Bison Are the Dumbest Creatures on Earth

The J.Rogan Experience. This book right here, I had this author in the other day. His name's Sam, Sam Gwyn, S.C. Gwyn, he wrote this book, Empire of the Summer Moon. It's fucking amazing, man. It's about the Comanches and it's about the war they had with like through Texas and Oklahoma and went on forever. Like the Comanches were the last holdout against the American settlers and against the soldiers. The Comanches were the last holdouts. They were the last truly wild tribe and they were running the plains for hundreds and hundreds of years with horses and shit. But here's the thing, man. This book, it's taking place in the mid 1800s to the late 1800s, which is like, that's so recently. It's so recent. Yeah, the giant rock from Egypt came over in 1888. Yes, came over in 1888. Right, it's probably older than that. These people were essentially living a nomadic stone age life. Everything was leather and sinew and buffalo tendons they used to make their bows and their bowstrings. They made their own bows and arrows out of wood and the arrowheads were made out of flint. They would chip away expertly and they would run around following buffalo and just shoot them with bows and arrows and spear them or run them off cliffs. They would run them off cliffs and stampedes and get to the bottom. And there were sometimes so many bodies down in the bottom of these buffalo jumps that the rotting would cause combustion and they would blow up. They would explode and catch fire just because there's hundreds and hundreds of dead rotting buffalo on top of each other because they can't eat that many. Say if you have a tribe, a tribe of 150 people and you kill a thousand buffalo, how many of those are you going to eat? You can't really eat all of them. So they would just let them sit there and they would literally start massive wildfires because they would burst into flames. I saw a bison when I was driving from Salt Lake City to some other gig. I should be clear, I don't think they started massive wildfires. I think they started a massive buffalo fire. The fires of the dead bodies. I don't know if there was like shit to burn outside of there. There must be though, right? Wait. It's probably grass and stuff on the ground. That's where the buffalo were eating. But it's at the bottom of a cliff. I don't know what was down there. But they had these areas that they would call buffalo jumps where they would just circle them on this high and circle them on this high. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yell at them and these buffalo would be like, ooh, where do I go? And they just off the cliff, everybody. And by the time you're running to the cliff and you realize, oh my god, this is a cliff. You try to hit the brakes, there's a thousand fat fucks behind you pushing you off the cliff. Wow. Imagine being the first buffalo to get like really close. He's like running up to the cliff. He's like, oh, oh, oh, shit, oh, shit. He turns around. Baaargh. Baaargh. Baaargh. The dumbest fucking giant beast on earth. The dumbest. Elephants are smart, right? Buffaloes are so dumb. They just run it. Baaargh. Baaargh. Buffaloes are like no disrespect to the buffalo. But they talk in the book about how they would shoot buffalo and that like everybody had like disdain for how dumb the buffalo were. I think it probably made it easy for them to almost wipe them out to the point of extinction. But if you shoot buffalo, one goes down and the other ones look and they go right back to eating. And then another one goes down and they look and they go back to eating. Like you have to literally go out, they were saying, and yell at them to get them to move. Yeah. That was the only way you got them away from the ones you shot because you wanted to eat the ones you shot. So when the ones went down, they were like, get out of here. Get the fuck out of here. They were like, okay, all right. I was going to hang around and eat while my friends died. Do do do do do. Bunch of dummies. But meanwhile, it's an amazing animal. You know? It's like the if like you had a you were going to say that God had a plan to provide people with the perfect animal for hunting. So what's want you to be eating healthy. So I'm going to give you millions of this fucking enormous animal that doesn't move when you shoot its friends. I'm going to literally fill the planes with these things. It's just people were just such cunts that they killed them all. People were so gross because the Buffaloes are so easy to kill that they just killed them all. They killed they would have mountains of bones, man. There's a Buffalo jump. So he had the bone bonfire shelters. It was called it had two big events in history where it happened here. Right. So they called the bonfire because all that black and shit apparently was because of the fires from the Buffaloes hitting and burst into flames. And some of those Buffalo jumps they say to this day you can find arrowheads if you go wandering around the area because you know so populated by Native Americans at the time. But the Comanches dude I think this is this Buffalo jump in Montana. This one's in Texas. Oh in Texas. Yeah. So Texas with the Comanches. There's other Native American tribes there too but a lot of it was the Comanches which is in this book. A lot of this book takes place in Texas. It's fucking amazing dude. And so scary. There's these Buffaloes falling down hitting a rock. Look at that. A large rock shelter was a scene of a series of prehistoric Buffalo jumps. Native American hunters ingeniously stampeded herds of bison over the edge of a cliff overhanging the shelter in a narrow box canyon that empties into the Rio Grande near Langtree, Texas. The Bisons plunged to their deaths on a rock pile. With the opening of the shelter and their historically documented accounts of Northern Plains Indian groups using this effective if indiscriminate technique of killing bison. But you also have to remember back then there was so many bison that if they thought they killed a couple extra thousand they didn't give a fuck. They were everywhere. There were so many of them. And here's why that happened. Here's where it gets even weirder. They think that that happened because people got smallpox and it killed like 90% of the Native American population. So when the Europeans came over in the 1500s and whatever it was when Cortez came over here, what was that? Was that the 1500s? Anyway when those guys came over and brought smallpox it just wiped out like most of the population. So the Buffalo who really their major predator was people, especially Native Americans, especially once they figured out how to ride horses. But now all those dudes died. And so the Buffalo went ham, just fucked up a storm and then there was millions of them. Man. This is author Dan Flores. There was this whole paper that he wrote on it. Was it called Bison Ecology, Bison Diplomacy? I think it's called something along those lines. But it's crazy. You hear about the fate of the bison in North America. It's like the most iconic animal when you really think about the old west. There was one animal when you think about the old west. Maybe it'd be horses. More likely it'd be a bison. Yeah. Why do they call Buffalo Buffalo, the city of Buffalo? Good question. Because a bison is not technically the same as a buffalo. Because those people don't move when they should too. He's son of a bitch. He snuck that in good. It's good timing too. You had a good pause there. I got genuinely curious. It's good pause. It seems like I've. I don't know. Maybe there was a lot of buffalo back then. There was buffalo everywhere. They were like elk. Elk were in literally every state pretty much. People were gross man. We killed everything. Yeah. The quick question of what's the difference is contrary to the song Buffalo did not roam in American West. They're indigenous to South Asia and Africa. Buffalo. Well bison are found in North America. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. They call it American Buffalo but it's a bison. It's a different animal. The buffalo that you get in like Asia and Asian water buffalo. Those are the ones that they get that are in Australia. They brought those over to Australia and dude they got a mess over there. There's nothing that kills them. So they're just all over the place and they destroy the land. They're so big. There's so many of them and they're wild. They even have wild domestic cows that grow out of control and the males become super ferocious. Like a bull doesn't want you riding them. Well they have a thing in Australia called scrub bulls and what it is is a domestic cattle. Like domestic cattle but that went wild generations ago. Many generations ago. So now they're just wild animals that happen to have enormous fucking horns and weigh 2,000 pounds and freak out if they see people. So they see people if you're too close they think you're closing in to try to kill them they just fuck you up. Oh fuck that. Is this uh. It's crocodile Dundee. Crocodile Dundee. I think that's a water buffalo. I think that's basically what's here. That's what's here. That's this. Wow. See that above me is from my friend Adam Greentree. He shot one of those. Oh this is crazy. He's gonna walk up to the thing. Yeah. Like he knows voodoo. He put his hand on it and it just dropped. Yeah. In the real world he would be dead as fuck. That thing would just smash him. He's like I want to just touch your head. Hi. I'll just touch your head. Hi. And then the bull just gave in and went down. Wow. Yeah. So. That dude. You know he wound up marrying the girl. That girl? That girl with the camera. No. It's co-star. Yeah. Wow. That's what else can you do? Yeah. Yeah. But that's all around Australia. Those big ass giant bulls. And then big ass scrub bulls. Wild domestic cow.