Agricultural
27 February, 2026
Clifton's Critters: Bison
Along the Clifton-Leyburn road, you’d be forgiven for swerving, not being sure what great, big mass you saw in one of the roadside paddocks.
It was Damien Bange who first told Clifton Courier journalist Rhett Kleine about there being Bison in Clifton.
“I thought, given that we were out the back of O’Shanley’s, that he must have been talking smack,” Rhett said.
But Mr Bange was indeed telling the truth.
Clifton is home to Bison.
Usually seen on the great plains of the American mid-west, and the sweeping slopes of Yosemite, the big, brutish, bovines, also inhabit the wide open plains of Clifton. At least to the extent of their paddock boundaries.
Their owner is Joe Maher, a stockhorse trainer originally from around Bathurst. He mainly uses the Bison to help train his horses. The Bison, Joe explained, are a lot fitter than cows.
They’re far more predictable which allows him to train his horses to “rate” cattle, at speed.
Whereas usually cattle would tire, bison don’t. This allows for stockhorse trainers like Joe to constantly train their horses at speeds they’d likely experience during a muster. But aside from that, Joe finds them a lot smarter than horses.
“They’ll grunt to test and see if a horse is scared, if they are they’ll chase it,” he said of the Bison.
Joe kindly enough took Rhett Kleine out to see the bison.
“One of their huge forms laid out in the dust, lounging peacefully in the midday heat,” Rhett said
“Joe took them some grain so that I could grab some photos, after some coaxing they came over.”
Joe and people in the industry more broadly started using Bison about ten to fifteen years ago for stock horse training.
They’re intelligent enough to pick up on training patterns and their flight zone doesn’t often include the horse and the rider, meaning they have less chance at spooking the horses.
Joe’s Bison are about 13 to 14 years old. Their great snouts heaved like steam engines as they munched on the grain. Joe says they eat less than cattle as well, having appetites more like camels.
Stareen Performance Horses near Goomeri, Queensland, have a flock of about 50 Bison between weaners and those trained up.
They use them in training, and train the Bison themselves. Since their introduction about thirty years ago Janine Stark from Stareen said, the demand for them has not dropped.
She and her husband, Nick sell about 16 a year alongside the herd they keep for their own stockhorse training. The majority that they sell go to Queensland and New South Wales.
“Their lung capacity, their endurance, they love routine, they’re really intelligent animals.” Janine said when asked what their biggest edge was over cattle.
They also have a massive benefit when it comes to longevity. Bison can work all week, and Nick and Janine have a heifer that they’ve been using in training since 2013.
So while the outback romances never had any Bison roaming the bush, it seems as though in
the legends of stockmen and women to come, Bison may just become a regular feature.
