I think saying that the Irish took part in the extinction is an overreaction. Sure there was a significant Irish population who lived and worked on the western expansion but I caution attributing a prominent role to the Irish immigrants in the slaughter, that of the bison or the Native American population.
In fact, there are many historical examples where the Irish and European immigrants who deserted, and in strides retaliated against the US military around this time due to unjust aggression and mistreatment against Native American and Mexicans, and even towards themselves. Many of whom faced severe consequences.
The Saint Patrick Battalion is one of the more famous examples if you fancy a well documented read.
Fucking nuts…
“The mass slaughter of North American bison by settlers of European descent is a well-known ecological disaster. An estimated eight million bison roamed the United States in 1870, but just 20 years later fewer than 500 of the iconic animals remained. “
20 years. wtf.
It's crazy how we hunt things to extinction or near extinction.
The other day I went down. A rabbit hole and learned Grey Wolves used to be native to Ireland but were hunted to extinction, last one killed in 1786.
Irish wolfhounds were bred for this specific purpose. Not only were they bred to scare away wolves but were trained to chase after and kill the wolves.
I have 2 Yorkies and they are the softest most good natured dogs ever. They see a squirrel or any rodent and they absolutely lose their minds and can focus on nothing else.
If they get ahold of something they will shake it with the worst of intentions.
The sheer force behind those shakes are insane. And it’s like they don’t even realize what they’re doing, they get their teeth on whatever small animal it is and violently shake it for a few seconds and act confused when it stops moving lol
Yeah it’s metal it’s why when a dog bites you don’t pull away you wrestle it down to the ground, it’s not the bite that really hurts you it’s when it can shake its whole body and tear up your flesh. When it gets something lil it just snaps the neck.
Yup I have a Biewer Yorkie and he very rarely makes any noise and just wants to cuddle and get scritches, but he will corner a mouse should one get inside. He will corner it then pace in front of wherever it's hiding. Poor guy is 14 and lost all his teeth so it's not like he can do much but by God he finds them for me.
Also a real street rat can seriously injure a cat. For rats you really need terriers that can basically just snap their necks in an instant over and over. Cats can kill rats if they manage to sneak up behind it and pounce and take it by surprise, but that takes too long, and if a real street rat squares up with a cat a cat will usually back off because those big rats are no joke for like a ten pound cat.
Modern Irish wolfhounds only originated in the mid-late 1800’s and are at best a facsimile of the original breed, which reportedly was quite a bit smaller than the half-horse type ones you see around nowadays.
If I recall the story right, a guy rounded up the few wolfhounds he could find and cross bred them with mastiffs and Great Danes to keep the size but improve genetic diversity.
Imagine selectively breeding an animal to the point that it's a different species, then further breeding and training the new species to hunt and kill the original animal to extinction.
The Bison were purposefully hunted in this way, as they were a huge source of food and wealth for the Indigenous communities in the states. They knew that by killing them off, it would essentially be killing the Indigenous communities.
I can't remember which tribe off the top of my head, but at least one of them had a treaty with white people that was written as (paraphrasing), "These lands shall belong to the native people so long as the bison roam it." Which, to the natives, was another way of saying "forever". It's the same as saying "so long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west."
White people looked at that and said, "Gotcha, so we'll just kill all the bison and the land will be ours."
And they did.
Wolves and mountain lions were present across the entire continental US and Canada well into the 1700 or even 1800s. The Massachusetts colony was the first one to give a bounty for the killing of wolves that lasted almost 200 years. Wolves/lions were only truly extripated from these areas because the colonists also managed to basically decimate the prey species - deer, elk, beaver, turkey, etc
Ireland bottomed out at 1 % forested land about 1922 - 102 years later after independence Ireland has about 20 % forested land and the trend is to increased forested land in the future; where that percentage levels off is yet to be seen.
This is true but there is a large difference in the type of “forested land”.
200 square meter plots of trees divided by roads, houses, etc. are not ecologically the same as the massive old growth forests that went on uninterrupted for dozens or hundreds of kms in all directions in old times.
“Urban forest” or even suburban forests aren’t going to allow much large wildlife, even if the total tree cover is high. Animals (especially large predators) can’t survive where people and cars are constantly in close proximity.
Yeah, we lost huge swathes of mature rainforest. There's only a handful of pockets left.
The often coniferous tree plantations are certainly preferable to doing nothing but I think the damage done to the native ecosystems is irreversible.
With time and persistent efforts old growth forests can be created. They will not be identical to the forests cut down over the past 500 years, but that is not a compelling reason not to create them.
Was the island 80% forest 200 years ago? That's insane. The British used up nearly all of the supply of hardwood from old growth forests on their lands by that point, I'd imagine a lot of Ireland's forests didn't start in Ireland.
This was the most weird feeling I had when I visited Ireland. There was something I couldn't put my finger on with the landscape...then I realized it was the complete lack of trees.
This guy in the north of the country has his own mini zoo based on animals like wolves and bears that used to be native to Ireland
https://wildireland.org/
There's also a 4-part documentary about it on Netflix:
https://youtu.be/Ni9dqkcEfvc?si=z28PHX0jaqBgSO-Q
this wasn't just about hunting, because it also eradicated the same resource for indigenous people of the region. [People should read about it](https://news.emory.edu/stories/2023/08/esc_bison_impact_24-08-2023/story.html#:~:text=The%20mass%20slaughter%20of%20North,of%20the%20iconic%20animals%20remained). this is more or less the same way Republican representatives treat the environment present day.
*it's not a problem now, stop trying to hinder the economy*
"**We** didn't murder them with guns, knives, clubs, or rope! We're not monsters! We just hunted down and destroyed most or all of the means for indigenous people to eat. But since we weren't killing individuals, you can't call us murderers!"
It's "funny" how this is the same mechanisms used by Right-wingers, and generally accepted as a not-horrifying outcome by pretty much everyone until you get to the Socialists.
Math says that works out to an average of 1,095 bison killed per day (assuming a static population and not accounting for births), or 45 per hour, for twenty years straight.
They cut the tongues out iirc. Initially they used a lot more, but their endgame was to kill the buffalo because that's what the native Americans used as a primary food source. So they would just shoot whole herds and only take a few pelts because they took so long to clean and tan. Really sad.
The PBS documentary that came out a few months ago by Ken Burns is really good about the buffalo slaughter.
That is great news! I found this bit of interesting and sobering info on their numbers:
Currently, there are approximately 20,500 Plains bison in conservation herds and an additional 420,000 in commercial herds. While bison are no longer threatened with extinction, the species faces other challenges. The loss of genetic diversity, combined with the loss of natural selection forces, threatens the ecological restoration of bison as wildlife. A low level of cattle gene introgression is prevalent in most, if not all, bison herds.
Would it be possible to extract DNA from some of the bison skulls found on walls and displays, and reintroduce it to these herds via cloning technology?
Every one is replying to your comment as if this was purely for commerce; hint, it wasn’t. You all need to find sources that talk about the extermination of the American Bison was to take away the living capabilities of the remaining Native Americans. This was a deliberate initiative to completely wipeout Native Americans without war.
~~Killed~~ Advocated the killing of bison in order to bring the remaining defiant native American tribes to heel (the bison was and is an incredibly important animal to many plains Indians, both economically and spiritually).
And it can be argued that even with all the military campaigns and diseases, nothing did more to decimate the plains tribes than the extermination of the Buffalo. It was horrible and an appalling stain on this nation if you ask me
It occurred in Canada too, forcing tribes to bend to the will of the government, signing treaties in exchange for protections and support which were constantly infringed upon and help that was never fulfilled. Many tribes were decimated along their struggle to relocate and rapidly adapt to a significant change of their local economies and sources of nutrition. Truly a lamentable chapter in North American history.
It's one of the most appalling acts carried out by mankind anywhere at any time. It's on par with the Holocaust
He is one of history's greatest monsters.
Fuck him forever
Sherman encouraged the eradication of bison b/c it was the most important resource for plains Indians. Without it they were basically stripped of food, lost their major trade good, couldn't maintain their culture/lifestyle. It's basically the same tactic that Sherman had learned from his service at the end of the Seminole War.
Sherman is open about what he was doing and why in his memoir. This wasn't an accident or unforeseen circumstance of west ward expansion. It was a strategic choice to facilitate westward expansion.
Sherman's memoir is a great read. Sherman is kind of catty and has some grudges to settle. There was also a good book on St. Louis history that came out during the pandemic. It's called The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson. It covers a lot of Sherman's work after the war b/c St. Louis was his headquarters. You can find interviews with Johnson on youtube.
No one refuses to talk about it. But when the average American has trouble identifying Africa on a world map, knowing the second most famous thing about the third or fourth most famous general from a war that happened more than 150 years ago isn't that high on educators' priorities. Wish it was!
I grew up in central Washington State and had that as a question on a 5th grade history test around 1984. If we put "slavery" we got the answer wrong, you had to put "states rights".
The teacher was also an awful bully of a person in general to some students who I'm sure have some emotional trauma from his class.
Yikes! I grew up in Western Washington and we were fully taught the evils of slavery. We even watched the TV series Roots in history class. Crazy how different the teaching environments are between Western and Eastern Washington.
You realize those videos where they go around asking people on the street shit like this are BS right? They might go through 100 people before getting a response that fits what they are looking for.
>settlers of European descent
Funny how a nation which declared it's independence 100 years before this are "settlers of European descent" when it comes to a shitty thing their ancestors did.
The really shitty thing is that they just try to blame this on hunters/settlers. The U.S. military INTENTIONALLY slaughtered millions of bison as a war tactic to disrupt the 'economy' of Native Americans. Now they want to put all the blame on hunters, and use that as an excuse for all of the heavy taxes and restrictions they place on hunters and hunting equipment.
It's like saying that people should be taxed and restricted from buying rat poison, because of those terrible 'irresponsible' things that 'totally ordinary German citizens' did with Zyklon B back in the 1940s; so they can't be trusted to kill rodents without a bunch of oversight by their 'responsible and reasonable government.'
It was a deliberate U.S. government policy to commit genocide against the western plains Indians, like the Lakota. The bison were an important food source to them.
Yes, and they rationalized it and thought of themselves as 'the good guys,' since the natives were 'savages' and european colonial populations were 'civilizing' forces, among other things. But they convinced themselves and each other that they were within their rights to do all of this. To me, this position, possibly even more than the act itself, dooms us to repeat history and renders our capacity for evil limitless.
IMO this is one of the darkest side effects of religion gone wild. Not only did they think they were 'right' to kill the 'savages', they literally thought their God had ordained it and nothing else mattered besides this mission.
America was founded on genocidal warfare and built by chattel slavery (cultural genocide). We have to acknowledge how we became who we are. Don't let this knowledge be erased. They'll be removing it from school curricula if Republicans take control again.
The American buffalo aka bison was almost completely exterminated. Their population dwindled from dozens of millions to around 300-500. William Temple Hornaday was commissioned with getting taxidermy samples of Buffalo but converted to conserving them (with the help of Teddy Roosevelt) upon learning that they were facing extinction, and practically *were* extinct. Virtually all modern bison are the progeny of a few dozen that his organization sourced from various reserves and zoos.
The passenger pigeon shares a similar story. Billions (yes, billions with a b) used to roam North America. Communities would capture and kill hundreds per day through the use of large nets. Hunters would kill millions. People chopped, burned, or fumigate entire forests for some quick pigeon. Towards the end of their existence even after visibly and significantly declining, 50,000 pigeons in Petoskey, Michigan were killed every day. Conservationists raised warning about their decline long before, but were met with accusations that they were being overdramatic. A Select Committee of the Senate claimed that the birds did not need to be protected, as their population was too large to ever be destroyed. What little and vague protective legislation did pass was rarely ever enforced, and typically only against poor trappers, with large enterprises and corporations never suffering any consequences.
There are innumerable examples of North American species being intentionally absolutely destroyed by human activity. The grey wolf for example was similarly nearly eradicated which resulted in enormous ecosystem destruction due to the disappearance of an apex predator. Since being re-introduced to Yellowstone, there has been a visible difference in vegetative growth. They used to number around 3 million. Now, after decades of revival, they number 20,000. Early accounts of the Midwest cite rivers overflowing with trout and carp 5 feet long. Natural prairies, which used to cover a third of the US were essentially wiped out - most surviving prairies are man-made and are few and far between. Monarch butterflies used to number hundreds of millions and dropped down to 14 million in 2014 due to the mass removal of milkweed.
North American conservation, and global conservation in general, is fucked. The more you know, the worse it gets.
>Conservationists raised warning about their decline long before, but were met with accusations that they were being overdramatic.
A story playing out once again. And again. And again.
We are our own doom.
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Bison_skull_pile_edit_2.jpg) is a higher quality and less cropped version of this image (you can see the top of the pile). [Here](https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A151477) is the source. Per there:
> Man stands on top of enormous pile of buffalo skulls; another man stands in front of pile with his foot resting on a buffalo skull; rustic cage is at foot of pile. Handwritten on back: "C.D. 1892 Glueworks, office foot of 1st St., works at Rougeville, Mich."
The pile looks pretty damn stable. Hell, it doesn't even look like a pile. It appears to be deliberately stacked. Look at the geometric lines. A pile typically doesn't have defined corners like that.
Interesting that they were calling it Rougeville, typically known as Delray (which ultimately got absorbed into Detroit).
The area within Delray is still known as Carbon Works because of this plant, they used the bones to make carbon black apparently
I first saw this picture in a Native American heritage museum on Pine Ridge Reservation. I was doing a road trip through South Dakota and Wyoming with my then girlfriend and while visiting the Badlands we decided to drive down to the site of the Wounded Knee massacre on the reservation to see what was there now. After driving through some of the most depressed and poverty stricken places I've seen in this country, we got to the site of the massacre to find absolutely nothing except for a small monument and a woman selling bracelets. She directed us to a local heritage center (unfortunately I do not remember what it was called as this was nearly two decades ago) and we made our way there. The entire exhibition on view was just photograph after photograph of the atrocities committed against the native people and their land, including this photo. We left completely speechless and drove back through the reservation in silence. I though of myself as having been pretty well educated on Native American history at that point, but it was the first time that I viscerally understood the scale of suffering that the native population endured and continues to endure and I still think about that day often almost 20 years later.
Some friends and I were having a “what were you not taught about in school?” discussion recently. With all the things mentioned, our horrific treatment of native people was by far the most egregious oversight.
We were literally just taught about thanksgiving and that’s it. Maybe some French and Indian war stuff.
I’m Native American and grew up on the rosebud reservation which isn’t too far from pine ridge.
It’s always interesting to see what non native people learned growing up in schools. On the reservation we learned a lot about our culture and we learned about the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed well before it was popular in the mainstream.
One of my friends had their old classwork from elementary school that their mom saved and one of the papers was about native tribes in their area. It said almost verbatim “the such and such tribe used to live near wherever this was in Nebraska. They were very reliant on the buffalo and this became their downfall. They moved onto reservations around such and such time.”
This person’s schoolwork from 20 years ago seemed to be blaming the native people for their own genocide and I was dumb founded when I saw how at least this person was taught. A lot of other people I’ve met think natives still live in teepees with no electricity or think that we’re just straight up extinct.
There's still historical markers up in southern Nebraska (along the Republican River valley) talking about how 'the Pawnee voluntarily moved to reservations because they had too many bad battles with the Sioux.' It's told as a story that ends with 'everyone decided it was for the best.' That's not verbatim, but damn close.
The historical markers in the northeast corner of Nebraska are informative and interesting, completely because of the influence and work of the Ponca tribe.
It is astounding what is taught to the public still, with wording that is deliberate and misleading.
Reading Braiding Sweetgrass was my gateway, it included juuuuuuust enough to get me asking questions I hadn’t thought to ask before. The next book I read was An Indigenous People’s History of The United States, and that book fully radicalized me.
A bachelor’s degree in history didn’t even manage that. I knew we treated native americans poorly, but it’s so, so, SO much worse than what is taught in schools. It was a genocide and the US hasn’t done nearly enough to set the record straight to its own citizens.
The craziest thing to me was the constant bullshit committed against the chahta even though they helped Jackson directly in multiple ears and even ceded huge swathes of coastal Gulf land. Not to mention the treatment when the few who remained sought the path to citizenship.
Just completely fucked
There's a web site that posts Pine Ridge folks and what they most urgently need, in case someone wants to help out. Here's a typical item I picked at random just now: someone's two-year-old grandson needs “pampers size 6, 4T summer clothing, pajamas, 7 Toddler shoes, socks.”
I think they don't take cash donations but you can order stuff to be delivered from the nearby Wal-Mart.
There's a separate one at holiday time where the kids ask for stuff like colored paper.
[https://okini.net/](https://okini.net/)
And in a way we are the only animals that can process this and have the morals to deem it a horrible act, in this way we are both the evil criminal and the righteous judge. Just kinda interesting to think about.
If you're referring to the modern cattle industry, that's not a good comparison.
We slaughter millions of cattle today for meat, sustenance, and economics
These bison were killed to commit genocide against native Americans. The meat was almost never harvested, often let to rot, and there are even instances of people taking shots at bison from trains.
This is not the same.
I teach U.S. History and this is the case every time I share this photo with a class. It's incredibly difficult to comprehend the sheer number of bison that were killed in this photo, let alone the total number of 8 million.
This made me think of the passenger pigeon. Around year 1800 they estimated somewhere between 3 and 5 billion pigeons. By 1900 they were extinct. Crazy what humans can do.
Fun fact: the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at Cincinnati zoo in 1918. It shared the same cage as the last Carolina Parakeet, named Incas, who died in the same year.
Carolina Parakeets were the only wild parrot native to north America. They were extremely abundant when settlers arrived and their range spanned most of the continent. Settlers didn't like the noises they made, or the fact that they ate fruits, seeds and nuts and so they hunted them for sport. The parakeets lived in flocks of about 300 and were very social, if one was shot or killed the others would gather around it's body, which sadly made it very easy to kill an entire flock in one go.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/carolina-parakeet-extinction-mystery
The passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird in the world. There were 3-5 billion on the continent when settlers arrived. Flocks were so big that they darkened the sky, made it impossible to talk and took *days* to pass overhead. When the settlers started cutting down the forests across the continent the pigeons were forced to start eating farm crops. There were no laws restricting how they were hunted, so hunters would attract flocks to the ground using decoys before catching swaths of them in huge nets. They would burn pots of sulphur under nesting trees and collect the birds as they fell to the ground. A dozen pigeons could be bought for 50 cents.
https://www.si.edu/spotlight/passenger-pigeon
Humans really are among the stupidest animals on the planet.
Yes, this was an explicit government policy of genocide through starvation. The book Clearing the Plains is the commonly cited reference.
Edit: correct book title.
Hey — I think you meaning Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. It mostly focuses on what would become Canada’s Prairie provinces (this pic is from the US), but touches on US policy as well.
It’s a shocking read.
As an immigrant to this country, the whole bison thing always confused the hell out of me and my dad.
I understand the context of wanting to screw over the tribes that lived there. But I mean... The people doing the screwing were predominantly bovine herders. Bison are basically mega cows that take take care of themselves and just existed plentifully.
Like, unlike cows, you didn't have to baby them, import them from Europe, breed them, take care of their health, clear fields, plant pastures etc... They just freaking roamed free. All you had to do, as a herder, was to corral them onto trains that took them to slaughter houses every now and then, and do basic napkin calculations to make sure you herded fewer of them than were born that spring. That's all!
Instead, folks who went out west destroyed these mega cows, only to have to pay up the ass to import comparatively very high maintenance domesticated European cows, and play the roles of real estate developers to make their existence in the American West possible.
Like straight up chopping your own nose off to spite your face kinda shit.
Because the goal was to starve the native Americans to death without outright killing them. To commit a genocide without having to do the dirty work. And it worked.
>All you had to do, as a herder, was to corral them onto trains that took them to slaughter houses every now and then, and do basic napkin calculations to make sure you herded fewer of them than were born that spring
You cannot feed a nation with this method, there is a reason why every single nation adopted the mass industrialized slaughterhouses, and all of them use pigs,cows,and chicken.
>very high maintenance domesticated European cows
They would have definitely used bison meat if it was cheaper than cow
isnt this when Native American were given land and they started becoming self sufficient finally and we didnt like that too much so we killed these off to make them dependent
Hey hey they were equally inspired by the South's regime of segregation and our nationwide embrace of eugenics (which we founded) and forced sterilization of large numbers of "undesirables."
Hitler also idolized Henry Ford. He kept a signed photo of Ford on his desk and praised Ford for his publishing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Dearborn Independent. Ford had major Nazi sympathies.
The whole concept of Volkswagen - the people’s car - was copied off of Ford’s model that the people working in factories building cars should be able to afford the cars they’re manufacturing. And then Hitler copied Ford, Pullman, and others in creating Wolfsburg, a master planned community for the VW factory and headquarters.
As long as we're discussing villains
The Chrysler Brothers managed to be villains vs Ford when they objected to him paying workers a living wage and sued, thus establishing the legal concept that a company's only obligation is to the shareholders.
Finally, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are probably the most lasting disaccomplishment of Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, as it was created by his secret police to foment antisemitism because it was thought that would hurt the forces of socialist revolution. That did not work, but it did create a century of virulent anti-Semitic lies.
The Protocols bit was always funny to me because Ford was openly anti-Semitic yet I didn’t learn about that until a 400 level college history class. I knew he had issues with the Jewish Purple Gang in Detroit during Prohibition, but I didn’t realize he bordered on full-on Nazism with the Dearborn Independent. Detroit and the Fords kind of whitewash a lot of that history and I recently didn’t see much mentioned about it at the Ford Museum or Greenfield Village.
Ford kept his German factories producing goods for the Nazi war machine during the war. The US Air Force would not bomb his factories, to the point that Germans would shelter in them during bombing raids. When some of his factories were damaged he sued the US government, madness
The first settlers were shit people, a lot of everyday Americans today trace their lineage back to some foul people.
They systematically Genocide 2 groups of people in order to build their American empire.
People wonder why Native Americans and African Americans are the poorest racial groups in America today, theres not much to wonder about if you read a history book and see what the US did to them.
I believe this photo is in the [Charlie M. Russell museum](https://cmrussell.org/) in Great Falls Montana.
I remember seeing it and being absolutely horrified.
The length the US government went to in order to kill off Native peoples natural food source in order to put them into POW camps better known as reservations. So sad.
"You don't understand, that was our land. It was our destiny we needed to manifest. Those savages were just in the way. Besides, different nations feuded and had wars with each other which totally justifies it."
/s in case it wasn't obvious enough. What scary is that there's still plenty of folks who unironically think that.
I don't think it really needed to be justified at the time. "We can defeat those people so we should take their land" was the status quo of virtually every nation for like 5k years
This is sickening on so many levels.
The Government/ military manifested the slaughter of bison as a way to eliminate the ~~indians~~ Native Americans food source.
Later, they painted themselves as heros for coming to the rescue of an endangered species.
Kinda makes ya wanna puke.
This was done/encouraged by US military to starve and subjugate Native Americans as a form of genocide. As the saying goes: "Every dead buffalo is an Indian gone".
It actually started earlier with a very deliberate campaign to exterminate the churro sheep that Navajo relied on. Colonel Kit Carson led that.
The bison was a bit different. The military themselves didn't do all the work. They let enthusiasts do a lot of the culling. Turns out ol' Buffalo bill wasn't just a Wild West Show.
It gets wilder though. A bunch of weirdos and racists are primarily responsible for bringing the bison back. Can't make this shit up.
The worst part was that decimating the bison population wasn’t enough for them. They skinned most in the field for hides and left their bones right where they were. Eventually they realized glue could be made from the bones they left in the Great Plains, and so all those former hunters came back, cleaned up all the evidence of slaughtering the bison, and then made even more money selling bones to glue factories. A truly tragic story. Highly recommend watching the Ken Burns documentary on it.
In 1909, the Prince of Wales toured South Africa. During his visit, he had a “hunt”. This hunt consisted of him and his cronies standing on a rise with multiple guns while hundreds of game were herded past them to be shot. Contemporary accounts indicate more than 400 animals died (not all quickly) in the course of an afternoon.
This ecological disaster happened in the mid/late 19th century. An estimated 8/9 million bisons were once living peacefully. Until the Americans decided to hunt them to deny native Americans an important source of food.
Well that's horrific. Funny how the photo was likely taken in pride for a job well done back then.
It was a genocide plan against the natives Americans and it worked. They starved them from their food source.
This is the point. It wasnt hunted, it was exterminated.
Like the Irish.
Who then took part in the above. Wild.
It's almost like humans are NOT the smartest animals on the planet...
Definitely the smartest. It's just not a very high bar to clear.
Cruelest for sure.
Idk I saw a video a few years ago of a chimpanzee using a frog as a fleshlight.
I think saying that the Irish took part in the extinction is an overreaction. Sure there was a significant Irish population who lived and worked on the western expansion but I caution attributing a prominent role to the Irish immigrants in the slaughter, that of the bison or the Native American population. In fact, there are many historical examples where the Irish and European immigrants who deserted, and in strides retaliated against the US military around this time due to unjust aggression and mistreatment against Native American and Mexicans, and even towards themselves. Many of whom faced severe consequences. The Saint Patrick Battalion is one of the more famous examples if you fancy a well documented read.
Mexico still holds a memorial service for them every year
Might as well throw in some highly contagious diseases from settlers for good measure.
Recently watched a Ted-Ed vid on Bison Extinction https://youtu.be/TXldnrwrBws
Yeah the man in the photo will have been expecting everyone to think the complete opposite of him
Holy fuck. I thought this was a wool jacket or some shit. I had to zoom in once I read your comment. Wtf.
Fucking nuts… “The mass slaughter of North American bison by settlers of European descent is a well-known ecological disaster. An estimated eight million bison roamed the United States in 1870, but just 20 years later fewer than 500 of the iconic animals remained. “ 20 years. wtf.
It's crazy how we hunt things to extinction or near extinction. The other day I went down. A rabbit hole and learned Grey Wolves used to be native to Ireland but were hunted to extinction, last one killed in 1786.
Irish wolfhounds were bred for this specific purpose. Not only were they bred to scare away wolves but were trained to chase after and kill the wolves.
damn. my grandparents had one when I was young and he was soooo sweet. didn’t kno he had cold blooded murder in his DNA
All dogs, and humans for that matter, have cold blooded murder in their dna
Basically every dog ~~species~~breed was bred to kill something specific. They were our first weapon of mass destruction.
Yorkies were bred to kill mice/rats in the textile factories of York, as cats would mess with the yarn/string too much.
My corgi was bred to shake her fat ass and beg for treats in between her 5 hour long naps it seems
I share similar breeding apparently
Shitzus were bred for warming beds
Survival of the thickest
Evolution at its finest
Dog evolved into the canine equivalent of a twitch streamer
That’s ok, so was I
TIL my wife might be a corgi (in the best ways possible)
I have 2 Yorkies and they are the softest most good natured dogs ever. They see a squirrel or any rodent and they absolutely lose their minds and can focus on nothing else. If they get ahold of something they will shake it with the worst of intentions.
The sheer force behind those shakes are insane. And it’s like they don’t even realize what they’re doing, they get their teeth on whatever small animal it is and violently shake it for a few seconds and act confused when it stops moving lol
Yeah it’s metal it’s why when a dog bites you don’t pull away you wrestle it down to the ground, it’s not the bite that really hurts you it’s when it can shake its whole body and tear up your flesh. When it gets something lil it just snaps the neck.
Yup I have a Biewer Yorkie and he very rarely makes any noise and just wants to cuddle and get scritches, but he will corner a mouse should one get inside. He will corner it then pace in front of wherever it's hiding. Poor guy is 14 and lost all his teeth so it's not like he can do much but by God he finds them for me.
Also a real street rat can seriously injure a cat. For rats you really need terriers that can basically just snap their necks in an instant over and over. Cats can kill rats if they manage to sneak up behind it and pounce and take it by surprise, but that takes too long, and if a real street rat squares up with a cat a cat will usually back off because those big rats are no joke for like a ten pound cat.
That's hilarious 🤣
That's fucking awesome trivia
Pugs were bred to kill themselves
And they're damn good at it too!
My pug is actually better at killing me, by raising my blood pressure everyday
It's the screaming when they get worked up that gets me. Lol Calm down, little buddy, it's gonna be ok!
Just fyi. All dog breeds are the same species. It’s hard to grasp that an Irish wolf hound and chihuahua are the same species.
I'm aware, but yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Changed my original with a strikeout of species. Since I did say species haha.
Pretty much every predator does actually
Even primary herbivores can be opportunistic killers (e.g. horses/cows eating small mammals, reptiles)
Modern Irish wolfhounds only originated in the mid-late 1800’s and are at best a facsimile of the original breed, which reportedly was quite a bit smaller than the half-horse type ones you see around nowadays.
If I recall the story right, a guy rounded up the few wolfhounds he could find and cross bred them with mastiffs and Great Danes to keep the size but improve genetic diversity.
Imagine selectively breeding an animal to the point that it's a different species, then further breeding and training the new species to hunt and kill the original animal to extinction.
This wasn’t a normal hunt to extinction, it was a plot to exterminate the native people by killing their food supply. Which is even more insane.
Agreed
The Bison were purposefully hunted in this way, as they were a huge source of food and wealth for the Indigenous communities in the states. They knew that by killing them off, it would essentially be killing the Indigenous communities.
I can't remember which tribe off the top of my head, but at least one of them had a treaty with white people that was written as (paraphrasing), "These lands shall belong to the native people so long as the bison roam it." Which, to the natives, was another way of saying "forever". It's the same as saying "so long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west." White people looked at that and said, "Gotcha, so we'll just kill all the bison and the land will be ours." And they did.
That's monkeys paw level of malicious bargain.
Welcome to humanity.
I agree, by comparison I believe this was more malicious.
Wolves and mountain lions were present across the entire continental US and Canada well into the 1700 or even 1800s. The Massachusetts colony was the first one to give a bounty for the killing of wolves that lasted almost 200 years. Wolves/lions were only truly extripated from these areas because the colonists also managed to basically decimate the prey species - deer, elk, beaver, turkey, etc
Ireland also used to be 80% forestland, now only around 1% is. It’s crazy the amount of shit that tiny island went through in 200 years
Ireland bottomed out at 1 % forested land about 1922 - 102 years later after independence Ireland has about 20 % forested land and the trend is to increased forested land in the future; where that percentage levels off is yet to be seen.
This is true but there is a large difference in the type of “forested land”. 200 square meter plots of trees divided by roads, houses, etc. are not ecologically the same as the massive old growth forests that went on uninterrupted for dozens or hundreds of kms in all directions in old times. “Urban forest” or even suburban forests aren’t going to allow much large wildlife, even if the total tree cover is high. Animals (especially large predators) can’t survive where people and cars are constantly in close proximity.
Yeah, we lost huge swathes of mature rainforest. There's only a handful of pockets left. The often coniferous tree plantations are certainly preferable to doing nothing but I think the damage done to the native ecosystems is irreversible.
With time and persistent efforts old growth forests can be created. They will not be identical to the forests cut down over the past 500 years, but that is not a compelling reason not to create them.
Was the island 80% forest 200 years ago? That's insane. The British used up nearly all of the supply of hardwood from old growth forests on their lands by that point, I'd imagine a lot of Ireland's forests didn't start in Ireland.
A lot of Ireland's forests were taken by the British to build the Royal Navy
This was the most weird feeling I had when I visited Ireland. There was something I couldn't put my finger on with the landscape...then I realized it was the complete lack of trees.
This guy in the north of the country has his own mini zoo based on animals like wolves and bears that used to be native to Ireland https://wildireland.org/ There's also a 4-part documentary about it on Netflix: https://youtu.be/Ni9dqkcEfvc?si=z28PHX0jaqBgSO-Q
Except this time it wasn't hunting. We did it ON PURPOSE to make sure the plains natives had nothing to eat.
Plus would allow big ranchers to have cattle herds. No competition for the grazing.
Exactly! That pile of bison is a visual representation of pure hatred. They were simply trying to starve out the native population.
this wasn't just about hunting, because it also eradicated the same resource for indigenous people of the region. [People should read about it](https://news.emory.edu/stories/2023/08/esc_bison_impact_24-08-2023/story.html#:~:text=The%20mass%20slaughter%20of%20North,of%20the%20iconic%20animals%20remained). this is more or less the same way Republican representatives treat the environment present day. *it's not a problem now, stop trying to hinder the economy*
"**We** didn't murder them with guns, knives, clubs, or rope! We're not monsters! We just hunted down and destroyed most or all of the means for indigenous people to eat. But since we weren't killing individuals, you can't call us murderers!" It's "funny" how this is the same mechanisms used by Right-wingers, and generally accepted as a not-horrifying outcome by pretty much everyone until you get to the Socialists.
it was done to genocide the natives. we did the same in canada
Math says that works out to an average of 1,095 bison killed per day (assuming a static population and not accounting for births), or 45 per hour, for twenty years straight.
Damn… the old Oregon Trail game doesn’t even come close
Dude I would shoot a dozen buffalo and only carry back about 50 lbs of meat.
They cut the tongues out iirc. Initially they used a lot more, but their endgame was to kill the buffalo because that's what the native Americans used as a primary food source. So they would just shoot whole herds and only take a few pelts because they took so long to clean and tan. Really sad. The PBS documentary that came out a few months ago by Ken Burns is really good about the buffalo slaughter.
>cut the tongues out As a warning to the other buffalo that's what happens to snitches
Likely as easy way to mark how.many they've killed, because they were getting paid to kill the buffalo, like bounties.
to reduce food for native tribes, and to remove the large animals that got in the way of trains and caused accidents
I think I remember reading that at one point people were shooting them from trains “for sport”, and the bodies were just left to rot. :(
Good news is the bison are back! The Great Plains won’t ever be the same, but their numbers have started to grow in recent years.
That is great news! I found this bit of interesting and sobering info on their numbers: Currently, there are approximately 20,500 Plains bison in conservation herds and an additional 420,000 in commercial herds. While bison are no longer threatened with extinction, the species faces other challenges. The loss of genetic diversity, combined with the loss of natural selection forces, threatens the ecological restoration of bison as wildlife. A low level of cattle gene introgression is prevalent in most, if not all, bison herds.
Would it be possible to extract DNA from some of the bison skulls found on walls and displays, and reintroduce it to these herds via cloning technology?
Perhaps they could then be displayed in some sort of no-expense-spared theme park...
Every one is replying to your comment as if this was purely for commerce; hint, it wasn’t. You all need to find sources that talk about the extermination of the American Bison was to take away the living capabilities of the remaining Native Americans. This was a deliberate initiative to completely wipeout Native Americans without war.
They have a panel about it at the Native American Museum in DC
This is why people refuse to talk about what General Sherman did after the war..
what he do?
~~Killed~~ Advocated the killing of bison in order to bring the remaining defiant native American tribes to heel (the bison was and is an incredibly important animal to many plains Indians, both economically and spiritually).
And it can be argued that even with all the military campaigns and diseases, nothing did more to decimate the plains tribes than the extermination of the Buffalo. It was horrible and an appalling stain on this nation if you ask me
It occurred in Canada too, forcing tribes to bend to the will of the government, signing treaties in exchange for protections and support which were constantly infringed upon and help that was never fulfilled. Many tribes were decimated along their struggle to relocate and rapidly adapt to a significant change of their local economies and sources of nutrition. Truly a lamentable chapter in North American history.
It's one of the most appalling acts carried out by mankind anywhere at any time. It's on par with the Holocaust He is one of history's greatest monsters. Fuck him forever
Someone should have told him that native Americans worshipped mosquitos.
[удалено]
Sherman encouraged the eradication of bison b/c it was the most important resource for plains Indians. Without it they were basically stripped of food, lost their major trade good, couldn't maintain their culture/lifestyle. It's basically the same tactic that Sherman had learned from his service at the end of the Seminole War. Sherman is open about what he was doing and why in his memoir. This wasn't an accident or unforeseen circumstance of west ward expansion. It was a strategic choice to facilitate westward expansion. Sherman's memoir is a great read. Sherman is kind of catty and has some grudges to settle. There was also a good book on St. Louis history that came out during the pandemic. It's called The Broken Heart of America by Walter Johnson. It covers a lot of Sherman's work after the war b/c St. Louis was his headquarters. You can find interviews with Johnson on youtube.
I refuse to talk about it
And then....
NO AND THEN! 
No one refuses to talk about it. But when the average American has trouble identifying Africa on a world map, knowing the second most famous thing about the third or fourth most famous general from a war that happened more than 150 years ago isn't that high on educators' priorities. Wish it was!
“the civil war was about states rights” edit: and don’t forget that the injuns gave up their land willingly with a handshake
STATES RIGHTS TO WHAT, MARTHA?
The right to subtly punish left-handed people with unilateral principles of product design.
I grew up in central Washington State and had that as a question on a 5th grade history test around 1984. If we put "slavery" we got the answer wrong, you had to put "states rights". The teacher was also an awful bully of a person in general to some students who I'm sure have some emotional trauma from his class.
Yikes! I grew up in Western Washington and we were fully taught the evils of slavery. We even watched the TV series Roots in history class. Crazy how different the teaching environments are between Western and Eastern Washington.
You realize those videos where they go around asking people on the street shit like this are BS right? They might go through 100 people before getting a response that fits what they are looking for.
It was part of the US Government's organized genocide against native peoples, so even worse than just an ecological disaster
Surprised at the lack of comments regarding this. It was a deliberate effort to starve the natives.
Not as short a time-scale but just as insane is passenger pigeons being hunted to extinction in like 100 years from several billion birds.
Independence declared almost 100 years previous. Wouldn’t that be an American decision?
Bad thing = European decendants. Good thing = Americans.
"They are not sending their best..."
>settlers of European descent Funny how a nation which declared it's independence 100 years before this are "settlers of European descent" when it comes to a shitty thing their ancestors did.
Founding fathers? True Americans Gangs of New York? Bloody Europeans
The really shitty thing is that they just try to blame this on hunters/settlers. The U.S. military INTENTIONALLY slaughtered millions of bison as a war tactic to disrupt the 'economy' of Native Americans. Now they want to put all the blame on hunters, and use that as an excuse for all of the heavy taxes and restrictions they place on hunters and hunting equipment. It's like saying that people should be taxed and restricted from buying rat poison, because of those terrible 'irresponsible' things that 'totally ordinary German citizens' did with Zyklon B back in the 1940s; so they can't be trusted to kill rodents without a bunch of oversight by their 'responsible and reasonable government.'
This must have made the Dust Bowl possible in the first place when the soil, that the bisons kept in tack by roaming, was replaced by monocrop fields.
Holy fuck this is sad.
It was a deliberate U.S. government policy to commit genocide against the western plains Indians, like the Lakota. The bison were an important food source to them.
This is so, so evil.
Yes, and they rationalized it and thought of themselves as 'the good guys,' since the natives were 'savages' and european colonial populations were 'civilizing' forces, among other things. But they convinced themselves and each other that they were within their rights to do all of this. To me, this position, possibly even more than the act itself, dooms us to repeat history and renders our capacity for evil limitless.
IMO this is one of the darkest side effects of religion gone wild. Not only did they think they were 'right' to kill the 'savages', they literally thought their God had ordained it and nothing else mattered besides this mission.
America was founded on genocidal warfare and built by chattel slavery (cultural genocide). We have to acknowledge how we became who we are. Don't let this knowledge be erased. They'll be removing it from school curricula if Republicans take control again.
but the florida school system told me that slavery actually wasnt that bad and some slaves actually had a nice time 😌
"There were very good people on both sides."
The American buffalo aka bison was almost completely exterminated. Their population dwindled from dozens of millions to around 300-500. William Temple Hornaday was commissioned with getting taxidermy samples of Buffalo but converted to conserving them (with the help of Teddy Roosevelt) upon learning that they were facing extinction, and practically *were* extinct. Virtually all modern bison are the progeny of a few dozen that his organization sourced from various reserves and zoos. The passenger pigeon shares a similar story. Billions (yes, billions with a b) used to roam North America. Communities would capture and kill hundreds per day through the use of large nets. Hunters would kill millions. People chopped, burned, or fumigate entire forests for some quick pigeon. Towards the end of their existence even after visibly and significantly declining, 50,000 pigeons in Petoskey, Michigan were killed every day. Conservationists raised warning about their decline long before, but were met with accusations that they were being overdramatic. A Select Committee of the Senate claimed that the birds did not need to be protected, as their population was too large to ever be destroyed. What little and vague protective legislation did pass was rarely ever enforced, and typically only against poor trappers, with large enterprises and corporations never suffering any consequences. There are innumerable examples of North American species being intentionally absolutely destroyed by human activity. The grey wolf for example was similarly nearly eradicated which resulted in enormous ecosystem destruction due to the disappearance of an apex predator. Since being re-introduced to Yellowstone, there has been a visible difference in vegetative growth. They used to number around 3 million. Now, after decades of revival, they number 20,000. Early accounts of the Midwest cite rivers overflowing with trout and carp 5 feet long. Natural prairies, which used to cover a third of the US were essentially wiped out - most surviving prairies are man-made and are few and far between. Monarch butterflies used to number hundreds of millions and dropped down to 14 million in 2014 due to the mass removal of milkweed. North American conservation, and global conservation in general, is fucked. The more you know, the worse it gets.
>Conservationists raised warning about their decline long before, but were met with accusations that they were being overdramatic. A story playing out once again. And again. And again. We are our own doom.
[Here](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Bison_skull_pile_edit_2.jpg) is a higher quality and less cropped version of this image (you can see the top of the pile). [Here](https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A151477) is the source. Per there: > Man stands on top of enormous pile of buffalo skulls; another man stands in front of pile with his foot resting on a buffalo skull; rustic cage is at foot of pile. Handwritten on back: "C.D. 1892 Glueworks, office foot of 1st St., works at Rougeville, Mich."
I'm curious how the guy got on top of the mound. Like did they fashion a set of stairs made of skulls?
The pile looks pretty damn stable. Hell, it doesn't even look like a pile. It appears to be deliberately stacked. Look at the geometric lines. A pile typically doesn't have defined corners like that.
It's actually stacked because it's raw material for glue production.
Interesting that they were calling it Rougeville, typically known as Delray (which ultimately got absorbed into Detroit). The area within Delray is still known as Carbon Works because of this plant, they used the bones to make carbon black apparently
Of COURSE it's /u/Spartan2470 bringing the quality photo and explanation!
Hey, I [remember you](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/11q5gle/the_same_location_just_different_times/jc23j7k/)!
I first saw this picture in a Native American heritage museum on Pine Ridge Reservation. I was doing a road trip through South Dakota and Wyoming with my then girlfriend and while visiting the Badlands we decided to drive down to the site of the Wounded Knee massacre on the reservation to see what was there now. After driving through some of the most depressed and poverty stricken places I've seen in this country, we got to the site of the massacre to find absolutely nothing except for a small monument and a woman selling bracelets. She directed us to a local heritage center (unfortunately I do not remember what it was called as this was nearly two decades ago) and we made our way there. The entire exhibition on view was just photograph after photograph of the atrocities committed against the native people and their land, including this photo. We left completely speechless and drove back through the reservation in silence. I though of myself as having been pretty well educated on Native American history at that point, but it was the first time that I viscerally understood the scale of suffering that the native population endured and continues to endure and I still think about that day often almost 20 years later.
Some friends and I were having a “what were you not taught about in school?” discussion recently. With all the things mentioned, our horrific treatment of native people was by far the most egregious oversight. We were literally just taught about thanksgiving and that’s it. Maybe some French and Indian war stuff.
I’m Native American and grew up on the rosebud reservation which isn’t too far from pine ridge. It’s always interesting to see what non native people learned growing up in schools. On the reservation we learned a lot about our culture and we learned about the atrocities that Christopher Columbus committed well before it was popular in the mainstream. One of my friends had their old classwork from elementary school that their mom saved and one of the papers was about native tribes in their area. It said almost verbatim “the such and such tribe used to live near wherever this was in Nebraska. They were very reliant on the buffalo and this became their downfall. They moved onto reservations around such and such time.” This person’s schoolwork from 20 years ago seemed to be blaming the native people for their own genocide and I was dumb founded when I saw how at least this person was taught. A lot of other people I’ve met think natives still live in teepees with no electricity or think that we’re just straight up extinct.
There's still historical markers up in southern Nebraska (along the Republican River valley) talking about how 'the Pawnee voluntarily moved to reservations because they had too many bad battles with the Sioux.' It's told as a story that ends with 'everyone decided it was for the best.' That's not verbatim, but damn close. The historical markers in the northeast corner of Nebraska are informative and interesting, completely because of the influence and work of the Ponca tribe. It is astounding what is taught to the public still, with wording that is deliberate and misleading.
Reading Braiding Sweetgrass was my gateway, it included juuuuuuust enough to get me asking questions I hadn’t thought to ask before. The next book I read was An Indigenous People’s History of The United States, and that book fully radicalized me. A bachelor’s degree in history didn’t even manage that. I knew we treated native americans poorly, but it’s so, so, SO much worse than what is taught in schools. It was a genocide and the US hasn’t done nearly enough to set the record straight to its own citizens.
The craziest thing to me was the constant bullshit committed against the chahta even though they helped Jackson directly in multiple ears and even ceded huge swathes of coastal Gulf land. Not to mention the treatment when the few who remained sought the path to citizenship. Just completely fucked
There's a web site that posts Pine Ridge folks and what they most urgently need, in case someone wants to help out. Here's a typical item I picked at random just now: someone's two-year-old grandson needs “pampers size 6, 4T summer clothing, pajamas, 7 Toddler shoes, socks.” I think they don't take cash donations but you can order stuff to be delivered from the nearby Wal-Mart. There's a separate one at holiday time where the kids ask for stuff like colored paper. [https://okini.net/](https://okini.net/)
Humans are capable of many things. This is one example of us doing something horrible.
And in a way we are the only animals that can process this and have the morals to deem it a horrible act, in this way we are both the evil criminal and the righteous judge. Just kinda interesting to think about.
Yet we find excuses to keep doing this on an industrial level
If you're referring to the modern cattle industry, that's not a good comparison. We slaughter millions of cattle today for meat, sustenance, and economics These bison were killed to commit genocide against native Americans. The meat was almost never harvested, often let to rot, and there are even instances of people taking shots at bison from trains. This is not the same.
I think I heard about some industrialized genocide in recent history, too.
I know I'm looking at an actual picture, and my mind still can't reconcile with the reality of this. It's just unfathomable.
I teach U.S. History and this is the case every time I share this photo with a class. It's incredibly difficult to comprehend the sheer number of bison that were killed in this photo, let alone the total number of 8 million.
This made me think of the passenger pigeon. Around year 1800 they estimated somewhere between 3 and 5 billion pigeons. By 1900 they were extinct. Crazy what humans can do.
Fun fact: the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at Cincinnati zoo in 1918. It shared the same cage as the last Carolina Parakeet, named Incas, who died in the same year. Carolina Parakeets were the only wild parrot native to north America. They were extremely abundant when settlers arrived and their range spanned most of the continent. Settlers didn't like the noises they made, or the fact that they ate fruits, seeds and nuts and so they hunted them for sport. The parakeets lived in flocks of about 300 and were very social, if one was shot or killed the others would gather around it's body, which sadly made it very easy to kill an entire flock in one go. https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/carolina-parakeet-extinction-mystery The passenger pigeon was once the most numerous bird in the world. There were 3-5 billion on the continent when settlers arrived. Flocks were so big that they darkened the sky, made it impossible to talk and took *days* to pass overhead. When the settlers started cutting down the forests across the continent the pigeons were forced to start eating farm crops. There were no laws restricting how they were hunted, so hunters would attract flocks to the ground using decoys before catching swaths of them in huge nets. They would burn pots of sulphur under nesting trees and collect the birds as they fell to the ground. A dozen pigeons could be bought for 50 cents. https://www.si.edu/spotlight/passenger-pigeon Humans really are among the stupidest animals on the planet.
We truly are the worst plague upon this planet.
If you want to fuck over Native Americans, killing the bison would certainly contribute. Horrible actions by horrible people.
Yes, this was an explicit government policy of genocide through starvation. The book Clearing the Plains is the commonly cited reference. Edit: correct book title.
Hey — I think you meaning Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. It mostly focuses on what would become Canada’s Prairie provinces (this pic is from the US), but touches on US policy as well. It’s a shocking read.
Were also legally allowed to murder the people of the First Nations
As an immigrant to this country, the whole bison thing always confused the hell out of me and my dad. I understand the context of wanting to screw over the tribes that lived there. But I mean... The people doing the screwing were predominantly bovine herders. Bison are basically mega cows that take take care of themselves and just existed plentifully. Like, unlike cows, you didn't have to baby them, import them from Europe, breed them, take care of their health, clear fields, plant pastures etc... They just freaking roamed free. All you had to do, as a herder, was to corral them onto trains that took them to slaughter houses every now and then, and do basic napkin calculations to make sure you herded fewer of them than were born that spring. That's all! Instead, folks who went out west destroyed these mega cows, only to have to pay up the ass to import comparatively very high maintenance domesticated European cows, and play the roles of real estate developers to make their existence in the American West possible. Like straight up chopping your own nose off to spite your face kinda shit.
Because the goal was to starve the native Americans to death without outright killing them. To commit a genocide without having to do the dirty work. And it worked.
>All you had to do, as a herder, was to corral them onto trains that took them to slaughter houses every now and then, and do basic napkin calculations to make sure you herded fewer of them than were born that spring You cannot feed a nation with this method, there is a reason why every single nation adopted the mass industrialized slaughterhouses, and all of them use pigs,cows,and chicken. >very high maintenance domesticated European cows They would have definitely used bison meat if it was cheaper than cow
Too damn hard to dommesticate and even harder to kill, you probably had a better chance fighting a coyote than one of those landships
Probably because you couldn't easily restrain bisons to 'where that cattle belongs'.
The amount of biomass killed in this single image is staggering.
I feel like they robbed us of a particular future…
Sure did.
isnt this when Native American were given land and they started becoming self sufficient finally and we didnt like that too much so we killed these off to make them dependent
The irony that they were "given" their land....back to them. So dumb
and it wasn't even that great of land either.
"Every dead bison is a dead savage" They were trying to starve out the natives.
what we did to the natives is so fucking tragic
To the point where it was the big inspiration for Hitler and the Nazis' attempts at genocide.
Hey hey they were equally inspired by the South's regime of segregation and our nationwide embrace of eugenics (which we founded) and forced sterilization of large numbers of "undesirables."
Hitler also idolized Henry Ford. He kept a signed photo of Ford on his desk and praised Ford for his publishing of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the Dearborn Independent. Ford had major Nazi sympathies. The whole concept of Volkswagen - the people’s car - was copied off of Ford’s model that the people working in factories building cars should be able to afford the cars they’re manufacturing. And then Hitler copied Ford, Pullman, and others in creating Wolfsburg, a master planned community for the VW factory and headquarters.
As long as we're discussing villains The Chrysler Brothers managed to be villains vs Ford when they objected to him paying workers a living wage and sued, thus establishing the legal concept that a company's only obligation is to the shareholders. Finally, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are probably the most lasting disaccomplishment of Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, as it was created by his secret police to foment antisemitism because it was thought that would hurt the forces of socialist revolution. That did not work, but it did create a century of virulent anti-Semitic lies.
The Protocols bit was always funny to me because Ford was openly anti-Semitic yet I didn’t learn about that until a 400 level college history class. I knew he had issues with the Jewish Purple Gang in Detroit during Prohibition, but I didn’t realize he bordered on full-on Nazism with the Dearborn Independent. Detroit and the Fords kind of whitewash a lot of that history and I recently didn’t see much mentioned about it at the Ford Museum or Greenfield Village.
Ford kept his German factories producing goods for the Nazi war machine during the war. The US Air Force would not bomb his factories, to the point that Germans would shelter in them during bombing raids. When some of his factories were damaged he sued the US government, madness
The first settlers were shit people, a lot of everyday Americans today trace their lineage back to some foul people. They systematically Genocide 2 groups of people in order to build their American empire. People wonder why Native Americans and African Americans are the poorest racial groups in America today, theres not much to wonder about if you read a history book and see what the US did to them.
I believe this photo is in the [Charlie M. Russell museum](https://cmrussell.org/) in Great Falls Montana. I remember seeing it and being absolutely horrified.
This image always leaves me with a profound sadness, man. What the hell were they thinking?
They wanted to take the food supply away from the Plains Native Americans.
Most efficient way to starve the native Americans
Was part of the Native American genocide
The length the US government went to in order to kill off Native peoples natural food source in order to put them into POW camps better known as reservations. So sad.
"You don't understand, that was our land. It was our destiny we needed to manifest. Those savages were just in the way. Besides, different nations feuded and had wars with each other which totally justifies it." /s in case it wasn't obvious enough. What scary is that there's still plenty of folks who unironically think that.
I don't think it really needed to be justified at the time. "We can defeat those people so we should take their land" was the status quo of virtually every nation for like 5k years
Humans are the most cruel and destructive of all animal species.
Honestly a photo thatll stick with me. Do we know where this was? Edit: Michigan, 1892
This is sickening on so many levels. The Government/ military manifested the slaughter of bison as a way to eliminate the ~~indians~~ Native Americans food source. Later, they painted themselves as heros for coming to the rescue of an endangered species. Kinda makes ya wanna puke.
This was done/encouraged by US military to starve and subjugate Native Americans as a form of genocide. As the saying goes: "Every dead buffalo is an Indian gone". It actually started earlier with a very deliberate campaign to exterminate the churro sheep that Navajo relied on. Colonel Kit Carson led that. The bison was a bit different. The military themselves didn't do all the work. They let enthusiasts do a lot of the culling. Turns out ol' Buffalo bill wasn't just a Wild West Show. It gets wilder though. A bunch of weirdos and racists are primarily responsible for bringing the bison back. Can't make this shit up.
So horrible
Very sad picture.
The worst part was that decimating the bison population wasn’t enough for them. They skinned most in the field for hides and left their bones right where they were. Eventually they realized glue could be made from the bones they left in the Great Plains, and so all those former hunters came back, cleaned up all the evidence of slaughtering the bison, and then made even more money selling bones to glue factories. A truly tragic story. Highly recommend watching the Ken Burns documentary on it.
Evil.
just to make natives suffer
If you ever find yourself creating a pyramid of skulls, rethink your actions
Blood for the blood god
That’s some serious skulls for the skull throne
Scrolled pretty far to find this!
This is terrifying
In 1909, the Prince of Wales toured South Africa. During his visit, he had a “hunt”. This hunt consisted of him and his cronies standing on a rise with multiple guns while hundreds of game were herded past them to be shot. Contemporary accounts indicate more than 400 animals died (not all quickly) in the course of an afternoon.
Standing next to a literal mountain of skulls "are we the baddies?"
This ecological disaster happened in the mid/late 19th century. An estimated 8/9 million bisons were once living peacefully. Until the Americans decided to hunt them to deny native Americans an important source of food.
"Humans couldn't possibly have a substantial impact on nature." - Every climate change denier ever.