Ed Dillinger stands on the bed of his pickup truck surrounded by acres of lush green grass and massive hairy figures. Big brown eyes follow his every move. A long, dark tongue snakes out from a long face topped with menacing-looking horns, curling toward the grain in Dillinger’s flattened palm.
Dillinger smiles, recognizing cows and bulls by ear-tag numbers and by hairdos. He never tires of snack time with his 2,000-pound bison.
Surviving History
Dillinger and his wife Susan own the Lazy Heart D Ranch, home to 80 bison, or possibly 100 after the springtime births.
The Westmoreland ranch is one of about 150 bison ranches in Kansas, according to numbers from the Kansas Buffalo Association. Though Dillinger is a proponent of the health benefits of bison meat, he is concerned about it increasing in popularity.
“To put it in perspective, sure we would like more publicity about buffalo, but 450,000, that’s all the buffalo in the U.S., and we kill more beef than that in a week,” he said.
Dillinger does not want to see the bison population nosedive as it did in the past. He said bison are smart. They had to be smart to have survived history.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, more than 60 million American buffalo once roamed the Great Plains and mountains from Canada to Mexico. In the 1600s, the Native Americans hunted them for their fur and later for their tongues, meat and bones.
By the late 19th century bison neared extinction.
According to the American Museum of Natural History, “the wholesale slaughter of bison on the Great Plains peaked in the years following the Civil War. During this time, the ecology of the American West was radically changed by a great influx of white settlers.”
Bison were slaughtered by the white settlers not only for their hides and meat, but also for recreation.
“Bison hunting was also justified by some as a way to aid the U.S. government’s struggle against the Plains Indian tribes by destroying their primary food source,” according to the AMNH.
This eventually left one wild herd of bison in the entire United States.
Efforts by conservationists helped slowly rejuvenate the bison population, and in 2002, the Census of Agriculture found 232,000 in the United States. Dillinger said he believes the number is now about 450,000.
“Probably at one time they were the largest number of mammal species on the planet,” he said.
According to the National Bison Association, the commercial bison industry began in the late 1960s and by 1998, “the price of live animals exceeded the ability of many producers to purchase new stock.”
Business peaked and went downhill until 2003. Today the industry is experiencing growth and profit.
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