hearthfire-heartfire:

shazrolane:

rpepperpotshipssciencebros:

captainlordauditor:

toastpotent:

stardustinoureyes:

toastpotent:

man i don’t wanna derail a post but i just saw a post that was showing different megafauna of different areas, like moose in colder climates like canada and russia, camels in the middle east area/deserts, kangaroos in australia. and someone commented “all we have in america is squirrels!!! 🤣”

but like. bison. bison were america’s megafauna. i don’t want people forgetting about bison and what happened to them.

I don’t know how to tell you this - but Moose are native to upper Midwestern states like MN, WI and MI as well as mountainous areas as far south as CO. Also Alaska.

this post was about american colonizers trying to kill off bison to starve native americans of one of their primary food sources.

Map of the historical range change of bison

I couldn’t find a map of total populations today, but there’s around 500,000 today - compare that to the millions before the colonization of the western US.

Just a reminder that it was once considered “fun sport” to shoot bison from passing trains, leaving the corpses to rot in the sun.  And don’t forget this lovely photo–those are bison skulls.  Imagine how many animals were slaughtered to make a pile this big.

This wasn’t for sport.  This wasn’t for meat.  This was for genocide.

Just to follow up, and to make this abundantly clear - the mass slaughter of the bison was to cause genocide of Native Americans. It was a deliberate destruction of their most valuable food source. 

Bison and prairie dogs are both essential having prairie grasslands AT ALL. Prairie dog burrows help precipitation to penetrate the water table and the numbers of buffalo moving across the earth mowing grasses, pooping the seeds, peeing, birthing, and making wallows shaped the entire face of the plains.

Indigenous people know this.