Corporate Desperadoes Romantic notions of the west mask the damage of public lands grazing. by Robin Smith America's love affair with the cowboy distorts a far less romantic reality: Grazing has degraded or destroyed 700 million acres of western grasslands and has been the primary cause of decline in the population of thousands of species of plants and animals. They destroy the land that we own, and we pay them (with our tax dollars) to do it. Wastland In his comprehensive book on public lands grazing, Waste of the West, Lynn Jacobs thoroughly recounts the destruction of public lands grazing. Cattle scour fragile rangeland for forage, razing public lands across the West. Public lands ranching transforms thriving grasslands into wastelands filled with poisonous, thorny vegetation that doesn't belong there or - worse yet - bare ground. Public lands ranching destroys our lands, denuding vegetation, creating deep erosion gullies and ruining critical drainage basins. When cattle strip the land bare and compact the soil, the ground can no longer absorb rainfall, which increases flooding, erosion and topsoil loss. Sediments, pollution and pathogens end up in our drinking water. According to Jacobs, ranching is the main cause of water pollution on publicly owned lands in the west. In addition, development poses a risk to our native wildlife. Gila trout, meadow jumping mouse, desert tortoise and masked bobwhite are just a few of the species that are threatened with extinction as a result of grazing. The Cow That Ate the West In 1884, 35 to 40 million cows, far more than the land could support, were grazing the West, each eating about 800 pounds of vegetation monthly. By 1890, starvation had reduced their population to 27 million. Because these lands have been grazed continuously since, they have not recovered from the destruction. In the East, where rainfall may exceed 35 inches a year, it takes very little land to support a cow because of the abundant grass that grows there. But the arid West simply wasn't made for cows. In the eastern U.S., it takes three acres to support a cow for one year. On western publicly owned land, it takes 185 acres to support the same cow. Each year, as cows eat grass faster than it can be regrown, our grasslands deteriorate. After a century of overgrazing, our publicly owned grasslands have been converted to wastelands. Over the past century, cows have eaten half of the grass that exists for domestic animals and wildlife. It's gone, and the land is no longer capable of growing it back. Of the sparse grass that remains, cows eat 86 percent and sheep eat 4 percent, leaving just 10 percent for wildlife. Even Yellowstone has fallen prey to the cows. Within the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which contains the greatest assemblage of wildlife remaining in the contiguous 48 states, 500,000 cows graze on publicly owned land. This is in comparison to just 170,000 deer, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, moose and buffalo that graze on publicly owned lands. Welfare Ranching Grazing fees are currently $1.35 per cow per month (a fourth of what it costs to feed a pet rat!) compared to approximately $10 on private land. In addition to virtually free land, public lands ranchers enjoy myriad indirect subsidies. According to the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington, DC think tank, grazing on publicly owned land has cost taxpayers billions since 1945, at the rate of $200 million per year. According to Zepezauer and Naiman (Take the Rich Off Welfare, Odonian Press, 1996), ranchers can account for profits as capital gains for a lower tax rate. That's a break other agricultural businesses don't get. And ranchers can write off ordinary expenses, such as the costs of buying and breeding livestock, immediately. Ranchers are also subsidized through a government predator control program called Wildlife Services. This agency operates as a full time army devoted to killing wildlife. When Wildlife Services gets a call from a public lands rancher complaining about predators, one of its soldiers goes out to the publicly owned land and poisons, traps or shoots, sometimes from an airplane or helicopter, just about every predator within miles. Ranching on publicly owned lands is a massive government give-away program for a small group of pampered businessmen who provide only a small fraction of the nation's beef. With so little of our publicly owned lands left, it's time we kicked these 20th Century land bandits off our property.