Slaughter of The American Serengeti
Less than 200 years ago, the Great Plains of North America rivaled the Serengeti of Africa in terms of wildlife abundance and diversity. Herds of bison, swift pronghorn antelope, roaming wild horses, and predators like gray wolves, coyotes, and grizzly bears once filled the landscape in such unimaginable numbers that John James Audubon himself wrote that “it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals.”
In American Serengeti, historian and naturalist Dan Flores brings this lost world back to life, blending lyrical narrative with natural history to reveal what happened to these creatures during the 19th and 20th centuries. Through market hunting, ranching interests, and ultimately a federal extermination program, millions of animals were slaughtered, driving entire species to the brink of extinction and forever altering the Great Plains ecosystem.
Flores explores not just the history of this ecological tragedy but also what it means for us today, as we consider the future of wildlife conservation, biodiversity, and America’s natural heritage.
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Start your free seven-day trial and unlock this episode plus hundreds more, all ad-free, when you become a Mysterian on Patreon. There were somewhere between a million and two million wolves on the Great Plains.
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Millions of coyotes sort of playing the role of jackals, the role that jackals play in Africa on the Great Plains.
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So it's this, I mean, the way you can think of it is it's this part of the United States that was, as I titled it in the book, very much a kind of a Serengeti sort of landscape.
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It looked like the Serengeti with these vast sweeps, these undulating, rolling plains of grasslands all out in the open where you could see all these animals, which was part of the magic of it.
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And then it had all these just millions of different species of creatures scattered up and down this landscape. And the crazy thing about it is that
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