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Don Peay, Ryan Benson to receive 300K to spread fables- Utah is dead last place in America in per-pupil spending on education. The state legislature does want to innovate, however. So for a second year it appears they will grant $300,000 to Don Peay, founder of Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife and the related anti-wolf group Big Game Forever, headed…
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Wyoming National Parks sequestered along with the rest in the U.S.- There are many stories and possible stories about the sequester’s across-the-board cuts. Like the rest of federal discretionary spending, the National Park System (NPS) has to deal with the cuts. NPS has to deal with $113-million in instant budget reduction. This is especially difficult…
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In yesterday’s post about the Owyhee “Group 1” grazing decision we discussed the NRCS Ecological Site Descriptions for Juniper Mountain that inaccurately describe the vegetation and magically discount the native juniper forests that exist there. In the Environmental Assessment the BLM states: “Ecological site descriptions for Castlehead-Lambert allotment do not identify the presence of juniper…
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The Owyhee BLM has finally issued a Proposed Decision on the so-called “Group 1” allotments but, unfortunately, the BLM really doesn’t go far enough to reverse damage caused by decades of abusive livestock grazing and they didn’t collect enough information to rationalize their decision even though the Environmental Assessment (EA) consists of a whopping 556 pages…
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It is time for a new “wildlife news” thread. Please put your news, links and comments below in comments.
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Recent discussions about how wolves are portrayed in the news media got me thinking about public attention to this issue, generally. Is the wolf issue heating up or cooling down following their removal from federal protections? I used Google Trends, a tool for examining the content of web searches over time to see how issue…
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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…
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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…