Rancher Kills Wolf to Save Cattle, Violates Endangered Species Act A Montana rancher killed a wolf to protect his cattle herd, and now federal officials say he violated the Endangered Species Act. This apparently extreme instance led one conservative analyst to claim that the act is doing more harm than good, because it forces landowners to "shoot, shovel and shut up." Roger Lang is a California entrepreneur who owns the 18,000-acre Sun Ranch, south of Ennis, Mont. Over the last 10 years he has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help ensure that his ranch is set up and operates legally, especially in conformity with the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Lang has experimented with fences, herders, and other nonfatal means to prevent his livestock from being killed by wolves, which had virtually been wiped out in the area during the 1970s but were reintroduced by federal officials in 1994. After five yearling heifers were killed this summer, Lang decided to become more aggressive in dealing with the pack, which numbered 13 wolves, including seven pups. "That's a lot of mouths to feed," the ranch owner, who obtained a permit to kill two adult wolves on his property, told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Instead, Lang's employees, shooting from a distance, killed a pup in July and wounded the pack's alpha female. As a result of those injuries, the female was unable to run with the pack and spent the next two weeks hovering near the rancher's cattle, seeking easy prey. But an employee on an all-terrain vehicle (ATV) saw the wounded animal and began chasing it. After hitting the wolf several times, the employee pinned it under the vehicle, Lang said....
Water Markets & Ideologies of the West The Bozeman-based Property and Environmental Research Center (PERC), a non-profit think tank at the forefront of “free-market environmentalism,” held their annual conference for journalists this past weekend in Big Sky. Sixteen of us—folks from Maine to Seattle—convened to consider worldwide water scarcity and contamination problems and how markets can inject incentives to help solve them. There were a dozen or so presenters, their topics ranging from big-picture issues such as global water supply, climate change, and domestic water quality to the very specific: payments-for-environmental-services schemes in Bolivia, removing dilapidated dams to turn a profit, a market to reduce agricultural nutrient pollution. It’s intriguing stuff for any conservationist, no matter your stance on the reach or limits of markets. What piqued my interest most, and perhaps most relevant to conservation in Montana, was the discussion of water markets in the West—the idea of selling, leasing or donating water rights for instream use. It’s not a new idea, but it’s one gaining momentum....
Feds, state at odds over California-Arizona transmission line The U.S. Department of Energy opened the door Tuesday for an electricity transmission line between California and Arizona one month after it was denied by state officials. At issue is what is called a "congested corridor," where energy transmission is lower than the necessary amount between states. The DOE designated the area a National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor. The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 states that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission decisions on transmission corridors designated by DOE supersede those of state government. By deeming the area a congested corridor, FERC has the power to overturn the Arizona Corporation Commission's decision against the 230-mile transmission line that would connect Palo Verde Nuclear Generating station to Devers, Calif. The $545 million line would supply the Los Angles area with 1,200 megawatts of power. Southern California Edison Co. would partner with Arizona Public Service Co. to build the line....
Feathers fly over pollution legislation Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson is raising a stink over manure. Fed up with manure runoff from farms polluting his state’s waterways, Edmondson is suing a batch of upstream poultry farms, including several owned by Tyson Foods, which he says have been irresponsible with their waste management and should be prosecuted under the Superfund law. The suit, which has been ongoing since 2005, has set off a panic in the agriculture community and a lobbying frenzy on Capitol Hill, where many fear the case will open the door for other large-scale or factory farms to be penalized with hefty pollution taxes. Edmondson, a Democrat, testified at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meeting last month, where lawmakers considered whether massive quantities of manure from confined animal feeding operations should be considered toxic waste under Superfund laws....
Meat recalls point to possibility threat is growing Last week's recall of 21.7 million pounds of frozen hamburger because of potential E. coli contamination is bound to fuel concern that E. coli outbreaks may be on the rise in the USA's meat industry for the first time this decade. The ground beef recall by Topps Meat is second in size only to Hudson Foods' 1997 recall of 25 million pounds of ground beef. And it comes just three months after a recall of 5.7 million pounds of ground beef tied to E. coli. The Topps recall has been linked to 27 reported illnesses, three confirmed, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says. The beef industry suffered its E. coli crisis in the early 1990s. But it tightened food-safety standards and reduced outbreaks so successfully that even critics held it up as a model of what industry could do. But the American Meat Institute (AMI) says it noticed a slight rise in positive E. coli tests by the government this summer and so met with industry leaders. "It's caused us to pause," says Randy Huffman, vice president of the AMI Foundation. "We've redoubled our efforts and focused on the things that work." The USDA sample-tests about 8,000 products a year for the deadly E. coli O157:H7 strain identified in the Topps recall. The rate of positive tests has shrunk about 73% since 2000 but trended up in 2007 compared with the past three years. Huffman says the rise could simply be a "random event." But Bill Marler, the nation's leading E. coli plaintiff's attorney, says, "Something has changed, and it has not changed for the better."....
Ranch-Raised and Arena-Savvy Mike Major of Fowler, Colorado, the source for "Make a Major Improvement," our September print feature on shoulder control, has spent his entire life horseback and working cattle. The ranch-raised horseman brings all that riding experience to the competitive arena and has since he was a youngster. Mike broke his first colt at age 7 and by 9 was starting many colts for use on the family's New Mexico ranch. He also jockeyed his father's horses in match races, but by 13 had outgrown that occupation. That's when he went to work for cattleman and cutter Bob Lee. A few short years later, Mike was running another ranch his father had purchased, and had begun showing cutting horses and attending junior and high-school rodeos. Buddy Major, Mike's father and a top professional calf roper and rancher, shared his skills with his son. Mike, who still team ropes today, roped professionally for a few years and spent 14 years riding bulls and saddle broncs. Throughout the 1990s, he competed in ranch rodeos and by 2002 had focused on working cow-horse competition, followed by ranch-horse versatility events. "But I've always ridden cow horses and always bred horses for ranch work and cutting," Mike says. "In a sense, I've been working toward cow-horse and versatility competition all my life, although I really got serious about it seven years ago." In 1990, Mike purchased the old Flying A Ranch, which Gene Autry once owned and Harry Knight operated. There, Mike and wife Holly operate Major Cattle Company, which includes about 1,000 yearlings and a horse-breeding operation, as well as the mother-cow herd on their Belen, New Mexico, ranch....
No Horsing Around for Students at Cowboy College Jim German has wanted to be a cowboy since he was a little boy. And for six days last month he became one. For his vacation, the 59-year-old San Francisco man enrolled himself in the Arizona Cowboy College - a small ranch at the edge of Scottsdale that gives ordinary people the chance to experience the true cowboy lifestyle. ``I've dreamed about this all the time, but I never had the opportunity,'' says German, covered in a thin layer of dust from a 20-mile horse ride. ``Here, for one week, I get to live out my dreams.'' German is one of 2,000 students who have attended the college since it opened in 1989. Unlike a typical dude ranch, the one-of-a-kind college markets itself as the true cowboy experience _ students sleep under the stars and learn horsemanship skills including riding, roping and shoeing. ``We don't play cowboy here,'' says Rocco Wachman, senior instructor at the school. `We do an old-fashioned day's job. I really show them how life was like 100 years ago.'' And amid the changing landscape of the Sonoran Desert, the college is helping keep a small part of the cowboy lifestyle alive....
School in the saddles at Colorado's Chico Basin Ranch The first sound a city slicker hears at 5:30 a.m. at Chico Basin Ranch is ... nothing. No television. No traffic whizzing by. Then, a thousand sounds. Insects dance. Songbirds call, and then their calls fracture into at least 10 distinct voices, like a feathery cocktail party. Geese honk. Cattle bleat. A horse sighs. The wind howls a long way off, as it gathers force across the prairie, like a wave. Only 35 miles southeast of Colorado Springs, this ranch resides in an odd place between the city and the Old West. Brian Wyka and his teenage daughter, Lauren, of Sarasota, Fla., begin to stir in the Holmes Bunkhouse. Once a family home, it now hosts visitors from all over the world. Chico Basin, an 87,000-acre working ranch, flings open its gates to visitors who come to play cowboy, to meet the mythical West, to ride horses and to earn calluses....Bleating cattle?