Grazing and Livestock

  • Idaho ranchers want more taxpayer money for grazing “studies”

    Ken Cole

    While Idaho taxpayers are facing budget cuts to public education and health care, ranchers are busy writing self-serving bills to provide money for “studies” that will paper over destructive impacts of livestock grazing on sage grouse. Last year saw thousands of people marching on the grounds of the Idaho Capital in Boise. People were marching…

  • Slavery or Indentured Servitude in Idaho?

    Ken Cole

    The average sheep herder who comes to work in the US under the H2A immigrant worker program gets paid only $650-$750 per month. Many of the workers come from South American countries like Peru or Chile and spend months in remote areas of Idaho with little communication and poor access to medical facilities. Contrast this…

  • Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service announce 2013 livestock grazing fees

    Ralph Maughan

    Once again, it’s $1.35/AUM — just a token fee- Like last year, the USFS and the BLM have announced that the 2013 grazing will a mere $1.35 per animal unit month (AUM). In a news release, the agencies wrote: “An AUM or HM – treated as equivalent measures for fee purposes – is the occupancy…

  • Those Ranchers Will Get Rid of Those Nasty Bighorn Sheep One Way or Another

    Ken Cole

    A fight is brewing over domestic sheep grazing in bighorn sheep habitat in Wyoming. The Biodiversity Conservation Alliance filed a lawsuit last year to protect the small Encampment herd of bighorn sheep from coming into contact with disease ridden domestic sheep which would likely kill the entire herd if contact between the two species were…

  • Woolgrowers complain about wage hike for immigrant herders.

    Ken Cole

    A notice published by the Department of Labor in the January 8th Federal Register requires woolgrowers in several states to increase the wages of immigrant workers who are hired under the H2A program. In some states the wages have increased significantly from a measly $750/month plus room and board to a measly $1422.52/month to match…

  • Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Idaho threatened with dismemberment

    Ralph Maughan

    Lawsuit aims to take back majority of marsh land used to create the Refuge- A lawsuit by landowners who helped create the Grays Lake National Wildlife Refuge in 1965, now threatens is dismemberment. One of the best known features of the obscure country between the eastern edge of the Snake River Plain and the Wyoming…

  • Presence of nearby domestic sheep ends plan to reintroduce bighorn to Bridger Mountains north of Bozeman

    Ralph Maughan

    Disease ridden domestic sheep killed off the bighorn in early 1900s and pose the same disease barrier today- As has been written so many times, domestic sheep are full of diseases that are fatal to their wild cousin, the bighorn. Now plans to restore the mighty bighorn to the rugged Bridger Mountains to the northeast…

  • Governor Gregoire’s Troubling Livestock Legacy

    Barrie Gilbert

    Washington Governor Christine Gregoire is rumored to be a front-runner for nomination as Secretary of the Interior, where she would oversee millions of acres of public land. But a livestock “pilot” program she instituted in Washington, which fast-tracked the introduction of livestock grazing on Washington Wildlife Areas free of charge to ranchers, while running roughshod…

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‎”At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.”

Edward Abbey

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