It will join the bald eagle as a symbol of America, our past, present and future.
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It’s now up to the president to sign the legislation, which would officially put the behemoth animals on an equal level with the Bald Eagle, which is the nation’s official bird.
The Great Plains Bison, the largest land mammal in North America used to thrive in the prairies in the Midwest, drawn up into southern MI by the great oak savannahs that once thrived here.
Senator Hoeven (R-ND) says the bison is a strong, proud, and free animal, symbolic of America.. Then, imagine the North American prairies and woodlands painted with bison thriving under shared stewardship- hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of them-grazing, wallowing, nourishing people and predators, and sustaining the belief that we can work together to fix what we have broken. There has not been an official mammal of the United States. Many of those are “beefalo”, cattle-bison hybrids raised for their meat.
Bison were hunted almost to extinction as Americans moved west. Theodore Roosevelt, a great conservationist who became president in 1901, launched efforts to restore their population across the plains.
That and other efforts have led to something of a bison renaissance; the World Conservation Society now estimates there are about 500,000 American bison on the continent, although 90 percent of them are contained on ranches.
“Many of the bison you see in the wild today can trace their roots back to New York”, Mr. Calvelli told The Christian Science Monitor in an interview.
“Even people in the cities, there’s just this attachment to the mystique”, said Dave Carter, director of the National Bison Association.
That’s why Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota pushed the national mammal designation through the Senate.
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It adds that the bison adorns two state flags and is the official mammal or animal of three states. The bill now heads to the White House for President Obama’s signature. The largest population lives in Yellowstone National Park.
