SPECIAL REPORT: High-principled outdoor clothing brand Patagonia has long been lauded for its stance on the environment, sustainability and social responsibility, but a recent collaboration with a bison ranch has drawn criticism from animal justice groups. Claire Hamlett reports.

Outdoor clothing company Patagonia is “creating more of a demand” for dead bison by partnering with a producer of bison skins and meat, says animal protection group In Defense of Animals (IDA USA). Patagonia, which is known for its environmental initiatives, has partnered with Wild Idea Buffalo Co. to sell bison-hide work boots and bison jerky. IDA USA is asking Patagonia’s CEO Ryan Gellert “to end the sale of all products made from the flesh and hides of slaughtered American bison.”

Patagonia and Wild Idea’s justification for killing bison is that bison are better for the environment than cattle. This is true - in fact, bison are responsible for a lot of the ecology of the North American plains, being a keystone species that once roamed far and wide and numbered up to 60 million. But then European colonisers all but wiped them out as part of their drive to expand agriculture and cattle ranching and to dominate Indigenous people for whom bison were deeply important. Conservation efforts have brought their numbers back up into the hundreds of thousands, but only around 20,000 of those live freely - the rest are fenced in on ranches and farms - meaning they are still considered “near threatened” by the IUCN.

Wild Idea ranch manager Colton Jones says, “The more bison product we sell, the more land we can place under our stewardship.” Patagonia acknowledges that it sounds “counterintuitive” to use “bison hides to save the bison”, but argues that “their numbers are growing, and their cycle of life has been essential to the prairie’s vitality for ages.”

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But in pre-colonial times, bison populations and by extension the prairie ecosystems thrived when only Indigenous people lived in a balanced relationship with them, using them as an essential source of food as well as for making tools and shelter. A paper critiquing the ecological impacts of ranching also explains how in pre-colonial America, “vast numbers” of bison who died naturally every year on the prairies would remain where they fell, providing “feasts for a coterie of decomposers and scavengers that included wolves, wolverines, eagles, vultures, bears, and many other animals.” In this way, they “constitut[ed] a central node in the food web that was critical to these scavengers and decomposers. All of the bison, scavengers, and decomposers were recycled back into the system, supporting a large biomass of other organisms in turn.” Replacing bison with cattle ranching takes all this good stuff out of the cycle of the ecosystem, but it isn’t clear that ranching bison puts any of it back in, especially while the number of ranch bison is much higher than wild bison. As the paper further explains, cattle ranchers “keep mortality to a minimum” because it is necessary for the economic viability of their business. Why should this be any different for ranching bison? Ranching, after all, “is an extractive industry” and Wild Idea clearly wants to sell more products.

As for how the bison are killed by Wild Idea, they are shot while they are out in the field. The ranchers describe it as “humane harvesting” as it avoids them being rounded up and sent to a slaughterhouse. Patagonia says “from the ability to roam free and eat the grass they were intended to eat to receiving a dignified end in the field on the Plains -- far from the stress of the slaughterhouse -- the animals are treated with care and respect.” But IDA USA argues that shooting “unsuspecting individuals standing among their herd and then chopping apart their bodies in the field in a specially designed truck isn't any better for bison whose lives and family bonds matter to them.”

It’s important to remember the historical ties between bison and Indigenous tribes in America and that some Indigenous communities are re-establishing their own herds and/or forming partnerships with ranches like Wild Idea. For some tribes, raising bison has been important for addressing food insecurity, while some also consider them to be family.

But IDA USA argues that Patagonia working with a ranch that makes a profit from killing bison is a perpetuation of the violence that has been wrought on bison since colonial times. As an ethically-minded company, IDA USA urges, Patagonia should “become the company it aspires to be by removing these products.” 

Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.

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