From great spirit to great steak?

The prairies may be all but gone, but the buffalo still roam in North America - if nothing else, as cash crops raised for meat on former cattle ranches. Indeed, might this noble symbol of the Wild West, held sacred by Native Americans for centuries, be reduced to two-whole-meat-patties-special sauce-lettuce-cheese-onions-pickles-on-a-sesame-seed-bun?

The mighty buffalo, or bison, was hunted for its meat, hide, blood and bones by North America's first people. Indigenous tribes even burned its dung for fuel. But the American Indians never decimated the bison's numbers. From a teeming 60 million at the time of the first white contacts, the great herds dwindled to less than 1,000 free and captive animals through government-sanctioned killing. A mere 100 wild bison survived decimation by taking refuge in Yellowstone National Park. Ironically, until 1992 bison were shot if they wandered out onto public lands leased to ranchers.

Now, with novelty appeal and meat with a taste and texture similar to beef (and allegedly less fat and cholesterol than chicken), low-maintenance bison have become lucrative market animals. There are now over 200,000 buffalo nationwide - most of them in the Rocky Mountain states. The Intertribal Bison Cooperative in South Dakota is reestablishing herds on Indian lands for cultural as well as commercial reasons, though most of the herds rights now are raised on former cattle ranches. Ranchers corral them with pickup trucks on 30,000-acre spreads enclosed by fences that only occasionally get trampled. "We feed them when they'll eat it, and by and large they're left to their own devices,"says Russ Miller, manager of cable TV tycoon Ted Turner's 7,500 head of bison in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska.

The harsh plains winters don't send the herds running into the barn, either. Bison have a powerful neck muscle in their hump which enables them to plow snow and get to the grass. Their plant selection is in tune with the cycles of the prairie. "A combination of three things shaped the prairie: Weather, fire and bison," says Harvey Payne, director of The Nature Conservancy's Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma, which was given 300 head of bison by a nearby ranch to complete its native tallgrass ecosystem.

Most popular in its burger form, buffalo is also chopped up into stew meat, sirloin butt, steaks and the formidable-sounding "buffalo steamship cafeteria round." "People want to try it, but it's pricey," says Khoury Mubarek, a sales manager at Nodine Smokehouse in Torrington, Connecticut, which sells the meat. Whereas ground beef costs about $1.75 a pound, a pound of ground buffalo meat costs roughly $4 in western supermarkets like Kings Super and Safeway, where it is most popular, and in specialty and health food stores in the rest of country.

"Federal regulations say you can only have so many animals per acre," Mubarek says. "It's not like cattle, where you can just cram them in. So that keeps the price high." Only about 10,000 bison were slaughtered last year, Russ Miller notes, compared to roughly 36 million cattle. "It's the sheer volume, not the practice of slaughter, that accounts for factory farming," he says.

Buffalo ranching has its detractors. "I think we're doing enough damage to the environment without buffalo ranching," says Dr. Alex Hershaft of the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM). "The last thing we need is another animal species getting exploited for profit," agrees the Humane Farming Association's Brad Miller. "Agriculture has a terrible track record. To see another species victimized is troubling. If left alone by humans, buffalo do a good job of protecting themselves. They don't need humans to exploit them in order for the species to survive."

Dr. Michael Fox of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) takes a middle view. "Buffalo ranching is ecologically a step forward as an alternative to continuing to graze the wrong species - namely, cattle - in the high plains and prairies," he says. "The obvious negatives are related to humane husbandry practices, transportation and slaughter." Fox says HSUS applauds ranches that do their slaughtering on-site and adds, "We would like to see more mobile slaughter operations on conventional ranches as well."

Will buffalo meat ever be more than a curiosity? Russ Miller thinks so. "If you want to look at it as a trade organization, the growth has been exponential. The supply and demand equation is heavily skewed towards demand." But Dr. Fox says, "Buffalo ranchers probably get more income from the skins and the skulls than from the meat. So the buffalo is not really going to become a major, mainstream substitute for the Great American Hamburger."