Today, there are more than 250,000 bison in ranches across the country. Roughly 120 years ago, there were fewer than 1,000; they had been hunted nearly to extinction.
In the late 1970s, however, a few ranchers decided to bring them back from the brink by raising them for meat.
Multi-billionaire Ted Turner was a prominent figure in this movement, founding Ted's Montana Grill restaurant chain, which specializes in bison meat. The number of these restaurants has doubled since 2004.
About 50 bison are processed daily in the United States. This is a pittance compared with the cattle industry, which processes 125,000 animals every day.
However, many believe that the small scale of the bison industry has benefits, allowing more care and attention, and using a program that tracks all bison from the time they're born to the time they arrive on the dinner table.
If you're curious why I recommend grass-fed bison meat as a healthy alternative to processed meats, you'll be interested in this brief history that explains why this once almost-extinct species is available today at all.
It's good to know that the National Bison Association tracks the relatively small number of bison for their entire lives. Compare that to cattle, with 125,000 animals, largely pumped up with antibiotics and tainted grains, being slaughtered daily in factory farms that feed them corn and other things they were never designed to eat -- that can lead to their developing mad cow disease.
If you have a hard time finding bison meat in your local markets you can consider the variety of Blackwing bison meats I sell in my Web store for your convenience. They are among the most nutritious meat you can eat, thanks to its proportion of protein and minerals in relation to its caloric value.
However, even healthy meat is clearly not for every one. About one in three people reading this should avoid meat and use other animal proteins like raw dairy, eggs and healthy fish. These would be carb nutritional types.