Cattle Ranching in Our National Parks

Grazing cows are common sights as you drive across the Great American Plains. Black, brown, dirty white beasts, long horns, short horns, even a long-haired Highland cow, if you look hard enough. Part of our American heritage is the right to homegrown steaks, fresh from the ranch.

What many of us don't think about is what the implications are for our national parks. Many of us don't even realize that there are cows, domesticated bovines, grazing on park lands. Can you imagine Old Faithful surrounded by longhorns? Cows hanging out on glaciers? Cows climbing arches?

It's not quite that dramatic, but it exists, nonetheless. And there are many sides to the story. On one side, ranchers who lease land from the federal government and insist that they, too, have a right to be there. One another side, many conservationists who insist that cattle have no place in national parks, that parks are places for the natural world, that cattle ranching is what the BLM and Forest Service are for. And in the middle, biologists for the Park Service, running test after test and getting answer after conflicting answer as to whether ranching does or does not adversely affect natural systems in parks.

But do they have a place? In some ways, they do. Ranchers in Point Reyes National Seashore have been there for generations, and some of the families have gotten together to argue for their status as "traditionally associated" to the park, a protection usually reserved for Native Americans. Basque people who used herd sheep in and around Great Basin National Park enjoy and impromptu (though not official) status as "traditionally associated," though they no longer ranch in the park. Should those people, many of whom have been there for 100 or more years, be ignored? Other parks simply benefit from the additional revenue, without which many forgotten parks could not operate due to the enormous NPS budget deficit. Should those parks eliminate ranching and financially stagnate?

The Nature Conservancy, at the Red Canyon Ranch outside of Lander, WY, are attempting to find a peaceable solution. On their property, they attempt to raise and graze cattle in a sustainable manner, taking into consideration ecological and economic concerns. On one hand of the argument is the idea that national parks are for nature, which includes the wolves, mountain lions and grizzly bears that could prey on cows, and therefore cows have no place in parks. Another side of the argument rightly points out that 200 years ago, North American was almost overrun with bison. Since then, we have managed to kill off most of them, with small herds existing in Yellowstone/Grand Teton, Great Sand Dunes, and various other national and state parks and on private farms. Bison were a major part of the ecology of North America, and since their mass slaughter, great herds of grazers no longer maintain a healthy environment. Some scientists believe that it is possible to imitate the historic, and biologically significant, migration patterns of bison with herds of cattle, that cows can restore the plains that were left fallow when the bison were virtually killed off. This would, in all probability, involve a reorganizing of the cattle industry, smaller herds on larger tracts of land with greater rotations, but could it otherwise be feasible? Is there a way to make it work? Or will cattle ranching and the National Park Service mutually exclusive operations?

Until we figure it out, I will leave you with my vision of the cattle industry as it can be seen inside the borders of Capitol Reef National Park: