Why are equines the only grazing
animal which seemingly enjoys chasing and dominating other grazing
animals? This is a question which has baffled me for years (actually
decades) yet it is an important aspect of animal behavior that people
seem to miss. I bring this up because of a recent discussion on
bison.
I know there are a lot of people out
there who are going to counter with “My bison charge anyone on
horseback,” but the simple fact is, they aren't. If they were,
cutting horse trainers would not risk using bison to tune up show
horses worth tens, if not hundreds of thousand of dollars. So why
does a herd of bison “charge” people who are horseback?
Curiosity.
When confronted with something new,
grazing animals are generally either afraid or curious. If they are
afraid, they will watch cautiously or flee. If they are curious they
will go see what it is. If one or two of a group of grazing animals
get curious about something and start running towards it, the whole
herd will follow.
In the case of a horseman being “charged” by a bison herd, it is a case of a few of the animals being curious enough about something to run over to check it. The rest of the herd follows. The first thing that pops into the rider's mind is panic, which transfers immediately to the horse. Horse and rider vacate the premises with the bison following trying to see what the heck that strange thing is.
Cattle will do the same thing. A
person walking across a field full of yearling heifers who are not
used to seeing a person afoot, will come stampeding right up to the
person and if the person runs, they will keep following. If the
person stops, so do the heifers, but they may come close enough to
them to sniff them.
Once I had a steer in a little group
of five hundred that was insanely curious about rabbits. One morning
all five hundred were running around the pivot, as a herd. I could
see noting they were chasing so I rode to that pivot to check it out.
When I got there they were all stopped in a big circle. When I got to
the middle, the one steer was standing on a jack rabbit's leg while
he was licking it. Other than standing on a leg to pin it down the
steer was not doing anything aggressive towards the rabbit. On the
contrary, he was grooming it!
This was not a one time affair with
this steer. In the several months I had this group of cattle, I had
to move them back and forth across some desert ground to some remote
pivots. This steer was naturally in the lead, and whenever a rabbit
jumped up in front of him, he'd take off chasing the rabbit.
There is a similarity between the
rabbits being chased by that steer, and riders being chased by bison.
Instead of thinking about what was really going on, they both ran
like heck to get out of the way. All the bison are wanting to do is
check you out, and all that steer was wanting to do was give the
rabbit a bath.
The point to all of this is that bison
can be worked horseback. You have to put some thought into it and
acclimate them first. After all, if bison choused horses, Indians
would have ridden bison and lived in horse hide teepee.
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