We Chose the Wrong Animal for the American Plains

Why the BLM’s bison decision in Montana hurts our homeland, not just Indigenous hopes

Photo by Elijah Pilchard on Unsplash

We keep choosing the wrong animal for this land. That’s the thought that’s been sitting in my chest ever since the Bureau of Land Management announced it was revoking American Prairie’s bison grazing permits in Montana.

On paper, it’s a narrow decision about seven allotments in Phillips County. In my body, it feels like the government just looked at the Northern Great Plains, looked at the animal that built that ecosystem, and said: “You don’t belong here — at least not if you’re not a cow.”

And I’m hurting.

Homesick for a prairie we’ve never known

The environmentalist in me longs for an almost-mythic version of the plains: an unfenced stretch of grassland running for hundreds of miles, across open country and undeveloped wilderness, a true natural spectacle in the Western Hemisphere. I want a landscape where you can stand on a rise and watch a herd of bison — tens of thousands strong — move like weather across the horizon, following rain and grass instead of fences and deed lines.

That’s not fantasy. Historically, tens of millions of bison roamed North America, engineering the prairies with their hooves, grazing, and wallows. The vision behind American Prairie — a 3.2‑million‑acre mosaic that could support tens of thousands of bison again — is one of the closest real-world attempts we have to let the plains remember what they once were. Every time an agency takes away a piece of that experiment, the distance between the prairie in my imagination and the prairie in our politics gets wider.

This latest BLM decision feels like that distance snapping tight.

Why the “Native angle” isn’t enough

I understand the Native and Indigenous argument here, and I’m very sympathetic to it. Tribal nations and Indigenous coalitions are right to say that canceling American Prairie’s bison permits doesn’t just hurt one nonprofit — it threatens treaty rights, tribal buffalo herds, food sovereignty, and the cultural revival that comes with bringing buffalo home. They’re also right that BLM’s move to exclude “conservation bison” from the definition of domestic livestock could be a legal weapon used against tribal herds across the West.

But here’s the uncomfortable part of my thesis: in the public eye — in the voter’s gut reaction — “Native rights” almost never beat “ranchers and the beef economy.”

Western politics has spent more than a century mythologizing the rancher as the American producer-hero, the guy on horseback feeding the nation and embodying freedom. When the story gets framed as “tribal sovereignty vs. local ranchers and food production,” most Americans, especially in the West, quietly choose the rancher. Not because they’ve thought deeply about treaties or history, but because jobs, cheap burgers, and the cowboy story feel closer to their own lives than Indigenous struggle does.

That’s why I think leading with “the Native angle,” as morally urgent as it is, can sometimes hurt this cause in the broader political arena. Not because Indigenous voices are wrong, but because a hostile culture is eager to file them under “someone else’s issue” and move on.

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

The story that should be front and center: our homeland

What should be at the center of this conversation is the land itself — our shared home — and the simple ecological truth that bison are a keystone species on the prairies.

Bison are not just big, photogenic cows. Their grazing patterns, constant movement, and selective feeding create a patchwork of plant heights and bare ground that supports a huge variety of grasses, wildflowers, insects, birds, and small mammals. Their powerful hooves break up crusted soil and help water soak in; their wallows become little basins that catch seeds and moisture and host unique plant communities; their dung feeds soil microbes and spreads seed across the landscape.

In short, bison don’t just “use” the prairie — they maintain and repair it. They are the original land managers of this biome, animals whose evolution is designed in dialogue with fire, grass, and predators to keep the plains alive.

If I’m trying to talk to the average American voter, I don’t start with, “You should care enough about Indigenous suffering to sacrifice steak.” I start with, “Do you care enough about the health of your homeland — the soil, the water, the climate resilience — to let the animal that built this place come back to do a job?” Restoring bison isn’t charity for Native people; it’s overdue maintenance on the only continent we’ve got.

Cattle: the wrong animal for the myth

Part of what breaks my heart is that we pinned our entire Western mythology on an animal poorly suited to this land.

Domesticated cattle are prey animals bred for docility and meat, not for surviving blizzards on open plains or outmaneuvering wolves over vast distances. They spend more time grazing than bison, hang closer to water, and, especially under continuous grazing, tend to overuse the same patches of ground. Their hooves and habits, in typical practice, compact soil, erode streambanks, and strip vegetation faster than the land can heal.

Bison, by contrast, move more, graze less intensively at any given spot, and are highly selective about what they eat. They co‑evolved with prairie grasses, and their behavior creates complexity — different plant heights, bare spots, lush regrowth — that increases biodiversity and helps grasslands withstand drought and extreme weather.

Yes, cattle can be managed in more regenerative ways. There are ranchers working their cows in tight rotations, mimicking bison disturbance and rest. But the dominant system in the West isn’t that. It’s a model that treats the cow as the unquestioned protagonist, the land as a background resource, and bison as competition.

We took a continent built by buffalo and decided the story would be about cows. And the land has been paying for it ever since.

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

The cowboy choice that still isn’t being made

Here’s the part that makes me angriest: there is nothing inevitable about seeing bison only as enemies of ranching.

Cowboys, ranchers, and rural communities could have been the global experts in managing semi-wild bison herds for both meat and ecosystem restoration. With different policies, different market incentives, and a different cultural story, the West could be known for bison ranching that works with the land’s logic instead of against it. Imagine a world where the iconic Western image isn’t a lone steer in a chewed-down pasture, but a mixed landscape where bison herds move through large conservation grazing blocks, supporting wildlife and tourism, while ranchers earn income from bison meat and habitat stewardship.

Instead, many of the loudest voices in “cowboy culture” have chosen to fight any expansion of bison on public lands, frame them as parasites living off taxpayer-funded grass, and demand that agencies like BLM define “real livestock” in ways that exclude conservation buffalo. The decision to revoke American Prairie’s permits is a perfect example: rather than seeing bison as partners in restoring degraded public range, the agency reinterpreted the law to say they don’t count unless they serve the same production model as cattle.

That’s a choice. And it’s a tragic one.

Photo by Luis Hinojosa on Unsplash

What I want this country to care about

I love the idea of a Northern Great Plains where you can walk out under a big sky and feel that the land is whole again: grasslands humming with insects, birds riding the air over diverse patches of plants, predators shadowing moving herds, streams running clear through unfenced valleys. I love the idea of a rural economy that thrives on tourism, on guiding people into that spectacle, on selling them bison meat and stories instead of just cattle auctions and subdivision lots.

When BLM cancels a handful of bison grazing permits, the headlines say, “Just seven allotments.” My heart hears, “We still don’t believe in that world you’re imagining.”

I don’t want us to stop talking about Indigenous rights. Those stories belong here because Indigenous nations understood bison’s relationship to the land long before Western science did, and because justice demands their voices at the center of decisions about their homelands. But I do want us to stop pretending that Native pain alone will move a political system that has repeatedly chosen profit over people.

I want us to talk about biodiversity as something patriotic: about buffalo as an American species that we owe a home to, about grasslands as national infrastructure as crucial as bridges and highways. I want us to admit we picked the wrong animal to build our Western myth around — and that we have the chance, right now, to begin correcting that choice.

Because in the end, my grief over the BLM decision is rooted in love. Love of a homeland that could be spectacular and resilient if we let the right creatures do their work. Love of a prairie that, even broken and fenced, still remembers the weight of bison hooves.

And I’m tired of watching our government, our culture, and our politics tell that land, over and over again, that the animal it evolved with doesn’t belong.