Re: The Cowboy and His Cow by Edward Abbey
greg3347
> "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."
>
> '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 ...
>
> read more »
An interesting and thought provoking essay.
greg
chatnoir
> On Sep 23, 2:55 pm, Tim Campbell <timc...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > "The rancher (with a few honorable exceptions)
Honorable Exceptions!:
http://www.lasatergrasslandsbeef.com/
Lasater Grasslands Beef is great tasting and full of flavor because
our cattle are finished on grass; they spend their entire lives
grazing in open pastures and are never confined in feedlots and fed
grain. They are not given growth hormones, are not fed low-level
antibiotics and are not treated with pesticides. That means the
goodness of nature comes through in the taste of our beef.
Lasater Grasslands Beef is better for the environment because our
cattle are raised with a 100-percent environmentally sustainable
process. They harvest the energy of the sun in the form of native
forages. Their carefully managed grazing provides the hoof impact and
fertilization vital to the Great Plains, mimicking what once was
provided by the herds of migrating bison. Land is damaged by
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avoid.
Lasater Grasslands Beef is better for you. The native grasses of the
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"The Lasater Ranch occupies about 30,000 acres of shortgrass prairie
near the town of Matheson, Colorado. It is a profitable, working
ranch
that for half a century has not used pesticides, herbicides, poisons,
or commercial fertilizers on the land, has not killed local predators
such as coyotes, has not administered growth hormones, anabolic
steroids, or antibiotics to the cattle."
http://www.lasatergrasslandsbeef.com/HistoryPhilosophy.html
The story began in 1882...
Our family's love affair with land and livestock began in 1882, when
Albert Hezekiah Lasater and his son Ed purchased a cattle ranch in
south Texas. Ed's son Tom began a crossbreeding program that led to
the development of one of two new breeds of cattle started in the
United States. More than developing a breed, Tom Lasater's life work
embodied a new ranching philosophy, one that embraced Nature as a
partner rather than a force to be overcome. In 1948 the family moved
the cattle herd to the shortgrass prairie of eastern Colorado.
Today, Lasater Ranch Enterprises are managed by Tom's son Dale, a
fourth-generation rancher. For more than half a century the Lasater
Ranch has been a wildlife sanctuary. There is no poisoning, hunting,
or trapping on the ranch. Like the bison, our cattle coexist with
coyotes, deer, prairie dogs, pronghorn antelope, rattlesnakes, and
other wildlife. Believing that working with nature is the best
policy,
many years ago we implemented practices that helped restore the
natural balance between animal species, domestic livestock, land and
man.
Grazing animals are vital to the environmental health of the Great
Plains, and rightly-raised cattle can help sustain that health. Our
cattle-like the roaming herds of bison once did-harvest grasses, till
the soil with their hooves, fertilize the ground (via that most
natural of processes) and then are moved to fresh pastures, leaving
the grazed plants to fully recover. When the pastures are rested
(typically 70 to 80 days), the grasses develop to their full
potential- growing extensive root systems that help them survive
drought.
For many years, our family has monitored the pastures which make up
the Lasater Ranch. Our goal is to see a continuous carpet of grass
and
forbs when we look down; bare hard-packed earth, which does not let
in
rainfall, is a sign of poor pasture health. Ground that is covered by
grasses is able to hold water, enabling the land to receive the
beneficial use of whatever precipitation falls. None of this is
possible without the impact of grazing animals.
The spread of noxious weeds into grasslands provides a relatively new
challenge for U.S. cattle raisers / grass "farmers". Rather than
employ herbicide, we have chosen to introduce bugs which are natural
predators for certain weeds and to bring in goats, which readily
graze
weeds. Most importantly, we try to manage the grazing to encourage
the
proliferation of healthy and diverse native plants that are able to
compete with the foreign species.
Call us smart or call us crazy-we always look for a way to do the job
naturally with the resources that nature gave us.
We have been ranching for more than a century, looking at our
surroundings holistically instead of in parts. One of the most
valuable lessons we've learned is that everything in Nature has a
purpose... the ant, prairie dog, the coyote, the porcupine... This
lesson governs every aspect of our business. We refuse to compromise
when it comes to Nature-in a very real sense, she is our most valued
business partner and the source of our business philosophy.
Everything
has its purpose, and it takes time to get results when you are on our
mother's schedule. Forty years ago it was common practice to dry-age
beef for 21 days. Due to the pressures to get beef quickly to the
meat
counter, dry-aging was eliminated. At the Lasater Ranch, we are not
in
a hurry, as we are still dry-aging our beef.
-----------------------
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QUESTIONS?
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? What kind of a place is Thirteen Mile Farm and who runs it ?
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? What is the Predator Friendly certification all about ?
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? What are the lethal control methods and how effective are they ?
? Why should we care about the American Sheep Industry ?