ODFW Wolves and Livestock Updates

This is ODFW's list of wolves and livestock incidents.  They update it pretty frequently and a smarter man would have posted it here before.  The latest update is from today, 10/24 and addresses ODFW's plans for managing its western wolf zone where, unlike in the case of the eastern zone, the wolf is still listed as an endangered species, together with the protections thereby afforded.  More to follow.      

OPB's 'This Land Is Our Land' Podcast

Lots of good stuff here. OPB has been on top of the Malheur occupation and subsequent legal proceedings to a degree that I, as a guy who also has a day-job and family to attend to, am not able to approach. Thus far OPB's reporting has been solid and probably the most in-depth of any readily available news source. I heartily recommend the podcast for those who are interested.

Who Owns the land, Part II; The Bundy Fiasco, Shenanigans on the Malhuer, Freemen, Patriots and Others

For the benefit of those who may not be fully acquainted with the broad outlines of the Cliven Bundy affair, what follows is a brief synopsis.  It is not intended as a complete record and should not be understood as such.  The case, or rather legal saga, has been covered extensively in a variety of media and anyone wishing to further acquaint themselves with the particulars can easily do so.  

In any case, the short version is that Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy refused to pay federal government grazing fees for the right to run his cattle on federal land over a period of something like 20 years, and in 2013 matters came to a head as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), repeatedly bilked, sought legal recourse.  Said legal recourse was shortly forthcoming and under the aegis of a court order, all cattle found grazing on the expanse of BLM land that had ostensibly been leased to Bundy were rounded up and attempted to be forfeit in redress of non-payment for past fees.  

Here’s where things got interesting.  Bundy, along with a group of supporters who came predominantly from other parts of the rural West, basically mounted an armed insurrection whereby the law-enforcement and federal officers charged with confiscating his cattle were held in a “stand-off” under the implicit threat of force, Bundy and many of his supporters being heavily armed.  

Ultimately, in the spring of 2014, Bundy and supporters earned what they evidently --though perhaps rashly, as later events would reveal-- considered an auspicious win as federal and local law enforcement officials backed away from the standoff in order to seek a less confrontational resolution.  One imagines that the Feds, and the other state and local law-enforcement agencies involved, had incidents such as Ruby Ridge and Waco well in mind when they chose to avoid a direct confrontation.  In any case, another year and a half passed and by winter 2015-2016 Bundy was still running cattle on the federal land in question without having paid a cent for the lease of said grazing rights.  

At this point it might profit the narrative were we to take a step or two backward and identify some of the larger trends at play, specifically as they relate to the underlying attitudes that inform the actions of the Bundyites and their many sympathetic fellow rural westerners, be they “Freemen, Patriots,” or just plain old fashioned Mormons.      

The first thing to point out is that Bundy, his family and near associates, are all members in good standing of The Church of Latterday Saints, that is to say that they are Mormons.  This is significant because Mormon mythology, far-fetched though it may seem to outsiders, includes a set of beliefs that link the western regions of North America to biblical narratives.  Without going into the details, the upshot of said beliefs is, for mormons, the idea that as the contemporary inheritors of the “true” history of the American west, they are ultimately divinely ordained to exercise dominion over the otherwise “empty” lands by which their forefathers found themselves surrounded when they originally made the journey west in the 1800s.  (Nevermind that the lands weren’t empty and that what may have seemed believable in the early-mid 1800s has, through archaeological and ethnographic work, been shown to be ludicrous and not even remotely plausible; nevermind that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism was a well-known con-man, huckster and fraud.)    

Bundy and his family and near associates have thus far had the good sense to keep this aspect of their motives to themselves, recognizing, one imagines, that broadcasting it publicly would be bad PR with regard to other rural westerners who may not be thrilled to learn that as non-mormons they are not necessarily included in this larger prescription for land-use rights.

A second factor that it’s worth pointing out has to do with the inherited sense, on the part of rural westerners in general, that “unoccupied” land is necessarily theirs to do with as they will.  This is a sense that dates back to early colonial America and that, despite what many may imagine, has in general been tempered, rather than openly encouraged, by the federal government.

The reason for this is simple; while the US government has always basically wanted western lands to be used or exploited by commerce and eventually settled by Americans at the family level, it has always wished that this process should be conducted in as orderly a manner as possible, which is to say, that it, the government, should control the process under a systematic rule of law, that land-use decisions should not be made through land-rushes and individual appropriation, that great deference and first priority should be given to industrial interests, and despite what many may imagine given its long history of broken treaties, that the rights of Native Americans should at least be paid lip-service to.  

A further complicating factor lies in the rise of environmentalism, or at least conservation, concepts which didn’t exist when the west was originally settled but that have since, especially in recent decades, gained widespread appeal and popularity across a broad swathe of the American public.  The sentiment, or prevailing wisdom, is that what’s left of the remaining wildlands in the American west can and should be closely monitored and regulated by the federal government for the sake of posterity and long-term sustainability.  

Of course, this idea flies in the face of how rural westerners see the matter.  Most/many of them are descended from the original European settlers who colonized the west in the 19th century and who, remember, often did so at odds with, or in spite of, the federal government.  The rural west was remote enough that westerners came to see themselves as something apart from the federal US as a nation, and indeed, the concept of “frontier justice” and the mythology of the gunslinging western sheriff are components of the idea that the west is best governed by its own, and not by the out-of-touch softies living thousands of miles away on the east coast.

A final damning component of the ideological conflict is related to the one area where federal, industrial and local interests happened to coincide, that is, in the area of resource extraction.  

The great tragedy for much of the rural west is that nearly all of its prosperity during the 20th century was built on resource extraction, be it in the form of timber, mining and drilling, or in ranching.  With the shift in public attitudes regarding conservation and the natural environment, much of this prosperity has disappeared leaving thousands of rural western communities basically destitute and with no viable means of economic sustainability.  

Where once the American public was more than happy to rape and pillage western lands in the name of growth, over time, with the rise of environmental awareness, public attitudes have shifted.  

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Study Casts Doubt on Theory That Legal Hunting Reduces Poaching-- NYT

Study Casts Doubt on Theory That Legal Hunting Reduces Poaching-- NYT

Intriguing.

A Study Argues that Hybrid populations account for a significant fraction of reported numbers, and that therefore, the potential delisting of the Grey Wolf is premature

Whole-genome sequence analysis shows that two endemic species of North American wolf are admixtures of the coyote and gray wolf

Here's the link.   

The take-away is obvious.