Buffalo

Infographic: Ralphies

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 20:10:19 +0000

Infographic: Ralphies Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/06/2017 - 14:10

As of August 2017, five individual buffaloes have served as Ralphie, including the incumbent, 11-year-old Blackout. What do you know about each?

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50 Years of Ralphie

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 20:04:00 +0000

50 Years of Ralphie Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 14:04

Parts of the story are well known — documented, verified, as certain as can be. Others are subject to interpretation.

A few parts have been repeated so often that they feel true and important, though the evidence may be thin, contested or dubious.

That’s the nature of legends.

In this case, it all adds up to the story of a live buffalo mascot called Ralphie, admired by generations of alumni, friends, fans and — dare we say it — rivals of the �鶹��Ѱ��.

You’ve probably heard about the time, back in 1934, when the Silver & Gold student newspaper sponsored a contest to identify a new and permanent nickname for CU, which had been known variously as the Silver and Gold, Frontiersmen, Thundering Herd and other names. More than 1,000 responses flooded in, including six recommending the buffaloes.

We all know who came out on top.

Legends are a mix of hard truth and inherited belief. This fall, should you witness all 1,200 pounds of Ralphie V charging down Folsom Field, there won’t be anything vague about the feeling you get. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Ralphie live mascot tradition, we’ve assembled pieces of Ralphie's story, some past, some present. Some of you surely know details that escaped us, or perhaps remember things differently. For posterity’s sake, we hope you’ll let us know.

As a mascot, Ralphie has entered her sixth decade. Won’t you come see her again?

Read more about Ralphie:

First Class Treatment

Ralphie's game-day schedule

Q&A with Ralphie's Vets

Hear from Drs. Lori and Michael Scott

Other Live Mascots

See other university mascots, from CSU's CAM to Yale's Handsome Dan

Girl's Got Game

Ralphie helps pay her own way in life — but the fans do the heavy lifting

Photo by Randy Parietti Photography (top); University of Colorado, Colorado State University

The buffalo who became Ralphie I arrived in Boulder in 1966. In 1967, her Folsom Field performances took root in �鶹��Ѱ��culture.

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Q&A with Ralphie's Vets

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 19:28:00 +0000

Q&A with Ralphie's Vets Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/01/2017 - 13:28

Christie Sounart

Drs. Lori and Michael Scott of North Denver Animal Clinic have treated animals for nearly three decades — including, for the last 20 years, all the Ralphies, active and retired. Despite the Scotts' own college ties — the spouses are both Colorado State University grads — they consider CU's buffaloes part of their family. Mike keeps a framed picture of Ralphie IV on his desk. Here, Lori talks about what it’s like to be the vets for Colorado’s most famous buffalo.

How did you and Michael get involved with the Ralphie program?

We got a call from Kevin Priola [a former Ralphie handler and program director] 20 years ago. Our ad in the Yellow Pages had a buffalo logo, and he figured we would know how to care for one. In fact, in the popular years of buffalo, my husband [Michael] cared for thousands of them.

Do you treat other buffalo?

Yes, we have one client with a herd in Lafayette. There’s about 40 or 50 of them. We do checkups if they need one, but buffalo are generally pretty resilient and healthy.

What’s involved in a typical checkup for Ralphie?

Things like yearly vaccinations and de-worming. We talk about her overall health, whether we need to change anything in her diet and whether she is planning on traveling anywhere that year.

Have you had to treat Ralphie for anything serious or complicated?

When Ralphie IV was sick with a liver problem, Dr. Mike was there for a while, but she wasn’t treated long. She went very peacefully [in March]. She was a good one.

Does Ralphie’s diet differ much from a wild buffalo’s?

Pretty much these girls graze and are fed hay. It doesn’t differ much from wild ones, except that those in the wild graze on thousands of acres.

How do you know if Ralphie is having an off day?

Not eating is the big key, and if Ralphie V is not as feisty as normal. You can tell by their eyes that they’re not feeling good.

What seems to make Ralphie happiest?

Running on the field, performing and the interaction with humans. Ralphie V loves to lick you and have contact. She is very tactile.

You went to CSU. Does CAM the Ram know you take care of Ralphie?

CAM bestowed the veterinarians’ oath on us. So privately he accepts our healthcare and treatment of a rival school’s mascot…Publicly he never lets on.

Photo by Casey A. Cass; © iStock/winterling; deepblue4you

Drs. Lori and Michael Scott of North Denver Animal Clinic have treated animals for nearly three decades — including, for the last 20 years, all the Ralphies, active and retired.

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Inflatable Mascot

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 17:41:47 +0000

Inflatable Mascot Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 12/21/2016 - 10:41

Christie Sounart

The request seemed simple enough to Loni Gilfedder (Fin’91): Create a giant inflatable buffalo.

Then came the curveball.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYywbsAqZTw&feature=youtu.be]

“He wanted fur, and two different colors of it,” Gilfedder, CEO of Boulder Blimp Company, said of Kent Zimmermann (Edu’80; MPubAd’90), the former �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Alumni Association executive director who ordered the inflatable more than a decade ago. “We didn’t even know how to offer it to him.”

Rising to the challenge, Gilfedder and her team delivered “Alphie” — named after his live counterpart, Ralphie — in 2002.

Ever since, the giant inflatable mascot has become a staple attraction at outdoor �鶹��Ѱ��Alumni Association events — an easy topic of discussion and the ideal photo prop for students, alumni and Buffs fans.

Well-traveled, Alphie has appeared at the Denver Zoo, golf courses, on Pearl Street and on Boulder’s 29th Street Mall. His farthest journey so far took him to CU’s football game at the University of Massachusetts in Foxborough, Mass, in 2014. His most recent trip was to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif,. for the Pac-12 Championship football game. The buffalo also has appeared on the ski slopes of Winter Park, Colo., and atop a giant apartment building in Denver for the Rocky Mountain Showdown.

“Alphie is one-of-a-kind,” said Dawn Barone (Hist, Psych’09), an Alumni Association senior program manager who has helped set up Alphie at more than 300 events for 11 years.

At each event, it takes two or three students, known as “Alphie Handlers,” to roll out the buffalo, plug in air blowers to inflate him and secure him to the ground with either 16 60-pound weights or eight 18-inch stakes, depending on the surface.

Deflated, Alphie weighs about 210 pounds. He takes about 30 minutes to set up.

“It’s not a one-person job,” says �鶹��Ѱ��senior Roy De Jesus (CompSci’17) an Alphie Handler who helps set up the inflatable at events on campus.

Alphie made 31 appearances in 2016 alone, and there’s one to go: The Valero Alamo Bowl in San Antonio Dec. 29, the Buffs’ first bowl game in a decade.

The original buffalo was used so often that he wore out. In 2016 the Alumni Association commissioned a new one, also from Lafayette-based Boulder Blimp Company, for $13,000.

Boulder Blimp Company specializes in creating giant inflatable shapes such as animals, race arches, tents and characters for large corporations and nonprofits alike. Past clients include Ford, Pepsi, Verizon, Chick-Fil-A and Walmart. But prior to 2002, no inflatable had been designed with fur. CU’s order posed a unique test.

Lead designer Chris Lund took 30 hours to perfect the design and create a 3D model, much more time than the typical 18-25 hours it usually takes to create a large custom inflatable shape. The fur was shipped to Colorado from a plush fabric company in Wisconsin.

The design team made about 100 fabric patterns for the buffalo and cut them in-house on a 45-foot-long cutting table. Six sewers pieced the 20-foot-tall by 25-foot-wide buffalo together using sewing machines. The entire process took six weeks.

“I would venture this is the only inflatable fur buffalo in the world,” Gilfedder said.

Photo by Peter Burke

Ralphie might not know it, but she’s got a sidekick

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Buffalo Rancher

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 16:45:00 +0000

Buffalo Rancher Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/01/2015 - 10:45

Eric Gershon

Hunted nearly to extinction by the time the University of Colorado was founded, the American buffalo owes its rebound mainly to private ranchers. Larry Strear of Boulder County has been raising herds for nearly 40 years.

By the time Larry Strear (Art’69) was in his mid-20s, he knew a lot about collecting art and raising turkeys.

An aunt in Denver with art dealers for friends and a fondness for watercolors whet his aesthetic appetite. At �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder he developed an interest in printmaking, eventually acquiring works by Picasso, Dali and Braque.

Turkeys Strear had always known: His family was an owner of Longmont Foods, a large Colorado turkey-growing operation.

Of bison he knew nothing, but that was about to change.

In 1975 Strear, then 28 and working for the family business, bought a 130-acre horse ranch about 10 miles north of Boulder, in Longmont. He wasn’t sure the turkey business was for him and he thought he would try growing hay and other crops. He named the property Wild Flower Farm.

Strear had no plans to raise animals but agreed to let a tenant graze cattle there. He looked after them in exchange for use of the tenant’s farm equipment, a period he calls “five of the hardest years I worked in my life.”

When the men went separate ways in 1979, the tenant partially settled affairs with livestock — four Angus cows and two bison, one male, one female. The bison were a surprise.

“This isn’t funny,” Strear thought.

But his curiosity and sense of adventure got the best of him. Strear kept the bison — or buffalo, as they’re interchangeably called in the United States — got help from a rancher and began growing a herd while still working with his family. In 1988 Strear left the turkey business to ranch buffalo fulltime. By now he’s been at it longer than anyone else in Boulder County.

“It’s been profitable in years, and devastating in years,” says Strear, who lives on the ranch with his wife, Suzanne Chatburn-Strear, in a home full of oversize art books and bison relics. From their bedroom window they can watch the buffalo grazing in the front pasture.

At 68, Strear says he has no reason to give up on bison, and no inclination: “I just bought some more.”

By national standards, Strear’s fluctuating herd of 40 or so buffalo is about average. The various herds of Ted Turner — the CNN founder and by far America’s biggest, most famous bison rancher — number about 57,000. Regardless of herd size, Strear, Turner and thousands of other buffalo ranchers around the United States can make a common claim: Without them, the iconic animal of the American West and of CU-Boulder would be little more than a curiosity to ogle in parks and zoos.

The modern bison emerged in North America between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, scientists say. Deep into the 19th century, buffalo on the Great Plains numbered in the tens of millions.

Larry Strear has been raising bison at his Longmont, Colorado, ranch for nearly 40 years.

For millennia the shaggy, broad-shouldered bovines had been hunted in the West by Native Americans without major effects on population. But 19th-century settlement by gun-toting Euro-Americans on horseback proved calamitous, a disaster that accelerated with the post-Civil War construction of the transcontinental railroad and growing habitat loss.

Eager to harvest buffalo hides, furs and meat — and happy to deprive Native Americans of the same — settlers and the U.S. military hunted buffalo near to oblivion.

“In the 1880s, there’s really just remnant populations,” says Thomas Andrews, an associate professor of history at CU-Boulder who has written about buffalo. The bison, he says, became “kind of a novelty.”

By 1900, there were about 1,000 left.

Mercifully, a conservation effort was getting underway, led by a handful of Western ranchers and Eastern powerbrokers. In 1902 the Army began protecting a wild herd in Yellowstone National Park, and in 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt — honorary president of the recently formed American Bison Society — authorized creation of the National Bison Range in Montana. Small herds were started in Oklahoma, Nebraska, South Dakota, New York City and Washington, D.C.

Today, public herds of varying types and sizes exist in South Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and elsewhere. Private bison ranches operate in all 50 states. Indeed, the vast majority of buffalo — an estimated 220,000 in the U.S. and 180,000 in Canada, according to the National Bison Association — live on private ranches, where they’re raised for meat.

“That’s totally driving the whole thing,” says Strear, who sells his bison calves for breeding. “There’s not a market for them as pets.”

That the long-term survival of bison may depend on human consumers doesn’t bother John Graves (Bus’09), who recently became manager of the Ralphie Handlers, the 15-member student group that cares for CU’s live buffalo mascot and dashes her across the field during football games.

“I’ve heard many people say this many times: The best way to save a species that’s endangered is to eat them,” says Graves, 28, who also works on a South Boulder horse ranch and serves as president of the Rocky Mountain Buffalo Association. “Because the demand for bison is so high, it has saved the species. And people do a great job raising bison these days.”

�鶹��Ѱ��students chose the buffalo as a mascot in 1934 after a national contest elicited more than 1,000 suggestions. Students rented a live buffalo at first, then a benefactor donated one in the early 1940s. The Ralphie Handler Program, begun informally in 1967, is now a varsity sport.

The North American buffalo population is estimated to be about 400,000, including 220,000 in the U.S. Bison ranches operation in all 50 states.

Competition to become a handler is fierce. As many as 70 students try out each year for a few open roster spots. The team trains 30 hours a week during the football season, including physical workouts and care for Ralphie.

Running with a buffalo, which unrestrained can reach speeds of 40 miles per hour, is nothing to take lightly.

“You don’t do it on horseback,” says Graves, who was a handler before he became coach. “It’s you and the animal.”

The current Ralphie, a 1,200-pound female called Ralphie V, and her predecessor were donated by Ted Turner, who has tried, unsuccessfully, to give a public herd to the city of Boulder. Ralphie V and her predecessor live on separate Adams County ranches, the precise locations of which are secret, a precaution against pranks by students at rival schools.

Strear, who recalls his �鶹��Ѱ��experience fondly and whose daughter is a �鶹��Ѱ��graduate student, personally disapproves of the mascot program. Because buffalo are social animals, he says, they should always be part of herds.

Graves himself advises people who acquire buffalo to get more than one. But he believes that Ralphie V, who lives alone on her ranch, gets the social interaction she needs from her handlers.

“We are her herd,” he says. “We see her every day, we get up close and personal. She knows who we are.”

He adds: “We treat her like a princess.”

Unquestionably, the buffalo is a powerful symbol for the �鶹��Ѱ��community and a distinctive presence in collegiate athletics. Ralphie frequently makes news media lists of “best college mascots” and in 2013 was named “the greatest live mascot in college football” by Bleacher Report.

Strear’s list, if he made one, would look different. But he’s as enamored as anyone of the American buffalo. He admires its power and the remarkable landscape it represents. On a mid-summer day at Wild Flower Farm, his herd grazes mid-pasture before marching en mass to a lake, all in the shadow of the Front Range. A Swainson’s hawk glides overhead. A bull nuzzles a pregnant cow.

“She’s gonna calve,” says Strear. “Probably today.”

Photography by Morten Kolby

Hunted nearly to extinction by the time the University of Colorado was founded, the American buffalo owes its rebound mainly to private ranchers.

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No Home to Roam

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 06:00:00 +0000

No Home to Roam Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 09/01/2012 - 00:00

Paul Danish

Last October Ted Turner offered to give the city of Boulder a herd of 25 buffalo to put on city open space along the Boulder-Denver Turnpike.

“The city of Boulder will have an ecosystem that is pretty much exactly like it was 300 years ago — right here for local citizens to see,” Turner told the Daily Camera. “It will be an attraction.”

The idea was thought up by Boulder City Councilman George Karakehian and George McKerrow Jr., the CEO of Turner’s Ted’s Montana Grill, where the specialty of the house is buffalo. The Boulder outlet is at 17th and Pearl.

“What a cool idea,” I thought at the time. “The city will jump at it. It’s a real no-brainer.”

“Not, so fast,” chorused the city moms and pops. “What about funding?”

“And liability?”

“And the rare prairie grasses? They might walk on them or even eat them.”

“And conflicts with other open space users like mountain bikers.”

Everyone was stunned. It was the first time that anyone in city government had said anything nice about mountain bikers since the Triassic period. Trust me on this. I checked the geologic record.

“We need a study,” said the city manager.

At which point the city moms and pops fell to debating whether the beasts in question should be called bison or buffaloes, which continued until Mayor Matt Applebaum declared “they’re familiarly known as American buffalo.”

Three months later the study arrived.

“Accepting the big guys is gonna cost you $470,000 to $750,000 up front, and $100,000 a year until the beginning of the next Ice Age (which has been postponed indefinitely due to global warming),” the consultant opined. “Most of that will go for fencing.”

“How are the buffalo gonna roam if they’re fenced in?” said the city moms and pops.

And quicker than you can say “killjoy,” they voted to look the gift herd in the mouth.

This decision may turn out to be imprudent, especially in a city already brimming with prairie dogs.

It turns out that in addition to having 55,000 head of buffalo roaming his ranches, Turner has about 250,000 prairie dogs on his land. The day he was in town to announce the buffalo gift, he also was due to receive the “Prairie Dog Protector of the Year Award” from the Boulder-based Prairie Dog Coalition.

At the time he told the Camera that creating a market for buffalo meat — i.e., putting them on the menu at Ted’s Montana Grill — has been key to helping the species thrive.

“You either eat them or they’re gone,” he said.

Then, the Camera reported, “his eyes lit up with an idea to help another species.”

“If we could just eat prairie dogs — there would be millions of them,” he said.

Photo courtesy Casey A. Cass

Last October Ted Turner offered to give the city of Boulder a herd of 25 buffalo to put on city open space along the Boulder-Denver Turnpike.

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