America’s ranching families raise the livestock that feeds and clothes this country. But environmentalist lawyers are plotting to put them out of business and seize control of the western lands where cattle and sheep have freely roamed for a hundred years.
Keeping a family farm, sheep or cattle ranch profitable is a difficult enough without special interest groups making it harder. The grizzly bear was once an endangered species, but in 2017 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s grizzly population exceeded scientists’ minimum goals for the powerful predator. It had fully recovered. The agency tried to remove the animal from the endangered list, but was sued in Crow Indian Tribe v. United States of America. More recently, environmental groups also got involved trying to prevent delisting of the grizzly.
Ranchers and Farmers in western Wyoming asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today to recognize the injuries ranchers and farmers will continue to suffer if the Court does not overturn a lower court’s decision to return the Yellowstone-area grizzly bear to the List of Endangered and Threatened Species.
Emerson and Fay Ray were a young couple, recently married, when they first came to California. It was the height of the Great Depression and Emerson had heard he might be able to get a job in California pouring concrete. Now the government is threatening to destroy the legacy they built for their family.
Farmers and ranchers lease federally managed land to raise their flocks and herds, and ultimately to feed millions of Americans. They pay large sums of money to lease those grazing lands. Some American Indian tribe members are claiming the right to hunt on the land the government leases to farmers and ranchers in the state of Wyoming, even though it’s a clear violation of their tribal treaty with the United States.
In 1988, the FWS listed as endangered the Bee Creek Cave Harvestman, a cave-dwelling spider found only in subterranean limestone caves in Travis and Williamson Counties, Texas. When the federal government bars use of private property to protect species that are found only in a local area and not throughout the country, it violates the Constitution’s Commerce Clause.
A small, family-owned Colorado oil and gas exploration company holds oil and gas leases in the White River National Forest in Colorado. Despite more than twenty years of investment in this area, extremists are trying to drive this small company out of business, no matter what the law says
Our client Mary A. Thoman, a Wyoming rancher whose family has raised sheep in western Wyoming for nearly seven decades, had to give up her family grazing land after her livestock losses to the grizzly bear became too great. One of her ranch hands was nearly killed in an attack. A judge put the bear back on the endangered species list—contrary to the recommendation of 20 years of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service research and the pleas of ranchers and citizens of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming. This makes it impossible for local and state officials to manage the growing grizzly population, and virtually guarantees more loss and death.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, without obtaining a permit, and over the objections of a hydrological expert, diverted a stream that flowed through the land owned by a small church, headed by Pastor Victor Fuentes. The resulting flooding destroyed the property, and the bureaucrats who did this think no one will hold them accountable.
One protection afforded small businesses from overly burdensome federal regulations is the requirement that agencies consider the economic impact of regulations on small businesses; however, no such analysis was done regarding the “waters of the United States” rules issued by the Obama administration.