Grazing and Livestock
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Two-hundred and fifty million acres of public lands need your help. The Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resourcesis poised to move the so-calledGrazing Improvement Act of 2013 (S. 258) out to the floor, legitimizing this bad idea that is nothing more than an attempt to exclude conservation interests from public lands grazing management. If enacted, this…
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A second case of brucellosis has been found in cattle in the brucellosis surveillance zone near the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) in Montana. This has prompted Texas to ask for further testing of cattle that are exported from the area to be tested once they arrive in the the state. It’s not as big of…
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The recently released Department of Interior Fiscal Year 2012 Economic Report shows that Grazing on BLM Public Lands Accounts for only 0.41% of the nation’s livestock receipts and only 17,000 jobs. In contrast, recreation accounts for 372,000 jobs and contributes $45 billion to the economy. According to the report, the BLM permits 12.4 million animal unit…
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There is a lot in the news about the potential listing of sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act. Western politicians are using heated rhetoric about how a listing would destroy their economies, and the “western way of life” (read death and destruction to native wildlife). And in good western tradition, they blame the federal…
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Western Watersheds Project and Wild Utah Project had a significant win this week on the Duck Creek allotment of Utah. In the longest running administrative grazing appeal hearing in the history of the Department of the Interior, including 12 weeks of hearings and a record of 15,000 pages, WWP demonstrated that BLM’s rangeland health assessments…
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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…
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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 of juniper…