Fenced In
The next time you are on a road trip across the American west, keep an eye out for cows grazing along the highway. When next you see a herd of cattle, take a second look. If you look closely at the fence line between the highway and the cattle ranges, you will notice a second iconic American sight; the mosaic of high grasses on the roadside of the fence and the dense low shrubland on the cattle side of the fence. Cattle preferentially graze on grasses, herbs, and flowers, leaving the landscape they graze on barren of those plants and instead covered in unpalatable shrubs like sagebrush. Billions of acres of this type of landscape, known as sagebrush plains, are spread across America. Most of us believe it is the natural landscape. It isn’t. In most cases, that grassland in the median between the highway and the fence line is the natural state of the western prairie, and it exists only in small strips along roadways, where it collects the litter blown by passing cars.
The length of fences in the American west along is estimated as more than 620,000 miles; nearly three times the distance from the earth to the moon. It seems strange to think that much of that fencing is on public land. After all, if land is public, why does it need to be fenced? The answer may surprise you.
Barbed wire fences, the kind most used on open rangelands to this day, were first manufactured in 1874 by Joseph Glidden. “Free grass” was coming to an end as the commons were overgrazed, and settlers began homesteading further and further west. Cattlemen at first balked at the invention, fearing it would injure their stock. In response to these rumors, barbed wire salesmen John Gates and Henry B. Sanborn established their own ranch which exclusively used barbed wire. From this ranch’s success the city of Amarillo — now the largest in the region — was formed, and barbed wire exploded in popularity. By May of 1883, the Watseka Iroquois County Times reported;
“The value of these lands begins to be appreciated, and the open range grows less and less year by year. Where two years ago there was an unconfined, almost limitless pasture field, there are thousands of acres fenced with substantial wire fences and the open range is being gradually diminished.”
The US General Land Office reported in 1887 that cattle barons had fenced over 50,000 acres of public domain land for their private operations, and this number has never dwindled. On the contrary, the modern Bureau of Land Management permits privately-owned cattle to graze on 155 million acres of the public land they are tasked with protecting. The US Forest service also allows grazing permits on National Forest lands. As part of these cattle grazing permits, the cattlemen are allowed to partake in “range improvements”, including building roads and outbuildings, installing cattle guards, drilling wells, and building fences. Nor are all these improvements paid for by the ranchers. If the US Forest Service must install a fence around a campground to keep cattle from trampling visitors’ tents, that cost is charged to the taxpayer recreation budget, not to the rancher who pays pennies per head to graze his cows on that land.
Fences are essential for controlling livestock and enclosing pastures and rangelands, as well as preventing cattle from staying onto highways. But they also block migration routes, increase disease transmission by concentrating animals, alter the hunting practices of predators, and impede access to key areas of water and forage. Fences also create ecological “no man’s lands” where only a narrow range of species and ecosystems can thrive; think back to those strips of native grasses along the highway. Fences may also prevent “genetic rescue”, isolating populations so they cannot easily bounce back if they suffer losses due to disease, drought, or fire. Birds are also vulnerable to fence collisions since the small mammals they hunt tend to hide in the shadows of fence posts, but the birds cannot perceive the strung wires.
Antelope, wild sheep, and deer are particularly harmed by barbed wire fencing. A study of wildlife mortality along more than 600 miles of fences in the rangelands of northeastern Utah and northwestern Colorado found an annual average of one hoofed mammal found tangled for every 2.5 miles of fence, and one found dead (but not tangled) for every 1.2 miles of fence. These untangled deaths were mainly antelope and deer fawns who were separated from their mothers by fences too tall for them to jump, their tiny bodies left curled up along the impassable fence line. Young, pregnant, and winter-stressed animals are the most vulnerable to fencing strung across their migration routes.
There is hope for the future. In 2018 a study called for greater scientific importance to be placed on the analysis of fences on wildlife and ecosystems. Since then, wildlife-friendly fences have become more popular, and the public has called for the removal of old fencing from public lands. Organizations such as the Oregon Natural Desert Association organize groups of volunteers to remove old fences on protected land. It is grueling and uncomfortable work, wrestling with rusty barbed wire in the desert sun. But for every 2.5 miles of fence removed, that is two deaths prevented yearly, two antelope or bighorn sheep or mule deer who get to live another day. We cannot remove all the fencing. But we can encourage our government to minimize or remove private livestock from our public lands to stop the endless “range improvements” that are added year after year.
References
Lohan, Tara (2021). “The Big Threat of Fences Across the West.” In The Revelator.
McClung, Robert M (1969). Lost Wild America. William Morrow and Company, NY:
In Milner, C. A., In O’Connor, C. A., & In Sandweiss, M. A. (1994). The Oxford history of the American West.
Robbins, Jim (2022). “Unnatural Barriers: How the Boom in Fences in Harming Wildlife”. In Yale Environment360.
