American Bison - Buffalo Field Campaign

Chapter 7 Numerical and Geographic Status
7.1 Introduction
The “Great Contraction”, a term used by Flores (1996) to
describe the destruction of bison in North America, has been
chronicled by numerous authors (Dary 1974; Isenberg 2000;
Reynolds et al.; 2003; Roe 1970) and was summarised in
Chapter 2 of this document. Fewer than 300 wood bison and
perhaps only 200 plains bison remained at the turn of the 19th
Century. The numerical recovery of plains bison began with
the efforts of private citizens in the U.S. and Canada to save
a few remaining animals (Freese et al. 2007). Governments
later became involved in the conservation of plains and wood
bison. Protective legislation was implemented first in Canada in
1877 (Gates et al. 2001). The first legislation providing specific
protection for bison in the U.S. was the National Park Protective
Act (Lacey Act) signed on 7 May 1894 by President Cleveland
(Boyd and Gates 2006). It imposed a jail sentence and fine for
anyone found guilty of killing game in Yellowstone National Park,
the range of the last free-ranging plains bison.
Between 1900 and 1970, modest progress was made, increasing
the number and populations of bison, largely in public herds.
Then in the mid-1980s, the commercial bison industry began to
prosper (Freese et al. 2007; Renecker et al. 1989); the number of
bison in North America increased rapidly to more than 430,000,
the vast majority of which are under private ownership (Boyd and
Gates 2006; Freese et al. 2007). However, numerical progress
alone cannot be equated with the security of bison as a wildlife
species. Conditions under which privately owned bison are
raised are commonly motivated by market objectives and there
are no regulations or government-supported guidelines requiring
private owners to contribute to bison conservation. Domestic
bison (those raised for captive commercial propagation) may be
subject to small population effects, selection for domestication
and market traits including docility, growth performance,
conformation and carcass composition, and intentional or
unmanaged introgression of cattle genes (Freese et al. 2007).
Although some private owners exercise their legal property right
to manage bison for conservation of the species and/or for their
ecological role, the conservation practices of such owners are
a matter of personal choice, with no guarantee of persisting
beyond the owner’s interest in the herd. Currently there are
no well-developed regulatory or market-based incentives for
managing private commercial herds for species conservation
(e.g., independent conservation management certification).
Lead Authors: C. Cormack Gates and Kevin Ellison
Contributors: Curtis H. Freese, Keith Aune, and Delaney P. Boyd
Unless effective private-sector incentives are developed, bison
populations managed in the public interest as wildlife represent
the most secure opportunity for their conservation, adaptation in
the evolutionary sense, and viability of bison as an ecologically
interactive species in the long term.
Some North American aboriginal communities and individuals
also own bison herds. As with other private bison populations,
the management of Native-owned bison is not necessarily
consistent with conservation policies. Management practices
vary from intensive management for commercial production to
semi free-ranging herds hunted for subsistence and retention of
culture.
It was beyond the scope of this status report to evaluate
the management of individual privately owned herds for
their conservation value, whether owned by aboriginal or
non-aboriginal people. The IUCN Bison Specialist Group
acknowledges the important opportunity that Aboriginal
Governments, the Intertribal Bison Cooperative, and the Native
American Fish and Wildlife Society have to develop guidelines
for enhancing the conservation value of herds managed by
aboriginal peoples. Similarly, the commercial industry could play
a role by providing standards and guidelines and developing
incentive-based programmes, such as independent formal
certification, for conservation management.
Contemporary conservation is focussed on ensuring long-
term persistence and maintaining the potential for ecological
adaptation through the effects of natural selection operating
in viable populations in the wild (Soulé 1987; IUCN 2003;
Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity 1992).
Viability relates to the capacity of a population to maintain
itself without significant demographic or genetic manipulation
by people for the foreseeable future (Soulé 1987). In wild
populations, limiting factors, such as predation, resource
limitation and mate competition, contribute to maintaining the
wild character, genetic diversity, and heritable traits that enable
a species to adapt to and survive in a natural setting without
human interference (Knowles et al. 1998). Therefore, viable wild
populations, subject to the full range of natural limiting factors,
are of pre-eminent importance to the long-term conservation,
security and continued evolution of bison as a wildlife species.
We consider the three conservation biology principles proposed
by Shaffer and Stein (2000), resiliency, representation, and
redundancy, to be relevant for evaluating the geographic and
American Bison: Status Survey and Conservation Guidelines 2010 55