Every month, Raymond Yowell, the 84-year-old former chief of the Shoshone Indian Tribe in northeastern Nevada, has almost $200 garnished from his $1,150 Social Security check, and it all dates back to a 5:00am phone call on a Friday morning in 2002.
That morning, a government official from the Bureau of Land Management told him to come down to a seizure site where the 132 cattle he owned were about to be impounded.
When he arrived, men brandishing handguns told him he couldn't get any closer than 250 yards from his cattle. He watched from a distance as the government loaded the livestock onto stock trailers.
Within a week, the cattle had been sold at a private auction – for what Yowell estimated to be a quarter of their market price. The proceeds belonged to BLM, officials told him, paying a portion of the grazing fees he suddenly owed. It wasn't enough to cover the full debt, and BLM sent Yowell a bill for $180,000.
Yowell has been fighting the BLM in court ever since, but while the case moves its way through the system, his Social Security check takes a hit every month.
The story, ranchers in Nevada say, is far from unique. Beginning in the late 1980s, BLM adopted aggressive tactics in the West, leading to large-scale cattle seizures and a disruption of life for ranchers that had utilized public lands for decades prior.
While the press has showered attention on Cliven Bundy, a polarizing man who prompted a tense standoff between Bundy's well-armed militia supporters and federal police, the struggle between ranchers and the BLM is much broader.
In 1994, Clinton Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt rushed through a total overhaul of cattle and sheep grazing regulations on over 260 million acres of land that was managed by the BLM and Agriculture Department's U.S. Forest Service, The Washington Post reported.
The 1994 “Rangeland Reform” regulations included doubling the current fees charged to ranchers for public forage and further environmental rules to prevent “overgrazing.” Opponents noted that in the runup to the new regulations, the National Academy of Scientists – a preeminent scientific authority on which federal agencies rely for expert analysis – had issued a report concluding so little was known about the condition of U.S. range lands that the new standards were essentially a shot in the dark. But Babbit forged ahead anyway.
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