The Bundy case is shaping up to be loads of fun. The pretrial detention memorandum for ol’ Cliven has been released, and in addition to making the case that he was a lawless, violent criminal, it explains that he was a terrible “rancher”.
While Bundy claims he is a cattle rancher, his ranching operation – to the extent it can be called that – is unconventional if not bizarre. Rather than manage and control his cattle, he lets them run wild on the public lands with little, if any, human interaction until such time when he traps them and hauls them off to be sold or slaughtered for his own consumption. He does not vaccinate or treat his cattle for disease; does not employ cowboys to control and herd them; does not manage or control breeding; has no knowledge of where all the cattle are located at any given time; rarely brands them before he captures them; and has to bait them into traps in order to gather them.
Nor does he bring his cattle off the public lands in the off-season to feed them when the already sparse food supply in the desert is even scarcer. Raised in the wild, Bundy’s cattle are left to fend for themselves year-round, fighting off predators and scrounging for the meager amounts of food and water available in the difficult and arid terrain that comprises the public lands in that area of the country. Bereft of human interaction, his cattle that manage to survive are wild, mean and ornery. At the time of the events giving rise to the charges, Bundy’s cattle numbered over 1,000 head, straying as far as 50 miles from his ranch and into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area (“LMNRA”), getting stuck in mud, wandering onto golf courses, straying onto the freeway (causing accidents on occasion) – foraging aimlessly and wildly, roaming in small groups over hundreds of thousands of acres of federal lands that exist for the use of the general public for many other types of commercial and recreational uses such as camping, hunting, and hiking.
I used to spend some time every summer at my uncle’s horse and cattle ranch in eastern Washington, and what I remember was all the work: up early in the morning, walking the irrigation ditches and watering the fields, taking hay out to the cows, and there was this tiring ritual of walking the fields and picking up rocks. None of that for the Bundys! Neglect the animals, do nothing to care for the land, just let everything run loose until you feel like going out and killing a few cows.
I’m unimpressed.
Doesn’t the Bible say something about good stewardship? Maybe they should take a look at that holy book they pay lip service to — it doesn’t look good for the Bundys.
The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Isaiah 24:5
And the Lord said, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom his master will set over his household, to give them their portion of food at the proper time? Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will set him over all his possessions. But if that servant says to himself, ‘My master is delayed in coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and get drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will cut him in pieces and put him with the unfaithful. Luke 12:42-46
They should count their blessings, though. Being cut into pieces isn’t a permissible punishment under federal law.
Ancient rabbis wrote in Papyrus?
Modern civilization, law enforcement and justice is supposed to be all about getting people like Cliven Bundy under control. He acts like a medieval/early modern predatory aristocrat, though not one that manages his manor competently.
How is he making money? I mean seriously, cows are expensive assets, aren’t they? And it sounds like he just loses the vast majority of them, that’s got to be massive losses annually, far outweighing the costs of getting people to supervise his animals. But let me guess, his farm is heavily subsidized to keep the price of his beef low.
Being cut into pieces isn’t a permissible punishment under federal law.
I’m sure Trump would have an opinion about that.
at these prices I am surprised there is not substantial lose form cattle steeling though with such lax care he might have a hard time identifying his cattle in someone else trailer.
might not be a bad place to stock up the freezer at least
uncle frogy
Only if you actually pay for their upkeep, which it sounds like he doesn’t bother to do. All he has to do is let them run free, round up a few for dinner, and collect his government subsidy checks for being a “rancher.”
Nothing but another right-wing welfare queen.
Some friends left some popcorn last gaming night. So I’m all set.
The pre- trial memorandum does answer one question. A lot of people have asked how could be so stupid as to get on a plane and not think he’d be arrested at the other end. According to the link in the OP he’s been thumbing his nose at the government since 1993. No bloody wonder he thought he could take a little plane ride, he’s been getting away with his bullshit for over 20 years.
Whatinhell were the other ranchers in his neighborhood doing?
Loose, unbranded bovid wandering on my property belong to me.
Especially if I went to the trouble of luring it off the public land adjacent to my property.
chigau @ 9
That’s assuming they want half-starved, feral, disease-ridden cattle.
Wow….that is quite some document.
Snoof #10
Maybe not so much want as getting rid of half-starved, feral, disease-ridden cattle.
chigau @ 12
Good point. I can’t imagine neighbouring ranchers want obviously unowned cattle mixing with their herds – they could be carrying anything.
A few observations from a foreigner.
FFS In the UK this guy would be up on animal cruelty charges so fast …
I notice that branding was an optional extra as far as Bundy was concerned, was this to avoid those attacked by his animals suing him?
Given the lack of branding and the fear that Bundy engendered in his local community, I wonder how many of his cattle were his …
It seems that Bundy and Finicum were abusers of welfare, how come the American Conservatives have not condemned him? Sorry, my mistake, Bundy and Finicum had too little melanin to be so condemned.
@3: No medication, no controls, just letting them run around like nature intended? I’m pretty sure there are people who would consider this to be “organic” as fuck, and pay ridiculous amounts of money for such cows…
prae
I always thought that the big plus of organic animal farming here was the combination of animal welfare and high quality meat. The Bundy way seems to fulfil neither criterion.
@16 Giliell: I don’t think there is any actual plusses in there, to me it seems like just a marketing scheme. There are also a lot of douchebags who assume that “Natural” automatically means “Good”, and the antivaxxers, of course, who would probably both approve of these methods.
The standard excuse is that they wouldn’t need to take government welfare if the government was godly and good instead of criminal and evil. I once debated a right wing Christian woman who believed that Obamacare was evil and that the Medicare and Medicaid programs should be scrapped completely. The fact that she was a long term cancer patient who was only still alive because of regular chemotherapy treatments paid for by, you guessed it, Medicaid and then Medicare, didn’t make one iota of difference.
And Republicans have benefited for years from this type of cognitive dissonance.
Re: prae (#17):
Doesn’t the very word ‘marketing scheme’ imply work? Things like outreach to find the right customers. Besides, many labels like ‘organic’ or ‘GMO-free’ tend to require some tracking, testing or documentation. All this seems wholly incompatible with the family ethos.
Anyroad, as long as the cattle muddle through and the Bundys don’t drag too many off all at once, the herd would probably be ok. Not well, but ok. Maybe the Bundys just assume a cow is theirs if there is no mark on it.* Given their attitude towards bills, taxes and their livestock the ranch must have phenomenally low operating costs. Throw in some generous subsidies and perhaps they might even make some money just for being there.
*This may also explain cattle mutilations usually credited to extraterrestials. Not aliens but peckish ranchers chancing upon an unmarked animal…
They’re on Government ground, it’s up to Government to look after them for him. As long as he doesn’t have to pay them for that, obviously.
prae @17,
Haha – indeed. At least, they will feel sure that those cattle weren’t autistic. Or something.
Prae #17: over here you can stick the word ‘organic’ on a bottle of shampoo and it means precisely nothing apart from a marketing scam. But you can’t stick organic on food without conforming to one of a small number of accreditation schemes. All require attention to traceable feed, better welfare conditions, good slaughtering arrangements. Some schemes will be more diligent than others, but whichever way you look at it as a farmer, going organic is a big cost and you’ll need to recover that with marketing and pricing. Most end up making less than a standard / intensive farmer. (I’m not going to say ‘traditional’ because there’s nothing traditional about most animal farming practices.)
Back on topic – There’s not a single organic farmer who would touch one of Bundy’s maggot-ridden, starving, injured-and-untreated cows. Animal cruelty it quite probably is.
prae
Well, I can’t help you with the thinking. I’m not a fool, I know that lots of the things around organic farming are woo, but here different labels guarantee good standards of animal welfare, and not in the sense of “just let them loose and shoot them when you’re hungry”. I’d happily buy non-organic meat (what do I care if there was some GMO feed?) if they guaranteed high animal welfare standards, but a market that competes exclusively over the price cannot do that. I admit that the organic butcher who needs to make use of good quality ingredients and good work instead of a chemistry set is a huge plus. In short, I haven’t eaten such delicious sausages from any conventional butcher in years.
+1 Giliel #23. I look forward to an organic meat scheme which isn’t scared of GMO per se. Though that might be a fundamental contradiction for most. And I’m 99% veggie anyway. In the UK, however, the available animal welfare registration standards – which are not organic- are a joke. The public here is happy to be mollycoddled like idiots with the soothingly bucolic ‘red tractor’ mark which is barely better than legal minimum. ISTR it scores the worst by people like CIWF compassion in world farming. There, in a non-organic nutshell, is the best example of the sort of callous marketing hype that Prae and Gorogh think they’ve seen through.
One reason why Bundy refused to pay grazing fees to the government is that he probably couldn’t afford the fees. Feral cattle like his wouldn’t be prime (restaurant grade) or choice/select (supermarket grade), the meat would be standard or utility (pet food grade). Friskies doesn’t pay high prices for the beef that goes into their cans.
LIke most “Sovereign Citizens,” Bundy wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to be a big-shot cattle rancher, but he doesn’t want anything to do with actually caring for his herd. He wants to live a self-supported life free of government oversight, while living off government subsidies and using government-owned land. I have never seen a Sovereign Citizen whole rhetoric didn’t boil down to “MINE! MINE! MINE!”
Fixed
***
Cuting to pieces rich inept white dudes with delusions of gradeur wouldn’t be permissible under trumperal law either, unless he made Mimicking the Emperor a crime.
“Being cut into pieces” is, of course, exactly the fate of these cattle. The ones that survive the wild, anyway.
Cracked, of all strange places to get actually useful information, did an article on organic dairy farming in the US. A lot of it will be completely obvious to anyone who has spent some time on a ranch like, “we sell our bulls as calves”. These are sort of “well, duh?” moments of ranching. But there’s a lot of “shocking” information from this clickbait article that seems completely obvious in retrospect, like composting dead cows. Or that is a logical consequence of organic dairy farming, like having to sell any cow you used anti-biotics on to a non-organic farm. Here’s the link:
http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2004-6-shockingly-brutal-realities-organic-dairy-farm.html
Dunno, passes my smell test. Not so much “shocking” as provoking moments of “Oh yeah, I guess you would need to do that…” Always thought people oversold organic labels.
Radovich #29 c/o Cracked hmmm
Not quite true. If you’ve been using unapproved antibiotics, or been using them as a prophylactic, then your entire registration is at stake and all those years of hard work going organic are heading down the tubes. Whereas if you’ve used the minimum-appropriate dose of antibiotic to treat a sick animal then the restriction is that you can’t send it to the food chain until the antibiotic has broken down – not too dissimilar to normal farming. Sorry, realise that was off topic (all because Prae suggested that Bundy’s Bovine Corpses would be organic) but people do repeat the strangest mistruths.
Wow: that Cracked article is misleading and more full of shit than a Texas feedlot.
Brian Radovich
Not everybody lives in the USA
WOW! I read through the bulk of that document and it really makes for fascinating reading. What I really got from it was the impression of a petty criminal who decided to use sovereign citizen arguments to Justify his theft from American taxpayers.
Like most of the people involved, when you start digging, they are not good people and really should be in jail for a long, long time. Here’s hoping.
One thing I really do love about the whole thing, my department is mostly staffed by young engineers in their 20’s. They are smart people and keep up with what’s going on in the world. But, NONE of them have any idea who Cliven, Ammon or any other Bundy is aside from Al.
EigenSprocketUK @ #31
Just curious, and seriously not wanting to start an argument but could you be more specific what’s wrong about the article?
I read cracked from time to time so I know they don’t have a strong connection to the truth. But, what about the article is wrong?
Yes, and I apologize for assuming that. I wasn’t really clear what you meant by “here”, and erroneously assumed it related somehow to my location.
I wasn’t holding up the cracked article as fine science journalism. I was trying to convey that with “clickbait” and putting “shocking” in quotations. I’m not sure if the shades of meaning there got across, but there’s an intended edge of sarcasm in my reply. What I’m actually trying to achieve by using the Cracked article is to illustrate how much belief plays into perceptions of what “organic” actually means. I was attempting to back up what Prae was saying about how we think “natural” means something specific. I’ll try to do that a little better in the future. Probably should’ve clarified what I meant by “useful information” as well.
I guess to make that point a little better, I present the USDA’s FAQ on becoming organic certified, (because Bundy’s cattle would need to be certified under US regulations): https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/faq-becoming-certified The part I want you to pay attention to is “Who Certifies Farms or Businesses?” Now, notice that we allow private firms to do the certification. If you look at the USDA requirements, you’ll notice that they only inspect the certifying agency. The actual USDA inspector is not required to visit the actual farm, ranch, or business. That’s the certifying agent’s job.
Now, the point I want to make is that the US regulatory regime would probably sound insane to someone living in almost any other country, BECAUSE IT IS! You actually pay the certifying agent to inspect and certify you, not the government or its food safety agency. This doesn’t work for car emissions and safety inspections, why should it be any different for any other industry? Emissions and safety inspections in each state can be done in a location that advertises “You don’t pay if you don’t pass”. There’s a lot of economic pressure on these companies not to fail someone unless they’re really terrible. If you can meet some or most of the criteria, they’ll overlook or simply not test the part that might fail you. I’ve seen people I know do this with window tinting I can barely see through from the inside of their car. They only get into trouble if someone files a complaint with the DMV about the vehicle and the DMV cares enough to investigate it. USDA is using the same sort of regulatory regime. They don’t check the site itself unless a complaint is filed about that site. Bundy could probably find a certifying agent who would pass him, possibly overlooking his operation’s faults. Bundy could then even get government assistance to help pay the certifying agent from the USDA. He could also sell his cattle as organic, until someone filed a complaint with the USDA. To get an inspection, they’d probably need to be detailed in that complaint. (When I interned doing environmental law, to file a complaint about an illegal mineral discharge into a public lake I had to actually go out and photograph the alleged breach site, the salt and mineral trail from said site leading to the damaged area, then collect a sample from that mineral trail and the damaged area itself before we got a water inspector to investigate. Place looked like a moonscape with long-dead waterfowl and rotted bullrushes everywhere). Once that complaint is filed and the inspector decides Bundy is in violation, he gets anywhere from a cease and desist letter to an $11,000 fine per violation). Bundy doesn’t pay fines anyway, so that’s kind of toothless. The meat processor could even advertise “all natural, anti-biotic free, grass-fed and grass finished beef”, because cheatgrass is technically still grass.
Here’s the entire 2015 schedule of organic farming fines levied: https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Compliance%20%26%20Enforcement%20Report_FY15.pdf
549 complaints nationwide last year. $1.8 million in fines levied, which the report notes are before settlement negotiation and some of which are still outstanding. To put that further in perspective, we had several serious outbreaks of listeria in organic products:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/amys-kitchen-recall-spinach-listeria-outbreak/story?id=29894726
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2016/01/123052/
One person actually died from the Dole outbreak. Sometimes I turn on the news and question how my country isn’t classified as the third world instead of the first. Americans will blindly walk to our doom with smiles on our faces if we’re convinced we’re doing something healthy. Sad thing is that certifying agencies in Nevada would probably be all over helping out Bundy by getting him an organic certification.
As has been pointed out previously in other threads, the fruitcakes who occupied the refuge in Oregon seemed to have a problem with the concept of “ownership”. This appears to also be true of the daddy fruitcake, judging by his long-term freeloading, etc. Hence, I would assume he doesn’t pay any attention to any brands: “It’s a cow, therefore it’s mine!”
Also, I’m annoyed at myself for going off on two long-winded tangents when I should have just said: I’m annoyed that Bundy is a hero when he cares so little about ruining the land around him or mistreating his livestock.
Brian Radovich @37:
But that’s precisely why Bundy is a hero: he’s standing up to the government and refusing to pay taxes or conserve anything for future generations. It’s so inspirational to the right-wingers who think that the government is spoiling all their fun by making them behave as if there are other people who might want to use the land as well.
Least surprising news all week, if not all month.
@#18: Yes, you should have heard my uncle, who went to college on the GI Bill after military service, was a public school teacher all his working life, bought his home with a VA loan, retired comfortably if not luxuriously on Social Security and a state pension, and had his health care in retirement provided through the VA, Medicare and Medicaid, rail against socialism. To the best of my knowledge he never spent a day of his adult life off the public payroll.
He was by all reports an excellent teacher. He certainly cared deeply about his students. He was a good husband and father. He had a wicked sense of humor. And he was he was really, really, really smart but somehow never saw the contradictions between his beliefs and his actual life. Very strange.
Forget ‘organic’ thems “Free Range” cattle.
One day, ranching will be a thing of the past, regarded with a mixture of horror and incomprehension. Descendants of ranchers will cling to their “glorious” history as people now do to the Confederacy.
That will be a good day.
Just imagine if his methods were more widespread. It wouldn’t take many people chucking thousands of livestock onto federal lands to cause a massive ecological disaster, not to mention the shootings that would occur from people disagreeing on exactly who’s cows they were.
Re: Golgafrinchan Captain @ #43…
You mean like… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_war
(Note the date at which the problem ended in the Western US.)
I’m kind of puzzled that the brand inspectors never took action against Bundy. If one of my neighbors was not feeding his cows, he’d be in a lot of trouble. In my state at least (NM) the brand inspectors do not hesitate to write tickets, put people in jail or confiscate livestock… sometimes all three depending on the situation. I’ve even seen ads in places like Craigslist for a group of cattle, with the owner grumpily saying they’ve been ordered to either feed the cows or sell/give them away, and of course one can see they have chosen not to feed them. I know our local brand inspector has been involved in armed stand-offs taking neglected animals away from the abuser. (No one was hurt, fortunately.)
I raise livestock, and that is NOT the way you do it. I have the utmost contempt for someone who treats an animal that way. I’m glad he’s finally in jail and facing the consequences of his actions.
kestrel @45:
Based on everything I’ve seen regarding the Bundies since the original standoff two years ago, it looks a lot like they’re chums with enough local and state politicians to get them out of such things as brand inspections.
Bundy is following in the footsteps of another rancher, Samuel Maverick.
Since cattle aren’t born with brands, true liberturdian greed.