The Design of the American Bison

The United States is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the pharmacy, but that’s just macadamia nuts to space. That is not a quote, but we may have heard it somewhere once. One of the great things about the United States, and one of the sad things, is that we aren’t always aware of what we’ve lost — or what we still have. Like an amazing creature, the buffalo — also known as the American Bison. If someone built the buffalo, it would be an engineering marvel. Here’s more from Banner Society:

Buffalo seem, by design, completely indestructible. Male buffalo are built for headbutting, carrying a shocking percentage of their mass in what you and I might call the t-shirt muscle territory, around the neck and down the shoulders, so that their yoke renders them nearly neckless. Inside that almost non-existent neck is a windpipe the size of an HVAC tube, protected on all sides by inches of muscle and tissue, wide enough to warm frigid air up to body temperature long before it hits the lungs. There is no set number on how cold a bison has to be before its metabolism stops slowing down. While yaks and Hereford cattle tapped out well before -30 degrees Celsius, the bison’s kept going, right down to the coldest temperature the trailer-sized refrigerator could reach. It could be lower, but there isn’t a big freezer that gets cold enough to hit the bison’s threshold.