Property rights activists are irate that the federal government has seized the cattle of a Southern Nevada rancher who has allowed his herd to graze on Bureau of Land Management lands. Back in 1993, the feds limited rancher Cliven Bundy to 150 animals in order to protect the desert tortoise. He responded that his family began grazing the area decades before the BLM was even formed in 1935. In protest, he stopped paying grazing fees and continued to graze 500 or more (by some accounts as many as 1,000) cattle on the land.
Bundy has lost several court cases since then and the BLM says he owes $300,000 in grazing fees. More than two decades after the dispute began, the agency finally sent armed agents in to remove the offending cattle. In the course of doing so, they arrested–and apparently roughly treated–Bundy’s son for stepping off an area the feds had set aside as a “free speech area” in order to videotape the federal action.
Nevada, of course, is ground zero for the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement the began in the 1970s promoting privatization of federal lands. There’s a good reason for that: something like 89 percent of all the land in Nevada is federal, which definitely impedes growth in the state. On the other hand, rancher Bundy’s pre-1995 grazing allotment covered nearly 160,000 acres, suggesting the land must be pretty poor quality (at least for cattle grazing) to handle just a few hundred cattle.
