Priscilla Feral, Friends of
Animals
July 2010
Meanwhile, yanking support from the cattle industry by refusing to consume meat and other animals products is one obvious fix. You can do it, and if you do, we’re forever grateful.
What if you had the chance to reclaim 300 million acres of Western lands
in the U.S. for all people, plants and animals?
We have that chance. The government -- our government -- could protect
wide-open spaces, habitat for free-living horses, wolves, grizzly bears,
elk, pronghorn antelopes, eagles, prairie dogs, coyotes and other animals.
So far, that hasn’t exactly been a trend. When they don’t seem useful to us,
animals are resented. Stalked. Rounded up. Killed or otherwise displaced.
In contrast, cows and sheep owned by ranchers are seen as having a dollar
value, so ranchers are relieved from having to compete over water and
grasslands with horses, burros, and carnivorous animals. Those inconvenient
beings are herded away with little fanfare. But now, people are starting to
wise up. People don’t want this madness any more.
Ranchers in 11 western U.S. states graze millions of cows and sheep on
public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management, trashing the
ecological health of much of the land, while taxpayers subsidize their
for-profit operation. These ruminant animals -- through no fault of their
own, for they don’t breed themselves -- harm native grasses and wildlife,
trample stream banks, and degrade the water that plants, fish, birds and
other animals need.
As authors George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson wrote in Welfare Ranching:
The Subsidized Destruction of the American West : "Livestock production, by
its very nature, is a domestication of the landscape. It requires using the
bulk of water, forage, and space for the benefit of one or two domestic
animals -- at the expense of native creatures."
But that’s not all. Look east, and you’ll find more cattle in Vermont than
on all the public lands in Nevada.
Missouri has more cows than Montana.
Louisiana produces more beef than Wyoming.
The western range isn’t the hamburger hub we might think it is. Yet U.S.
taxpayers are stuck subsidizing the western livestock industry through the
federal government.
Fellow taxpayers, we spend oodles of money on federal grazing projects that
don’t even amount to three percent of U.S. beef production. Think we’ve been
had? Read on. Most of these subsidies go to millionaires -- large
corporations and hobby ranchers. Beer giant Anheuser-Busch, hotel mogul
Baron Hilton, the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas, media mogul Ted Turner, the
Packard family of Hewlett-Packard fame, the Metropolitan Life Company, the
Agri-Beef Company and Nevada First Corporation. These cattle barons who are
unwilling to share public lands with wildlife are charged $1.35 for each
cow-and-calf pair or five sheep each month. To graze on lands that shouldn't
have cattle and sheep at all.
Why do they do it? Ranches, whether profitable or not, are status symbols.
They provide retreats for meetings with major clients.
And then there’s the Utah-based Kingston Clan, a polygamist sect that runs a
massive cattle operation known as Holtz, Inc. in northern Nevada, at the
Utah border. The operation -- Wine Cup Ranch, formerly owned by the late
actor Jimmy Stewart – boasts of access to almost 750,000 acres. Most are
really federal lands, obtained through a grazing permit.
In 1993, President Clinton announced plans to raise monthly grazing permit
fees to $5.00 for western ranchers. Some members of Congress attacked
Clinton’s proposal, and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt along with it. They
decried the betrayal of ranchers. Senator Conrad Burns (R-Montana) called
ranchers the best stewards of the land and said that raising grazing fees
showed the lack of knowledge on the part of “Secretary Babbitt and his
extremist crowd about current range land conditions."
We want an outright end to the subsidizing of cattle ranchers. We want to
stop private grazing on public lands. Unfortunately, President Obama
appointed Ken Salazar, a cattle rancher, as Interior Secretary, and Salazar
has acted mainly to the benefit of ranchers at the expense of wild horses,
burros and wolves in most of the Northern Rockies.
In March 2009, Secretary Salazar activated a Bush Administration plan to
de-list gray wolves from the Endangered Species Act in the Northern Rocky
Mountain region. That gave Idaho and Montana control over wolves. Hunts were
implemented. More than 500 wolves were killed in those states -- 257 by
hunters and approximately 250 by state and federal Wildlife Services agents
-- under the banner of livestock protection.
Inside this summer 2010 issue of ActionLine
you'll find a photo essay covering the March for Mustangs rally Friends of Animals
organized in D.C. There's also an interview of the Emmy-Award winning
documentary filmmaker Ginger Kathrens, who works as Executive Director of
the Cloud Foundation -- a group that leads efforts to end wild horse and
burro roundups.
Meanwhile, yanking support from the cattle industry by refusing to consume
meat and other animals products is one obvious fix. You can do it, and if
you do, we’re forever grateful.
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