Posts by: Brian Ertz

Last year I learned that anti-predator activists were organizing a predator killing derby to take place in Salmon, Idaho – a place smack dab amidst one of the largest and most breathtakingly diverse public landscapes in the country. A few of us infiltrated the event with the aim of exposing the extent of the depravity […]

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The sighting of a man or woman who has fashioned a goat costume and taken to the mountain to be among the wild goats of northern Utah has prompted the awe and adoration of at least one wildlife activist known to readers of The Wildlife News.

‘Goat man’ seen among wild goats in northern […]

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A Big Bonehead

On May 31, 2012 By

Politico‘s Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist Matt Wuerker weighs in on Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson’s use of a Congressional Rider to attempt to deny bighorn sheep protections on national forests in order to allow a few lone sheepman access to graze domestic sheep that transmit deadly disease to imperiled bighorns on National Forest public […]

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Less than a year after Flat Top Ranch was awarded $600,000 for a conservation easement – half of which was paid for by a Blaine County levy assessed to protect wildlife –  Flat Top Ranch has run into more conflicts with wolves:

Jerome Hansen, supervisor of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game’s Magic Valley […]

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A new federal assessment of rangelands in the West finds a disturbingly large portion fails to meet range health standards principally due to commercial livestock operations.  In the last decade as more land has been assessed, estimates of damaged lands have doubled in the 13-state Western area where the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) […]

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Recently we were informed of a new effort by two conservation groups, a Native American tribe and livestock interests “to secure $25 million from the upcoming 2012 Farm Bill to help livestock producers reduce the risk of livestock losses to grizzly bears, wolves, black bears and mountain lions.”

This taxpayer money is meant to “reduce […]

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Forest Service agrees to remove livestock corrals that impede the pronghorn’s migration.

Cheyenne, WY- Conservationists and the US Forest Service today signed a settlement agreement that will protect a 6,000-year-old, critical migratory corridor necessary for the survival of North America’s fastest land animal, the pronghorn. The Path of the Pronghorn is the longest remaining […]

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Federal Judge Douses the Flames – For Now

Custer County Commissioners have been rattling their sabres over a central Idaho road closure enforced by the Bureau of Land Management.  The closure occurred 12 years ago after a landslide and prevents off-road-vehicles (ORVs) from access to the Jerry Peak Wilderness Study Area.

Despite being given the […]

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Yesterday, Western Watersheds Project, Hells Canyon Preservation Council, and The Wilderness Society filed a motion in federal district court seeking to halt domestic sheep grazing on three allotments in the Payette National Forest in order to protect imperiled bighorn sheep in Hells Canyon, and native bighorns in the Salmon River Canyon.

In 2010, the Forest […]

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Grazing Improvement [Entrenchment] Act Gains Legs, Threatens Hundreds of Millions of Acres of YOUR Public Land

The public land ranching industry is up to it again.  They’re looking to further obstruct the proper administration of grazing on federal public lands by eroding public participation and further tying down the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service’s […]

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Quote

‎"At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, “thus far and no further.” If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, “If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour."

~ Edward Abbey