Ecos File Yet Another Suit
To Force Livestock Off Land

SALT LAKE CITY — Like tag-team wrestlers taking turns pummeling a single, exhausted opponent, eco-activist groups are parceling out a flurry of anti-grazing lawsuits amongst themselves, each one hitting livestock producers from a different angle.

The latest assault comes from an Arizona activist group that has struck many times before. Now it wants to eliminate grazing on tens of thousands of acres across the Southwest in the name of a tortoise. It's not the first time the reptile has been used as a pawn in the anti-grazing jihad.

The Southwest Center for Biological Diversity, based in Tucson, has filed a formal notice of intent to sue the Department of Interior to force it to end grazing in parts of Utah as well as Southern California, southern Nevada and northwestern Arizona.

At the heart of the lawsuit is the contention that cows pose a significant threat to supposedly "endangered" desert tortoises.

"This is not an attempt to shoot down ranchers," claimed Daniel Patterson, a spokesman for the center. "It is not a vendetta. We are trying to protect and recover the tortoise."

The lawsuit claims grazing is a threat to the tortoise because it removes annual plants needed by tortoises for proper nutrition. Livestock are also known to trample tortoises, their burrows and their eggs, Patterson contends.

The center is demanding that all livestock be removed from public lands throughout the range of the desert tortoise until the federal agencies bring grazing programs into what the activists consider "compliance" with the Endangered Species Act and they can demonstrate scientifically that grazing is consistent with tortoise recovery.

Jim Crisp, manager of the St. George Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management, is puzzled by the impending lawsuit. State, federal and local officials in the region have spent millions of dollars in recent years developing and implementing a massive tortoise recovery program and saving thousands of acres of tortoise habitat from development, he points out.

For example, the plan created the Red Cliffs Desert Reserve, consisting of 61,000 acres of state, federal and private lands on which grazing is not allowed.

Federal land managers have also developed a management plan, to be implemented next year, that bans grazing on the Beaver Dam Slope from mid-March to November when tortoises are out and about.

In total, Crisp said grazing has been eliminated or significantly curtailed on about 1750 square miles of tortoise habitat.

"We have taken a strong stance to protect the tortoise, and we have done everything reasonably expected of us," he said. "We have done a credible job, and I would defend that position in court."

(The problem, of course, is that term — "reasonable." These anti-grazing zealots wouldn't recognize reason if it trotted up and bit them on the rump. They are no more acquainted with reason than their patrons, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, are with the truth. Their crusade is to destroy productive enterprise and plunge this country into a wreck so they and their ilk can "rescue" it, and in the process resurrect the Glorious World Socialist Revolution. They won't stop until their weapon of choice — the federal Endangered Species Act — is repealed, buried and a stake driven through its treacherous heart. — Ed)