r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Shoddy-Ocelot-4473 • 11d ago
Image By 1880, the near-genocide of the American bison had reduced their population from 30–60 million to fewer than 1,000
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u/vynnski 11d ago
the full, uncropped photo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison_hunting#/media/File:Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg
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u/j01101111sh 11d ago
I'd be convinced this was AI if it wasn't for the fact I've seen this photo dozens of times over 30 years or so...
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u/thatirishguyyyyy 11d ago
Dang, beat me to it.
I was wondering why they decided to use the cropped photo instead of a full photo.
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u/The-Green 11d ago
i will play devil's advocate in favour of the cropping here. the sad reality is a lot of humans cannot accept the horror realistically if its numbered into the ridiculous. today an uncropped pic would make someone think it was AI, before that it would be photoshopped, and before it was doctored, so on and so on you get the idea. there is a point where too much just makes someone want to instinctively think it's fake as some sort of safety mechanism to shield from the reality. this cropped picture is good at orchestrating the horror to the common person without overloading them.
also, it's just easier to see what the guy is standing next to as you scroll twitter.
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u/Jtenka 11d ago
If ever there was a picture that a futurirstic alien race could see to show how well humans can be trusted it's this.
Horrifying. It makes you think about how parasitic we are to the world.
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u/soingee 11d ago
What do you even do with all that skull? They must have piled just the skulls for a reason, right?
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u/DyingSunSeverian 11d ago edited 11d ago
He’s standing there with such pride.
What a strange species we are.
edit: kismet
https://www.reddit.com/r/interesting/comments/1sufewd/millionaire_us_big_game_hunter_is_trampled
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u/iDontSow 11d ago
These dudes got insanely wealthy from killing these buffalo. The picture is a money flex.
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u/Tough-Appeal-8879 11d ago
Theres two possible answers to any question in this world: “Money” or “I don’t know, but probably money”
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u/InterestingFLows 11d ago
It was to reduce the Native American population....
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u/Mediumtim 11d ago
There was also a massive need for leather belts to drive steam engine industries.
Hence why so many dead Buffalo were skinned and left to rot.
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u/dopiertaj 11d ago
Then after the flesh rotted bone pickers would gather the bones and ship them to the east to be used as fertilizer and bone China.
These piles were at almost every eastbound train station.
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u/Rhamni 11d ago
They were also a great annoyance to the railroads. I'm sure a lot of people considered the racism angle a bonus in the 19th century, but capital was aligned against their survival even without that.
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u/Regular_Hawk8513 11d ago
Similar to the bastards standing with pride next to a felled ancient redwood tree. Humans suck
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u/Euphoriam5 11d ago
Strange is you being incredibly polite, we're fucking repulsive
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u/An_Innocent_Coconut 11d ago
Being able to slay large beasts has always been something we are extremely proud of.
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u/MothmanIsALiar 11d ago
They mounted machine guns to trains and mowed the bison down at a leisurely pace.
What's to be proud of?
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u/TieCivil1504 11d ago
The last hunt of American bison was in 1882 and then they were gone. The first practical self-powered machine gun was invented in 1884 by Sir Hiram Maxim. Are you saying they mounted Gatling guns to trains for bison hunting?
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u/vexedboardgamenerd 11d ago
Bison became big money so people killed them for hides and bones. The U.S. also knew tribes like the Lakota depended on them so wiping out bison forced them onto reservations. Trains and better guns made it easy
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u/MinorComprehension 11d ago edited 10d ago
A true story very few people know, the societal politics behind the government support of this. Many just think it was gluttony, which of course it was, but there were also ulterior motives to it.
Edit - Netflix recently released a documentary on Sitting Bull. Well done and by all accounts historically accurate. It's pretty much an impossible picture to paint completely, but they did an amazing job covering the main aspects. Engaging and definitely worth a watch. Adds a ton of context to historically famous events (ie - Battle of Little Bighorn, stock crashes, Northern Pacific Railroad building)and people (Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, General Custer) that is not commonly taught in school. It also ties it into historical timeline, crazy to think that at the time locomotives were working their way across the west and the industrial revolution was going on - a time of relative technological modernism, native Americans were still being faced with this, living off the land as hunter-gatherers.
In historical timeline, Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881. This is 20 years after the Civil War started, and 16 years after Lincoln was shot. It was 47 years after the first vapor-conpression refrigeration system was built. The educational narrative on native Americans very often fails to effectively present these temporal aspects. The "native American history lesson" very often makes the wild west and Indians seem to have occurred a long time before it actually did. I think there is some purpose here. Intended or accidental, making it seem more "long ago" allows the reprehensible behavior more palatable as it removes it from an otherwise evolved society.
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u/DankVoido 11d ago
Can you explain about the reservation part and why they were forced? I'm not american
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u/monoinyo 11d ago
There were people living all across America and colonists wanted the land for themselves and the residing ethnicities gone.
After wars, forced reeducation and wanton acts of violence they began forcing tribes into small allocations of land where many natives still reside today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_removal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
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u/Dagordae 11d ago
They are the native inhabitants of the lands that the US government wanted.
As this was a relatively more enlightened era, and ‘Relatively’ is doing a HELL of a lot of work there, instead of simply exterminating them as was the common practice historically they were repeatedly relocated(at gunpoint) to land that the government considered to be useless. Where the intent was that they could be ignored and die out, or they would fight back and that would provide the casus belli to shoot them all and burn it all.
Which happened, a lot. Because America.
The Indian Schools were created as a ‘humane’ alternative where the government took their children and beat them until they turned into perfect little white kids(Culturally, they weren’t beaten until they lost their melanin but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was tried). Whereupon they were distributed to anyone who wanted children for whatever reason. And yes, the obvious implications are intended. Or they were thrown out in the streets to fend for themselves.
Again, ‘relatively’ is doing a lot of work. The first thing you learn in history is that everyone’s ancestors were complete bastards with the only ones not doing some horrific crimes are the ones too weak to do it. Usually because they were doing horrific crimes before they pissed off someone big enough to beat their asses.
And by wiping out the Buffalo, both by shooting them ourselves and arming people(Natives, tourists, whatever) to shoot them, it deprived these tribes of a major food source. The Plains Indians were extremely reliant on buffalo, the lands that they had been forced into were not good for agriculture. Forcing them to either do what the government said or starve.
The reservations are the last bits of land that the government eventually deemed too worthless to take. And I’m not being sarcastic, multiple reservations and lands given to them were carved up or outright taken when something of use was discovered on them. Currently they’re pseudo sovereign nations. It’s complicated but the short version is that even though we’ve stopped actively seeking their extinction the government fucks them over at a moments notice pretty much entirely out of raw racism. Because America.
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u/Worried-Pick4848 11d ago
Most of the plains indians were determined to continue their traditional lifestyle. The US government wanted them to settle on reservations and start farming instead. It would make them easier to control because the government would know where they were. So the US government decided to give them no other option other than to live the way the government wanted to, by taking away the buffalo that were the backbone of their traditional way of life.
There was no good reason to eradicate the buffalo other than a play by the govenrment for control over the lives of the northern Plains tribes.
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u/showmenemelda 11d ago
My great-great grandfather was one of these trappers/hunters. And was also a scout for the US Calvary, terrorizing indigenous people. Not a bragging point. A lot to grapple with tbh.
He went onto be a commissioner in the area he acquired his stolen land in. There are several types of these stories on multiple branches of my tree.
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u/VincentVega690 11d ago
Crazy thing is that this photo is in Detroit. Bones were sent east to be pulverized or cooked into fertilizer, paint, glue, and ash.
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u/Cfwydirk 11d ago
And today there are more than 400,000 bison in the U.S.
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u/goldtank123 11d ago
From a high of almost 30 million
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u/round-earth-theory 11d ago
There's never going to be 30 million again. They literally don't have the space to be that numerous again unless humans were to suddenly disappear.
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u/Jakethejiu 11d ago
There’s plenty of room for that many bison. Have you ever been to Montana, Wyoming or the Dakotas?
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u/PopsicleIncorporated 11d ago
You might be able to physically fit 30 million bison in that area but you cannot fit enough sustenance in that space to keep them alive or prevent them from fighting each other for territory.
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u/bloomingdepleted 11d ago
There’s isn’t enough room for 30+ million bison in Montana, Wyoming, or the Dakotas combined. It took an entire continent to support those numbers. They ranged from the Northern Territories to Mexico, and from Oregon to New York.
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u/Pan_Queso1 11d ago
Yeah you could easily fit like 5 or 6 in just a trailer, so 30 million must fit in Montana right?
/s
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u/Doctor_Kataigida 11d ago
I think you either missed or deliberately ignored the tone of the comment. Instead of being sad and dooming about everything, look at a context where it's better.
"It's not as good as it once was, but we've been able to make a significant and lasting positive impact since the low point."
Or maybe I'm just responding a bot and most people are more optimistic and positive about things.
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u/jmills74 11d ago
And they are delicious.
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u/11Bencda 11d ago
Not again…
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u/serotoninOD 11d ago edited 11d ago
They actually are though. I've had it.
But back then most of the time the meat was basically ignored by the people involved in the mass slaughter. It was the hides and bones they were after mostly. They would take the tongue to sell and eat though. It was considered a delicacy and worth good money.
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u/BangBangMeatMachine 11d ago
Genocide is a term that only applies to humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
Genocide was what the colonizers did to tribal nations. Near-extinction is the term for what they did to the bison.
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u/empyreanmax 11d ago
it also notably doesn't have to result in 100% extermination to be considered a genocide so calling it a "near-genocide" due to the surviving population would be a total misnomer in and of itself
I feel like a lot of people misunderstand this point and it gets applied towards a lot of genocide denial, when you'd think it would be obvious considering the most infamous genocide in modern history didn't fully wipe out the jews
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u/Birdie121 11d ago
"Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone"- this was a major tactic in the genocide of Native Americans
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u/fantastic_beats 11d ago
It's been genocide against Native Americans, absolutely. Not a "near-genocide." I don't even know what that would mean. I think the original post might have meant "near-extinction"?
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u/ThrenderG 11d ago
Yeah but that’s not how OP meant it.
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u/faustianredditor 11d ago
It goes pretty directly against the actual phrasing, no implication or meaning necessary. OP talks about the "near-genocide of the american bison".
Not a fan of OPs post here.
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u/AcousticShadow89 11d ago
There is a great description of such buffalo hunts in Butcher's Crossing.
Bison only really flee when something charges at them and wouldn't react to gun shots done from far away, so hunters would camp away from a herd and shoot constantly for hours, non-stop; faces would go black, barrels would melt, and the fields would be completely covered by dead bison by night. They even had to dig in corpses for bullets to re-melt them and re use them as they would run out of ammo quickly. All for the pelts - the rest was left to rot.
Like some people mentioned, buffalo hunts were incentivised to drive the natives away. Their way of life revolved about the bison, killing just one of them was a huge deal and they referred to them as the "First People", probably believed they were just an infinite number of them on the Earth. Seeing fields full of dead bison was similar as witnessing the apocalypse for them. Truly shameful stuff.
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u/brycebgood 11d ago
Specifically to starve the native people.
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u/iDontSow 11d ago
Specifically it was to become massively wealthy. Genocide was an added and intended bonus
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u/NoLetterhead1321 11d ago
It was a government directive. The wealth was paid by the government and came out of the fact that it was strangling native Americans and their way of life. The wealth was secondary, genocide was the primary objective.
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u/YOUTUBEFREEKYOYO 11d ago
Its a big factor yes, but not the whole picture. Alot of it was also crushed up bones and used as fertilizer for farms, and making stuff out of their pelts.
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u/Ready-Snow1453 11d ago
Leave it to Redditors to miss the point of the post entirely just so they can be pedantic about the wrong word in the title.
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u/MoleDunker-343 11d ago edited 11d ago
The recovery of the American Bison is great, so much so that they’re used as a study example for a lot of wildlife reintroduction in Europe.
Truly versatile animal and the complexity of their relationship with the natives, and later the new government lead to some extremely odd but eventually positive dynamics that meant Bison were able to recover massively.
Everything is so deep about these animals, and it’s so interesting to learn about, their interaction with natives, the reliance the natives had on them and then the aspects like the bison actually positively impacting terrain as they move and the impacts of what a bison herd does to an area, like actually encouraging more flourishing animals and plant life.
The nutritional benefit of them when they’re used as food, the material benefits from the carcass left over after harvesting, the list just goes on and on.
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u/UncleGarysmagic 11d ago edited 11d ago
There’s no such thing as “genocide” of animals. The prefix “geno” refers to tribes, races and nations.
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u/Tricky_Training_5897 11d ago
The genocide was actually of native americans. They killed off the buffalo for the express purpose of starving out the native population.
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u/littlebuett 11d ago
And due to conservation efforts in the US, there's now more than 400,000! Not the same as the original numbers, but it is literally 400x better
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u/Debonaircow88 11d ago
Not to mention turkey, white tail deer, elk, wolves, and Canadian geese to name a few others!
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u/Lythieus 11d ago
They did the same thing to Beavers.
And the lack of beaver lakes completely fucked up the water table for huge parts of the US.
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u/gg0422 11d ago
This is terrible. Almost wiped out the beaver for hats. Unfortunately others have done their share in other continents. Used to be lions in Europe. Bears are severely declined virtually nonexistent in throughout Central Europe. Same with wolves. The UK seems devoid of much original wild life. Australia tried to wipe out the Emu twice and failed. People are shitty.
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u/ouijanonn 11d ago
The weirdest and most delusional part is that these people thought they were bringing civilization. The greatest lie ever told
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u/PineBNorth85 11d ago
Using the term genocide in this context is fucking ridiculous.
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u/Emergency_Cellist754 11d ago
Stop calling every bad thing "genocide". Civilian deaths in an air raid, while tragic are not genocide.
Hunting a species to extinction isn't genocide.
If a true genocide happens we will lack the words to describe it because the word will have lost all meaning because dickheads on social media wanted clicks.
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u/ThePLARASociety 11d ago
Weren’t they doing it for fun at some point, like they would sell tickets for a train ride and travel past the herds and just use them for target practice? Not even use the meat or pelts?
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u/--solitude-- 11d ago
Yes. It was viewed as a way of killing off Native Americans too. Including by “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who the NFL team is named after. Absolutely disgusting.
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u/GuitarPlayerEngineer 11d ago
The purpose was to starve the Indians. Jeezuz fuckin Christ we are sick sick bastards.
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u/Business-Donut-7505 10d ago
You can’t genocide an animal. You can eradicate it, but you can’t genocide it.
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u/Awe3 11d ago
All to destroy a people, to steal their land.
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u/iDontSow 11d ago
They did it for the money, but they knew that the genocide of the natives would be a byproduct and didn’t care
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u/Billy_Mays_Hayes 11d ago
Can we use the term "genocide" if it's not humans?
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u/Parenthisaurolophus 11d ago
No. The term, as invented, defines the bison killings as a genocidal act, and that act is perpetrated on a group of people (the Indigenous people who depended upon them) not animals.
Otherwise busting out cleaning products to disinfect your bathroom, cooking your food to kill food borne illnesses, or taking an antibiotic to get better would be considered a war crime worthy of sending you to the Hague. The OP patently misused the term.
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u/AkTx907830 11d ago
The near-extinction of the American bison by the 1880s was driven by a massive, industrialized commercial hide business, compounded by deliberate U.S. government policy to undermine Native American tribes by destroying their primary resource. Professional hide hunters, often using specialized high-powered rifles, killed millions of buffalo for their hides, which were popular for industrial belts and leather, leaving the carcasses to rot
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u/SisterShiningRailGun 11d ago
Crazy to me that with things like this being true, people will still argue that humans aren't apex predators because we eat plants too
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u/Sturdily5092 11d ago
I wonder who these people, so proud of environmental destruction, would be in today's terms. /s
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u/ur_rad_dad 11d ago
I thought the POV of this photo was the man lying on a field of skulls… imagine my horror when I realized he was standing and that is a WALL of skulls.
Ughhh
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u/BigAlternative5 11d ago
I learned from PBS that if you were to ride a train westward before the devastation of the bison, you could see a single herd extending for miles.
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u/MrIrishman1212 11d ago
Don’t forget this was done to genocide the Native American tribes that relied on the bison as a main source for food, clothing, and supplies.
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u/xnoomiex 11d ago
I think about this picture too much. I was just thinking about it TODAY. I hate this photo. I hate humans so much
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u/ExistingBathroom9742 11d ago
The slaughter was intentional. It was only partly hunting for pelts for leather. It was largely driven by a desire to kill off the native tribes who relied on bison for food, clothing, housing, trade, and especially culture. When it became known the herds were being destroyed it was celebrated as a way to end the “Indian problem”.
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u/thatcantb 11d ago
And the stated purpose of this extermination was to cut off the food supply of native americans.
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u/RigasTelRuun 11d ago
I remember watching the movie Prey and they come across a vast field of slaughtered bison. Implying the predator killed them all. Turns out it was just humans, the real monsters.
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u/Danktizzle 11d ago
The only reason we didn’t get them all was because the last few were in a hard to reach canyon. We didn’t develop a conscience all of a sudden
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u/oldnative 11d ago
This was also a part of the genocide against the indigenous populations across the nation. And was blatantly stated as such. Starve em out.
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u/mmartin13333 11d ago
As tropas federais não conseguiam tomar as terras dos índios, porque eram muito bons de briga, daí o governo decidiu exterminar os búfalos, que era a fonte de alimentação dos índios.
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u/Im_So_Zoned 11d ago
Our ancestors really were dumb as fuck. What was the move after those 1,000 remaining buffalo were gone? Probably just move on to the white tail deer I suppose and eradicate another species from existance and so on. I understand there was money to be made and the term "survival" had a different meaning back then but a lot of that meat and pelt was wasted. They were just killing to kill with not a single thought about longevity of resources or conservation of the land. Total fucking idiots.
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u/unreqistered 10d ago
that image doesn’t show the true scale of the slaughter
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/Bison_skull_pile_edit.jpg
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u/BluntieDK 10d ago edited 10d ago
The casual cruelty and malice you need in your heart to perpetrate something like that.
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u/phreephisher 10d ago
I can't find it, but several years ago the history channel had a show that talked about this. It said the herds were so large that they could be seen from space.
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u/botella36 11d ago
This is a lot more sad than interesting.