Blood and Milk
I am uncomfortable because whenever there is talk of pure populations, culling inevitably follows.
Are there other ways we can understand a true bison? Some have said that genetically pure bison should be valued because they may interact with the landscape differently, for example bison face storms while cattle turn and drift in the face of them. But at what dilutions of purity do these behavioral shifts happen? Could we not look at continual relationship with the land, lack of human intervention into breeding and herd structures? A long uninterrupted relationship with human and non-human predators? In other words, by examining kin ship?
And when we prioritize the techno-science label of pure how do we denigrate the agency of those that survived by adapting. The calves that were captured by McKay and Jones that accepted to their new mothers, formed a bond through milk and stayed alive, who allowed themselves to be herded and transported. That’s not to say that there should be any judgment passed on those that died of capture stress or could not accept a surrogate mother, a sudden and dramatic change in being and relating was required of these individuals, not a gradual generations long adaptation.
What makes a bison? Is it carried in the blood or is communicated in social structures and bonds? I would say that bison like any being is constantly being made in relation, it cannot be statically determined by a lab.
And what of the milk cows that adopted cross species calves, what did they become? Their milk was produced by birthing their own calves, who were taken from them, some slaughtered, so that they could be offered to the more valuable bison calves. In the case of Jones’ old red cow she forever after rejected cattle calves, presumably even her own, in preference of bison calves. How was she dramatically remade in these relationships?
Have you ever seen a bison calf nurse? They ram their heads into their mother’s udders to get the milk flowing. Human women wince when they see those heads ram into the soft engorged tissue.
I had to check on youtube to see if domestic calves do this, I was pretty sure they didn’t but I realized I couldn’t remember ever seeing a domestic calf nursing. In a dairy they are removed from the mother within hours and bottle-fed formula if they are female. Killed or confined to a veal shed if male.
I wonder if our understanding of agency has been limited to a very human conception of will, of the minds power to determine and direct forces externally and internally. It’s an illusion that comforts and when it falls away it can be frightening, but it can also be profound/spiritual when an agency not of the conscious mind – but one of a bodily hormonal feedback loop bonds two beings through nipple, milk and body.