Residents of a quiet stretch of Loudoun County, Virginia, about 50 miles west of Washington, got an unscheduled visitor Monday morning: a roughly 1,500-pound male bison, ambling down the gravel roads after slipping through a broken fence on his home farm.
Loudoun County Animal Services' Humane Law Enforcement team fielded the first calls and, according to UPI, spent several hours working alongside deputies from the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office to coax the animal off the road and into a nearby field, rather than attempt to physically corral an animal that can weigh close to a ton and outrun a horse over short distances.
Officers used the county's Operation: Protect Livestock database — a registry built for exactly this kind of situation — to identify the bison's owner and arrange for his return, WJLA reported. No injuries, to bison, bystanders or officers, were reported by the time he was walked back to secured pasture.
Loudoun County sits in Virginia's horse country, dotted with hobby farms and small-scale livestock operations, and bison ranching has grown into a modest niche business in the region over the past two decades — prized for leaner meat and, evidently, for testing the limits of fencing. Escapes are rare but not unheard of; county officers say a broken fence rail is usually all it takes for a bull-sized animal to go looking for greener grass.
Bison are among the largest land animals in North America, and while individual escapes rarely make national news, they tend to travel well once they do: viral bison-on-the-loose clips have become an odd-news staple in recent years, from Yellowstone's free-roaming herds wandering into parking lots to smaller escapes on private ranches from Montana to the mid-Atlantic. Unlike cattle, bison can clear fences that would stop most livestock and are known to run in short bursts exceeding 30 miles per hour, which is part of why officers here opted to coax rather than chase.
By Monday afternoon, the bison was back where he belonged, and Loudoun County's gravel roads returned to their usual, considerably less newsworthy traffic.
