John James Thornber
Published: 2018-02-12
Total Pages: 20
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Excerpt from The Practical Application of the Kent Grazing Bill to Western and Southwestern Grazing Ranges: An Address Now, with high prices for meat and this shortage of beef staring us in the face, let us look for just a moment at the awful condition which confronts the stockman today, with free and unrestricted grazing. He cannot fence part of the public domain. No, no, that is criminal! He is not allowed to count upon his grazing resources one month in advance. That is bad business management, due to our government's negligence. If he stacks up feed on the public domain for a famine period, develops additional water supplies, improves: the quality of his herds, eradicates poisonous weeds, seeks to improve the carrying capacity of the land, or tries to prevent erosion or cutting and over grazing, he does so at his own expense, and his neighbors may derive as much benefit from this work as he, without sharing any of the outlay. Gentlemen, I call this rank injustice. I condemn it. If the stockman has water and grass on the public domain for a thousand cattle, no matter how long he has been a resident, another stockman, and perhaps a non-resident, can put down there beside these cattleanother thousand head of stock, and the resident stockman can have no recourse. He must share, and share alike, his losses with the intruder, regardless of his improvements and his, foresight. Besides this injustice to the individual stockman, unrestricted grazing has done infinitely greater harm to our country as a whole. It has invariably resulted in overstocking and overgrazing, and in destroying the best and most nutritious grasses on the ranges, thereby reducing both the quality and quantity of the remaining forage from vear to year. It also makes impossible the alternate grazing and resting of areas to insure natural seed production, and it has been directly responsible in the past, and it is no less responsible today, for the heavy losses of stock from starvation on the ranges. In Arizona more than three-quarters of a million head of cattle, to say nothing of sheep, have perished from famine in thirty years' time. I condemn free grazing as unsafe for that one awful truth alone. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.