alt Hacker NewsUnfortunately there are apparently no real true American bison anymore. A sturdy a while ago showed that all American bison in all of North America have varying degrees of cattle DNA. They’re basically all “beefalo”. They are quite different from cattle in many ways, but they aren’t actually really American bison anymore. Those technically are extinct by objective measures, not all that different than if you breed one dog with a different one, the offspring is neither of the parents and also basically nothing at all until some defining characteristics are identified, reproduced and named at least as a sub-breed.
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Bison and beefalo are different animals. Beefalo can't be marketed as either bison meat or beef.
A lot of coyotes are mixed with dogs and wolves too
There are several extant herds that have been genetically tested and proven "pure", although they're the minority
They have less than 2% cattle DNA, sometimes as little as 0.25%. That they were crossbreedable at all though shows they were already highly related.