Part 1 of a 3 Part Series on the Duality of Raising Animals
Many people struggle to reconcile how producers can devote so much time and care to raising their animals, only to ultimately facilitate the end of their lives. To better understand this tension, bridge the gap between the field and the table, and offer a fuller picture of the food system, we spoke with three producers about the duality of raising animals for meat; The labor, the emotions, and the responsibility it carries. Their stories reveal why the way animals are raised and processed matters, and why choosing your food (and who raises it) with intention makes all the difference.
Almost every Monday, Matt Skoglund starts his day the same way: He sharpens his knives, packs his gear, and fills a thermos with hot water and a travel mug with coffee.
As he drives out to the pasture, he listens to his music of the month. When he arrives, he takes a picture of the herd, puts his phone on airplane mode, locks in, and then time stands still.
“My ritual is to be totally and completely present and focused on the process while I’m field harvesting that bison,” says Matt. It’s his way of honoring the animal.
When he has pulled the trigger, he walks over to the bison he has just killed, one that he knew and cared for, and does something which could only be described as intimate:
“I do the same thing every time: I kiss my hand, and then I rub my hand over its face and its eye, I thank it, and then I get to work.”
By the afternoon, there will be two field-dressed bison on the back of Matt’s truck as he heads to Amsterdam Meat Shop, filled with a sense of satisfaction and contentment.
Matt and his wife, Sarah, are the owners and founders of North Bridger Bison, a regenerative, family-run bison ranch in the Shields Valley that provides environmentally friendly and humanely field-harvested bison meat. Life on the ranch is low stress and simple: Nature is in charge.
“We just let bison be bison,” Matt says.
In practice, this looks like a herd that stays together year-round, a natural breeding cycle, calves that aren’t forced to wean, and overall minimal intervention. The goal is to allow the animals to thrive as they would naturally, on a landscape where they have lived for thousands of years.
Despite the hands-off approach, there’s still plenty to do on the ranch. There are orders to fill, fences to mend, and land to manage. The bison are rotationally grazed and must be moved from pasture to pasture. Instead of “pushing” them from pasture to pasture, Matt “pulls” the herd, and they follow him – it’s part of their zero-stress management philosophy for the herd. Matt spends a lot of time with the bison, and as a result, he and the herd get to know each other.
“They all have different personalities,” he notes, “there are certain bison that are more gregarious or just curious. There’s other bison that are the opposite; they’re kind of shy in the back of the herd, and I don’t know them at all. I’ll see their ear tag and be like, ‘Did you show up last night?’”
The connection doesn’t make the work easier. If anything, it adds weight.
“Our entire business model is built on the bison trusting me,” Matt says. “If I drove out to field-harvest and they took off running, our business model collapses overnight.”
Generally, as the largest land animal in North America, bison do not have a lot to fear, making them fairly easy to harvest – if they stay standing still for Matt to take his shot. If Matt were to load a bunch of bison onto a truck and drive them to a slaughterhouse – which is how it’s done 99% of the time with other bison ranches – it would be a much more efficient process, but that would lead to an extraordinary amount of stress for the bison – which Matt simply won’t do – and that stress also negatively impacts the quality of the meat.
Not only does stress affect the quality of life for the bison, but when animals experience stress, their cortisol levels increase. If this hormone is present when the animal dies, it results in a product that doesn’t taste as good.
“Our process is as ethical and humane as it gets for food – not just meat – and it leads to incredibly delicious bison meat because you don’t have stress negatively impacting the meat. I’m convinced that the fact that we run a stress-free operation here has led to incredible animal health,” says Matt.
This is the reason he chooses to field-harvest the bison – so they live the healthiest, zero-stress life that they can – all the way through their death. What’s healthy for the animal, is also healthy for the person who eats it.
Matt thinks a lot about the trust he’s built with his bison herd.
“I’m the same guy that they’re following to fresh grass, doing pasture moves all the time in the summer. Instead of a rifle, I’ve got a camera in my hand. Or I’ve got a ranch tour for a group or I’m just out there with Sarah and our kids. The overwhelming majority of the time they interact with me, either nothing happens or good things happen.”
This trust results in what Matt describes as “a beautiful, stress-free, instant death.”
“There’s a lot of horrible ways for things to die, but fortunately, there’s also some beautiful ways that things can die. We raise our bison, we give them these great lives, and then they really get – I just can’t say it enough – a beautiful death. They’re standing on their homeland, grass in their mouth, with their herd. They know me, they know my truck. It’s just another day for a bison. And then it’s instant.”
While there is a sense of gravity to it, Matt doesn’t consider their deaths to be a sacrifice; rather, something that is an essential part of life.
“I guess to me a sacrifice would be something that’s non-essential, right? You’re sacrificing something that otherwise didn’t need to die. But we need to eat. And this is, it’s just how life works – there’s no escaping it. We can do mental contortions to try to avoid it, but death is an essential part of life.”
That said, I’m aware that I’m cutting that bison’s life short. And I do feel that, you know? But I ultimately just feel so good about the process and the bison’s death. And I guess I just am like, what’s the alternative? Again, if you want to live, you can’t escape death.”
Despite feeling so good about the process, it’s not without emotion.
“I always say to Sarah, ‘If I ever wake up on a field harvest day, and go through the whole thing, and I don’t feel anything, we have a problem. And I just believe so deeply in what we’re doing, and the way we’re doing it, and how I kill these bison, and I want to connect people to where their food comes from, and show them that death can be beautiful – it doesn’t have to be locked and hidden in the basement.”
For Matt, this distancing of death is one of the largest problems in the modern food system. Death is omnipresent through our entire food system – especially with our “plant-based” foods, Matt likes to point out – and he sees death constantly being hidden, green-washed, or misrepresented. People simply don’t see the full picture. Matt likens this to a Disney movie for kids. “Everything lives forever, the meal on your plate came from unicorns and fairy dust, nothing was injured or killed, and we all live happily ever after.”
“For us, we’re raising all these animals, ultimately to kill them and eat them. And so it just seems odd to me that the death part is locked in a basement somewhere, out of view.”
Death doesn’t have to be something we run away from, explains Matt. It’s an essential part of life, and it can be beautiful.
“We have a saying here, ‘eat with your eyes wide open,’ because we’re all killing stuff constantly, right? With the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the phones in our pockets, the cars we drive, the planes we fly in, and on and on and on. To be a living human being in America in 2026, you’re killing a lot of stuff. You might not see it or be aware of it, but you’re killing all sorts of things in our modern world. You simply cannot escape it.”
So we say, eat with our eyes wide open. Let’s try to be a little more mindful around the reality and necessity of death.”
Join us next month for Part 2, with Carla Nordlund of Jackstone Creek Farmstead!
Photos courtesy of North Bridger Bison
Written by:
Emilee Wood