Her knowledge of the BLM and Bundy trumps any fucked-up *opinion* held by a New York Yankee living in exile in Texas, you dumb Yankee twit.
Originally Posted by I B Hankering
I doubt her knowledge trumps anything. She is hardly an unbiased observer.
How many desert tortoises were in Nevada - and how much range area did they cover - when the Spaniard first brought cattle in 500 years ago? And how many are left NOW and how much range area do they cover?
Why do you think the opinions of the ranchers who profiteer from grazing on those lands are an unbiased opinion about desert tortoises welfare?
Listening to her or other ranchers explain that their cattle don't do any damage to the habitat is a little like listening to coal mining companies explain that stripping overburden off the tops of mountains and maintaining huge slag pools doesn't really harm the rivers around the mines.
And It appears from this Salon article, that the US (through the BLM and the National Forest Service) is carrying the freight for a whole LOT of ranchers.
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/18/cliv..._not_law_rule/
Bundy appears to be a demented ingrate.
Most of the rest of them appears to be just ordinary ingrates.
Key quotes:
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As Bundy musters up an army of supporters for this theft from the American public and the harm to the public lands,
taxpayers lose at least $123 million each year that the federal grazing program continues. According to the Government Accountability Office, in 2005,
the grazing fee wasn’t nearly sufficient to cover the costs of managing public lands grazing, and we – you and me, but apparently not Mr. Bundy – subsidize the program with
$1.2 billion every decade, not counting the
additional costs of species recovery, range infrastructure, soil loss, weed infestations, increasing wildfires, and bacterial contamination of water supplies. Despite the efforts of Western Watersheds Project and others, the fee formula has never been revised.
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Furthermore, the American public is woefully misinformed about the entrenchment, expense, and ecological harm of this land use. Make no mistake, Bundy isn’t the only rancher ripping off the American public. Every public lands livestock permittee is banking on
federally-funded range infrastructure like solar wells and fences and benefitting from federally-funded wildlife killing that targets native predators like wolves and coyotes for the sake of livestock safety. Many permittees benefit from
drought payments and disaster payments, seek
handouts for “restoration projects” that are really just reseeding the forage species their cows stripped in the first place. And most livestock operations occur at the peril of endangered species, whether it’s the Mojave desert tortoise being nutritionally starved or Greater sage-grouse nests being trampled and their eggs destroyed. How do you calculate the cost of extinction?
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I know you are dim-witted, IBLying, but did you comprehend that last part?
The ranching operations damage the land (water pollution, stripping forage, killing native species) and require fences and other infrastructure. But, the ranchers hand the bill to the government to "restore" the land from the damage THEY did.
Nice job if you can get it.
So here is a thought: Confine all grazing to private lands, like ranches in Texas and other places in the midwest.