DNA tests found most beefalo contain no detectable buffalo at all
Beefalo is sold as a cattle-bison hybrid, officially three-eighths bison. Yet when geneticists sequenced 47 animals in 2024, including samples from the founding herd, 39 showed no trace of bison ancestry. The rest carried at most 18 percent, and many turned out to be part zebu, the humped cattle of South Asia.
People have been crossing the two species for centuries. Accidental hybrids were noted in the southern British colonies of North America as early as 1749, and Robert Wickliffe of Kentucky began deliberate experiments in 1815 that ran for decades. In 1880 the warden of a Winnipeg penitentiary crossed eight bison with Durham cattle; a naturalist reported the offspring were calmer and better milkers than bison yet just as hardy, with a smaller hump and finer coat.
Weather drove the next push. After watching thousands of cattle freeze in an 1886 blizzard, Charles Buffalo Jones bred crosses near what became Grand Canyon National Park and named them cattalo in 1888. Canada's government persisted with its own programme until 1964 with poor results, managing only 30 cattalo by 1936. The biology was stubborn: bison bulls with domestic cows yielded few calves, and while hybrid daughters were fertile, sons almost never were, so breeders had to keep herds of wild, difficult bison cows.
A fertile hybrid bull finally appeared in Montana in 1965, and in the 1970s the California rancher Bud Basolo launched the Beefalo breed without ever disclosing its exact pedigree. The breed association still defines it as at least five-eighths domestic cattle. A USDA study found the meat, like bison, lower in fat and cholesterol than ordinary beef, though the new genetics raises questions about what buyers are actually getting.
The traffic also runs the other way: most American bison herds carry some cattle DNA, and only four remain genetically unmixed. One biologist argues such animals look and act exactly like bison and are bison. Meanwhile a free-roaming herd of hybrids in the Grand Canyon grew to at least 600 by 2015, damaging ancient ruins and causing near-daily incidents with tourists, until trapping and relocation to Native American tribes cut it to 216 by 2022.
Source: Beefalo
