Denver, Colorado — January 31, 2022 — It’s no secret that anti-grazing extremists are on a mission to push ranchers off Western public lands. And almost any pretext for serving ranch families eviction orders will do, no matter how flimsy or phony. One such pretext is the alleged imperative to “protect” a bear that long ago qualified to be removed from the endangered species list, thanks to a very successful recovery program, but which remains listed so that it can be weaponized for just such purposes.
The grizzly bear has become the pawn in a larger anti-ranching game, Mountain States Legal Foundation argued in court filings last week – a disingenuous pretext extremists are using to drive our clients off pastures they’ve been using since homesteading days. Any conflicts between livestock and grizzlies in Wyoming’s Wind River Range are not the fault of these families, but result from federal efforts to significantly boost bear populations and expand their range, bringing them into areas where they haven’t been seen for a century, making such conflicts inevitable.
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“The ‘problem’ on these Upper Green River allotments isn’t the ranchers,” argues MSLF Senior Attorney Joseph Bingham. “The issue is that environmentalists aren’t satisfied with a recovered grizzly species population, like the one that’s arisen alongside longstanding grazing activity; they’ll be satisfied with nothing less than an indefinitely expanding grizzly population and territory that pushes ranchers off the land their families have used for over a century. They even explicitly object to basic protections for human safety.”
Added Bingham: “The groups driving this agenda don’t want to see ranchers and grizzlies coexist; they want to keep ceding land to the bears until there no reasonably safe place for ranchers to operate. If grazing outside the Grizzly Recovery Zone were an impediment to grizzly recovery, why has grizzly recovery has been so successful? The truth is that grizzlies pose a much greater danger to livestock operators than livestock operators pose to grizzlies, and ranchers in the Upper Green area have a long history of compliance and cooperation with grizzly recovery efforts. All our clients seek is the ability to continue feeding America by being good neighbors alongside a recovered grizzly population in the Greater Yellowstone Area.”