Beth Shapiro

What exactly is it?

Can we figure it out?

And so I wanted to look at these different species pairs.

And we knew about beefalo because people have beefalo ranches.

There's a beefalo of the week.

You should look that up because this is going to be like there's beefalo of the week competition where you see these animals.

Anyway.

So people in the early 20th century decided that they wanted to make hybrid cattle and bison because they wanted animals that were as robust in the North American prairies as bison, but as tame and easy to deal with as cattle.

So they started breeding them together.

And we're just like...

This isn't working.

You know, this is really hard.

When we get the F1s, that's first generation hybrids, often it's only the females and they're not reproductive.

You know, there's problems here.

We can't do this.

And because the, yeah.

And so then people kept trying to do it because they really wanted to do this.

And then there was this guy called, I can't remember the name of the person who actually did it, who claimed that he had been able to create this animal that was three-eighths bison and five-eighths cattle.

And he sold his animal to a guy called Bud Basolo in California who created this herd of 5,000 beefalo.

And it was announced with great fanfare, like front pages of newspapers.