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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FrozenZ who wrote (142215)	8/1/2004 2:07:06 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It's really not all that obscure of a topic. One of the standard references, Andrew C. Isenberg's The Destruction of the Bison, is excellent and has a wealth of foodnotes, but what I really like about it is the weird factoids, like the fact that the horse and bison both competed for the same food, and of course horses were new. Another interesting odd factoid is that honeybees changed the environment in ways which were unfavorable to the bison. Honeybees are not native to the Americas, and they are more efficient at pollinating plants which were not native to the Americas. I keep bees. Native bees are solitary, the queen overwinters alive and lays her eggs in the spring, so it takes a while for them to get going. But the whole hive of honeybees overwinter alive and are ready to go as soon as it warms up. Anyway, I am not saying that white people did not kill lots of bison, there are plenty of stories about shooting bison from trains, and cutting off just the tongues, stuff like that. But changing the environment in a way that causes animals to go extinct isn't usually deliberately destructive, just selfish and shortsighted. Think of overfishing in the Atlantic. The fishermen don't kill cod to be fugheaded, it's their livelihood. BTW, the honeybees are all getting killed off by parasites that came here from China. What goes around, comes around.