EUROPE'S BISON

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 273, 18 November 1941, Page 4

EUROPE'S BISON

THE LAST HERD

POLAND TRIED TO SAVE IT

One of the minor tragedies of the present war, but regrettable enough of its kind, is that the European bison has probably been exterminated, just at the moment when efforts to re-establish it appeared to be succeeding.

Also known as the wisent and as the aurochs, since the original bearer of the latter name, the primitive ox, became extinct about 1627, it was a magnificent animal, similar in appearance to the American bison, showing the same shaggy mane and shoulder hump, but was slightly bigger, a good bull standing 6ft high at the shoulder.

Essentially a\ forest animal, its numbers dwindled as more and more land was claimed for agriculture, until, at the beginning of the last war, there were only a few hundred left. Richtofen, Germany's flying ace of the last war, esteemed it the greatest honour that his country bestowed on nim that, when on leave, he was permitted to go and shoot some of the animals of one of the last remaining herds.

Herds Sacrificed Efforts had been made In Poland and Czarist Russia to save the animal; in Poland, the penalty of poaching was death (as a formal sentence), and under the Czar exile to Siberia, but in the famine days of war and revolution the last two big herds, one in Bialowieze Forest, of Lithuania, and the other in the Circassian Mountains, were sacrificed.

How Poland made a gallant effort to save the species from extermination was mentioned by the Polish Consul-General in New Zealand, Count Wodzicki, who was formerly professor of biology in Warsaw University. In 1922 there were just 28 European bison alive, in zoological gardens and private parks—the Duke of Bedford, recently in the news as a peace propagandist, has a small herd at Woburn Abbey. Many of this small remnant were, however, of mixed blood, the stock having been crossed with the American bison, and the Polish Government, canvassing the whole of Europe, could get together a stud of only seven, a bull and six cows, of the pure breed.

As the cow bison does not have a calf until she is five or six years old and thereafter only every second year, the little herd, quartered in a forest under strict protection, was slow in increasing, and numbered only 20 when the German invasion came. Nazis who shoot helpless peasants for amusement are not likely to have spared the last herd of bison, and the Polish herd is now probably only a memory. j