The North Dakota Buffalo Association held their annual fall consignment sale Saturday in Mandan. I drove past the Kist sale barn on Memorial Highway and decided to stop in for a little auction atmosphere. I've always enjoyed being around livestock sales and wanted to check one out again. A line from a western song sings "the auctioneer's gavel, how it raps and it rattles." The untrained ear might think the lingo coming out of an auctioneer's mouth is pure jibberish, but with a little concentration, it's pretty easy to understand him. I didn't stay long but watched a few yearling and two-year old bulls sell. A board above the sales ring listed their weights, and I could easily see from the fact that the selling price per head was about equal to their weight so that they sold at about one dollar a pound.
Buffalo need extra investment to maintain as a ranch animal. They require a double-high fence to contain them in a pasture, and fencing costs run expensive. Breeding animals a few years back reached very high price levels, and ranchers wanting to get into the business really extended themselves financially. Therefore, I don't think a dollar a pound stretches very far. Buffalo meat always runs higher priced per pound in a meat counter so we've never bought very much of it.
Nevertheless, there they were having their annual sale. The sale catalog promised consignments of over 700 head, and I paged through it finding animals from the four states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota. Wild and predictably unpredictable,
they carry about them an air of wanting to be free. They look clumsy but are very athletic and fast. A couple of years back I saw one try to jump out of the sales ring when he made an unbelievable vertical leap against the iron railings. When they leave the ring to return to the stockyard pens, you can hear the staccato beat and pounding of their hooves on the floor. I wouldn't want to work around those beasts, but it's enjoyable to watch them as a bystander.
