Bison in Yellowstone National Park also originally contracted the bacterial infection known as brucellosis from domestic livestock. Wolves, grizzlies, prairie dogs, and swift fox are just a few of the species eliminated from much of their former range by government agents. Granted, streamside areas in the arid West would improve if ranchers managed cattle and sheep more carefully. But these green ribbons of life are home to 70 to 80 percent of all native wildlife in the region. Such crucial habitat is too precious to risk to a bureaucrat or rancher's promise to do better in the future.
Every hamburger is more than the flesh of a dead cow.
As a co-owner of the American federal lands, and as a supporter of all things wild, I can no longer abide the high price of private interests making money off the lands that belong to all of us. We should totally eliminate livestock grazing on our public lands. George Wuerthner is a freelance photographer and writer. An ecologist by training, he is currently at work on a book about the impacts of livestock production. Grazing should also be banned on public lands where monitoring is not being done, because monitoring is essential to good management decisions.