The Media Adores Ranchers. Here’s Why They Shouldn’t.

http://dailypitchfork.org/?p=597

[Part I of a series on ranchers]

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Vickery Eckhoff // 32 Comments

The US livestock industry has enormous economic and political clout. But news reports consistently highlight a small segment of it — ranchers grazing livestock on federally-managed western grasslands — as news sources, granting them undue influence on policy issues in which they have a large economic stake.

This bias has occurred despite a decade’s worth of empirical evidence showing that public-lands ranchers — who rely on hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies but represent only 2.7 percent of the nation’s total livestock operators — fleece US taxpayers, public lands and protected species in order to graze livestock (mostly cattle) on the cheap.

The media bias seems endemic. Whether discussing wild horses, bison, predator species (wolves, coyote, cougars and bears), sage grouse or desert tortoises, livestock operators and lawmakers from western states are consistently allowed to present themselves in news reports as stewards of 230 million acres of grasslands, forest and wildlife habitat that nearly everyone agrees have been compromised. And they do this while suing the federal government to remove wildlife at public expense, block wildlife protections and gain control of federal land. Check out the linked articles and see for yourself.

The federal grazing subsidy gives them the political and environmental power they’re currently exploiting. But the media doesn’t mention it — and the ranchers never bring it up.

A lot of studies have, however, going back quite a few years. Just last month, The Center For Biological Diversity put out a report: Costs and Consequences: The Real Price of Livestock Grazing on America’s Public Lands.

Randi Spivak, Director, Public Lands Program for the Center of Biological Diversity, told me that she sent the report to 100 journalists, both nationally and in Western newsrooms. Only three outlets provided coverage: E&E News (a news bulletin covering energy and environmental policy and markets); the Idaho Mountain Express; and the Sierra Sun Times, Spivak said.

The rest? Radio silence.

For the media, the cowboy myth lives on.

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Sustainable Cowboys or Welfare Ranchers of the American West? | The Daily Pitchfork

http://dailypitchfork.org/?p=631

Report analyzes taxpayer bailout of U.S. public lands ranching [Part II of a series on ranchers]

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Vickery Eckhoff // 28 Comments

Each public lands livestock operator cost taxpayers nearly a quarter of a million dollars in subsidies over the last decade. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review-Journal, John Locher)

Five hundred million dollars[1]. That’s what 21,000[2] ranchers who graze their livestock on America’s iconic western rangelands are estimated to have cost US taxpayers in 2014 — and every year for the past decade. This averages out to an annual taxpayer subsidy of $23,809 per rancher — approximately a quarter of a million dollars each since 2005. So why does this small subset, representing just 2.7% of US livestock producers, protest the “welfare rancher” label?

The public lands grazing program is welfare.

That $23,809 — and it’s a lowball figure — is a form of public assistance similar to other welfare programs. The only difference is, it doesn’t arrive as a check in the mail. It instead represents a loss covered by taxpayers: the very large difference between what public lands ranchers pay in fees to the US government and what public lands grazing costs taxpayers every year. But it’s still a subsidy, as a newly updated economic analysis, Costs and Consequences: The Real Price of Livestock Grazing on America’s Public Lands, makes clear. And the recipients aren’t low income; a large number are millionaires and some are billionaires and multi-billion dollar corporations. Cattle barons, if you will.

Public lands ranching costs western ecosystems, wildlife and taxpayers.

“Several federal agencies permit livestock grazing on public lands in the United States, the largest being the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Department of Agriculture’s United States Forest Service (USFS).

The vast majority of livestock grazing on BLM and USFS rangelands occurs in the 11 western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

Rangelands are non-irrigated and generally have vegetation that consists mostly of grasses, herbs and/or shrubs. They are different from pastureland, which may periodically be planted, fertilized, mowed or irrigated.”

So says the report, which was prepared by three economists for the Center for Biological Diversity and published in January 2015, the latest of numerous studies (see list at end of this article) to examine a program Americans know nothing about.

The 44-page fiscal analysis describes a federal program that exploits not just taxpayers but is ruinous to public lands and the wildlife that inhabit it, a viewpoint shared by rangeland science experts and conservation groups, from Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity, to WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and many others.

An obvious culprit identified in the report (and its predecessors) is the negligible fee that livestock operators pay to graze a cow and her calf or five sheep for an entire month on public lands, otherwise defined as an AUM (animal unit month). In 2014 it was just $1.35 (priced less than a can of dog food) — a figure that is the lowest fee that can be legally charged.

The $1.35 figure has barely budged over the past 34 years[3] and is well below the market price to graze on private land ($21.60). Fees set by other federal agencies and individual states on public property are also significantly higher.

In 2014, BLM and USFS permit holders paid an estimated $18.5 million in fees to graze 1.14 million livestock “units” on the 229 million acres of federal land used for grazing. But only a fraction (between one-third and one-quarter) of that $18.5 million actually went into the US Treasury, according to the report. The majority was diverted to range rehabilitation and improvement funds to construct fences for containing livestock, and improving vegetation and forage. In other words, two-thirds to three quarters of the low fees ranchers pay go right back into their pockets, leaving approximately $7.9 million to help defray total costs which are, well enormous.

Indirect costs significantly higher than direct costs.

The study indicates that, in 2014, $143.6 million was directly appropriated to the grazing program (an amount that’s been consistent over the last 10 years). Some quick math reveals that, on average, public lands ranchers paid just $376 for what cost taxpayers $6,838 last year.

But that doesn’t reflect the indirect costs: 34 related programs and services enumerated at the back of the report (Appendix A, tables 1-4) that aren’t directly budgeted under grazing by BLM and USFS budgets or that are carried out by other government agencies or at the state and local level. These aren’t figured into the $143.6 million appropriated for the grazing recipients.

The entries either benefit livestock producers or remediate damage tied to their operations. Multiple programs deal with soil erosion, desertification, and the spread of noxious weeds while others deal with damage to streams, watersheds and riparian areas. Several others address harm to archeological and cultural resources (oftentimes, of indigenous peoples) and recreational areas used by the public. Four remedy harm to wildlife. Fire management and control is a big issue, too.

Two controversial programs directly remove and kill wildlife that threaten livestock at taxpayer expense. USDA Wildlife Services spends $8 million[4] to kill millions of native predators every year, courtesy of an unknowing public. The BLM’s Wild Horses and Burros program also removes thousands of federally protected horses and burros each year from designated wild horse habitat so that, during the ongoing drought, more water and forage are available for ranchers on public assistance. The cost of that program tops $80 million a year. That’s $380 per rancher to kill predators (wolves, coyotes, bear, cougars, bobcats and eagles) and ten times that much ($3,809) to get rid of wild horses and burros.

Add in the USDA’s livestock assistance program, under which payments are made directly to ranchers due to natural disasters, like droughts. And don’t forget all the various agencies indirectly involved with federal grazing issues and consequences: The US Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, the USDA, and Dept. of Justice. What does it equal? Special interest welfare estimated between $500 million and $1 billion a year.

Here’s where the cattlemen’s claim to be great stewards of public grassland and forest preserve gets exposed — just like their disavowal of receiving welfare payments.

States the Western Watersheds Project,

“Public lands ranching is the most widespread commercial use of public lands in the United States. Ranching is one of the primary causes of native species endangerment in the American West; it is also the most significant cause of non-point source water pollution and desertification.

Public lands ranching significantly contributes to climate change by emissions of the global warming gases nitrous oxide and methane; it causes loss of soil carbon reserves by causing erosion and by substantially reducing the landscape’s potential to sequester carbon.”

Almost a year ago, Cliven Bundy ripped into low-income Americans for collecting government subsidies at the same time that he was stiffing the government of $1 million in back grazing fees. Since then, only a handful of articles have called out the rest of his public-lands ranching brethren for the hand-outs they receive. The mainstream media acts as though all that welfare ranching stuff disappeared with Bundy’s armed rebellion.

The time is here for journalists to inform the public about the federal grazing program. For too long, they’ve let the 2.7% of US livestock producers run away with the “sustainable” cowboy narrative — leaving the public, public lands, and wildlife paying the price.

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Bad Ranchers, Bad Cows | The Daily Pitchfork

http://dailypitchfork.org/?p=742

A newly published study offers photographic proof of what ranchers have long denied: the extent to which livestock grazing damages public lands. (Part III of a series on ranchers in the media)

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Vickery Eckhoff // 66 Comments

Livestock have been severely depleting public rangelands for decades. They do so by trampling vegetation, damaging soil, spreading invasive weeds, polluting water, increasing the likelihood of destructive fires, depriving native wildlife of forage and shelter and even contributing to global warming—all of which has been noted in study after study. Global studies. Peer-reviewed studies. Government studies. Lots of studies going back many years.

So why do people get up in arms about drilling for oil in the Arctic national wildlife refuge, demolished forests and polluted streams, but accept cattle trampling wildlife refuges and national parks, forests and grasslands as if that’s a productive use of our nation’s shared landscape?

Why does that damage—amounting to as much as a one billion dollar subsidy to a very small slice of the livestock industry every year—go unmentioned by a media that so eagerly condemns climate change deniers and proponents of fracking? (Read The Daily Pitchfork’s analysis of the destructive economics of public lands ranching here).

Perception.

Everyone can recognize an oil-soaked sea bird, a clear-cut forest, a stream that’s been ruined by industrial pollutants and extreme drought and other destructive weather. But few Americans visit the nation’s public grass and forest lands; fewer still know what livestock damage actually looks like on them.

This is something that the media’s present fascination with grass-fed beef being good for everyone (not just people, but cattle and western grass and forest land) has directly abetted with the help of western politicians, the beef industry and livestock producers themselves.

The media, it turns out, comfortably quotes ranchers on conservation issues but not scientists. Not surprisingly, the immense negatives of ranching in the arid West seldom make their way into mainstream media.

You can thank all that for conditioning the public to see ranchers as trusted stewards and cattle and sheep as native grazers of one million square kilometers of public land in 11 western states where livestock receives preferential treatment at great cost to everyone but livestock operators. That photographs of cattle impacting sensitive Western ecosystems don’t make the news shouldn’t surprise anyone.

That’s what makes the newly published study in Environmental Management—Restoration of Riparian Areas Following the Removal of Cattle in the Northwestern Great Basin—so important. It shows what devotees of grass-fed beef, rotational grazing and holistic management (Allan Savory) spend so much of their careers glossing over: visual proof of what livestock damage looks like—in this case, within a wildlife refuge in Oregon.

The study assessed the effects of livestock in riparian systems at Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeastern Oregon, 23 years after the removal of cattle grazing, using 64 before and after photographs.

To see them is to be impressed by how badly cattle are suited to the arid public lands of the West, and how long it takes these sensitive ecosystems to recover once cattle are removed.

Riparian areas are critically important ecosystems located along the banks of rivers, streams, creeks, or any other water networks where cattle congregate (because public lands are mostly arid and not irrigated).

To damage a riparian area isn’t just to despoil it for cattle; it’s to despoil it for every critter dependent on that ecosystem: fish, frogs, birds and native populations of elk and antelope, among other species.

The Environmental Management report cites numerous scientific studies in painting a graphic picture for the American public:

Cattle grazing can indirectly cause a significant decrease in bird species abundance and diversity, largely by removing shrubs that are important habitat for many bird species. Altered stream cover, water depth, and bank stability due to cattle grazing can all affect fish populations. Cattle grazing can accelerate stream bank erosion, causing streams to become shallower and wider, which can result in higher water temperatures.

Other water quality issues that can result from the presence of cattle include pollution from excrement and increased sedimentation from trampled banks. Decreases in both the density and height of woody plants have been documented with grazing activity along with increases in exotic species
Although grazing can sometimes lead to greater species richness and diversity, this often occurs due to the introduction of invasive species and the suppression of vegetation cover. Other documented effects of cattle include loss of native biodiversity, interruption of nutrient cycling, and destruction of biotic soil crusts.

As the study further states:

Cattle grazing can exacerbate effects of climate change. Ecosystems stressed by grazing activity may be less resistant to temperature and moisture changes, compared to ecosystems that have had time to recover.

But it’s the photographs that drive the message home:

Trampling the public trust

The following photos reveal what's nearly always left out of media coverage of public lands ranching: the mechanics of how cattle degrade the system and how it can recover once they're removed. The following photos from the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in Oregon show the condition before cattle were removed in 1984-1991 and again in 2013-2014.

As the study describes, while there are extensive perennial and intermittent streams within the refuge, riparian areas represent just 1 percent of the total land area. Approximately half the streams are inhabited by fish except during periods of drought when adequate water is not available.

In 1994, at the time that it was decided to remove livestock from the refuge, only 13 percent of the streams were characterized as being in good condition, with 73 percent of riparian areas characterized as either poor or in very poor condition. Cattle grazing was identified as the leading cause of stream and riparian degradation at Hart Mountain, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Twenty-three years later, when the photographs comprising the study were taken, there was a dramatic reversal of that damage:

“Results indicated that channel widths and eroding banks decreased in 64 and 73 percent of sites, respectively. We found a 90 percent decrease in the amount of bare soil and a 63 percent decrease in exposed channel as well as a significant increase in the cover of grasses/sedges/forbs, rushes and willow.”

As it happens, few Americans are aware that cattle—which were brought to this country 400 years ago—originated in lush, wet climates of Asia. They are no more native to the arid West than are alligators (in fact, there are more cattle produced in Florida than on western public lands leased to livestock operators).

It’s also important to note that only 2.7% of the nation’s livestock spend any portion of their brief lives grazing on western public rangelands, which are so stripped of vegetation that 100 acres are needed to sustain a cow compared to a couple of acres of pasture in the eastern US. This is how such a small percentage of the nation’s livestock have wrought such a large environmental impact on public lands—something very few Americans realize.

But the before and after photos—not just the three side-by-side comparisons in the photo gallery, but all 64—put all that in context.

Whether or not you’re a science person, prone to reading studies, it’s not hard to see a difference with the naked eye.

A few years before cattle were removed in the study area, Edward Abbey wrote in Cowburnt, which was published in Harper’s Magazine,

The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions) is a man who strings barbed wire all over the range; drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds; drives off elk and antelope and bighorn sheep; poisons coyotes and prairie dogs; shoots eagles, bears, and cougars on sight; supplants the native grasses with tumbleweed, snakeweed, povertyweed, cowshit, anthills, mud, dust, and flies. And then leans back and grins at the TV cameras and talks about how much he loves the American West.

The idea that ranchers are protecting western rangelands for present and future generations is a myth. Today, public lands ranchers depend on the public to subsidize the continued destruction of public lands through cheap grazing.

Yes, public grazing allotments do occasionally get retired, but they remain a hot property for ranchers because they come with such heavy fiscal subsidies, courtesy of US taxpayers—the very ones the media is telling to listen to ranchers and buy grass-fed beef.

As the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge study concludes, “the removal of cattle can result in dramatic changes in riparian vegetation, even in semi-arid landscapes and without replanting or other active restoration efforts.”

Don’t let the gentle, scientific tone fool you. Instead, return to those photos, read the supporting study and make up your mind. And if you’re in the media, report on that. We’ve all heard enough about how livestock is great for the environment. It’s time some truth was shared around the public campfire.

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Forbes Billionaires Top US Welfare Ranchers List | The Daily Pitchfork

http://dailypitchfork.org/?p=698

They're mega-rich, powerful and on public assistance. [Part IV of an ongoing series on ranchers in the media]

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Vickery Eckhoff // 35 Comments

Guess who's fleecing U.S. taxpayers over nearly one billion dollars in public grazing subsidies?

Americans love ranchers: Gritty ranchers, mom-and-pop ranchers, renegade ranchers — especially those who raise livestock on the vast open prairies of the West through hard work and rugged independence. But there’s another side to the ever-popular rancher mythology— a side the media doesn’t cover and the public never sees.

The Koch brothers, Ted Turner, the Hilton family and nine other powerful ranchers share an uncommon privilege: giant public subsidies, unknown to U.S. taxpayers. It’s the other side of the Cliven Bundy story, the other side of the Wright brothers saga—the bronc-riding, ranching family at the center of the New York Times photographic essay published March 11, 2015. It’s also the other side of the ongoing news feed in which ranchers work to remove wild horses from public lands.

That “other side” of those stories is the federal grazing program that enables the Wrights to run their livestock on public lands for cheap; allows ranchers to have thousands of protected wild horses removed from public lands at public expense. It’s also the program that earned Bundy the title of welfare rancher.

Bundy didn’t earn it by failing to pay his grazing fees, though. The welfare rancher label applies to all ranchers who hold permits to graze the vast public spaces of the West, both delinquent and not. It includes the Wright brothers; the ranchers in Iron and Beaver counties in Utah complaining that wild horses eat too much; and 21,000 others.

They are all welfare ranchers subsidized by US taxpayers, and you know who are the biggest welfare ranchers of all, grazing livestock across hundreds of millions of acres of public grass and forest land, all assisted by public subsidies paid for by US taxpayers?

Billionaires appearing on Forbes rich lists

The .01 percenters are the nation’s biggest welfare ranchers, according to numerous environmental and policy groups; and it’s time they brought some attention to themselves and the federal grazing program they’re exploiting to the tune of an annual estimated one billion dollars in taxpayer subsidies while causing long-term damage to one of the public’s most treasured assets.

David and Charles Koch (Koch Industries)

The brothers hold a half-dozen grazing permits on public land in Montana to go with its 300,000-acre Matador Ranch there. The brothers are tied for fourth place on Forbes 2014 400 Richest People in America list (net worth: $ 42 billion each). The Koch family ($ 89 billion) is #2 on Forbes Richest Families list; Koch Industries is #2 on Forbes America's Largest Private Companies list, ($ 115 billion in sales).

J.R. Simplot Corp.

The largest U.S. public lands ranching entity (with an estimated 2 to 3 million acres of allotments in CA, ID, NV, OR and UT) is #63 on Forbes 2014 list of America's Largest Private Companies ($ 5.8 billion in sales). In 2014, the family was #29 on Forbes list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 8 billion).

Bruce McCaw (McCaw Cellular)

McCaw was #382 on Forbes 400 list of America’s Richest People in 2005 (net worth: $ 925 million). Through his 9 sprawling ranches, he controls a significant number of public grazing leases in ID and possibly NV. One of them (Camas Creek ranch) includes 272,000 acres of Federal grazing allotments in Idaho's Camas Prairie. Grazing permitted to his other ranches could easily double or triple that to a million acres or more.

Barrick Gold

The Canadian mining company is one of the two largest public lands ranchers in NV, ranking 771st on Forbes Global 2000 list of the World’s Biggest Public Companies in 2014, (sales: $ 12.56 billion). Like many other large public lands ranchers, Barrick buys ranches to secure water rights.

Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA)

The supplier of drinking water to Las Vegas is a large NV public lands rancher with an estimated 1 million acres of public grazing allotments. Like Barrick Gold, it, buys up private ranches to gain their water rights.

W. Barron Hilton (Hilton Hotels)

The hotel heir dropped off Forbes Billionaires list (ranked #459 in 2011) as well as its list of the 400 Richest Americans (#144 in 2010), with a net worth of $ 2.5 billion. He died in 2013. Though records are hard to pin down, Hilton's heirs inherited a ranching operation in the CA-NV border area, which has been known to have vast public lands grazing allotments permitted to it.

Mary Hewlett-Jaffe (Hewlett-Packard)

Jaffe holds the largest BLM public lands grazing permit in central ID and is among the top 15 public lands ranchers in the state (estimated at under 200,000 acres that are said to be in extremely degraded condition, according to sources).

James Barta (Sav-Rx.com)

Barta is not on any Forbes rich lists, but owns one of the largest cattle ranching operations in the U.S., according to his attorneys. Barta holds grazing permits to nearly 900,000 acres of public grazing allotments in connection with two properties: White Horse Ranch (in OR) and Soldier Meadows (in NV). Barta may have additional NV grazing leases through two other ranches in NV, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds Project.

T. Wright Dickinson

Though not on any Forbes list, the Dickinson family is a large public lands rancher, with grazing permits estimated at more than a half million acres of CO, UT and WY public lands under its LLC, Vermillion Ranches. Dickinson is a former County commissioner and proponent of county efforts to gain control of federal lands, according to the Denver Post.

Stan Kroenke (Kroenke Group) & Ann Walton Kroenke (Walmart)

With just two of his ranches (in MT and WY) totaling 664,000 acres (not including public grazing allotments), Kroenke is one of the ten top land owners in the U.S. In 2014, he ranked #89 on Forbes list of the 400 Richest Americans, #247 on its Billionaires list, and #5 on its list of Richest American Sports Team Owners (net worth: $ 5.8 billion). His wife, Ann Walton Kroenke (net worth: $ 5.6 billion), was #261 on Forbes Billionaires list and #11 on its list of America’s Richest Women.

Family of Robert Earl Holding (Sinclair Oil and hotels)

Forbes ranks the family #87 on its 2014 list of America’s Richest Families (net worth: $ 2.7 billion). With 400,000 acres of land, the family is the 19th largest private land owner in the US, according to the 2014 Land Report 100. This includes land that Forbes reported “may be the largest ranching operation in the Rocky Mountains.” Public grazing leases are associated with some of the family’s WY and possibly MT holdings, according to Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds.

Ted Turner

He's the second largest U.S. land owner (2 million acres in 6 states), is estimated to hold grazing leases in MT and NM (estimated at as much as 300,000 acres), and owns the world's largest bison herd. Forbes ranked him #296 on its 2014 list of the 400 Richest Americans and #818 on its global Billionaires list (net worth: $ 2.2 billion).

Fifteen years ago, two percent of public lands ranchers controlled fifty percent of permitted grazing acreage, according to John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians.

Today, Horning says, that elite group of mega-rich owners has consolidated its hold on federal grazing property even further through grazing leases attached to the larger-than-life ranches they inherit or buy outright.

Along with that comes all kinds of perks paid for by taxpayers: the USDA’s wildlife services, which killed four million endangered and predator species in 2013 to help livestock operators. The costly and wildly ineffective Wild Horses and Burros Program which operates to the benefit of welfare ranchers. Numerous programs that work to undo the grazing damage that welfare livestock causes. And let’s not forget the bank loans that an estimated 45% of public lands ranchers obtain, using their grazing leases as collateral, and which heighten the value of their primary ranching property.

Only 2.7 percent of the nation’s ranchers hold such leases. That’s a lot of costly benefits flowing to a small segment of the livestock industry. That two percent of them hold more than fifty percent of the acreage under that program? Never mind that two of the recipients love to attack all welfare programs that benefit the bottom tier of the economic pyramid. It’s the antithesis of rugged independence. It’s undemocratic, too.

Their faces are absent from the media’s coverage of ranchers. Some of that is is laziness. The other part is resources. It takes a lot of digging to identify any public lands ranchers with precision. Why? Because the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service (which administer most federal grazing leases) have record-keeping systems that are the antithesis of transparent. There is no central database. Finding out who’s doing what on federal lands requires identifying all the various LLCs that ranchers establish to hide who they are, then tracking down leases in 10 Western states.

The BLM, for its part, isn’t eager to help. Call any BLM specialist and identify yourself as media, and they send you to a media representative. Most I reached out to didn’t return phone calls—not promptly, anyway. You want information? You’ll be stuck sending out Freedom of Information Act requests. I sent on April3, 2014. It’s still outstanding.

Paul Rogers of the San Jose Mercury News spent nine months collecting information on 26,000 grazing leases in order to publish a comprehensive article (“Cash Cows”) in 1999 on the money pit that was the federal grazing program at that time. Many of the same players are still in the game, but the process of keeping tabs using real records is so arduous that no environmental groups do it.

The way I came up with the names in the accompanying photo gallery was by interviewing groups working to reform public lands grazing and cross-checking names against news reports online. The estimates provided of leased acreage were provided by Jon Marvel, founder of Western Watersheds Project. Net worth figures and list rankings are from Forbes; the rankings of richest land owners from the Land Report 100.

It’s not an exact science, but one thing is clear: the public is being lulled by stories about bronc riders like the Wright brothers and outliers like Cliven Bundy while missing the big picture: a handful of cattle rustlers—rich ones—whose hands are deep in the public’s pockets, along with all the other smaller permittees.

And that’s what ranching in the West is like. It’s still rough and tumble. But if you don’t have a big-ass ranch, a huge fortune and public assistance, you’d best just head for the hills.