G
greg3347
Guest
On Sep 23, 2:55 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 ...
>
> read more
> "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 ...
>
> read more