> On Oct 19, 5:46 pm, Ted hotmail.com> wrote:

>> On Sep 23, 3:38 pm, Tim Campbell 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