Wild American Bison are captive?

Actually, kept-for-food bison aren’t crossed with cattle. They’re bison. The crossed-with-cattle hybrids are called beefalo or . . . I forget. They’ve largely falled out of use.

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Cattalo

Thanks! Cattalo.

They were crossbred with cattle long ago. Their phenotype is all bison now but they all have (often a significant amount) of cattle genes. No farms keep pure bison.

As a professional plant taxonomist, I can tell you that taxonomy, the naming and classifying of organisms, is not the simple, easy process that we might wish.

Among the many problems, introgression happens. That is, two individuals hybridize, their offspring breed back to one of the parental species, the next generation breeds back to the same parental type. Eventually the populations of that species have a low percentage genes from the other species, genes that may help it be better adapted or may do nothing at all. Sometimes the hybridization goes on regularly (e.g. Carrion & Hooded Crows or Blue-winged and Golden-crowned Warbler, certain Spiderworts). Sometimes its rare. Sometimes it happens so much that the two species become one (Radish and Jointed Charlock on the Pacific Coast of North America, three “species” of Tamarix in North America, Lolium perenne/multiflorum). Usually the two species remain separate. Taxonomists deal with issues like this frequently. We’re used to complexity.

I cannot imagine a taxonomist classifying bison that look like bison but have a low percentage of cattle ancestry (e.g. those at Wind Cave) as anything but bison. (The question of wild vs. not is a different question.)

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I completely agree, they’re bison. But a lot of people (especially those in favor of introducing bison) really care about the bison being 100% pure, which very few bison today are.

A situation for which the saying, “The perfect is the enemy of the good” was created. (Eyes rolling)

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It can work the other way, too. People can settle for “good enough,” and use that as a reason not to do better.

True, but in the case of bison with a low percentage of cattle genes, I stand by “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

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I think that example does do a good job of showing that ‘cultivated’ things do matter and probably should have some option where they are not demoted from research grade, as it is scientifically valuable to know where large cultivated populations are. Also, if someone has planted a highly invasive species in their roadside flowerbed, there is probably positive scientific value in encouraging users to track their existence, as that is a common vector for invasives to escape and could help track the origin of or prevent an infestation. It would be ideal if there was an intermediate flag to separate those that did not demote them from research grade. On the other hand things in places like potted houseplants, indoor botanical gardens, zoos, and museums probably don’t need to be research grade.

As for the yellowstone bison example, even though there is not a physical fence, the virtual “100% chance of getting shot” fence constrains them more in practice than most fenced elk herds, which can sometimes jump their fences and escape, so the existence of a physical fence is not really a useful delineation. If you think the distinction is important, it would be more constructive to perhaps make a feature request where the entire species could be tagged as “managed” or something, so that you going through and tagging every single individual bison in the world as “captive” didn’t erasing the useful distinction of bred for meat vs wild.

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Something interesting is that the Wind Cave Bison aren’t as confined as they seem. There have been cases where bison from adjacent Custer State Park have gotten across the park border and have attempted joining in with the Wind River herd. According to the article this isn’t an isolated occurrence, it’s happened several times in the past. The article also notes that the only reason anyone noticed is the bison had been rounded up for the annual cull; if someone had figured it out beforehand it would have been a lot harder to isolate the Custer State Park bison from the herd because the bison are left to their own devices.

https://www.sdpb.org/blogs/kevinwoster/wind-cave-bison-roundup-features-surprise-visitor-new-gps-collars-to-keep-tabs-on-herd-movement/

It’s unclear if the opposite is true because the Wind Cave bison herd is heavily scrutinized and it seems like all 350+ bison are microchipped. However, the Wind Cave bison herd is often described as “one of the only free-ranging bison herds in the lower 48 states”, along with the Yellowstone herd and the Henry Mountains bison herd in Capitol Reef, though as this thread has noted the Wind Cave bison are confined to the park.

Additionally, I would totally agree that under the criteria that @raymie is using, the bison herd at Yellowstone National Park should be considered captive. The Yellowstone bison are not free to roam as they please, but are artificially confined to the region around the basin formed by the Yellowstone caldera in order to prevent them from spreading brucellosis to surrounding cattle herds. Much as the case with Antelope Island in Utah, the park uses the natural barriers created by the steep rim of the caldera to keep them isolated. There are only a few natural entries and exits to the caldera region, and these paths are well-enough known that hunters and park rangers are able to track every bison that leaves the caldera zone (“like livestock”, as one of the references cited here puts it) and effectively keeps the bison confined to this area. This site even makes the argument that the Henry Mountain bison herd should be considered more wild than the Yellowstone herd because they are not confined, but the Yellowstone herd are.


Map of bison range in Yellowstone from https://greateryellowstone.org/yellowstone-bison-today, showing their confinement to the general area around the caldera.

https://greateryellowstone.org/yellowstone-bison-today
http://ricklamplugh.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-reality-of-yellowstones-bison-hunt.html
https://montanafreepress.org/2020/04/09/study-says-yellowstone-bison-are-exerting-an-unhealthily-heavy-footprint/
http://ricklamplugh.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-reality-of-yellowstones-bison-hunt.html

And, perhaps most important, this confinement is deliberate on the part of Yellowstone National Park, not an unintended consequence of local hunters overzealously hunting any bison that steps foot across the park border.

Much like with Kruger National Park, this isn’t a case where the animals were introduced into a fenced-in area, but a case where the animals were there previously and humans erected barriers around them to prevent them from leaving the managed area.

However, tagging all of these bison as cultivated ignores the fact that while the population may be managed in a broad sense (annual culls or broad-swathe attempts to maintain population health), they aren’t artificially provisioned like a zoo animal, livestock, or cultivated plant is and are allowed to play a direct role in the wild ecosystem as well as starve, get sick, or get eaten like any wild animal would (and they do get predated on. I’ve talked to Custer State Park rangers who describe weakened bulls getting picked off by mountain lions at the end of the rut. The rangers’ reactions were more “well that’s just nature” rather than the fury one would see from someone managing livestock).

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Welcome to the Forum! I have nothing more to add to (what I consider) this inane conversation.

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It seems iNat really should change its definitions for more clearer one and those to help pages, many things that are not controvercial are not mentioned there and unknown for those who don’t use the forum, and as we see such streamlined wording leads to confusion even amongst heavy users, if we can’t rely on “fencing is => controlled movement” part in this case it means it’s not working in other cases too, it should be fixed somehow, reworded.

I think the biggest problem is that the reality is often confusing. There are clearly wild organisms and clearly captive/cultivated organisms, but there are intermediate states. Sharpening definitions will not help. (It’s like species definitions – we humans need clear, mutually exclusive words, and reality doesn’t care about that.)

I personally leave things “wild” in questionable situations because that leaves the record fully available and functional on iNaturalist.

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But we have that list of what is captive and what is not on Help page, at least expanding that part (and adding explanations!) would help with quite a few of those grey areas.

So, if a bison escapes the fence, is it then considered “wild”. And, as others have alluded to, would every other organism inside the fence not need to be considered “captive”, as well?

The fencing issue does seem to be arbitrary. There is fencing along interstate roadways that restrict animals’ movements. Are the animals behind those installations “captive”? When development isolates an environment, for example, residential housing surrounds a wetland, eliminating some of the inhabitants ability to leave; are those organisms then “captive”?

As has been debated, plant-wise, to a great extent, if an organism is the result of natural reproduction and can survive where it exists without any human intervention, I believe it should be considered “wild”.

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The problem is we have individuals whose definitions of wild versus cultivated are very specifically not what is listed on the Help page. The help page specifically lists a “zebra in the Serengeti” as wild versus a “zebra in a zoo” as captive. Yet several of the users in this very thread have stated that “I would in fact claim that lions and elephants [in] Kruger National Park are captive”. This is despite the fact that many of the African national parks and game reserves are fenced in (with the Serengeti being an ironic exception due to the wildebeest migration, and even that might change if conservation measures aren’t upheld).

Expanding the list of what is and isn’t considered captive or not would be useless, because 1) the admins seem to be leaving us to our own devices and may not be interested in altering the definitions on the help page, and 2) everyone minus a couple of individuals seems to agree that animals left to their own devices (e.g., no human provisioning) in national parks are “wild”. However, the issue with this is that all it takes is one sufficiently motivated individual to mass flag a large number of observations as “captive”, and it is much harder for anyone to stop them because they don’t have as strong of motivations to flag every observation in site. It’s the Machiavelli principle at work, it doesn’t matter how well agreed upon the rules are, all it takes it one individual who interprets the rules differently and doesn’t want to change their own definition to mess everything up (not just with this specific case, but with any definition on the site), and adding more rules won’t fix that. Add to this that it’s much easier to flag a specimen as captive than unflag it, because flagging it as captive removes it from the visible database unless one makes a dedicated effort to search for it.

This, in turn, has very serious consequences for anyone trying to use iNaturalist data for scientific project. As mentioned above, we’ve had cases where people trying to use bison observations they took in person for teaching ecology classes find them vanishing by the next day, and there’s the little fact that the definition used by the users above would result in the entire observation pool of megafauna in Kruger National Park vanishing into thin air because it is “captive”.

Similarly, if we greatly expanded the case examples for wild versus cultivated in the Help section, it would end up looking like a legal document more than a useful self-help guide for new users.

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Large populations of pronghorn are virtually confined to certain (if very large) parts of Wyoming because they are unable to jump. They can crawl under the fence but in many cases they are stuck where they are due to barbed wire. Does this mean that pronghorn in these parts of Wyoming aren’t wild?

I would think the bigger deciding factor in whether an organism is “cultivated” or “wild” would be to what degree it is provisioned by humans. There are several factors to this…

  • Humans often provide food for their captive animals. In some cases if humans were not there to provide food for them the animals would not be able to survive in that environment. Similarly, humans often prevent their livestock from feeding on native wildlife in favor of processed foods (sometimes, hoofstock feeding on grasses and domestic cats killing songbirds being obvious examples).
  • Humans deliberately provide shelter for their captive animals. In many cases without this shelter these species would die from heat stroke or cold (e.g., all the giraffes kept in temperate climates).
  • Humans typically protect their captive animals from predators. This often keeps them from contributing to the local ecosystem as prey (though there are exceptions to this, wolverines in Scandanavia are pretty much dependent on local reindeer herds for carrion).
  • Humans control the reproduction and health of the animals in their care, usually very directly (contrast this with managed game populations, in which the health of a species is usually considered in broad-scale population terms, like culling to prevent sleeping sickness outbreaks, rather than providing veterinary care to every individual). Hence their populations are not subject to the local environment.

Hence, in a Darwinian or ecological sense, the survival of the organism is not dependent on its ability to survive in the local environment, but by how much effort and interest humans have in keeping it alive. In many cases if humans were to stop providing support the animal would die (and in this case the bison are definitely more “wild”, because they survive perfectly well on their own without human assistance. Indeed, humans are more of a hinderance to their survival via culling and prevention of migration than anything they do to keep them alive).

Most of what makes a species “cultivated” involves how it is allowed to interact with the local ecosystem and how much of the individual organism’s survival is due to human intervention (contra populational survival, as in something like a California condor). Little to none of these things are contingent on the presence or absence of fences.

There are still some grey areas to this. Like, what do we consider salmon in the Great Lakes? Salmon are deliberately stocked in the Great Lakes, they are left to their own devices to forage on their own and get eaten by predators, they aren’t fenced in and nobody is trying to confine them to the Great Lakes, but while there is some natural reproduction ultimately the local fish and wildlife services have to continually add new salmon into the population to keep it viable, and I’ve even heard suggestions that without human intervention salmon probably could not maintain a breeding population in the Great Lakes (not enough suitable rivers for them to spawn in, unlike the Pacific coast).

Similarly, one of the reasons why foxes and feral cats are such a problem in Australia is that they turned out to be foraging from human garbage dumps, which gave them a backup food source to survive harsh conditions when the native marsupials would starve (some similar things occurred with invasive placentals and ranchers creating artificial water sources via cattle troughs). Humans aren’t trying to provision for them and keep them around, but ultimately it’s human intervention that’s keeping them alive.

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I’d say making others’ opinions as strong to one side of it will help eliminate effect of one individual, for now I’m confused by this case from iNat perspective, so I wouldn’t go and remark them wild or captive.

I think what we’re all asking for is a stronger definition of “wild” and “captive” from the iNat staff. Not just about this but with other issues like escaped pets similar situations.