had more tender meat and were much easier to skin and treat, resulting in severe damage to the herds' reproductive capacity.
Environmental factors play large roles in newer histories of the West. For example, Flores says that the study of tree rings, or dendrochronology, suggests that Indians were so effective in decimating the buffalo because climate had already weakened and diminished the herds.
From the 1500s to the mid-19th century, a period known as the little ice age, tree rings show that the climate in the West was much colder than normal. That favored the grasses buffaloes eat, and they flourished. When a long, widespread drought ended the little ice age in the mid-1800s, the grasses changed and the bison population crashed just as the tribes began market hunting.
At the same time, Flores said, buffaloes began having to compete for forage with horses that were brought by the Spaniards to North America in the 1500s and later went feral. By the 1800s, Flores estimates, two million horses were sharing the range with the buffalo.
Flores and the others also differ from their predecessors in their use of Indian sources. Many bands of Indians, for example, kept a record of events, often symbols painted on bison robes. The Northern Plains tribes kept winter counts of buffaloes on buffalo hides, while the Kiowa, in the south, kept calendars.
"The symbol for 'many buffalo,' a circle with a dot in the middle, appears numerous times from 1800 to 1840 in the Kiowa calendars," Flores said. "But after 1840 it appears only once."
Such counts are crucial to the debate over who or what killed off the bison, but all sides agree that estimates are a tricky business.
In the past, historians estimated bison numbers at 40 million to 60 million, sometimes as many as 75 million. But Flores has tried to calculate how many buffaloes the range could support by analyzing 1910 census data on cattle, and has concluded that in good years the range could hold only 20 million to 24 million.
After the little ice age, at the time of the Civil War, buffalo numbers may have been as low as 10 million to 12 million, he said.
But his calculations have been criticized by Deloria, who says that comparing fenced-in livestock with free-roaming buffaloes is an inappropriate comparison.
Dr. Calvin Luther Martin, who taught history at Rutgers and lived with Eskimos for two years on the Alaskan tundra, also disagrees. Martin, the author of a new book on Indian life, "The Way of the Human Being" (Yale University Press), argues that to judge Indians by contemporary environmental standards "is patent foolishness."
The Indians were caught between two different worlds and two different realities, Martin said. "They don't translate into each other," he said, adding that Indians had no concept of being wasteful.
And the claim that competition with horses would have affected the buffalo has also been criticized by Dr. Valerius Geist, an ecologist who is an emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Geist, author of "Buffalo Nation: The History and Legend of the North American Bison," noted that bison had evolved on the prairie with other large mammals. "Flores is a historian playing ecologist," Geist said.
Finally, the new bison scholarship also casts doubt on another major tenet of buffalo history: that the destruction of the herds was a conspiracy between the United States Army and hide hunters who did the killing.
"I don't think there was a conspiracy by any means," Isenberg said. "The army was happy to see hide hunters, but they were not commanding them to kill bison."
Flores traces the notion of a conspiracy to the memoir of a Texas buffalo hunter named John R. Cook, called "The Border and the Buffalo." According to the book, the Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, the Indian fighter, urged the Texas Legislature not to pass a law that would protect the buffaloes remaining there and instead to create a bronze medal for the hunters "with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other."
Flores said he had found no record of Sheridan's speech to the legislature and believed it was apocryphal. The notion of a conspiracy, he said, has become fact through repetition.
Flores said he had recently discovered letters in which Sheridan wrote that he was concerned about the demise of the buffalo. After hearing in October 1879 about the killing of thousands of buffaloes by hide hunters near Miles City, Mont., Sheridan sent a telegram to Washington, saying, "I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the buffalo should be stopped."
Isenberg denies that the new work on the buffalo is anti-Indian.
"It's romantic to imagine Indians as always living in harmony with nature," he said. "But they are people who did many things right and who also made mistakes. If you want to see them as a real people and not a romantic notion, then you have to look with a clear eye at these kinds of things. None of us have any animus toward Indians."
Journal of Mammalogy
Article: pp. 1363–1380
AbstractLarge mammals often play critical roles within ecosystems by affecting either prey populations or the structure and species composition of surrounding vegetation. However, large mammals are highly vulnerable to extirpation by humans and consequently, severe contractions of species ranges result in intact large mammal faunas becoming increasingly rare. We compared historical (AD 1500) range maps of large mammals with their current distributions to determine which areas today retain complete assemblages of large mammals. We estimate that less than 21% of the earth's terrestrial surface still contains all of the large (>20 kg) mammals it once held, with the proportion varying between 68% in Australasia to only 1% in Indomalaya. Although the presence of large mammals offers no guarantee of the presence of all smaller animals, their absence represents an ecologically based measurement of human impacts on biodiversity. Given the ecological importance of large mammals and their vulnerability to extinction, better protection and extension of sites containing complete assemblages of large mammals is urgently needed.
Report from BBC News on the above.
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7161644.stm
December 27, 2007
Humans 'drive out large mammals'Almost 80% of the Earth's surface has experienced a sharp fall in the number of large mammals as a result of human activities, a study suggests.By examining records dating back to AD1500, US researchers found that at least 35% of mammals over 20kg had seen their range cut by more than half.
They said urgent action was needed to protect the animals, which were being hunted or suffering habitat loss.
The findings have been published in the Journal of Mammalogy.
The research, carried out by a team of scientists from Princeton University and conservation group WWF-US, has been described as the first "measurement of human impacts on biodiversity based on the absence of native, large mammals"."Perhaps the most striking result of our study is that [the] 109 places that still retain the same roster of large mammals as in AD1500 are either small, intensively managed reserved or places of extremes," revealed lead author John Morrison, WWF-US's director of conservation measures.
"Remote areas are either too hot, dry, wet, frozen [or] swampy to support intensive activities."
'Eco-engineering'
The researchers compared the current ranges of the world's largest 263 land mammals with their distribution 500 years ago.
We can now pinpoint places where large mammals assemblages still play important roles in terrestrial ecosystems
Eric Dinerstein,
WWF chief scientistThe species that suffered the greatest loss were "habitat generalists", including tigers, leopards, lions, American bison, elk and wolves.Geographically, Australasia fared best, holding on to 68% of its large mammals. At the other end of the scale, South-East Asia only had 1% of the mega fauna that roamed the region in AD1500.
In their paper, the scientists explained why large mammals were so important for maintaining the ecological equilibrium.
"Large carnivores frequently shape the number, distribution and behaviour of their prey," the researchers wrote.
"Large herbivores function as ecological engineers by changing the structure and species composition of surrounding vegetation.
"Furthermore, both sets of mammals profoundly influence the environment beyond direct species interactions, such as through [the food chain]."
WWF chief scientist Eric Dinerstein said he hoped the findings would help focus conservation efforts.
"We can now pinpoint places where large mammal assemblages still play important roles in terrestrial ecosystems," he explained.
"Through strategic re-introductions - such as returning wolves to Yellowstone - we can restore... places missing one or two species and recover the ecological fabric of these important conservation landscapes."