“There are prophecies about white buffalo calves being born at a time of great change,” says one expert. How rare are white bison—and what does this birth mean?
A rare white buffalo calf was born in June 2024 in Lamar Valley of Yellowstone National Park. White buffalo are sacred animals in Native American cultures—considered"both a blessing and a warning."
Buffalo used to roam from Alaska to Mexico and number between 30 to 60 million. Although that population was driven down to just 325 animals by 1884, scientists and conservationists have since rescued bison from the brink of extinction. But most of the 30,000 buffalo that exist today aren’t as free or as wild as you might think.
One statistic bandied about online, and misattributed to the National Bison Association, is that a white buffalo calf will occur in one out of every 10 million births.Most of the white bison you do hear about actually come from cross-breeding bison and white Charolais cattle. Matheson and the National Bison Association agree. “Our code of ethics would forbid that type of cross breeding,” he says.The other, less common ways you can get a white bison would be examples of albinism or leucism, genetic conditions that affect pigmentation. Bison with albinism would have pink eyes, hooves, and noses, while leucistic animals lack pigment in some but not all of their tissues.
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