Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the plains bison and wood bison in Canada were hunted by nomadic indigenous hunters and white hunters alike. By the 1880s, the bison was nearly extinct, spurring a movement to save the few herds that remained. Federal government wildlife policy evolved from preservation of wilderness to utilitarian, scientific conservation and management of bison populations.
Government preservation efforts began with the passing of the Unorganized Territories Game Preservation Act of 1894, which restricted legal hunting to certain times of the year. Bison herds were tracked down and moved to reserves where hunters were banned from operating.
In 1909, Buffalo National Park in Alberta was established with a herd of 300 plains bison. By 1916 more than 2,000 bison lived in the park, which was now overpopulated. As a result, many were moved to Wood Buffalo National Park in north-eastern Alberta (est. 1922). There, the plains bison and wood bison mingled and created a hybridized species of bison. The plains bison carried new diseases that were transmitted to the existing wood bison population.
When bison populations collapsed in the mid-19th century, Aboriginal groups that relied on the bison had to find new ways to support themselves. In the 20th century, the Canadian government's conservationist policies that restricted hunting and requisitioned land to preserve as national parks made it even more difficult for Aboriginals to remain self-sufficient. Ultimately, Canadian bison would go extinct and Aboriginals had to find other ways to survive.
Government efforts to conserve the bison are ongoing. Parks Canada has plans to reintroduce the plains bison to Banff National Park, in order to restore the species and to promote tourism. The commercial bison industry still breeds bison for food, which conflicts directly with wild bison conservation efforts. Approximately 500,000 bison live in North America today; only 20,000 of those are considered wild. Many activists believe that conservation efforts must go beyond simply increasing population size and focus on the restoration of the bison to its wild, undomesticated state.
Historical decline of the North American bison population
Plains bison In the early 19th century, there were an estimated 30 million bison on the Great Plains. But profits in the lucrative robe trade stimulated overhunting of the plains bison by indigenous peoples and white settlers alike. The bison on the western plains were the last to be affected by white American expansionism, but by the 1850s even those herds had declined. Westward migration of domesticated animals and people destroyed grazing grounds, and drought and new diseases exacerbated the decline. The plight of the bison was largely seen as the superiority of man over nature until the early 19th century.
Historian Andrew Isenberg argues that the rise of capitalist ideology drove white hunters to compete for every last animal, and that a multitude of factors – disease, drought, westward expansion, commercialization and industrialization of hunting, colonialism, and the introduction of domestic animals from Europe – caused the near-extinction of the bison.Isenberg 2001, 197-198 Others note that the bison depletion was a problem of the tragedy of the commons, the opposite of capitalism: The bison were communal property, not private property, therefore they were abused and squandered for short-term gain that ultimately caused long-term problems, as no one person or group was responsible for maintaining a healthy population.
Wood bison The majority of the world's wood bison herds are located in Northern Canada after a small herd of bison was discovered in the northern part of Wood Buffalo National Park. In 1965, 23 of these bison were relocated to the south side of Elk Island National Park. The 300 surviving there today are considered the most genetically pure wood bison remaining.
While there are many factors that have contributed to the decline of the wood bison, the most prominent are the over-hunting that took place in the 1800s; inadequate conservation methods, which failed to prevent hybridization with the plains bison and other species; and the spread of communicable diseases. Wood bison were largely over-hunted in the 1800s, and only a few hundred remained in Northern Alberta by the early 20th century. By 1957, wood bison were thought to have been finally extinct in Canada due to hybridization with the plains bison, which took place in Wood Buffalo National Park between 1925 and 1928.
As wood bison species became threatened with the hybridization, relocation and breeding conservation programs specific to wood bison were established in 1963. The population increased steadily. From the 1970s to the 1990s, however, the population began to decline again because of the spread of bovine tuberculosis. The disease had accompanied infected plains bison that were transferred to Wood Buffalo National Park. There the number of wood bison declined from 10,000 bison in the late 1960s to 2,200 bison by the late 1990s due to this process.
Social ecology Aboriginal worldviews emphasize a connection among all life forms. Aboriginals had a reciprocal, sustainable relationship with the bison. Traditional governing structures ensured the continuity of resource use over time, allowing Aboriginals to adapt to frequent, unpredictable changes in the environment. In Canada, northern Aboriginals had a subsistence culture based on local hunting and trapping economies. The traditional hunting cultures of the Cree, Dene, and Inuit peoples came into direct conflict with the Canadian federal government's wildlife conservation programs. The Aboriginals' life on the land was impossible without access to animals for hunting.
Aboriginals of the Great Plains faced a choice in the 1700s: they could remain in their villages, cultivating food and trying to defend themselves against new Eurasian infectious diseases, or they could adapt to the white colonial economy and become nomadic bison hunters, selling bison robes, tongues and other parts in exchange for commodities. Many chose the latter option. For decades they profited from the bison trade. By the 1850s, however, the near-extinction of the bison had removed their livelihood, and many of these Aboriginal groups starved to death.
Shift in hunting practices After the introduction of horses, newly nomadic First Nations groups could hunt bison more easily. In the nineteenth century, the bison hunt became highly commercialized and capitalistic, valuing quick profits over long-term sustainability. Isenberg argues that cultural and ecological interactions between Native Americans and Euroamericans in the Great Plains were responsible for the near-extinction of the bison. The new forms of bison hunters were mounted Indian nomads and Euroamerican industrial hidemen. These hunters, combined with environmental pressures, nearly extinguished the bison. Isenberg says that the Indian adoption of horses also led to competition with bison on the Plains for scarce water and forage. Industrialization played a role, with the expansion of railroads providing access into bison areas, commercial hunting (sometimes from the railcars), and the fur trade market.
Implications for preservation efforts The first bison preservation efforts in Canada included the Unorganized Territories Game Preservation Act of 1894, through which the government legislated a closed season on the bison. This act was passed after naturalists conducted rough and largely inaccurate visual surveys of the bison population, concluding that the animal was in decline. From this assumption, naturalists created a more active federal wildlife administration in the Northwest Territories. The Wood Buffalo National Park was created in 1922 in response to Northern Canada's wildlife crisis.
Origins of wildlife conservation in Canada
Ideological development of the wildlife conservation movement
During most of the 19th century, wildlife preservation was not a goal of the federal government because of its belief in the superabundance of natural resources, the fact of wilderness frontiers, and a political climate that emphasized development and exploitation of land for human use. But the bison was the iconic species of the North American conservation movement, an animal that symbolized frontier wilderness. As its numbers declined, it was associated with the disappearing wild. Protecting the bison inspired conservation efforts in Canada, as did concerns for recreation and resource preservation. Canadian officials were also influenced by the growing movement in this period in the United States for wildlife conservation, for similar reasons.
Wildlife conservation in Canada also had a practical aspect: the government wanted to protect animals to develop tourism and recreation to parks. Howard Douglas, appointed superintendent of Rocky Mountains Park in 1897, began to preserve wildlife and try to increase their numbers to attract more visitors to the park.
Between 1900 and 1920, there was increasing public interest in parks, and a change from focusing on tourism to establishing the National Parks Branch. Canada had the world's first governmental organization dedicated to parks. Related governmental agencies were established, such as the Commission of Conservation. The Canadian Commission of Conservation, established in 1909, was intended as an independent body dealing with questions of natural resource conservation in Canada. In the early years of the commission, wildlife investigations were mostly focused on resource-commodity species, such as fish and fur-bearing animals. Later studies developed to include greater variety of species.
Further ideological development resulted in institutionalization of environmental protection. Several government civil servants promoted these goals, such as Robert Campbell, a Canadian Forestry Branch Director; Gordon Hewitt, a Dominion entomologist; and James Harkin, the first Parks Commissioner, who expressed strong conservationist philosophies. These bureaucrats actively sought administrative support from the government and intensively engaged in their own research to pass numerous environmental protection policies. Due to the efforts of Canadian government officials, the wildlife conservation movement became institutionalized and strengthened. While their personal experiences had shaped their efforts, they were also influenced by the neighboring experience in the United States: the loss of the frontier, the adverse effects of development causing decline in wildlife numbers, and the establishment and success of American national parks. James Harkin was especially influenced by American John Muir and his wilderness preservation theories. Both Harkin and Douglas were well aware of the developments in American wildlife protection movements.
Canadian society and government developed a greater awareness and sense of responsibility, leading to a wilderness consciousness and preservation ethic. The public supported government in protecting wildlife as an intrinsically valuable international resource, rather than simply a tourist attraction or commodity. Canada's wildlife conservation movement demonstrates how a small faction of dedicated civil servants transformed their own goals of preserving endangered species into active government policy.
Evolution of federal government wildlife policy in Canada
From preservation to conservation