Take everything away from them they worked for all their life...
Not a cattle man, but I'm having a little trouble understanding the wisdom of "working for all their life" on land you don't own, never will own and for which you stopped paying lease fees 20 years ago.
I agree for the most part. Many is time when I asked myself why people sink a lifetime of hard labor into a ranch that is a permit to graze cattle, and could be taken away in the bat of an eye by BLM or Forest Service to make a bunch of welfare hippies happy, and not even have the consideration of being paid for your investment.
I have seen families that struggled with staying in ranching even in the best of years have to load up two generations of folks into the pickups and cattle trailers and leave the ranch their families homesteaded over 100 years ago, and leave because they were forced to much the same way Bundy was. With absolutely no retirement or 401k, or even enough money for a down payment on a small house. With no other job skills that would even make them marketable in the job market, because all they knew was how to ranch. How will the kids go to college? Will their wives have to try and get a job too? What's gonna happen to that mare you gave your daughter when she was 7 years old now? What happens to that old, one horned cow that you pulled out the mud last year?
What will happen to America when nobody is out there raising food for those in the cities? Will the government feed them? With what? Imported beef? Beef imported from another country that recognizes the need to feed a nation?
Many times this happens. I KNOW people it has happened to.
One day, back in 1993, the BLM showed up at Bundy's house and told him they were taking his ability to make a living ranching away from him because a radical environmental group wanted his land for the desert tortoise. They had cut his permit from 600 head to 150 head. He couldn't live on that, and faced the situation you see above, with loading his family and leaving with nothing....
Even though he had always paid his fees.It was THEN that he told then they could GFY.He didn't just wake up one day and decide he would put more in his pocket by not paying paltry grazing fees. But, that is the way it worked out. He fought them in court the past 20 years to no avail because if you know anything at all about how the BLM and USFS is structured legally, you CAN'T win. It isn't in their playbook. ALL the rules and all the laws and all the courts are "by the government FOR the government". So his winning isn't even an option on the table. But, by God, he didn't walk away... He made them work for what they took from him.
From ranching both private land and public land, I tend to agree with you. Many ranchers even on private land have lost the ranch because there just isn't any money in it anymore. Too much government regulation, and that same government allows so much imported beef into our country the markets are all over the place at best. Drought and rising cost of feed due to ethanol production taking up the lion's share of the corn that used to be affordable for feeding livestock...
Why would anyone in their right mind try and ranch for a living? Especially where the government can give you the boot without even a "Thank You"?
You got me... I don't have the answer for that myself.... And then comes the BLM jackbooted thugs to create 1st Amendment Zones, point guns at his loved ones, throw his sister to the ground as she continued the battle with cancer, tazed his son, even though he had never even doubled up a fist.
They ran his cattle to death with helicopters. Shot his bulls. And left newborn calves out in the desert to die because there mothers had been rounded up, and they were left behind.
I can't imagine ANY man mad enough to fight after that.Can you?
