A group just outside of San Antonio is working to bring buffalo back to Texas, decades after the near extinction of the animals by the 1900s hurt the livelihoods of indigenous people and the environment.
– is to heal Texas’ indigenous people and the environment by restoring the buffalo population.“Once again, the buffalo are thriving here in Texas,” said Lucille Contreras, director and founder of the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project. “We are in the Southern Coastal Plains.”
“At one point, the buffalo were everything to Texas Indigenous people,” Contreras said. “They were our source of spirituality, our source of nutrition and food.”“They were killed for sport,” Contreras said. “They were killed for their hides, and they were killed as a way to exterminate the Native Americans.”
“We’ve had to hide in plain sight, as forced assimilation, as a way to survive,” Contreras said. “Just as the buffalo had to survive.”“It was devastation also to the environment and to the land and to the climate,” Contreras said. We need our grasslands and buffalo together because they help combat climate change by promoting biodiversity and keeping carbon in the ground.“These native plants, what you see on the surface, really provide habitat for birds and pollinators and also microorganisms and other species that are very critical to the health of our soils, to the health of our food that provides for us and other species,” Scott said.
“Beef cattle, they are not native to here,” Contreras said. “They eat the grass so much that they pull it all the way up, and it doesn’t replenish itself, versus Buffalo that move. They graze rotationally, naturally, and they only eat the tops of the grass, so the grass continues to grow.”Cattle are known for releasing tons of methane through manure, contributing to global warming. Contreras said buffalo manure better decomposes than cattle manure.
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