: I still never understand this assertion. There sure were a lot of
turkeys
: and buffalo left when the Europeans got here. What made them by
nature
: unsuitable for domestication? They're domesticated now.
One reason is that buffalo are naturally inclined to wander, and cover a territory hundreds of times as large as wild cattle do. If herders lose control of their wild cattle herd for an hour or two, they can retrieve them; a group of buffalo that wanders off is in all liklihood gone forever. Their need to wander also means that buffalo are less healthy, and less inclined to breed, when kept in captivity, making them less suitable for domestication than wild cattle.
Buffalo are undomesticatable in the same way that elephants are - it's not that it's impossible to do, it's that they're so inherantly difficult to domesticate that the returns can't justify the effort. Even today, buffalos aren't a successful domestication; buffalo farmers haven't succeeded in making the buffalo into a particularly profitable animal.