By Dr. Robert Thorson

Have you ever wanted to go on safari, but never found the time or money for an African trip? Well, if a determined bunch of field ecologists have their way, large tracts of the semi-arid southern High Plains and Intermountain West in the United States would be fenced in and populated with elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses. I think this is a capital idea.

These creatures, including camels and sabertoothed tigers (Smilodon), were widespread in America during the Pleistocene epoch, commonly known as the last great ice age. They disappeared during a mass extinction that took place after the arrival of ice age hunters about 13,000 years ago.

Though the jury is still out on whether humans actually caused the mass extinction, one thing is clear. The same mega-fauna survived, roughly intact, through all of the climatic and environmental disruptions of the previous million years before humans arrived.

The ecological goal of introducing these animals is not to turn North America into Africa. The goal is to replace creatures missing from the impoverished mammalian ecosystem of the modern-day New World with their closest surrogates from the modern-day Old World.

Bringing big game back to America is not a new idea. Menageries of exotic animals already thrive on ranches throughout Texas and nearby states. Drive-through game parks have become popular tourist attractions, especially San Diego’s Wild Animal Park, which gets 1.5 million visitors a year. Humans flock there because practically everyone from toddlers to centenarians experiences a positive emotional response when sighting large animals in the wild (or, failing that, the semi-wild).

Elephants were an important part of the original North American mega-fauna. Though the mammoths and mastodons are gone, their ecological roles could be broadly filled by the African (Loxodontna africana) and Asian (Elephas maximus) elephants, respectively.

North America even had its own version of the lion (Panthera leo atrox) similar in body form to its African counterpart (Panthera leo). Lions play a critical ecological role in the Serengeti ecosystem today, as did American lions once did in the American West and Midwest.

The pronghorn antelope (Antilocapra americana) survived the mass extinction. Its great speed and agility probably were evolved traits driven by the American cheetah (Acinonyx trumani), which is closely related to its African sister species (Acinonyx jubatus).

Horses also originated in North America, surviving for tens of millions of years before becoming extinct after humans arrived. They (Equus caballas) were re-introduced by the Spanish conquistadors in the late 15th and 16th century.

America’s feral horses and wild asses (Equus asinus) are close surrogates for the horse species that roamed the same areas throughout the ice age, filling an ecological role close to that of Africa’s zebra.

Believe it or not, camels also originated in North America before spreading elsewhere. The extinct genus Camelops was widespread throughout North America before the mass extinction. Related camels from the Old World (Camelus bactrianus) would make close ecological surrogates for replacement.

A more scientific reason for putting the “big” back in America’s big game country has been kicking around academic circles for years. It’s called conservation.

The survival of elephants, lions and cheetahs in the African wild is by no means assured, owing to habitat encroachment from expanding human populations and continuing political instability. Meanwhile, a broadly similar landscape in America is being de-populated, due in part to climate warming and the ensuing drought.

County-sized game parks on private land in north Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, and the Dakotas could give these local economies a tremendous boost while helping to save Africa’s signature species from extinction.

What I’m talking about is the “Re-wilding of North America,” a phrase borrowed from the ecologist Josh Donlan and his colleagues. In their August 2005 article in Nature, they point out that the benchmark for habitat restoration in North America should not be 1492, when Columbus arrived from Europe, but the end of the last ice age, when bands of Homo sapiens arrived from Eurasia.

Just thinking about what America used to be like is enough to make me want to dress down, grab the nearest stone-tipped spear, fence myself into one of those game parks, throw away the key and be the original me.