Black Angus on federal grazing allotment, southern Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Recent reporting has exposed some of the many ongoing problems with livestock grazing on federal public lands. These problems include great resource damage, little oversight or repair of that damage, and the oversized political influence of ranchers and wealthy landowners. Despite this recent attention, little has been written about the many problems that livestock grazing causes, specifically to designated Wilderness and its native wildlife.
Many people think that Wildernesses, those beautiful, wild areas designated by Congress under the 1964 Wilderness Act, are off limits to grazing by cattle and sheep. Unfortunately that is not the case.
According to a Wilderness Watch report, livestock actively graze about 10 million acres of the 52.4 million acres of designated Wilderness in the Lower 48 states. This includes grazing in over 330 Wilderness areas in all of the 11western states, primarily public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service.
In addition to all of the problems that non-native cattle and sheep grazing inflict on Wilderness from physical resource damage, trampling of riparian vegetation, water quality impairment, and degraded wilderness conditions for visitors, livestock grazing also causes great harm to native wildlife in Wilderness. Here are a few examples:
+ Upper Green River Allotment in Wyoming. The Upper Green River Allotment, at 170,000 acres the largest Forest Service grazing allotment in the nation, lies in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem east of Jackson in prime grizzly habitat. Small parts of this allotment overlap the Gros Ventre and Bridger Wildernesses. Yet the Forest Service has authorized the killing of up to 72 grizzlies—supposedly protected as a threatened species under the federal Endangered Species Act—over 10 years in order to protect the cattle that graze in that allotment.
+ Domestic Sheep Impacts on Wilderness Bighorns. In places like the High Uintas Wilderness in Utah and the Weminuche Wilderness in Colorado, herds of domestic sheep graze in the habitats of native bighorn sheep. Yet domestic sheep can transmit a fatal form of pneumonia to native bighorn sheep, which usually decimates the bighorn herds.
+ Utah’s Predator Killing. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources currently hires trappers to kill mountain lions and other native predators across broad swaths of public land, including a number of Wilderness areas, according to informationshared at that agency’s Regional Advisory Council meetings in December. This predator killing is done primarily to protect livestock and artificially increase deer populations. But the mountain lion population in Utah – including in Wilderness – has steeply declined as a result.
To make matters worse, the U.S. taxpayers subsidize this damage to Wilderness and its wildlife, since federal livestock grazing fees are set so low in comparison to grazing fees charged by private landowners. The federal government charges ranching corporations only $1.35 per month for one cow and her calf, or five sheep, to graze on federal public land, which is only about 6 percent of the typical private land grazing fee, meaning that U.S. taxpayers are subsidizing the damage to Wilderness and its wildlife as described above.
Because of all the damage and degradation caused by livestock grazing in Wilderness, its relatively tiny contribution to the livestock industries, and the taxpayer subsidies it requires, it is well past time to end all livestock grazing in America’s National Wilderness Preservation System. We should instead protect these wild, natural gems as unmanipulated places for both their native wildlife and human visitors.
