The Bison* Experiment
In August 2002 Whitsunday Beefalo got 5 bison heifers from Deanne and Ashley Brown, Beetoomba Bison
Our goal is not to breed and sell bison, but to start an experiment: we want to breed the bison heifers to one of our Beefalo bulls to get Hybrid Bison and eventually Beefalo. At the same time we are continuing to breed up from bovines to Beefalo.
This
is Evanston Thaddaeus (17.5% bison content), the young bull who runs with the
weaner bison heifers. At 23 months (June 2003) he weighs 604 kg, almost double the bison's
weight. At the beginning he was
pretty impressed by the strange looking creatures, but has got used to them
and interacts with them.
Why female bison? Breeding in the USA has shown that trying to breed Beefalo or bovine females to bison bulls is risky. The bovine dams develop 'hydrops', an accumulation of water in the uterus; they most likely abort and/or die. Bison females don't seem to develop antibodies against the 'foreign' bovine tissue: they will normally have healthy hybrid heifer calves and sterile bull calves. The bull calves could be weak and have problems. But that is all in the future:
As we describe in our Farmdiary things started to go wrong in October. They started to loose weight and by mid October they carried lots of ticks. The pour-on only took effect very late, because of their thick coat. At the beginning of November, despite the best of care, with vitamin injections, iron treatment and constant supervision of their skin, the first bison, Gamma, died. The post-mortem didn't reveal anything dramatic, only that she didn't die of tick fever or any other known bovine disease, nor did she die of any poison. What the blood tests showed was an extreme anemia: the blood was like raspberry Cordial!
Beginning of December the second bison died, Delta, the smallest and the most anemic. We were devastated and thought that our bison experiment had failed.
Since then, things look brighter. Very slowly, the three remaining bison recovered, regained their appetite and started to gain weight. We make sure that they don't carry any ticks and they get Vitamin C and B12 in their water. They chew their cud and seem to be very content. So we keep our fingers crossed that our bison experiment will still go ahead, albeit with only three instead of five.
In July the 3 bison are doing very well, all weighing more than 300 kg. At the end of July the first one cycled! Things start looking good again...
loving
the cool weather!
