Buffalo and beef crossbreeding

Dakota79

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Oct 18, 2012
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This morning on the news they were talking about the Yellow Stone Buffalo herd and how it was one of the last remaining herds of pure bred Buffalo. I don't know if this is true or not. Anyway how did the crossing of Buffalo and beef get started? My family and neighbors have Buffalo so how did they get crossed with cattle? Educate me.
 
it's funny that Arizona has one of the few herds of bison recognized by B&C. all the AZ buffalos are supposed to be hybrid. a rancher started crossbreeding them MANY years ago near the grand canyon. the Bovine gene has probably been 99.999999% bred out of them by now though
 
Google: Beefalo

Yeah most of the genetics from beef are extremely watered down in most outside Yellowstone herd.

Also the herd in the Henry Mtn is supposed to be pure.
 
Ranchers tried to cross bison with cattle for a long time in an effort to create a hardier cow that still maintained some of the desireable characteristics of domestics. The crosses were not very successful, hybrids were often sterile and it turned out that bison didn't breed with cows as readily as they had hoped.

In most public herds that have tested positive for cattle alleles, less than 1 percent of the population possesses them (at least as of a couple of years ago).

The panel that has been used to test for hybridization though is also only looking at a fraction of a percent of the genome. So failure to detect cattle alleles in herds like YNP means simply that....Cattle alleles have not been detected. Proving absence is not the same thing as failing to detect. So "pure" isn't really the correct term, because we don't know that for certain. We just know we haven't detected hybridization in those herds. Seems like semantics, but scientifically those are very different things.
 
Only beefalo I know where started in a test tube. They spent a lot of money, really never took off.
 
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