Monday, April 23, 2012

Putting county's last cattle rancher out of business

by Vin Suprynowicz

The federal Bureau of Land Management has suspended plans to seize the 500 to 750 head of cattle run by Clark County rancher Cliven Bundy south of Mesquite - and 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas - for now.

But Bundy, 65, realizes this is just a truce in an ongoing battle. Both the Mesquite City Council and the Clark County Commission have expressed support for a plan to turn the entire Gold Butte region into a federal conservation area. Mark Andrews, a local photographer who's frequented the area for 35 years, writes in that the "BLM and the Friends of Gold Butte group have removed countless miles of road and open land access from free use. Places I used to go for decades are now blockaded. These are roads that are nearly 100 years old and in steady use. And this activity has become very aggressive and pronounced in the last 24 months."

The area south of Mesquite "is really the only public area Clark County has left that's not designated for some conservation area, or preserve, or monument, or whatever," Bundy says. "I'm really the only resource user who's still got any interest in the land," he adds, referring to the grazing rights which have come down through his family for more than 100 years, a property right he insists was not granted by and therefore cannot be suspended by the bureaucrats of Washington.

Arguments that Bundy - the last active cattle rancher in Clark County - is damaging the range by overgrazing as many as 750 head or somehow cheating the public by not paying management fees to the BLM sound somewhat curious when we look at what's happened to the 51 other allotments on which ranchers were grazing cattle in Clark County, within living memory.

Attempting to cooperate with their federal overseers, "year-by-year their operations were crippled by rising fees and reductions in AUM (animal units monthly)," wrote investigative reporter Tim Findley in the summer 1999 edition of Range magazine. "The numbers of actively used allotments were rapidly diminishing. The cattlemen took their cases to court, and won, but the BLM simply imposed new 'force and effect' regulations. More ranchers gave up."

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