Episode 5 - Interlopers: Cows, Elk, and Buffalo

MB = Michelle K Berry

EW = Emily Wakild

MB 0:00

Hello, my name is Michelle Berry.

EW:

And I'm Emily Wakild, and we are your hosts for More Than: a Podcast. We're both historians, but before you push stop, let us explain what kind of history we study. We're both environmental historians.

MB: 0:18

Oh dear, Emily, I'm not sure that that makes us seem any more interesting. How about this instead? Basically, we tell stories about the past and try to make sure that our stories include animals, plants, bugs, dirt, weather, and the like. And we have created this podcast to convince you that history and even nature are more than you ever thought they were.

EW: 0:42

We also both live and work in the U.S. Mountain West. Think of the region connected by the Rocky Mountains, where we've spent most of our lives. We met in graduate school and we've been friends for almost 25 years. In this podcast, we bring you stories about different parts of the ecosystems that you can find throughout the U.S. Mountain West, from the Sonoran Desert, where Michelle lives, to the Northern Rockies, where I live.

MB: 1:06

These stories have fascinating historical components and connections to contemporary issues. In addition to hopefully showing you how much more history can be, we also call the podcast More Than, because unlike typical history, we're going to put the morethanhuman at the center of each episode.

EW: 1:25

We are convinced that once you hear about the power the more than human has had in the past, you will love history and nature even more than you do now.

MB: 1:38

Now, each of the topics we have chosen has many histories, so we're only picking a few to focus on in each episode. But for many of the episodes, we'll also have a special guest or two to tell us even more about that particular topic. Join us as we explore more than you could ever expect to in a podcast about the environment and history.

I just asked Emily if she's done typing. Hi, Emily. Are you done typing?

EW:

I'm done. I'm done.

MB:

Well, welcome. How are you?

EW:

I'm great. How are you?

MB:

I'm great. Things are good. The weather's gorgeous. Can't complain. We are today entering into our interlopers episode, which we're really excited about. I'm particularly excited about it because I wrote a book on cows and that's one of our topics for the day. But I also grew up on the back of a bull. Kind of seriously. Sounds crazy when I tell people the story. But seriously, we had a bull. Yeah, cow pies. Exactly. Yeah, good job. I was going to say bull, you know, but this is a family show. [laughter] We had a bull on the ranch named old 93 and he was huge and he seemed so big and mean. And of course he's a bull. So, um, they can act quote unquote wild, right? Even though he's just part of this herd of black Angus. And I loved that damn bull. And I think he actually loved me. And I was just thoroughly unafraid of him. And my crazy parents would let me sit on the top of him. I mean, obviously they were there to catch me should I fall. But I don't know what they were going to do if he decided to go nuts. But... It's funny because I was actually less scared of him than some of our horses, if I'm being honest. But as I grew up and I started thinking more deeply about old 93 and me sitting on that bull, I realized how transgressive that relationship was. And in my book, I talk a little bit about the ways in which the humans who care for livestock have these deep relationships with them that transgress the binary of the human and the natural of culture and nature. What am I saying? Hello. It's sort of early and I'm not quite awake, so whatever. But anyway, I just think that in general, I think livestock ungulates are transgressive in a lot of interesting ways. And when we were brainstorming for this episode, we thought about naming it transgressors, but that didn't seem quite right. So of course we did what all smart writers do. We Googled a bunch of synonyms. [laughter] How else can we say that? And we settled on interlopers for this ungulate or grazer episode because the subjects of the episode are, they are interlopers whose trespassing tendencies help us to think about binaries and boundaries and demarcations and siloed concepts. And yes, I'm using that word intentionally. Ha, get it, silo. There's all kinds of ag puns that are available here. And I think they help us think about these concepts that normally don't connect to each other, obviously, in really powerful ways. And so you and I geeked out as we planned this episode. We're going to try really hard not to be too crazy abstract with our thinking on some of this stuff. But either way, we hope, dear listeners, that you come along for and enjoy the ride in this episode of Interlopers: Cattle, Bison, and Elk.

EW: 5:38

Giddy up. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna have a great ride. Maybe not on ole 93. But there's a lot here. There's a lot in the power of the words. And these animals that we're talking about today, are great example of more than because they're more than all of these different ways we describe them, right. And so we have a lot of fun with that. I, on the other hand, did not grow up on the back of a bull. However, I did have a high school boyfriend who named a new born calf after me.

MB:

No way. Seriously?

EW:

Oh, yeah. Seriously. Yeah, he helped him be born.

MB: Oh, my. What a great cowboy. You should have married that guy. What were you thinking?

EW:

I don't know but I think they made the right choice. So there were cattle always around. I remember having venison cooked for me for the big homecoming dance in high school. And even more recently, I've stood with my children in awe as bison roam across a meadow, right? And so there's all kinds of examples. I think people that live in the West, especially anyone who spends time in the rural West, you don't have to think hard to think about examples of animals like these in their own lives. I sent you a picture last weekend when we drove up to the mountains and there was a herd of cattle licking the salt off the highway, right? They're everywhere. And they have this really interesting role in the history of the West. And they're almost never held in common. You either talk about cattle or bison or wildlife, right? Or elk and deer sort of separately. So we wanted to put them together, maybe not have a party, but maybe some sort of ball, right, and have a dance with them.

MB: 7:53

Oh, my gosh. I just went to something called a seed ball on Friday for the Avra Valley Conservation Alliance, which is a group doing really great work on conserving working landscapes down here in southern Arizona. And they called the fundraising event a seed ball, if that's not the cutest thing. And then for takeaways, they gave seed balls, balls, you know, that are kind of contained lots of different kinds of wildflower seeds to plant. It was just fabulous. Anyway, I digress. So, yeah. So I think that one thing for sure we thought about and wanted to do in this in this particular episode is to think about, as you just said, cattle, elk, and bison as more than enemies or as more than competitors. I think sometimes we think about the ways in which if you have cattle, you don't have elk and you don't have bison and the ways in which, you know, if you have elk and specifically quote unquote a healthy elk herd, you don't have coyotes, right? Because they're competing. And I think we wanted to think a little bit more holistically about the ways in which all those, all those guys connect in interesting ways. And also they're more than food, right? We often also think of this as, oh, elk and bison are so much healthier than cattle to consume, and beef is not necessarily healthy for you. And so we very much, in our anthropocentric way, think about these animals as sources of food. food, both nutrition, but also unhealthy, um, kinds of food in some people's opinions. Um, there's lots of debate out there, but, I think they're also food for thought. And so they lead us into thinking about all kinds of more thans. They're more than simply wild or domesticated. They are more than public or private. We like to think of our ungulate friends precisely because they make us think about animals in general. Uh, and right now, Emily and I are sort of obsessed with animals in history, but they help us to think in general about what they are beyond maybe what's most obvious or most commonly talked about. And so should we start our discussion with cattle since, you know, they're the best?

EW: 10:02

Absolutely. Yes. And cows are the bananas of the West, right? They're ubiquitous. They're everywhere. They're in every grocery store, right? Like, they're so common. And yet, rarely do we stop and think about the historical question of why that is the case, right? Like, that's the result of millions of consequential decisions by individuals and communities to make that happen. And so historically what is a cow? And funny thing, I've got an answer to that because I actually have a dog named Cow.

MB: 10:48

He's not a cow, Emily.

EW: 10:51

He's not, but it makes me think about this question a lot, probably more than a regular person. And we made all kinds of jokes asking our daughter to teach him how to moo instead of bark, right? And we have asked if she can try and get some milk from him. And she can't, right? But cow is this amazing black and white 75 pound ball of muscle and legs. And he's a dog. But when we tell people his name is Cow, they laugh. That's the initial reaction. And cows are interesting because they really are a thousand things. And they're not dogs. They're really, really distinct. They're probably more closely related to us than they are to dogs. But they're enormous, right? And I say they're thousand things because they are a thousand pounds. A thousand pounds of moving grass chewers. They're ungulates. That means they're hooved and they eat grass. And they're descended from wild aurochs, right? A-U-R-O-C-H, not like Tolkien character, right? These amazing old bulls from Central Asia. And there are nearly a thousand breeds of them. around the world. And so I think we think about biodiversity as only a wild thing and thinking about the number of different kinds of cattle, lots of different kinds of dogs too, right? But the different breeds of cattle is really sort of interesting to think about the different ways they've been used all around the world. And there are a thousand million cattle in the world today, right? So cattle are a bunch of cows, another name for a bunch of cows, also boy cows and girl cows. But I think one of the most interesting things about cows is not a thousand, but four. Cows have four stomachs, right? And those four stomachs and that very materiality of the animal is part of what helps us answer that question of why they're so ubiquitous. Those four stomachs basically allow them to become a grass factory and to transform very slowly all of that plant material into bigger cows, into more cow space. That's something that humans can't do. We can't process grass in our stomach the way that they do. This mechanism has then, by default... This mechanism being the cow has converted grass into money, or into food, as Michelle, you just mentioned. And because people can't get a lot of nutrition out of the grass itself, cows have helped them from Argentina to Mongolia convert grass into food -cheeseburgers or steak, not to mention milk or cheese or all of these other different things. And that very mechanism of sort of taking a landscape that's infertile for most human food and making it into something that allows and gives, provides sustenance, has been a big part of the story of cattle grazing over the past 150 years, right? It's helped this livestock industry as we call it to develop and who grows the grass is a big component of that industry but another one is sort of thinking about the different layers of ownership of those different sort of components.

MB: 14:41

um What's happening? Oh, my. I'm getting a Zoom, a reminder to renew my session on Zoom. Isn't it funny? I'm not really on Zoom, so I'm confused by that. But whatever. Here we go. You know, so speaking of technology, I think it's really interesting to think about another way in which cattle in particular, but I think a lot of different kinds of wildlife are also technologies. I think thinking about horses and the work horses do and the ways in which human beings have mobilized horse labor to help them do a variety of tasks makes them technology. And of course, cattle themselves are, like you just said, are grass factories in interesting ways. And so there's another blurring of that binary between nature and technology and the industry versus sort of the more than human nature that cattle exist in. I could go forever on this, but I'm not going to. I just want to say that the history that you're talking about, the millions of choices that humans have made over time to adopt livestock, and now the conversation and the debate over whether or not livestock cultivation should continue for all kinds of reasons, climate change, range condition, all of these things, that history is so vast that we're not going to delve into it today. profound piece of cultural history for the Mountain West. It's a profound tool of colonization by Anglos and the Spanish who sort of arrive in the Southwest and then eventually into the Mountain West, driving their herds, displacing indigenous peoples. Eventually, indigenous peoples themselves become really, really very excellent ranchers of both sheep and cattle. And of course, obviously sustain incredible herds of horses. That story goes on and on. And it's so fascinating. But if we fast forward kind of into the late 19th century and into the 20th century, there's this wonderful term by an author in high country news called, and he calls it the political power of the cowboy. And that is sustained, in the Mountain West in a variety of ways. I think it's important and interesting to think also about the cultural power that cattle hold. We do see them everywhere sometimes they're not in our consciousness but in fact we do i mean we're just thinking about Yellowstone you're going to talk a little bit about Yellowstone in just a second Emily but the the hit show Yellowstone takes place on a cattle ranch and there's a lot of and that's just being watched by you know millions and millions of people so there's still something some sort of mystery or some sort of uh romance to thinking about ranching in the old way. Ranching changed a lot in the mid to late 20th century and into the 21st century. But I think thinking about the ways in which livestock cultivators, also known as ranchers, have cared for their livestock over time and thought about the interactions between the ranch and the ranch environs and the cows themselves is really powerful. Throughout all of that, you're constantly seeing the cattle themselves demanding attention and being the center of ranching culture in particular. There's this power of the cow, not just the power of the cowboy, but also the power of the cow that directs the approach of range management, that directs the approach of You know, disease management, how they handle the health of the body of the cow. It's all fascinating and it blurs boundaries of nature and technology and continually asserts itself as a kind of culture, which I think is really interesting. It's important to note, I think, that what gets most of the attention in public policy conversations today is this notion of public lands grazing. And it is a thing. Cows graze in our public lands. But it's not nearly to the extent that I think a lot of people think it is. We've got something like 22 million beef cattle in the United States at this point, and only about one and a half million are actually grazing on public lands. And they're only grazing over about 25% of all public lands. So we're not going to get into this policy debate about whether or not that should be stopped. But when we think about the presence of the cow, there's a lot of cattle in this country that aren't necessarily grazing on public lands. And I think the interesting stories that cows have to tell us transcend that controversy of whether or not cattle should have access to public land. So that's kind of interesting. But 22 million beef cattle, that's like eight Los Angeleses, right? Or 30 Denver proper, or seven Denver metro areas. This is a lot of animals that exist in our world and in this country and are doing all kinds of important work to change the ways in which we conduct our daily lives.

EW: 19:38

Absolutely. And we want to focus on more than just those cows, right? But that's a tremendous number. And yet they're not by themselves, right? They're connected with this sort of more than human landscape, too.

MB: 20:08

In the 1950s and 60s as more and more recreationists start to enter into range spaces or rural spaces of the west and especially in the form of hunting right they come out and they've got their their hunting licenses to go hunt and and the ranchers are like oh my god don't shoot my cow! There's a great image from the Wyoming Stock Growers Association in the 1950s where a rancher has painted the word cow on the side of their cow and there's this hunter and I'll put this on the website, so the rancher's like, don't shoot my cow, you dumb city person who's here trying to assert your masculinity. So yeah, absolutely. They are interacting in really powerful ways that I think sometimes we don't think about.

EW: 20:54

I absolutely love that story. And I've been in National Park parking lots where an elk walks by and one of the sort of new people in the park are like, what is that? Is that a cow? That's usually where they start. And it's like, no. [laughter] But one of my favorite elk memories was a backpacking trip I did with a dear friend of mine, Christina, in the mid 1990s in Crater Lake, which of course, like you go to see the scenery, you see the lake and we'd hung our food from the bears to keep it safe. And we'd bed it down for the night. And then as soon as we got in our tent, the whole ground began to shake, right? And it was like, oh, there's an earthquake or what? There's a herd of cattle, right? Like something is coming and we're going to get trampled. And we peeked out of the tent just in time to see a herd of maybe 25 elk barrel by in front of us, not 20 yards from us with dust and smell and antlers. And it was magnificent and totally unexpected, right? And sort of one of those animal experiences that helps you sort of reorient to the world around you because you're in a kind of new place. And I've always thought that elk are such a curious animal - unlike a cow which is sort of common and banal and elk sort of feels like a frankenstein. It's like put together out of these strange parts or it's it's kind of like this game of not it right like it's not a cow it's not a horse it's not a deer yes definitely not a dog but but elk are also like cattle and And they're not distantly related from cattle, right? Sort of like going back, they're both European and North American relatives. And there's much debate whether the red deer in Europe are actually the same species as the species in North America. But one of the features that's really strange or compelling about an elk is their huge antlers. And so the Europeans called elk moose, to much confusion. When Europeans came to North America, they called the elk also moose, but they're not, right? Mooses are totally different species. But the antlers on elk grow every single year. And so to imagine the amount of testosterone that is fed through the brain of the elk to grow these huge racks. They're not tiny little horns like a cow might have, but they can be 60 inches or five feet long. long and up to six feet wide, weighing 30, 35 pounds. So imagine having a hat that's six by five feet, right? And 30, talk about a headache. And also to imagine that when they grow out of the head, they're covered in velvet and then elk scrape those antlers to get the velvet off by the end of the season. And then they go into this mating season called a rut where the testosterone is done driving the antlers. And now it's just driving the need to mate. What happens inside the species is visible for everyone to see, not just in the display, but in the smell and the sound. Enter into that hunters that go in that season to acquire meat for the winter. This ritual is a really interesting one to help hold in contrast to the idea of livestock.

MB: 24:59

Yeah, so my so my brother is a big bow hunter of elk, right? And so it's also interesting to think about those antlers as not just outward manifestations of the internal biology of the elk, but also external manifestations of sort of masculine pride among hunters, right? So that when they become when the racks get come off the animal after having been hunted successfully, and go up on the wall, and how many points they are, and they kind of become a cultural symbol of kind of an adeptness in the wild, a kind of ability to connect to one's wild self in a really interesting way, and then bring the wild into the home or into the barn or wherever you're going to hang the rack. And the number of points suggests, you know, like how good you are at hunting. And I think it's a really important subculture and another manifestation of this combining of nature and culture in really interesting ways.

EW: 26:01

Absolutely. And that trophy then is mounted on a horse or a car or a house or in gateways to Glacier Yellowstone National Parks as a pile of antlers that welcomes you into that space, right?

MB: 26:18

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in the park, in the main park there's a big antler arch. Yeah. I'm assuming it's still there.

EW: 26:27

Oh, yeah. Well, yes. Last time I was there. And others wanted to invest in this very culture Michelle just described, and also the status that it conferred. But what's so interesting about one of the things that happened there is that states and state governments were chosen more than 100 years ago to be the repository of that power, not the federal government. Federal government owns lots of lands, but the state government owns the wildlife. And we see see the cultural differences across states in the very terms that they use to describe this ownership and the way that they manage it, right? Or own it or regulate it. And very importantly, collect taxes on it, right? Collect money on the privilege to shoot those animals. So some governments like Idaho call it the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. And game is the catch-all term for animals that could be shot for sustenance. Right. And hunted down. But other neighboring states like Washington call it the Washington Department of Wildlife. And wildlife being a play and a cultural pull on this idea of an open landscape and a wild landscape where these more than humans are self-willed or have sort of more power over their own destiny and use of the landscape. And despite the differences and the changes, what developed was a North American model of wildlife management very much a Western science approach to counting animals, regulating animals, allowing some to be hunted and used, and maintaining consistent populations of others. And recognizing in that that animals interact with each other, but largely in contrast to indigenous approaches to wildlife that existed for millennia before that. And I think the big contrast here is that when we think about animals across the continent, most Indigenous groups engaged in seasonal rounds or a movement with the trends of wildlife that followed winter or spring or summer seasons. And so as Native families and communities would follow those animals seasonally, that is when they would make use of the resources that they provided. They didn't expect to have venison every night, right? It was something that came as a harvest at a particular time of year. And so the North American settlement patterns and also this model of wildlife management flattened that seasonality and didn't move it around. And so what this meant, what it resulted in largely was that you either brought your animals with you, cow, sheep, livestock, or you access wild ones through a regulated apparatus. And this had huge effects, right? Not just on the animals brought with, but also on elk and deer and species that emerged out of it.

MB: 30:08

Well, I think it's so fascinating because we actually didn't talk about this before we started recording, but I kind of want to go to the sustenance idea because I think it's really important to point out that as we think about these species, as we think of them together, as we think of them as more than what we maybe traditionally think of them as, sustenance is a really important concept. One, you can sustain people physically with these animals. They are food and they can be actual sustenance. But they're also really important cultural sustenance. And so sustaining the cultural identity of hunters. And in most cultures, those are men and males who do the hunting. But then also if we think, and we're going to get to buffalo in just a second, but then if we also think about the cultural importance of these different kinds of animals and their spirits and the ways in which they have a right to exist in most indigenous cultures, we can think of the coyote, we can think of the Blackfeet. We can think of a lot of specific indigenous cultures from the Great Plains and sort of the eastern edge of the Mountain West, these animals and their ability to move, as you're suggesting, and to exist in the way they have traditionally existed without being hemmed in, without necessarily being regulated, was really important for the cultural sustenance of Indigenous peoples. And when Western approaches to, quote unquote, game or wildlife management, or both, came in, it in many ways disrupts a lot of cultural in order to assert another kind of need, another kind of cultural need for sustenance, which is, you know, recreationists need to see the wild, to recognize that animals are, quote unquote, protected, that the access to these animals on the part of those who want to hunt them is somewhat limited so that they can maybe flourish or at least not be completely overhunted. So it's really interesting to just think of sustenance and all the ways in which cattle and elk, meet a need for sustenance among a variety of constituent groups and a variety of people. And it's so fascinating to think about the power of these animals to sustain so much human life.

EW: 32:33

And how the knowledge of that sustenance is passed down is also part of that powerful cultural apparatus, right? And, you know, how you hunt an elk is... maybe something you can learn on YouTube, right? But that is not the sort of cultural power of it. It's something that's passed down from elders to youngers, right? And it's something that is very much part of a ritualized understanding of the patterns of the natural world, right? And the animal drives that and in very real ways makes the culture more than human because of the response, whether it be Western or indigenous or somewhere in between, right? So one of the symbols, and you mentioned it already, Michelle, of the sort of wildlife in the West is Yellowstone. And Yellowstone, I mean, we could do obviously a whole show. There's so much on Yellowstone. We're not going to. But I study national parks in different cultural contexts. And Yellowstone is the oldest national park, continuous national park in the world, right? 1872, it was created. I will say other parks were proposed before that. Other parks existed in other parts of the world. But Yellowstone was created as a national park because Wyoming was a territory. It wasn't a state. So Yosemite and California was a state park and it was 1864, right? It was before Yellowstone. But Yellowstone is symbolic in all of these culturally relevant and important ways, also problematic and yada, yada, yada. But one of the things that's neat when we think about the more than human is the dynamism of Yellowstone's ecology and the ways that humans have manipulated this almost until really the last generation, almost entirely unintentionally. Right. Not sort of strategically for the health and well-being of those inhabitants. And so elk is a great example of that because the Yellowstone landscape with its amazing vistas and its glacial carved valleys and its geysers that pop up in steam. Really, the heart of Yellowstone is the animals. And the animals also shape and drive that landscape. There are kind of two big ways that we have seen that in my lifetime happen. And it is an important lesson, I think, for anyone who cares about history or is interested in understanding more than humans as animals not just managers in the political sense, but as shapers of a particular place. And in 1988, the Yellowstone ecosystem caught on fire, right? Lightning strikes started this tremendous fire that burned more than a third of the entire park, right? Almost 800,000 acres, a huge lightning cause burn of all of these supporters, right? And our supporters issue, we talk about the pine and, and What that lesson did, what that historical event did was sort of teach a U.S. public about the role of fire in an ecosystem. Because that place evolved with fire, right? Especially with indigenous burning and use of fire in particular places. But that happened. And then not too long after, in 1994, the federal government... With the help of Canadian wolves and the Nez Perce tribe and this really intricate and important and interesting reintroduction brought gray wolves back through the Endangered Species Act to Yellowstone and return free roaming packs within the park and has sort of managed them and protected them within that ecosystem ever since. And this itself is a whole nother story, right? Ancestry.com tracks the lineages of these wolf packs. It's not unknown and sort of, you know, just like nature doing its thing. It's so humanized. Many of the alpha males and alpha females have book-length biographies of who they are and where they travel. So like humans have been watching through every technology possible this return. But one of the things that happened that was mysterious and that continues to help scientists understand the landscape is that is that what wolves did when they got to the park was they chased elk, right? And by chasing these herds away from riparian areas, away from the water where the creeks meet the land and where really new willows and aspens grow up, was that they made the elk scared again. And once the elk were scared, they stopped overgrazing these really important habitats that foster all kinds of life. And while there was this affinity for this top predator, I don't think... really anyone on the ground understood how this trophic cascade, how this top predator would really change the entire web of life within the park. And species from plants to fish to beavers all responded in really dynamic and positive ways to this reintroduction.

MB: 38:03

Yeah, that's so... It's so cool because... you know, as, as we say the water is over the bridge. Is that, is that, is that the saying? Why am I so bad at sayings? Under, I think. Wait, water over the bridge suggested a major flood event. No. So yeah. I know it's water under the bridge [laughter] to talk about the folly of, of Western management of wild spaces. We are, I would suggest that, and we'll talk about this, in another episode, but that even the concept of wilderness is maybe no longer very useful. And I avoid the Anthropocene as a term and a concept because I think it's so unbelievably narcissistic of humans to name something after, you know, name an entire age after themselves. But I do think that we, that humans are managing all the time these spaces. I don't think we can ever go back to a time when just wolves are doing what they quote unquote naturally do without human intervention. But it's so fascinating to think about about the ways in which animals still continue, especially our ungulate friends here that we're talking about today, continue to you know flummox or mess up the best laid plans of human land managers. And this is never more true than in national parks, which have, as a former park ranger, it's the whole point of the park service. They have the hardest job in terms of land management, in my opinion, of any of the land management agencies, because they're trying to conserve the resource for future generations while letting future generations come in to it. And it's a fascinating thing the public policy role that the Park Service plays, we're not going to go there. But I do think it's important to think about the fact that so much of what happens in national parks is cultivated. And it's cultivated with a visitor in mind. It's partly cultivated with the ecology in mind and with the needs of animals and different more than human species. But I think it's also largely cultivated for the human gaze. And Louis Warren has written a great book, The Hunter's Game. And he's really careful about thinking about the way in which all migratory animals, and of course, most ungulates move, unlike our trees from our supporters episode, but animals bring with them as they move, social context. And I think sometimes that's rendered invisible in the ways that management systems choose to define where the animals should be. And it's particularly troubling in the ways in which national parks were created because they're meant to exclude humans in some ways, right? And so, especially indigenous peoples who have long hunted in the boundaries of newly created national parks, like Glacier, for example, the Park Service and land managers tried to exclude that traditional land use of Indigenous peoples, especially the Blackfeet. And what you'll see in that story at the turn of the 20th century, in the early 1900s, you'll see the elk moving, and even the deer and antelope, moving back and forth out of the park boundary and onto the Blackfeet Reservation and onto their traditional lands. Of course, Glacier's also So they're traditional lands. And then, of course, the Blackfeet people themselves following because they need the sustenance of the hunting of these ungulates, following them back across the boundary of Glacier. And so it's really interesting to think about the ways in which the Park Service tried to regulate. It's not really the Park Service quite yet. Park Service comes just a little bit after Glacier gets created. But it's fascinating to think about the ways in which these land managers are trying to literally outlaw the hunting in Glacier. Which they do in 1914. And despite all their efforts, the elk are wandering, the Blackfeet are wandering. Tourists and recreationists are wandering into the park, demanding to see more elk. So now the land managers are like, maybe we should try to manage the coyotes and other natural predators and try to get rid of them so the elk can be there, be all pretty and cute for the tourists. We see similar things in New Mexico where... Wild herds are fed in particularly hard winters to try to ensure their presence in a variety of different places where they will be appreciated by those seeking spiritual sustenance. It's all of these things that come into this complex approach to trying to herd, there it is [laughter], try to herd these animals into a particular role in our culture. And I think in general, it very often doesn't work.

EW: 43:09

Absolutely. And the feeding of the animals so that people can view them and they'll be in the right spots, to me, has always been just one of these really interesting... So does that make them domesticated? Are they then livestock? I mean, there's an elk herd that... Yeah, we see all the time that lives within this perfect fence. It gets fed every winter, and that's to keep it out of the crops that are growing to feed the cattle later,

MB: 43:36

We're going to talk about the bison here, and Colorado especially. I always remember driving from Grand Junction to Denver. My grandparents lived in Denver, and we would go from the Western Slope over to see bison- to see grandma and grandpa. And you drive on Genesee Mountain right as you're starting to get to Denver. I always, as a kid, knew I was getting to Denver because you'd see the buffalo sitting out there in Genesee Park. And they were there. I didn't know this until I was older and later in history and thinking historically, but that buffalo herd that sits there had been there for really more than a century. The Genesee Park area was the first mountain park acquired by the City of Denver. So we can think about that interesting juxtaposition between city and and mountain and parks and urban areas. But it was populated with the bison in 1914 as a conservation effort. And the first two members of the herd came from the Denver Zoo. So you're sort of driving through the Rocky Mountains and you see these buffalo and you think, oh my gosh, look at the the iconic natural statement species. And there they are grazing on the beautiful, in the beautiful foothills as we head into Denver. And in fact, they came from the zoo. Then eventually, the park managers bring in buffalo from Yellowstone, from that park's herd. And Yellowstone Park, of course, sustained the herd by feeding them at various times and what have you. And so it's just funny because the appearance of the Genesee Park bison with their prominent shoulders along with this DNA testing, it indicates that the herd is actually a rare vestige of the original American bison. So they are really not human-created hybrid of some kind. But their behavior... is still domesticated, as you're saying. It's still almost cattle-like in that they're sitting there waiting to be fed, and they're not really roaming like bison are supposed to roam. Anyway, so that is a tangent, but it leads us into the bison, which is, I think, one of the best species.

EW: 45:45

Well, and let's stop for a second and talk about bison buffalo, right? Because I think one of the really interesting things about this animal is that in English, we use the terms bison and buffalo and that is itself a transgressor because there's just no reason and no sort of hope for cleaning up the usage of bison and buffalo, which are really sort of the same. And when we say the same, we're talking about this enormous animal, right? We're talking about sort of picture a hairy, noisy, smelly beast the size of a Volkswagen bug. Do people know what a Volkswagen bug is anymore, Michelle?

MB: 46:57

I assume so. Although I was just thinking about that it might be smelly to you, Emily, but I bet if you're like another buffalo, it probably smells just fine. I think smelly is in the nose of the beholder or whatever, right? [laughter]

EW: 47:14

I guess that's my cultural preference, right? That's right. For us non-smelly. Right. I think buffalo are one of these really interesting places where indigenous rights have actually been embedded in law. And there's symbolism of this, you mentioned the nickel, sort of the Park Service emblem has the buffalo on it. But more importantly, there are a number of treaties in the late 19th century. So for example, here in Idaho, the Shoshone and Bannock peoples were moved out and are subject to the Fort Bridger Treaty of 1868. And one of the critical pieces of that treaty is historical access to hunting and fishing grounds on all non-private lands, essentially. And so retaining the rights to hunt and fish on spaces throughout the Intermountain West is an articulated right within that treaty. And this idea of being able to hunt buffalo, And also raise buffalo. There's a buffalo herd that is raised on the Fort Hall Reservation, for example. And the ability to sort of do both is this amazing interloping of space. But there's also this really neat piece of the restoration story around the bison that's tied to indigenous leadership. And I think that's a transboundary piece as well. So we talked about the wolf as being sort of subject to the laws of the United States and whatnot. And it's actually been the Blackfoot peoples and the Blackfoot Confederation that have led to a great extent this initiative, which they call the ENI initiative, which is the Blackfoot word for buffalo, to have a free roaming bison herd in the North American West. So a Canadian and United States free roaming herd, not one behind a fence. And the idea is to start in national parks, on native lands, but also to expand that maybe to a larger scale. And a free-rooming bison herd raises a lot of questions, right? No one knows how the animals themselves would fare crossing roads, crossing lands, crossing shopping malls, right? They already live in a mixed landscape, right? One with grasslands and mountains and rivers and aspen and all of these things, but so much more of that landscape has human development on it now. And they face predators like grizzly bears and wolf packs, but also us, right? And usually unintentionally in that way. But the Blackfoot Confederacy has been asking for a decade now, what would it look like to transgress these jurisdictional divides, US, Canada, Native Nations, national parks, and let the buffalo roam? So talk about interlopers, right?

MB: 50:29

Right, absolutely. Yeah, And again, buffalo are so powerful, both in their physical bodies, but also in what they mean to so many people, that their power is sort of trying to lead various groups of people to really rethink all of the different kinds of boundaries that we want to hang on to so much in the Mountain West, but across Western culture, which is really, it's needed. It's well, in my opinion, well past time. We have this whole other section about saving the buffalo, right? Because that's the other interesting thing is Western culture and especially colonization has a tendency to overhunt and destroy stuff and then go, oh God, we didn't mean to do that. Or, you know, look what we did. And then we try to save it or try to bring it back. Wolves, as you've mentioned earlier, another case in point. But because that was just such a beautiful place to stop is to just think about the future and the possibilities that exist around bison conservation restoration um and thinking about the ways in which animals are so powerful in in inspiring humans to rethink things culturally. I think that's a really beautiful way to stop. I think I'll just, we'll just add the part about the American Buffalo Society and some of the, or bison, sorry, I did it. I confused the two. American Bison Society. And we'll put that on the website and folks can go look at it. It's really cool because there's a great primary source that one can go read, written by, you know, the executive secretary of the organization about going and trying to see the wild bison herd that's being oh so very cultivated. in Dixon, Montana, in the Montana bison range. So we'll put that on the website so you can learn more than we've talked about here. And then I think we should just kind of stop where we are because I think it's a beautiful place to stop.

EW: 52:25

I agree, Michelle. And what a wonderful ride it's been, right? To think through these animals and I think seed these questions of who's in charge of nourishing and stewarding wildlife and who gets sustenance from these relationships and how can we better use the past to think about being purposeful in the future around concepts that aren't clear binaries, right? That aren't clear wild or domesticated or civilized or uncivilized or even one species or another. And I think helping our world think through the sort of cultural power of the more than human, it's really important to take the past in order to do that. So thanks for going on this journey with us, dear listener.

MB: 53:18

Yes, totally agree. And of course, animals and all things more than human are more than you think they are. Can't wait till next time. Bye, Em. Bye, folks.

And that's it for this episode of More Than: a Podcast. We hope you've loved what you've learned and we hope it's made you think a little bit differently about nature and about history. We hope you've learned more about the world around you and the histories and stories that make up those places and those more than human beings who are so important to our historical past. We want to thank our guests and our amazing producer, Ruxandra Guidi. We'd also like to give credit to Jason Shaw, who composed our music, Back to the Woods. We'd also like to cite our sound effects from the BBC, and we'll give more specific citation information on our website. There, you can also find sources that we've used and links to other interesting stories to continue your learning. So go check out morethanapodcast.earth. If you'd like to, please leave a review about this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for the next episode of More Than a Podcast.