Bookshelf: Beefing About America's Cattlemen
As a carnivore who reluctantly eats vegetables as a concession to health, and a rancher who carries a rifle in his pickup, I may be ill-suited to review Denzel and Nancy Ferguson's "Sacred Cows at the Public Trough" (Maverick Publications, Bend, Ore., 97708, 250 pages, $8.95), a vitriolic indictment of the Western livestock industry. The book catalogs the inefficiencies and ecological atrocities generated by stockmen and their bureaucratic lackeys responsible for managing 217.3 million acres of federal range lands -- an area 70 times greater than Connecticut. Unfortunately, it contains just enough truth to merit consideration.</br></br>From the authors' perspective, no industry has destroyed or altered more of nature than the Western livestock industry. "Cowboys and cows are the center of a monstrous myth, a part of Americana that rests on concocted imagery and fabrication -- an enormous falsehood based on profound ignorance." The book attempts to substantiate these charges and concludes with the following admonition: "The American people have little choice other than to accept the challenge of a recalcitrant, uncompromising, and coddled minority -- the public should boot every last one of them off the public lands."</br></br>West of the Mississippi, nearly half the land is federally owned. The U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management manage this land. There are about 38,000 private permitees grazing animals on federal range. The region is arid and productivity is low. The Fergusons claim that this small group of Western stockmen controls the federal grazing programs and that the federal agencies are used as political tools to extract wealth from the general public, using it to subsidize ecologically destructive and economically inefficient grazing.</br></br>Over-grazing produces massive erosion, while productive watersheds are replaced by deserts, and native prairies are invaded by tumbleweeds, cheat grass and sagebrush. Most important is the virtual destruction of wildlife habitat. Further, the public is supporting 700 government trappers in the Animal Damage Control Program. They kill bears, mountain lions, bobcats, lynxes, coyotes and wolves to reduce livestock predation.</br></br>Range improvement programs, mandated by law in the 1970s, are correctly viewed by the Fergusons as "a bureaucratic euphemism, a sick disguise for deceit, bad ecology and corrupt economics." They term public investments in these "range improvements" a ploy to avoid reducing grazing to the capacity of the land. Native vegetation not used up by livestock is sprayed, burned or chained out of existence and replaced, at huge expense, with exotic monocultures.