Why Open Range Cattle?
It’s a Yard, Not a Pasture!!
There are so many reasons for a sensible person to be opposed to the “open range” practices I cannot see how this is still in place today. First, let me say that I was not always interested in open range or grazing or cattle and ranchers in particular.
That changed for me about three years ago. My family was living in Taylor, Arizona at the time. Starting in September of 2000, every five months our family’s pets were attacked in the night:
- The first time, someone fed our dog meatballs laced with fire ant poison. We know this because our pet expelled some of the poison at the vet’s office in town and the attendant was sight-familiar with the poison. Our pet did not survive.
- The second attack, five months later was worse: someone took my son’s puppy from an enclosed pen during the night. When we found the puppy the next morning he had been eviscerated and left at the base of a hill behind our home. It was my husband’s 34 th birthday.
- Five months later, July of 2001, another of our pets was poisoned and died in our yard.
I contacted national and local animal agencies to report these crimes. They established a hotline for anyone with information on our case to call in, and even offered reward money. We received a call from an employee of a local animal agency who told us they had received numerous (more than 10) calls regarding the identities of the perpetrators, but the people calling indicated they would not come forward publicly nor would they accept the reward money. Now please understand, the reward offered was up to $2500- a lot of money for our area, and not one of the people who called in would take it. They all said they just wanted the perps to stop. Everyone reported the same names- a pair of local ranchers. When the police were given these names, they refused to even question the men accused. When we reported to the police that we had seen a license plate of a vehicle speeding away from our home after one killing, they refused to look into it. (AZ 471-BSK)
I have since discovered that it is perfectly legal for a rancher to kill a dog, as long as he can say the dog either had killed or wounded his cattle, or that the dog consumed poison meant for a predatory species. All my animals were either chained in the middle of my fenced yard or in a pen inside my fenced yard, when they weren’t inside my home. When I started to fear for the lives of my children, we left Arizona. In my view, the ranchers deprived me of my way of life so it is my duty to deprive them of theirs. They’ve had too much control for too long.
"The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
Albert Einstein