Because the bison were between 3x to 4x less numerous than cattle, lived far longer lives than the average 2.5 years to slaughter of a cow (not counting veal ca

Because the bison were between 3x to 4x less numerous than cattle, lived far longer lives than the average 2.5 years to slaughter of a cow (not counting veal calves which are killed far sooner and never graze). It’s not just the number of cows or bison alive at any moment, but when you consider a 10 year period and count total individuals it’s even more stark due to rapid turnover of cattle. Buffalo were part of an ecosystem, so you had a loop of carbon in soil, carbon in plants, carbon in buffallo, and then a lot of that carbon returning to the soil as bison or wolf corpses. Modern cattle spend some time grazing in the Great Plains, but start their lives on farms, and finish their lives on feed lots. Then they’re slaughtered, and more CO2 is emitted transporting them all around the country and indeed, world. Then of course, the bison existed in a world before heavy industry, a world of millions rather than billions of people, a world before automobiles, airplanes, coal fired plants, oil exploration, strip mining, rainforest clearing, ocean acidification and overfishing, etc... etc...