The Cowboy and His Cow by Edward Abbey
Tim Campbell
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."
'Suppose, by some miracle of Hollywood or inheritance or good luck, I
should acquire a respectable- sized working cattle outfit. What would
I
do with it? First I'd get rid of the stinking, filthy cattle. Every
single animal.
Shoot them all, and stock the place with real animals, real game,
real protein: elk, buffalo, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep,
moose."
-from below
This was a speech given before a "crowd of five to six hundred
students, ranchers, and instant rednecks (transplanted Easterners);
it
was reprinted verbatim, bawdy stories and all in the Montana magazine
Northern Lights."(Abbey 3) Written in April of 1985 it was given at
the University of Montana. Having been asked to speak at an event
highlighting the issue of free speech, one cannot help but wonder if
deep down inside he was saying, "Free speech? I'll give you free
speech!"
Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow
by Edward Abbey
When I first came West in 1948, a student at the University of New
Mexico, I was only twenty years old and just out of the Army. I
thought, like most simple-minded Easterners, that a cowboy was a kind
of mythic hero. I idolized those scrawny little red nosed hired hands
in their tight jeans, funny boots and comical hats.
Like other new arrivals in the West, I could imagine nothing more
romantic than becoming a cowboy. Nothing more glorious than owning my
own little genuine working cattle outfit. About the only thing
better,
I thought, was to be a big league baseball player. I never dreamed
that I'd eventually sink to writing books for a living. Unluckily for
me coming from an Appalachian hillbilly background and with a poor
choice of parents-I didn't have much money. My father was a small-
time
logger. He ran a one-man sawmill and a sub marginal side hill farm.
There wasn't any money in our family, no inheritance you could run
ten
thousand cattle on. I had no trust fund to back me up. No Hollywood
movie deals to finance a land acquisition program I lived on what in
those days was called the GI Bill, which paid about $150 a month
while
I went to school. I made that last as long as I could-five or six
years. I couldn't afford a horse. The best I could do in 1947 and '48
was buy a third-hand Chevy sedan and roam the West, mostly the
Southwest, on holidays and weekends.
I had a roommate at the University of New Mexico. I'll call him Mac.
He came from a little town in the southwest New Mexico where his
father ran a feed store. Mackie was a fair bronc rider, eager to get
into the cattle-growing business. And he had some money, enough to
buy
a little cinderblock house and about forty acres in the Sandia
Mountains east of Albuquerque, near a town we called Landfill. Mackie
fenced those forty acres, built a corral and kept a few horses there,
including an occasional genuine bronco for fun and practice.
I don't remember exactly how Mackie and I became friends in the first
place. I was majoring in classical philosophy. He was majoring in
screw-worm management. But we got to know each other through the
mutual pursuit of a pair of nearly inseparable Kappa Kappa Gamma
girls. I lived with him in his little cinderblock house. Helped him
meet the mortgage payments. Helped him meet the girls. We were both
crude, shy, ugly, obnoxious-like most college boys.
[Interjection: "Like you!"]
My fried Mac also owned a 1947 black Lincoln convertible, the kind
with the big grille in the front, like a cowcatcher on a locomotive,
chrome-plated. We used to race to classes in the morning, driving the
twenty miles from his house to the campus in never more than fifteen
minutes. Usually Mac was too hung over to drive, so I'd operate the
car, clutching the wheel while Mac sat beside me waving his big .44,
taking potshots at jackrabbits and road signs and bill boards and
beer
bottles. Trying to wake up in time for his ten o'clock class in brand
inspection.
I'm sorry to say that my friend Mac was a little bit gun-happy. Most
of his forty acres was in tumbleweed. He fenced in about half an acre
with chicken wire and stocked that little pasture with white rabbits.
He used it as a target range. Not what you'd call sporting, I
suppose,
but we did eat the rabbits. Sometimes we even went deer hunting with
handguns. Mackie with his revolver, and me with a chrome-plated Colt
.45 automatic I had liberated from the US Army over in Italy. Surplus
government property.
On one of our deer-hunting expeditions, I was sitting on a log in a
big clearing in the woods, thinking about Plato and Aristotle and the
Kappa Kappa Gamma girls. I didn't really care whether we got a deer
that day or not. It was a couple of days before opening, anyway. The
whole procedure was probably illegal as hell. Mac was out in the
woods
somewhere looking for deer around the clearing. I was sitting on the
log, thinking, when I saw a chip of bark fly away from the log all by
itself, about a foot from my left hand. Then I heard the blast of
Mac's revolver-that big old .44 he'd probably liberated from his
father. Then I heard him laugh.
"That's not very funny," Mackie," I said.
"Now don't whine and complain, Ed," he said. "You want to be a real
hunter like me, you gotta learn to stay awake."
We never did get a deer with the handguns. But that's when I had my
first little doubts about Mackie, and about the cowboy type in
general. But I still loved him. Worshiped him, in fact. I was caught
in the grip of the Western myth. Anybody said a word to me against
cowboys, I'd jump down his throat with my spurs on. Especially if Mac
was standing near by.
Sometimes I'd try to ride those broncs that he brought in, trying to
prove that I could be a cowboy too. Trying to prove it more to myself
than to him. I'd be on this crazy, crackpot horse going up, down
left,
right, and inside out. Hanging on to the saddle horn with both hands.
While Mac sat on the corral fence throwing beer bottles at us and
laughing. Every time I got thrown of, Mac would say, "Now get right
back on there, Ed. Quick, quick. Don't spoil 'im."
It took me a long time to realize I didn't have to do that kind of
work. And it took me another thirty years to realize that there's
something wrong at the heart of our most popular American myth-the
cowboy and his cow.
[Jeers.]
You may have guessed by now that I'm thinking of criticizing the
livestock industry. And you are correct. I've been thinking about
cows
and sheep for many years. Getting more and more disgusted with the
whole business. Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare
parasites. They've been getting a free ride on the public lands for
over a century, and I think it's time we phased it out. I'm in favor
or putting the public lands livestock grazers out of business.
First of all, we don't need the public lands beef industry. Even beef
lovers don't need it. According to most government reports (Bureau of
Land Management, Forest Service), only about 2 percent of our beef,
our red meat, comes from the public lands of the eleven Western
states. By those eleven I mean Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New
Mexico, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and California.
Most of our beef, aside from imports, comes from the Midwest and the
East, especially the Southeast-Georgia, Alabama, Florida- and from
other private lands across the nation. More beef cattle are raised in
the state of Georgia than in the sagebrush empire of Nevada. And for
a
very good reason: back East, you can support a cow on maybe half an
acre. Out here, it takes anywhere from twenty-five to fifty acres. In
the red-rock country of Utah, the rule of thumb is one section-a
square mile-per cow.
[Shouts from rear of hall.]
Since such a small percentage of cows are produced on public lands in
the West, eliminating that part of the industry should not raise
supermarket beef prices very much. Furthermore, we'd save money in
the taxes we now pay for various subsidies to these public lands
cattlemen. Subsidies for things like "range improvement" -tree
chinning, sagebrush clearing, mesquite poisoning, disease control,
predator trapping, fencing, wells, stock ponds roads. Then there are
the salaries of those who work for government agencies like the BLM
and the Forest Service. You could probably also count in a big part
of
the overpaid professors engaged in range-management research at the
Western land-grant colleges.
Moreover, the cattle have done, and are doing, intolerable damage to
our public lands-our national forests, state lands, BLM-administered
lands, wildlife preserves, even some of our national parks and
monuments. In Utah's Capital Reef National Park, for example,
grazings
is still allowed. In fact, it's recently been extended for another
ten
years, and Utah politicians are trying to make the arrangement
permanent. They probably won't get away with it. But there we have at
least one case where cattle are still tramping about in a national
park, transforming soil and grass into dust and weeds.
Overgrazing is much too weak a term. Most of the public lands in the
West, and especially in the Southwest, are what you might call
"cowburnt." Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American
West
you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking,
fly-covered, manure-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a
pest
and a plague. They pollute our springs and streams and rivers. They
infest our canyons, valleys, meadows, and forests. They graze off the
native bluestem and grama and bunch grasses, leaving behind jungles
of
prickly pear. They trample down the native forbs and shrubs and
cacti.
They spread the exotic cheatgrass, the Russian thistle, and the
crested wheat grass. Weeds.
Even when the cattle are not physically present, you'll see the dung
and the flies and the mud and the dust and the general destruction.
if
you don't see it, you'll smell it. The whole American West stinks of
cattle. Along every flowing stream, around every seep and spring and
water hole and well, you'll find acres and acres of what
range-management specialists call "sacrifice areas"-another
understatement. These are places denuded of forage, except for some
cactus or a little tumbleweed or maybe a few mutilated trees like
mesquite, juniper, or hackberry.
I'm not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don't
make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway. Anyone who
goes beyond the city limits of almost any Western town can see for
himself that the land is overgrazed. There are too many cows and
horses and sheep out there. Of course, cattlemen would never publicly
confess to overgrazing, any more than Dracula would publicly confess
to a fondness for blood. Cattlemen are interested parties. Many of
them will not give reliable testimony. Some have too much at stake:
their Cadillacs and their airplanes, their ranch resale profits and
their capital gains. (I'm talking about the corporation ranchers, the
land-and-cattle companies, the investment syndicates.) Others, those
ranchers who have only a small base property, flood the public lands
with their cows. About 8 percent of federal land permittees have
cattle that consume approximately 45 percent of the forage on the
government range lands. Beef ranchers like to claim that their cows
do
not compete with deer. Deer are browsers, cows are grazers. That's
true. But when a range is overgrazed, when the grass is gone (as it
often is for seasons at a time), then cattle become browsers too, out
of necessity. In the Southwest, cattle commonly feed on mesquite
cliff
rose, cactus, acacia or any other shrub or tree they find
biodegradable. To that extent, they compete with deer. And they tend
to drive out other and better wildlife. Like elk, or bighorn sheep,
or
pronghorn antelope.
How much damage have cattle done to the Western range lands? Large
scale beef ranching has been going on since the 1870s. There's plenty
of documentation of the effects of this massive cattle grazing on the
erosion of the land, the character of the land, the character of the
vegetation. Streams and rivers that used to flow on the surface all
year round are now intermittent, or underground, because of
overgrazing and rapid runoff.
Our public lands have been overgrazed for a century. The BLM knows
it;
the Forest Service knows it. The Government Accounting Office knows
it. And overgrazing means eventual ruin, just like strip mining or
clear-cutting or the damming of rivers. Much of the Southwest already
looks like Mexico or southern Italy or North Africa: a cowburnt
wasteland. As we destroy our land, we destroy our agricultural
economy
and the basis of modern society. If we keep it up, we'll gradually
degrade American life to the status of life in places like Mexico or
southern Italy or Libya or Egypt. In 1984 the Bureau of Land
Management, which was required by Congress to report on its
stewardship of our rang elands-the property of all Americans,
remember-confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was is
"good condition," and 60 percent was in "poor condition." And it
reported that only 18 percent of the range lands were improving,
while
68 percent were "stable" and 14 percent were getting worse. if the
BLM
said that, we can safely assume that range conditions are actually
much worse.
What can we do about this situation? This is the fun part- this is
the
part I like. It's not easy to argue that we should do away with
cattle
ranching. The cowboy myth gets in the way. But I do have some
solutions to overgrazing.
I'd begin by reducing the number of cattle on public lands. Not that
range managers would go along with it, of course. In their eyes, and
in the eyes of the livestock associations they work for, cutting down
on the number of cattle is the worst possible solution -an impossible
solution. So they propose all kinds of gimmicks. Portable fencing and
perpetual movement of cattle. More cross-fencing. More wells and
ponds
so that more land can be exploited. These proposals are basically a
maneuver by the Forest Service and the BLM to appease their critics
without offending their real bosses in the beef industry. But a
drastic reduction in cattle number is the only true and honest
solution.
I also suggest that we open a hunting season on range cattle. I
realize that beef cattle will not make sporting prey at first. Like
all domesticated animals (including most humans), beef cattle are
slow, stupid, and awkward. But the breed will improve if hunted
regularly. And as the number of cattle is reduced, other and far more
useful, beautiful, and interesting animals will return to the range
lands and will increase.
Suppose, by some miracle of Hollywood or inheritance or good luck, I
should acquire a respectable- sized working cattle outfit. What would
I
do with it? First I'd get rid of the stinking, filthy cattle. Every
single animal. Shoot them all, and stock the place with real animals,
real game, real protein: elk, buffalo, pronghorn antelope, bighorn
sheep, moose. And some purely decorative animals, like eagles. We
need
more eagles. And wolves we need more wolves. Mountain lions and
bears.
Especially, of course, grizzly bears. Down in the desert, I would
stock every water tank, every water hole, every stock pond, with
alligators.
You may not that I have said little about coyotes or deer. Coyotes
seem to be doing all right on their own. They're smarter than their
enemies. I've never heard of a coyote as dumb as a sheepman. As for
deer, especially mule deer, they, too, are surviving-maybe even
thriving, as some game and fish departments claim, though nobody
claims there are as many deer now as there were before the cattle
industry was introduced in the West.
I've suggested that the beef industry's abuse of our Western lands is
based on the old mythology of the cowboy as a natural nobleman. I'd
like to conclude this diatribe with a few remarks about this most
cherished and fanciful of American fairy tales. In truth, the cowboy
is only a hired hand. A farm boy in leather britches and a comical
hat. A herdsman who gets on a horse to do part of his work. Some
ranchers are also cowboys, but most are not. There is a difference.
There are many ranchers out there who are big time farmers of the
public lands-our property. As such, they do not merit any special
consideration or special privileges. There are only about 31,000
ranchers in the whole American West who use the public lands. That's
less than the population of Missoula, Montana. 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. Cowboys also are greatly
overrated. Consider the nature of their work. Suppose you had to
spend
most of your working hours sitting on a horse, contemplating the hind
end of a cow. How would that affect your imagination? Think what it
does to the relatively simple mind of the average peasant boy, raised
amid the bawling of calves and cows in the splatter of mud and the
stink of shit.
[Shouting. Laughter. Disturbance. ]
Do cowboys work hard? Sometimes. But most ranchers don't work very
hard. They have a lot of leisure time for politics and bellyaching
(which is why most state legislatures in the West are occupied and
dominated by cattlemen). Any time you go into a small Western town
you'll find them at the nearest drugstore, sitting around all morning
drinking coffee, talking about their tax breaks.
Is a cowboy's work socially useful? No. As I've already pointed out,
subsidized Western range beef is a trivial item in the national beef
economy. If all of our 31,000 Western public-land ranchers quite
tomorrow, we'd never even notice. Any public school teacher does
harder work, more difficult work, more dangerous work, and far more
valuable work than the cowboy or the rancher. The same applies to the
registered nurses and nurses' aides, garbage workers, and traffic
cops. Harder work, tougher work, more necessary work. We need those
people in our complicated society. We do not need cowboys or
ranchers.
We've carried them on our backs long enough.
[Disturbance in rear of hall.]
"This Abbey," the cowboys and their lovers will say, "this Abbey is a
wimp. A chicken-hearted sentimentalist with no feel for the hard
realities of practical life." Especially critical of my attitude will
be the Easterners and Midwesterners newly arrived here from their
Upper West Side apartments, their rustic lodges in upper Michigan.
Our
nouveau Westerners with their toy ranches, their pickup trucks with
the gun racks, their pointy-toed boots with the undershot heels,
their
gigantic hats. And of course, their pet horses. The instant rednecks.
To those who might accuse me of wimpery and sentimentality, I'd like
to say this in reply. I respect real men. I admire true manliness.
But
I despise arrogance and brutality and bullies. So let me close with
some nice remarks about cowboys and cattle ranchers. They are a mixed
lot, like the rest of us. As individuals, they range from the bad to
the ordinary to the good. A rancher, after all, is only a farmer,
cropping the public range lands with his four-legged lawnmowers,
stashing our grass into his bank account. A cowboy is a hired hand
trying to make an honest living. Nothing special. I have no quarrel
with these people as fellow human. All I want to do is get their cows
off our property. Let those cowboys and ranchers find some harder way
to make a living, like the rest of us have to do. There's no good
reason why we should subsidize them forever. They've had their free
ride. It's time they learned to support themselves. In the meantime,
I'm going to say good-bye to all you cowboys and cowgirls. I love the
legend too-but keep your sacred cows and your dead horses out of my
elk pastures.
[Sitting ovation. Gunfire in parking lot.]
All of this information was taken from One Life at a Time, Please
which was written by Edward Abbey and published by Henry Holt and
Company, Inc., in 1988.
Dispelling the Cowboy Myth: an Interview with George Wuerthner
http://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 05/21/429.
aspx
Sacred Buffalo, Holy Cow: The Struggle for the Western Range
http://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 05/06/403.
aspx
We Ought Not Grow Cows In Dry West
http://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 04/29/386.
aspx
Cowboy Mentality Dominates Bison Slaughter
http://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 04/14/339.
aspx
Cattle are the biggest source of global warming, producing more
greenhouse gases than cars!
http://www.virtualc entre.org/ en/library/ key_pub/longshad /
A0701E00.
htm
Western Watersheds Project
http://www.westernw atersheds. org/
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/smilinks/ environment. html
natural-health-forum"at"yahoogroups.com