🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 23, 3:38 pm, Tim Campbell <timc...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> "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 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 Wuerthnerhttp://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 05/21/429.
> aspx
>
> Sacred Buffalo, Holy Cow: The Struggle for the Western Rangehttp://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 05/06/403.
> aspx
>
> We Ought Not Grow Cows In Dry Westhttp://eeng. net/CS/blogs/ smileycoyote/ archive/2007/ 04/29/386.
> aspx
>
> Cowboy Mentality Dominates Bison Slaughterhttp://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.virtualcentre.org/ en/library/ key_pub/longshad /
> A0701E00.
> htm
>
> Western Watersheds Projecthttp://www.westernwatersheds. org/
>
> http://www.angelfire.com/mi/smilinks/environment. html
>
> natural-health-forum"at"yahoogroups.com

The cowboy genre could help itself by starting to play, "Cowboys and
Mexicoons".

ted

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