Politics
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Increased Fees to Graze On Public Land Still Doesn’t Cover Costs President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget for the Department of the Interior includes a tiny bit of good news for western public lands: a $1 increase in the fee charged for livestock grazing on Bureau of Land Management lands. The fee, which is required of each public…
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Senator Jeff Siddoway also pushes amendment to turn Land Owner Appreciation bill into a no access gravy train- Idaho rancher and State Senator Jeff Siddoway has introduced a bill (S1305) in the Idaho statehouse that would authorize the slaughter of wolves involved in molesting or killing livestock by any number of creative ways. Senator Siddoway…
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Wants to sell them back to the state- In Nevada he said he didn’t know their purpose, “I don’t know the reason that the federal government owns such a large share of Nevada.” Of course this man who never got his hands dirty doesn’t know about the public lands. Does he know anything except that…
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Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, Wyoming , Colorado poll. Arizonans stand out- Generally speaking Arizona is not thought of as a state especially friendly to environmental policies. Of course a state’s reputation on such things is the result of the real attitudes of the people as channeled by politicians and interpreted by the media. In early January…
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Is the strategy, cut their budgets and make up the difference with a private “appropriation” from the self-interested, cutting out the public? We all know the watchword in Washington has been cut, cut, cut the budgets of all the agencies that look out after the public interest under the guise that we have a terrible,…
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Recently the Idaho Department of Fish and Game announced that they are planning a “Wildlife Summit” to be held at the Riverside Hotel in Boise, Idaho. It was originally scheduled for September but after some concerns were raised about the timing it was moved forward to August 24-26th so as not to coincide with the…
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Narrow focused Chief of Alaska Fish and Game Wildlife Chief’s resignation cause for rejoicing among many- Corey Rossi is the kind of guy wildlife biologists don’t like. He had a narrow focus on big game hunting and what he thought would result in the maximum production of moose, caribou and a handful of other hunted…
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Years of legal pressure prompts favorable policy change Public land domestic sheep grazers and bighorn advocates have been clashing for decades over land-use conflicts which place bighorn sheep populations at risk of deadly disease. With the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2012, favorable policy change promises new avenues of conflict resolution that may…