NYT's Gail Collins: Of Fox and the Cattle
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/collins-of-fox-and-the-cattle.html?smid=fb-share&_r=2
This was Bundy’s happy time. He was a star on Fox News, where his new friend Sean Hannity asked him probing questions like: “How far are you willing to go?” “How far are you willing to take this?” “What would happen if they came in the early morning hours one day to your ranch?” Bundy’s job was to say things like: “Just come on! We’ll take you on!” A careful listener might have deduced that this was not the sharpest hoof in the herd.
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But what about Bundy’s cause? You wouldn’t have important politicians like Heller and the governor of Nevada and Senator Rand Paul expressing sympathy for people who pointed semiautomatic rifles at government agents unless there was something really serious at stake, right? Let’s consider the actual issue, which was grazing fees. I know this is not something most of you grapple with on a day-to-day basis, but give me a second. Ranchers are supposed to pay $1.35 a month for every steer — or cow and calf — they graze on federal lands. “Which doesn’t come close to covering what it’s worth, or what it would cost if they were grazing on private land or state lands. It doesn’t even cover the administration costs,” said Debra Donahue, a professor of law at the University of Wyoming and an expert in public land use.
I had an extremely interesting telephone discussion with Donahue, who believes that there shouldn’t be any cattle on federal lands, because the cows ruin the fragile soil and foul the water. “The single most effective thing we could do to help Western lands adapt to climate change would be to take the cattle out,” said Donahue. And, she added, the animals creating all these problems produce only about 2 percent of the nation’s beef.
This sounds like an important topic for further discussion. Let’s demand congressional hearings! Also rallies! Unlike Bundy’s, they’d have to be gun-free. So they wouldn’t be quite as dramatic, but we probably could get more actual people. And when cowboys want to know why the public wants to kick them off their subsidized grazing space, we’ll say we got the idea from Sean Hannity.
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