AMERICAN COWBOY
Ted Turner, Alder, Mont. 71, is not a cowboy. “I am a bison man,” he says. The famously outspoken media mogul and philanthropist has, in fact, been a driving force behind the resurgence of bison production in the United States. Managing editor Tom Wilmes sat down with Turner last January at the National Bison Association’s winter conference in Denver, where Turner was a keynote speaker.
What is it about bison that made you want to protect and promote them?
When I was a boy, I was really interested in the natural world, and I read all the books that I could get my hands on about birds and wildlife. It seemed so silly to me that the passenger pigeon and the Labrador duck were driven to extinction. People nearly succeeded with the bison, too. In just 100 years, the bison population was decimated from 30 million down to 100 in the United States.
Turner bought his first few bison in 1978, shortly after he purchased a parcel of land in South Carolina. “Then I started dreaming about having a ranch out West where I could have maybe 1,000 of them,” he says. Turner bought the 114,000-acre Flying D Ranch in southwestern Montana with some of his first profits from founding the cable news channel CNN. The ranch is one of 13 he currently owns in the U.S. and Argentina.
What prompted you to purchase your first few bison?
I was looking for some bison, and somebody knew where there were three that somebody wanted to get rid of, so I bought them. We had three, and then we had five, and then the next year we had only one baby, so we had six. When I bought my first three, there were about 70,000 bison in the world. Today, there are 500,000 worldwide, and about 300,000 in the United States. The thought that we went from three to 52,000 [the size of Turner’s herd today] is just mind-boggling. That’s more than 10 percent of all the bison in the world. That’s a big share to have of a major living creature.
Please download the PDF to read the full article.
Originally published in American Cowboy June – July 2010
