Stampede!

[Knight9]

don't tell me you are going buffalo hunting like it is some big adventure.

Sorry, but that does still exist! :thumbsup: We have a couple of wild herds in Alberta. The Zama herd in northern Alberta has had a lottery draw hunt for several years due to its increasing population. Nothing simple about this hunt. It is in the dead of winter, very cold, and deals often with deep snow. Yes, you may get lucky and catch a bull by a road somewhere, but often they are way off the beaten path and it is WORK to get them. I put in for the draw every year, with no success so far, but I hope to get the opportunity one day.

Wood Bison Hunt - Hay-Zama

 

[KevT]

Sorry, but that does still exist! :thumbsup: We have a couple of wild herds in Alberta. The Zama herd in northern Alberta has had a lottery draw hunt for several years due to its increasing population. Nothing simple about this hunt. It is in the dead of winter, very cold, and deals often with deep snow. Yes, you may get lucky and catch a bull by a road somewhere, but often they are way off the beaten path and it is WORK to get them. I put in for the draw every year, with no success so far, but I hope to get the opportunity one day.

Wood Bison Hunt - Hay-Zama

Yes but that is in Canada, not Kansas. If I remember right when I looked it up (25 years ago)Canada still had 3 wild herds. The USA had none.

And I wish you luck with the draw, that would be an adventure of a lifetime!!!

 

[MossRoad]

Sorry to see they had to be shot, but we eat a lot of Buffalo, it is good eating. I sure hope they immediately field dressed those animals and got them to the processing plant. It would be tragic to let all that good food go to waste.

Yes they are large dangerous animals when mixed up with people.
In the immortal words, of Deets from Lonesome Dove: "them bulls will hook ya".

I am glad I did not have to make the decision to put down all of those animals, but I hope at least good use was made of the meat.

I think I read they cannot sell the meat. Can't remember the reason. Can't find the link to that, either. Gotta look some more.

 

[Mace Canute]

I raise Beefmaster cattle.
DISPOSITION is a formal selection criteria, meaning "good disposition."
To me, it is the most critical criteria. If you can't round up the cattle in a pen and put them in a trailer, you can't even take them to the auction barn.
In the first few years of putting my herd together, I ended up with one bull calf which escaped the pen, ran thru the gate before I could shut it. When I next rounded things into the pen, he was about 900 lbs, snaky as they come. Despite working him with kid gloves, he jumped out of the 6 foot high steel pen...didn't even touch the top rail. Next time it took me days to trick him to come into the pen. When he finally did, I got him under the barn, down the chute and into the steel trailer with steel bars across the roof, no tarp. I breathed a sigh of relief, then he began to climb out of the trailer, straight up, pushed the bars aside and simply levitated out of there. I was hitting him over the head with a six foot two by four, literally drawing blood for the upper half of his escape and it didn't begin to slow him down. He now would jump any fence on the place, and did so whenever he saw us, running to the other side of 200 acres or onto neighbor's property. I ultimately called an abattoir, explained the situation and he said, "shoot him and bring him in, I'll grind him up!" That's what we did. All 1400 lbs of him. Had to hunt him down like a deer, head shot at 150 yards, couldn't get closer.

I well understand there are some situations where only a center fire rifle is the solution.

Buffalo, IMHO, are all bull headed and do not respect fences and are exceptionally dangerous to people and horses...MUCH more than cattle.

We had an almost exact situation with a critter back in the 60`s. He was a feeder steer we bought and when it came time to ship him, he wouldn`t go into the loader chute. We got tired of trying and ran out of time so said to heck with him, we`ll get him next time but next time was the same even though we were a little more prepared for him...or so we thought. We tried several times but never could get him into the chute and ended up keeping him in the feedlot for quite some time. We figured someone must have laid into him with a shock stick when in a chute before we owned him to make him so skittish of one now. He was never as bad as your`s though but ended up the same in the end. We shot him in the corral and since the local abattoir was run by our neighbour three quarters of a mile down the road we loaded the carcass onto a two wheel trailer and hauled him away to be butchered. He dressed out at 925 lbs.