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"Grazing and Livestock"
I recently visited Yellowstone National Park and, while there, my father and I used a friend’s place as a base camp in Gardiner, Montana. From there we would drive about 10 miles to the Park where we watched wildlife, took photographs, and just enjoyed some of the solitude that Yellowstone provides during this part of [...]
Continue Reading →Salmon-Challis National Forest said to not enforce grazing laws-
Boise. ID. When you drive or hike into this east central Idaho high country (Idaho’s highest mountains), you would expect to see pristine creeks. On the Salmon-Challis NF, however, one is usually disappointed. The creeks are sacrificed to appease local ranchers with tiny amounts of extra grass [...]
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Are ranchers stupid? You might think so if you watch their behavior towards predators. For decades ranchers have declared war on coyotes. Despite their best efforts, coyotes not only survive, but thrive. Even with taxpayer subsidies to America’s welfare ranchers in the form of Animal Damage Control agents, and the slaughter of tens of [...]
Continue Reading →The collar of Grizzly #726, emitting a mortality signal, was detected during a routine flight on September 12, 2012. The collar hadn’t moved for a while so the mercury switch that tells the collar that the bear is still alive hadn’t been triggered, thus increasing the frequency of the beeps heard from the telemetry monitor. [...]
Continue Reading →The month of March was an active month for sage grouse. Not only have sage grouse started to assemble on their strutting grounds known as leks due to the abnormally warm start of the month but the season for strutting has begun Washington D.C. and Boise, Idaho and other areas in western states. On March [...]
Continue Reading →The Supreme Court recently ruled in an 7-1 vote (Justice Stephen Breyer recused himself) that the EPA regulations about water pollution as mandated by the Clean Water Act did not apply to sediment and other pollution from logging operations. The timber industry is rejoicing over the ruling. But citizens should be less sanguine than industry. [...]
Continue Reading →Holistic grazing guru pieces together false assumptions to produce ineffective but popular recommendations on climate change-
Allan Savory is a name not well known to most people concerned about climate change. However, he has been preaching his gospel of holistic grazing for a generation now and is somewhat loved by the Western livestock grazing industry, [...]
Continue Reading →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 [...]
Continue Reading →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 [...]
Continue Reading →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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