#ranching

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Three more wolf packs confirmed in California as ranchers call for relief

California wildlife officials confirmed three new wolf packs in Northern California, bringing the state total to 10.

So, here's the thing: ranching in the United States was developed in part by exterminating any large animals that could pose a threat to cattle and other livestock, whether through predation or competition for food. That includes wolves, bears, cougars, bison, etc. While it's likely there was someone along the line who tried to coexist with these wild animals while raising livestock, the prevailing solution was to kill "nuisance" species, whether by shooting, trapping, or poisoning them en masse. These animals were wiped out from much of their native range in the lower 48 states by the early 20th century, and their more recent return represents a reckoning with the way we have used and abused the land since.

Now that we have more understanding of the ecological importance of every native species that exists in an ecosystem, there's no excuse to keep defaulting to killing wolves and other predators. Conservationists have offered ranchers a wide variety of solutions to protect their stock, from wolf-proof fences and hazing protocols to livestock guardian dogs. Ranchers can request financial compensation in many Western states for wolf-killed livestock and other losses, though not every rancher wants to differentiate between a cow killed by wolves, and one that died of other causes but was scavenged by wolves postmortem. And, unsurprisingly, some ranchers file fraudulent claims to game the system.

But there also remains the attitude that ranchers should be able to let their cattle run wherever they want on private or public land, and not have to monitor them or create adequate barriers against predators. The entitlement they feel to enormous areas of land, to include public lands that are supposed to be for everyone's use, has its roots in the assumption that "taming the land" for economic profit is more important than any other use. They want any potential threat to be preemptively removed for their convenience, no matter the ecological cost--or human cost, for that matter. Don't forget that every ranch in the West was once the homeland of indigenous people who were, more often than not, forcibly and violently removed so the ranchers' predecessors could move in with their livestock.

It's time for ranchers to accept that they're going to have to adjust to the return of native animals that have lived in these ecosystems for thousands of years. It is already beyond generous that states are willing to pay ranchers for lost cattle. They need to return the favor by working with conservationists to find solutions that reduce predation without just shooting the predatory species native to their region. Ranching as it stands today can only be achieved by the elimination of native animals from the land, but it's not the only way to successfully raise livestock in wild areas. It's time for new solutions that benefit both the cattle and the wildlife alike.

[peapicker19]

[backroad-life]

Credit: Backroad-life

[hope-for-the-planet]

Bringing back the birds: the ‘ghost woodlands’ transforming England’s barren sheep fells

A groundbreaking tree-planting programme is uniting farmers and rewilders, as portions of common ground in the Yorkshire Dales national park

From the article:

The Howgill Fells are a smooth, treeless cluster of hills in the Yorkshire Dales national park, so bald and lumpy that they are sometimes described as a herd of sleeping elephants. Their bare appearance – stark even by UK standards – has been shaped by centuries of sheep grazing. Yet beneath the soil lie ancient tree roots: the silent traces of long-lost “ghost woodlands”. Now, these woodlands are being encouraged to grow again. Over the past 12 years, 300,000 native trees have been planted across these hills in sheep-free enclosures. The results are beginning to be seen: birds and flowers are returning. Birdsong ripples through the valley as first light spills over a ridge line and on to 26 hectares (64 acres) of fenced-off land near Tebay village. Meadow pipits, reed buntings and stonechats are among the choristers. A flush of cotton grass bobs in the morning breeze and a stonechat fledgling clings to a spindly branch, shrieking for a parent. Big rewilding projects often happen on private land with limited public access. These enclosures are a result of agreements reached between dozens of farmers on common land with public access. “Doing so much tree-planting on a common was groundbreaking,” says Peter Leeson from the Woodland Trust. “People hadn’t been doing this in the uplands before at this scale.” Bluebells are popping up and there are patches of bracken, which suggest the soils and seed banks retain the memory of being a woodland despite hundreds of years of sheep grazing. “We call these memories ‘ghost woodlands’,” says Leeson. These ancient woodland indicators could offer a blueprint of where trees should return. Each year, Douglas is finding more breeding birds moving in. Last year, there were 14 breeding species here. Before the enclosure was created, he says, just four would have been found: meadow pipit, skylarks, wren and grey wagtails. Eleven new breeding bird species have been recorded since the original 2016 survey, with numbers increasing year-on-year. “I’m surprised by how quickly birds have colonised, and the diversity of species,” says Douglas.

[mypastnow]

[admiraltx]

Heading out

[probablyasocialecologist]

Wrenching the Ranchers | Christopher Ketcham

In the American West, grazing by cattle has come at a devastating ecological cost. One man wants to upend it—at whatever cost.

While they contribute little to society, welfare ranchers on public lands demand a lot in the form of subsidies whose scope is a testament to their outsize power and influence. It’s estimated the state and federal largesse to the industry amounts to between $500 million and $1 billion a year, all of it funded generously by the taxpayer. This includes below-market grazing fees for cows and sheep, fence construction, road building and maintenance, cattle guards, forage improvement and seeding programs, poisoning of unwanted vegetation, forest clearing, stream diversions, water projects such as dams, pipelines, aqueducts, stock ponds and troughs, the monitoring of livestock health, and control of predators and other mammalian and avian pests deemed a threat to the industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture operates a specialized hunting and trapping unit—referred to by the Saboteur as “hired killers”—that slaughters tens of thousands of animals each year to aid public lands stockmen, including coyotes, beavers, and prairie dogs. Ranchers also receive generous federal and state tax write-offs for every cow they graze, along with reduced state property taxes for their private deeded lands. They are additionally “blow-jobbed,” as the Saboteur put it, by the very agencies that are supposed to be preventing their overstocking and overgrazing of public lands. The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are the primary culprits in this charade of regulation, in which it appears the cowboys run the show and the bureaucrats are their puppets. The industry is thus provided all kinds of preferential treatment and survives on the dole because in the arid conditions of the West, where the climate conspires against cattle production, it cannot do otherwise. “Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites,” wrote author Edward Abbey, the literary father of the eco-sabotage movement in the United States, who also observed that cattlemen “survive by hiding behind the cheap mythology of the ‘Cowboy’: literally, a boy who looks after cows.” Abbey was hardly alone in coming to this conclusion. Conservative pundit George Will opined that an inner-city mother on public assistance was “the soul of self-reliance compared to a westerner who receives federally subsidized range privileges.” The industry, naturally, wants ever more privilege. The primary advocacy group of ranchers who exploit the public domain is the Public Lands Council, which is funded and staffed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a political and cultural giant in the annals of lobbying. Every few years, the Public Lands Council issues a policy document to outline priorities for Congress and the White House. Katie Fite, an ecologist with the nonprofit Wildlands Defense in Boise, calls it the “Welfare Rancher’s demand letter.” “The Big Hats basically want super-duper extra special status for every welfare ranching permit holder,” she told me in an email, “because if you have herds of cows or sheep you are a Lord.” Among the common demands: the general annihilation of prairie dogs, a keystone species already 98 percent gone throughout the West but which ranchers still consider a pest; the stripping of Endangered Species Act protections for the trifling number of remaining grizzly bears and for “all species of wolves” in the United States; and rollbacks of key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental impact assessments of all commercial activities on federal lands, including ranching operations. The Public Lands Council has also sought to amend the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act so that wild horses can be killed because they compete for forage with cows. “They want wild horses in the West pretty much GONE,” Fite wrote me. “The Endangered Species Act rendered meaningless/GONE. They want a free hand to grossly pollute water. They attack just about everything good or positive with public lands and the environment.”

1 April 2025