The Atlas of Conflict Reduction: A Montana Field-Guide To Sharing Ranching Landscapes With Wildlife

By Hannah Jaicks

The book is a firsthand account of Dr. Hannah Jaicks’ journey through western Montana's ranching landscapes to showcase the stories of ranchers and affiliated groups who are pioneering strategies for reducing conflicts with wildlife, while also stewarding the landscape. Often seen as antithetical to one another, American ranchers and wildlife have long been entangled with another. This book is about producers who are forging new paths in conservation and addressing these seemingly intractable entanglements to sustain working ranch operations alongside healthy wildlife populations. It elevates the voices of these people striving daily to achieve wild and working landscapes in the West and serves as a model for how others can begin to do the same. Dr. Jaicks takes readers on a journey up western Montana to a different valley in each chapter and showcases the place-based stories of everyday conservation heroes who provide consciously raised agricultural products and protect vital habitat for endemic wildlife that would otherwise be developed and subdivided beyond repair. This book will inform readers about progressive ways to make the world we share – with people and animals – a better place to live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839982538

Book preview

The Atlas of Conflict Reduction

Anthem Environment and Sustainability Initiative (AESI)

The Anthem Environment and Sustainability Initiative (AESI) seeks to push the frontiers of scholarship while simultaneously offering prescriptive and programmatic advice to policymakers and practitioners around the world. The programme publishes research monographs, professional and major reference works, upper-level textbooks and general interest titles. Professor Lawrence Susskind, as General Editor of AESI, oversees the below book series, each with its own series editor and an editorial board featuring scholars, practitioners and business experts keen to link theory and practice.

Strategies for Sustainable Development Series

Series Editor: Professor Lawrence Susskind (MIT)

Climate Change Science, Policy and Implementation

Series Editor: Dr. Brooke Hemming (US EPA)

Science Diplomacy: Managing Food, Energy and Water Sustainably

Series Editor: Professor Shafiqul Islam (Tufts University)

International Environmental Policy Series

Series Editor: Professor Saleem Ali (University of Delaware)

Big Data and Sustainable Cities Series

Series Editor: Professor Sarah Williams (MIT)

Climate Change and the Future of the North American City

Series Editor: Richardson Dilworth (Center for Public Policy, Drexel University, USA)

Included within the AESI is the Anthem EnviroExperts Review. Through this online micro-review site, Anthem Press seeks to build a community of practice involving scientists, policy analysts and activists committed to creating a clearer and deeper understanding of how ecological systems – at every level – operate, and how they have been damaged by unsustainable development. This site publishes short reviews of important books or reports in the environmental field, broadly defined. Visit the website: www.anthemenviroexperts.com.

The Atlas of Conflict Reduction

A Montana Field-Guide to Sharing Ranching Landscapes with Wildlife

Dr. Hannah F. Jaicks

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Hannah F. Jaicks 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021953406

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-251-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-251-9 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Photograph of Turbo fladry, by Jennifer Sherry/NRDC

This title is also available as an e-book.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Foreword by Dr. Susan G. Clark

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter One

Boundaries

Smarter than your average bears

There’s predator hatred, and then there’s wolf hatred

Chasing wapiti

Secure attractants: Wildlife conflict-reduction tools

Chapter Two

Understories: The Centennial Valley

Place identity

Place attachment

It’s Not Plug-and-Chug: Considerations for Using Conflict-Reduction Tools

By landowners, for landowners: The Centennial Valley Association

Chapter Three

Fear and Loathing: The Big Hole Valley

Carrots and sticks

Community matters: The Big Hole Watershed Committee

Chapter Four

The Problem with Nature: The Ruby Valley

Overcoming cycles of sue, settle, repeat: The Ruby Valley Strategic Alliance

Chapter Five

Beasts of Burden: The Gallatin Valley

Chapter Six

A Climate Case for Cattle: The Tom Miner Basin

Cattle, carbon and climate change

Chapter Seven

This Is Going To Be a Huge Challenge: The Blackfoot Valley

The three P’s: Process, pacing and people

Appendix: Methodological Notes

Representativeness of the sample

Sample recruitment letter

Rancher interview guide

Project partner interview guide

Notes

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

X.1 Fables of ranchers and ranching remain ever-present

1.1 Merino sheep are regarded as having some of the finest and softest wool

1.2 LGDs wear spiked collars as an added layer of protection

1.3 The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, High Divide and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem

1.4 Ursos arctos horribilis

1.5 Canis lupus

1.6 Cervus elaphus

2.1 Cygnus buccinator

2.2 Thymallus arcticus

3.1 Alces alces

3.2 Moose tracks

3.3 Bear-resistant garbage bins are designed and tested to keep human trash away from bears to prevent conflicts

3.4 Carcass pickup and composting programs help remove predator attractants

4.1 Castor canadensis

4.2 Corvus corax

4.3 Ovis canadensis

4.4 Bighorn sheep tracks

5.1 Ruby the guard burro is effective in helping to reduce conflicts with black bears and mountain lions

5.2 The big, bad wolf

5.3 Wolf tracks

5.4 Grizzly tracks

5.5 Puma concolor

5.6 Turbo-fladry is effective in deterring neophobic wolves when used strategically

5.7 Electrified fencing is an effective, long-term grizzly and black bear deterrent

6.1 Bunching cattle through low-stress livestock handling is beneficial to the welfare of the animals and the health of the rangelands

6.2 Cattle and the Carbon Cycle

7.1 Elk tracks

7.2 Elk raise challenging questions in terms of management and shared landscapes

7.3 For public meetings to be successful, the common-ground approach and 80–20 rule are key

A.1 Consent form with Institutional Review Board approval from the University of Montana Western

Table

1.1 Inventory of commonly used nonlethal tools for reducing conflicts with carnivores and ungulates

FOREWORD

What are our relationships to nature, wildlife and especially large carnivores—bears, wolves, cougars? That is, what are we supposed to get out of nature? How do we relate to her? How do we transact with nature to get what we need? How do we reciprocate that transaction by giving something back in return? These are a few of the many questions at the heart of this book. These are big questions and our answers have huge consequences for nature, wildlife and ourselves. In the end, humans are transcended by nature, and nowhere is this clearer than in our learning to live with wildlife in the American West.

Large carnivores and other wildlife such as elk are for many of us, nature incarnate! For others, they represent challenges to ways of knowing and working on the land—challenges that lack clear and easy responses. As the pace and scale of our changing world continues to accelerate, wildlife focuses much of our attention and questions. We have to learn to deal with every day pragmatic questions in living with these creatures. We also have to learn how we ought to live with these big animals. Dr. Hannah Jaicks digs into the large questions by her extensive and intensive on-the-ground conversations with ranchers, hunters, site visits, first-hand experiences, and talking and listening to diverse people. This book is a serious set of conversations and stories about how people are looking beyond the simple dichotomies of good and bad animals (and good and bad people) to find ways to share the landscape.

From time to time, people like Dr. Jaicks come along and give us a serious social science glimpse into our living in nature, a view of ourselves, our understandings and our behavior. In this case, she does so in these stories and weaves in important but accessible psychological concepts to help break down a problem-solving process readers can take with them into their own lives. We live at a time of great change, so the timing of this book is all the more urgent. It is especially incumbent on us today to attend to practical matters and also the needed education and ethical issues before us in terms of nature, biodiversity and our own living.

What is the task of a social scientist like Dr. Jaicks, as an environmental psychologist? and more? Often citizens, even leaders, and perhaps most people’s worldviews prevent them from seeing society, other people and themselves—reality as it is. She helps us come to grips with the fictions of human understanding, beliefs and institutions. She brings us to ground level through the lived experiences and views of people, in particular ranchers and partner groups in western Montana, seeking conflict-reduction strategies for achieving shared landscapes with wildlife.

This account can help us all to be responsible, self-directed citizens and contributing community members, as we figure out what sharing the landscape with wildlife and one another more effectively really means. And, it can work at the same time to expand our formula for coexistence out into the world for the many other urgent conservation challenges. The task of the social sciences is nothing less than uncovering our true nature, perhaps seeing ourselves as we are for the first time. Dr Jaicks does a first-class job.

This book is very easy to read, and at first glance, you might see it as simple stories about living and working in the Rockies. However, it is much deeper than that as it attends to the big questions and many real-life matters. And, the lessons of experience she offers point the direction that we need to refine and learn. This book has implications for improved management policy. Leaders and citizens can benefit from a careful read.

I can assure you, this book is well worth your time. It flows in style. It is an exciting account of real people and real big carnivores. Hopefully, it will get you thinking about your ethics, responsibilities and behavior.

Susan G. Clark

Yale University, Institution for Social and Policy Studies,

World Academy of Art and Science,

Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I owe a huge thank you to the many people across western Montana who were willing to share their lives with me and trust me with telling their stories. The different communities—that readers will come to love as much as I do—welcomed me in and helped me understand what wild and working landscapes truly are and why we should work to protect them. I also want to thank the land itself. I have lived a lot of places during my relatively short stint on Earth so far, but none have captivated my heart the way Montana does. This place is wild, beautiful, rugged and sacred. I am grateful to all of its inhabitants, human and animal, for helping me find home.

I am deeply appreciative of the organization Future West for hosting and supporting this project during the many years of research required to complete this publication. I would also like to thank Future West’s donors, including the AMB West Conservation Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Cinnabar Foundation, Kendeda Fund, Harder Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation, Natural Resources Defense Council, American Prairie Foundation, and several individual donors—especially my parents Bryan and Dawn, who have always supported my many passions growing up. Likewise, thank you to Michelle Anderson at the University of Montana Western for her institutional support and mentorship on the development of my research, and to Kayla Coleman, my intern, for her hard work during the fieldwork side of this project.

This book has been far and away the most difficult piece of writing I’ve ever completed, and I could not have gotten through the process without the help of many individuals who got me across the finish line. Logan Johns, the greatest friend someone could ask for, read my messy early drafts and provided helpful feedback on the outline, allowing me to know whether I was making any sense whatsoever. Ron and Karen Ollenburger also deserve immense recognition for reviewing the geology sections and helping me format the descriptions in a way that was factually accurate as well as interesting for others to read.

Susan Clark (my forever advisor), Ben Williamson and the entire community of the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative have been indispensable sources of feedback as well as extraordinarily kind colleagues in their efforts to elevate the profile of my work. I am also grateful to my communities of peers and friends from Bozeman, Queens, Swarthmore and the City University of New York Graduate Center, including and especially Emily R., Daniel R., Emily D., Jeff K., William J., Bryce, Scott, Jennifer P., Sruthi, Will P., Bekka, Carl, Rilla, Kara, and my dedicated dissertation committee: Cindi Katz, Caitlin Cahill, Roger Hart and Bill Wyckoff. Thank you also to Pappy and Nancy for pushing me to quench my unending curiosity and thirst for knowledge growing up. Not many people can say they have such a solid network of support, so I count my blessings daily to know and matter to so many kind-hearted, intelligent individuals.

My brilliant illustrator, Katie Shepherd Christiansen, has been indispensable. Her willingness to jump in and create magnificent drawings of the wildlife and conflict-reduction tools helped make my words come to life. The final product has been shaped by her work, and I don’t think it would have the same impact without her illustrations. Thank you to Jennifer Sherry for her beautiful cover photo, which captures the heart and soul of this book. The talented Auideo team, Cole Schaefer and Cevan Likness, brought their patience and know-how to the recording and development of the audiobook version, and I am so lucky to have had their help.

As an unabashed proponent of mental health, I owe Dr. Jean Hantman, my therapist, more credit than I currently possess the words to express (I’ll find them one day with her help I’m sure). There’s no one I trust more with helping me traverse the mountains and the valleys that come along with being human. She has helped me know myself and, more importantly, helped me like myself. This book and everything else I’ve achieved have happened because she gives me the grounding and strength to show up 100 percent ready for life every single day, so I can go out and try to make other people’s lives better just like she’s done for me.

Finally, I want to thank Mark, my exceptional partner and best friend, who was present for the most challenging aspects of this book’s development. He kept me motivated whenever I felt stuck and, conversely, reminded me to go easy on myself whenever I needed to step back and regroup. We entered quarantine right as I began writing, and I count myself incredibly lucky to have had his unwavering support, advice and love as we navigated many uncertainties together. He makes everything better and so much more fun, and the joy he and his beloved dog Posey bring to my life is a constant source of comfort and inspiration. Mark and Posey, this book is dedicated to the two of you.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

It’s either love or hate. There is no place for ambiguity in the attitudes held by most Americans—not just westerners—toward ranching. Instead of being genteel niceties, cowboy and ranching are pungently, and often politically, evocative words: their polemic outstrips politeness.¹

Last year two young bears got into trouble by being baited into people’s garbage, so we realized we couldn’t let those bears get conditioned because then it’s going to be all they’re wanting to do. They go from ranch to ranch and homestead to homestead, and so far, where we are in the Blackfoot Valley, last year was the first year we saw that. We had a grizzly within a hundred yards of the office here one morning, and he stayed most of the summer, right near my brother’s house.² I looked out the window into the field to where David Mannix was referring as we sat down for an interview one morning in late June and started imagining what it would be like to have a 700-pound animal grazing in my yard that can run up to 35 miles an hour. David returned me from my thoughts, He didn’t cause any problems, but he was a big boar. If you got him in the wrong place, or had it been a sow with cubs and you were heading into the brush to fix fence, it could have been a problem.

Everything is still lush this time of year in the Blackfoot Valley thanks to snow melt and afternoon rainstorms of early summer, making the Garnet Mountains visible from his office window a vibrant green color speckled with black dots of cattle grazing at the foothills. David Mannix, of Mannix Family Grass Finished Beef in Helmville, Montana, has never thought of himself as someone who simply owns the land. Since the establishment of the Mannix ranch in 1882, David and his family have seen themselves more as caretakers of the soil, water, grass, forests, wildlife and the human community who call the Blackfoot home.

David showed me pictures of grizzlies caught on wildlife camera³ footage in recent years and went on, As our landscape gets more complex, we have had to learn how to accommodate them. As we get more complex, we need to respect and work with the predators. Remember, a hundred years ago, the primary interests in this area were mining and cattle. ‘Let’s just shoot them all.’ And we did. And the Government helped us, right? They had bounties on wolves and lions and whatnot. We all worked together because we had so few objectives: cows, mining and logs. Wolves, we didn’t need. Bears, lions, we didn’t need. Now we do. So, as we learn and the animals coming back learn, it takes an effort to get everything right. It takes resources and time and energy and dollars to accommodate that. You also have to be collaborative. You have to work with people and build relationships, and that takes time. Ultimately, that takes the most time. It’s not that we spend the most time putting up fences to keep cattle out of the creek. We spend a lot of our time sitting at meetings, but that’s important. In the short term, that doesn’t bring any dollars home. In the long term, I believe it’s the only way we can be sustainable. I think you and I have talked enough to know how I feel about that and what I believe to be true. I nodded, having heard David speak at conferences and seen his thoughts printed in articles, which, given the now seemingly paradoxical fables of the lone cowboy and solitary rancher, it was pretty clear as I sat in his office that morning that our modern conceptions of ranching were in desperate need of some revisions. Managing the land and livestock in a unified way and contributing to the long-term health of his local community are the best chance people like David have at a healthy ecosystem that protects his family’s ability to make a living, supports diverse wildlife populations and provides healthy, accessible food to people across North America.

David is one of the many people who spoke to these ideals on my travels up and down the western portion of Montana. Ranchers and local community groups or agency staff who partner with them are increasingly dedicating their attention to the types of practices that not only produce superior meat, wool fleeces and other livestock goods but also provide the highest standards of care to the ecosystem in their role as stewards of the land. Despite longstanding arguments by many environmentalists to the contrary, David and the ranchers like him, whose stories are introduced throughout this book, are all conservationists because their lives, communities and livelihoods are inextricably intertwined with their local landscapes, but also because they care deeply about the land itself. These ranchers possess a depth of commitment to integrating the implications of the work they do to ensure a place for more than just humans on the landscape. They shoulder a sense of responsibility of bridging the past with the present and bear a steely determination to ensure their children and grandchildren can hold on to a heritage that spans centuries and generations. Their connections to their local ecosystems and the elements have enabled them to see complexity and diversity as a necessity for the survival of us all. This recognition and responsibility do not mean any of them have figured out the perfect solution for how to ranch in the twenty-first century. Many will be the first to say they still have more work to do and can’t do it all on their own. They have gotten started though and raised the bar for the rest of us.

The Problem

Livestock raising as a lightning rod of controversy is not a new phenomenon due to its central connection to wildlife conservation. Often seen as antithetical to one another, North American ranchers and native wildlife have long been entangled with one another thanks to a dynamic history of interwoven proceedings like European settlement and displacement of native human and wildlife communities, early twentieth-century predator-eradication policies and recent environmental regulations enabling wildlife populations to rebound.⁴ There is, unfortunately, a substantive basis for this adversarial relationship.

On ranches across western Montana, conflicts between ranchers and wildlife are ever-present. Native carnivores are wide-ranging mammals like grizzlies, wolves and mountain lions that, as their populations continue to recover, require vast areas of land and resources to survive.⁵ As David’s account of the grizzly entering his family’s garden shows, the recovery of these predators has led to potential safety threats to people and damage to the viability of a family’s ranching operation when a predator attacks or kills livestock like sheep and cattle. Ungulates are native hoofed, grazing herbivores such as elk, bison, bighorn sheep, mule deer and pronghorn that have returned thanks to efforts by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government wildlife agencies. Conflicts between native and nonnative grazers (cows and sheep) arise when ungulates compete for grass on ranchers’ pastures because they can attract predators into the herds. Plus, overgrazing pastures negatively affects the health of the soil and native grasses. The encroachment of Brucellosis via ungulates also poses major concerns for ranchers, as they have to worry about transmission of this disease into their livestock herds.⁶ One positive Brucellosis test can bankrupt a struggling ranch operation.

Conversely, for a grizzly bear, wolf, elk or any migratory animal, the journey up the western slope of Montana is unforgiving. An animal is not apt to wander through it without accident or risk. Known for its richness and abundance of wildlife diversity afforded by the different habitats of the region, ranging from high alpine forests to dense sagebrush, meadows and geothermal areas,⁷ western Montana also encompasses a staggering complexity of human developments, institutions and practices. Along any wild animal’s journey, it will encounter proverbial land mines like roads, private real estate, recreational areas, agricultural lands and hunting grounds delineated by markers unfamiliar to an animal that has never seen a human.

Often absent from the accounts about the conflicts between ranchers and wildlife is a clarification about the power dynamics of decision makers and influential lobbyists that have contributed to and exacerbated these entanglements on the ground. The oversimplified dichotomy of ranchers versus wildlife has long persisted as a straw man in scientific and political agendas, and it prevents attention to the underlying factors contributing to the conflicts and misrepresents the varied individual identities of ranchers and animals alike. It also treats ranchers’ conflicts with wildlife as a cause of conservation crises rather than underscoring how the conflicts are an indicator of the broader set of issues facing the United States today. Most distressingly, these constraints ensure no concrete solutions are identified. Luckily, there are a growing number of people like David who recognize how the agricultural lands of the Last Best Place are our last best chance of keeping wild and working landscapes intact for the people and wildlife who call Montana home.

A backbone to this book is one central tenet: wildlife and ranchers’ conflicts with one another on the landscape are not the cause of the problem. Rather, they are symptoms of more systemic concerns like climate change, the dissolution of family ranches due to consolidation and globalization of agriculture, and the ever-expanding reaches of human development. Human-wildlife conflicts are people’s conflicts with one another about the land, its resources and how people and animals are allowed to use the two.

Through this book, I take readers on a journey to ranching communities in different valleys along the western slope of Montana. I interweave place-based storytelling with theories and concepts from environmental psychology⁸ and human geography to clarify the underlying systemic problems and help people understand ways to overcome them. My goal is to create sufficient dissonance in readers to expand their conceptions about ranchers and their potential to not only share landscapes with wildlife but also effectively steward them both. In turn, this broadened awareness will enable readers to undertake future work with a contextual, inclusive process for how to approach humanity’s ongoing, divided environmental challenges. I hope readers will finish this book with an ability to think more comprehensively and critically about conservation crises and a renewed optimism about our ability to protect the places, communities and living beings we care about.

An Old Livelihood in the New West

Most aspects of life in the early twenty-first century go beyond easy analysis and resolution. The subject of ranching, particularly in the context of wildlife conservation in the American West, is bound then to aggravate anyone who demands singular causes, explanations and fixed solutions. Better it is then for the rest of us to contend with and, perhaps, enjoy the richness of complexity. The story of ranchers has been told in countless forms over the years. However, ranchers like David have little in common with the fictionalized versions of themselves carted out onto political platforms or publicized in popular culture. Enduring folklore, thanks to accounts from Western films, television and dime novels, has given rise to preconceived notions about ranchers persisting today (Figure X.1). Such notions, affectionately or not, are imbued with themes of open space, contact with nature, free enterprise and rugged individuality, community formation, distaste for government and official influence.⁹ These themes, along with ideas about family heritage and land tenure, have a degree of truth to them, but the fictionalized caricatures from shows like Yellowstone or old John Wayne movies paint a one-dimensional picture of ranchers.

Figure X.1. Fables of ranchers and ranching remain ever-present.

Source: All illustrations are by Katie Shepherd Christiansen, Coyote Art & Ecology.

Despite these one-dimensional framings, ranching is not a monolithic profession—agriculture entails a range of occupations. For the purposes of this book, I define farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers broadly as producers who own and/or operate establishments that produce crops, livestock and dairy products. Farms are generally land where crops and livestock for dairy products are raised, while ranches are where livestock like sheep, cattle, goats and pigs are raised. Most of the producers interviewed in this book self-identify as livestock ranchers, but a couple of farmers who raise livestock for meat as well as dairy products were also interviewed. Given the depth and complexity of achieving shared landscapes among people, livestock and wildlife, I limited the scope of my research for this particular book to producers who raise livestock to focus on the suite of challenges unique to that demographic. I primarily spoke with ranch owners to better comprehend land tenure concerns such as succession planning that are inherently embedded in how they look to reduce conflicts with wildlife. However, a number of agricultural managers were also interviewed, as many of them share the same concerns as ranch owners, regarding the future. Distinctions between the two, along with the specifics of each operation and interviewees’ role on the land, are elaborated on in the text. Readers will also quickly identify gender and age trends among ranchers interviewed, which reflect national trends in agriculture—as of 2017, 36 percent of all producers are female, and the average age of all producers is 57.5.¹⁰ Compounding the constraining one-dimensional caricature of producers in contemporary folklore, these aforementioned framings of ranchers have helped put them in the unenviable position of being constantly debated about in public spheres.

These debates prevent attention to the actual issues of landscape degradation, industrialization of agriculture and species management concerns growing ever more pressing because they stall us from contemplating tangible solutions—key word being tangible. Removing human or animal communities is not a viable option. If you are looking for an account exploring whether or not ranchers should remain on the landscape, or its wildlife complement, this book is not for you. Evaluating who belongs is dangerously misguided and reflects an omnipotent mentality that is not only impractical but also destructive and alarming given our far too recent colonialist history involving the supplanting of indigenous communities and slavery.¹¹ Such debates also prevent us from addressing the fragility and vulnerability of our food systems desperately requiring our attention as the United States’ increasingly globalized agricultural sector puts our country’s accessibility to high-quality, healthy food in jeopardy.

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, many family farms and ranches had to dispose of produce and euthanize livestock, while consumers had restrictions placed on the amount of meat and produce they could purchase in the grocery store. Thanks to bottlenecks created by monopolies on meat-processing facilities and the volatility of our agricultural commodities market, both producers and American consumers were left without their basic needs being met. Plus, many employees of these massive facilities found themselves facing health risks, as witnessed by thousands of positive Covid-19 cases and multiple deaths documented at processing plants across the country. Unable to afford losing their job, people went into work knowing their health and their loved ones’ health were in jeopardy.¹² Few livelihoods evoke such strong attention as that of a rancher, but what are we risking when we focus all our energy debating whether or not this community of people belongs? Quite a lot it turns out.

Given the intense reactions agricultural producers incite in people, why haven’t the stories of ranchers been told from their own perspectives? In my conversations with ranchers over the years, I heard a near-universal theme about the need to be better at telling their story to people outside of their social and professional networks in order to instill a greater appreciation for their role on the landscape. While some members of the ranching community can come to wield a great deal of social capital and political power in various public and private sectors through board of directors membership, agency partnerships and involvement in relevant trade organizations (e.g., Montana Stockgrowers Association), a disconnect with the broader American public remains in terms of lived experience and cultural understanding.

The need to address this physical and symbolic chasm is immense because Americans depend on these people who live by working on the land. Ranchers comprise less than 1 percent of the US population, but, coupled with farmers, they take care of more than 60 percent of our country’s land and provide the nation’s markets with more than 87 percent of our agricultural products. Ranchers and farmers are not only a major food source upon which we rely; they also have the potential to shape the future of our landscapes, waterways and wildlife communities.¹³ In Montana alone, there are more than 26,000 ranches and farms on more than 58 million acres of land—ranking second in the nation for most acres of land in farms and ranches behind Texas and occupying ~62 percent of the entire state’s land area. Producing a wide range of commodities, beef and wheat are at the top of the list in Montana, with over 66 percent of the land in agriculture being used for pasture and grazing of livestock.¹⁴

When you spend your days watering, feeding and caring for your animals and land, while also tackling the inevitable curveballs day-to-day ranch life presents, it’s hard to blame someone for not wanting to take time away from their family to sit down and chronicle their story in the evening. Not to mention agriculture ranks among the highest in hazardous occupations due to the risk of injury and stress-related illness or death. When basic mental and physical health concerns, the needs of your family and livestock and the ability to meet your bottom line are perpetually demanding your attention, writing about yourself hardly seems like a good use of time. As many people admitted, ranchers’ desire to tell their story is further dampened by the vitriolic opposition to ranching presented by people who contest ranching as a unilaterally destructive force to the environment.¹⁵

This contest is rooted in a longstanding perception about ranchers as a threat to the natural world due to changes produced on the landscape by their nonnative grazing herbivores, namely cattle and sheep. Perception is slippery ground to base an argument on, however, and reality is often far more complicated than anyone would like to believe—let alone tolerate. Although ranching has a controversial history, it is essential for the broader environmental community to understand the critical role ranchers can play in keeping healthy landscapes intact, much like ranchers must learn the needs of the wildlife present on the landscapes they are responsible for stewarding.¹⁶

Coincidentally, there is no semblance of consensus among ranchers, agricultural economists, animal range scientists or wildlife managers when it comes to defining exactly how we must safeguard landscapes and wildlife. The only community in agreement about ranching, landscape stewardship and wildlife management are social scientists who reside in ambiguity.¹⁷ Unfortunately, there is little room for ambiguity in the minds of people toward ranching (among other things), which is largely due to our pervasive desire as humans for discrete causal explanations and solutions.

Also unfortunate is the relatively limited number of ethnographic accounts of ranchers in the American West by social scientists. Twenty years after Let the Cowboy Ride was published, Paul Starrs’s observation that livestock ranching deserves more investigation from social scientists, although work of substance may have to wait for a change in the trade winds of academic fashion still rings true today. The lack of attention, Starr explains, has somewhat to do with the difficulty of entering these relatively insular communities, but the reward for persistence is worthwhile: Rancher society is by no means closed, but doing advanced fieldwork requires a level of expertise and participation that few ethnographic researchers are able to summon. Fieldwork among western ranchers is an especially idiosyncratic undertaking.¹⁸

The tension between ranchers and wildlife made my own idiosyncratic undertaking worthwhile, as the stories I present in this book provide