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Your comment about wild horses are better for the range than cattle is not true. If wild horses are left unchecked, nature is the cruelist manager of all, overpopulation results in herd management by starvation or disease. You have a biased attitude toward cattle and the industry, using the word "rancher" as some would use the "n" word. I love the land, I enjoy ranching in the desert southwest, and I think we as a nation should use our resources, such as BLM range, to the best use which includes sustainable ag. Some would have us lock up everything and not use it. In that case, their would be no wildlife or wild horses in the west due to lack of water resources, which have been provided by cattle ranchers and maintained by those ranchers. The CDT trail through Hidalgo County is over 75 miles with no water sources, other than those provided by cattle water, which provides this life giving liquid to deer, antelope, quail, javelina, mountain lion, and much more...<BR>
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I would be glad to visit with you. I would love to show you our part of the CDT trail through our cattle ranch. We maintain cattle numbers to not use more than 50% of the forage and grasses that grow each year from natural rainfall. The grass stays healthy and the cattle do well, along with all the wildlife. We rotate our cattle through different pastures throughout the year, so that some pastures are rested 6 months or more each year. No modern rancher would ever overgraze. In fact, it is impossible to overgraze, cows die before they eat all the grass or destroy it. In a drought, the feed value of the feed goes down and the cattle lose condition, we always sell off our herd during dry years. To do otherwise would be suicidal in a business sense.<BR>
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Have you been through the CDT?<BR><BR><STRONG><FONT color=#0c0c0c face="Comic Sans MS">Ed "Bim" Kerr</FONT></STRONG><BR><STRONG><FONT color=#0c0c0c face="Comic Sans MS">Kerr Ranch Tours</FONT></STRONG><BR><A href="mailto:edkerr52@hotmail.com">edkerr52@hotmail.com</A><BR><STRONG>575.313.2606</STRONG><BR><STRONG><A href="http://www.kerrranchtours.com/" target=_blank>www.kerrranchtours.com</A></STRONG><BR><BR> <BR><BR><BR><BR> <BR>
> Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2010 23:52:57 -0500<BR>> From: blisterfree@yahoo.com<BR>> To: cdt-l@backcountry.net<BR>> Subject: Re: [Cdt-l] Fwd: : wild horse roundup<BR>> <BR>> When we cut through the rhetoric, we recognize that wild horses, while <BR>> not indigenous to the West, are nonetheless ancestral to western North <BR>> America, and that the land is far more suited to their style of grazing <BR>> than that of today's beef cow. Of course the BLM's notion of <BR>> "sustainable conditions" is largely an economic principle. The grazing <BR>> allotment is for the benefit of the beef ranching industry, and that <BR>> industry, subsidized by the BLM, gets to decide when and with what they <BR>> share their range. From their point of view, overpopulation is mostly a <BR>> synonym for economic threat. But of course from a biological <BR>> perspective, overpopulation by cattle is simply the devastating status <BR>> quo that is pushing the land to the brink, evolving it to shape the <BR>> requirements of an industry at the expense of native biodiversity. The <BR>> industry's defense remains that this status quo is necessary, because <BR>> the only perceived alternative, however false, is for the rancher to <BR>> abandon his relationship with the land, to give up ranching altogether. <BR>> And this false binary logic maintains a culture of permissiveness on the <BR>> part of BLM out of fear of damaging the relationship, of losing what <BR>> little faith and cooperation the ranching industry continues to uphold <BR>> with the government.<BR>> <BR>> Had the wild horses of North America survived the last ice age, then <BR>> today we might be eating horse burgers and reading about how the <BR>> natives, skilled equestrians, successfully drove off the invading <BR>> Conquistadors and their cattle. Food for thought.<BR>> <BR>> - blisterfree<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> _______________________________________________<BR>> Cdt-l mailing list<BR>> Cdt-l@backcountry.net<BR>> http://mailman.backcountry.net/mailman/listinfo/cdt-l<BR> </body>
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