Federal Government Announces Agents Will Be Shooting Cattle from Helicopters
The Federal Government has announced a plan to begin shooting feral cattle from helicopters in order to protect the environment.
According to Albuquerque, New Mexico, local outlet KOB 4, the U.S. Forest Service approved a plan to fly a helicopter over the Gila National Forest in New Mexico in order to hunt unbranded wild cattle that, according to environmentalists, are causing damage to rivers and streams with their mouths and hooves.
“The feral cattle in the Gila Wilderness have been aggressive towards wilderness visitors, graze year-round, and trample stream banks and springs, causing erosion and sedimentation,” forest supervisor Camille Howes said.
Local ranchers, however, have criticized the plan as cruel and have warned about the unintended consequences that could come from this plan.
They say it sets a dangerous precedent, as more and more ranching plots are left vacant across the West and fences become untended. They claim that this could result in privately owned cattle wandering off and getting caught up in the mix.
There is also the argument from the ranchers that the plan is cruel and inhumane. “Our society should be better than this,” Tom Paterson of the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association said in a statement. “We can be more creative and do it a better way where you’re not wasting an economic resource.”
Meanwhile, according to NBC, ranchers are also worried that the wolves who eat the carcasses of the dead animals will become used to eating cattle and will come closer to ranches in order to find more to eat.
Again, we are seeing the government implement plans to protect the environment, without considering all the factors involved.
Maintaining the environment is important, but there are other important issues that also need to be balanced with it. For instance, you cannot protect the environment by putting people’s livelihoods in jeopardy.
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This is what could happen to ranchers in New Mexico, as their own cattle risk getting caught up in the mix as federal agents shoot at cattle from helicopters, and there is the risk that wolves may be encouraged to kill privately-owned cattle.
But it is not only in New Mexico that initiatives such as these risk doing real-world harm to ordinary people. In Europe, for instance, many farmers want laws protecting wolves to be relaxed after complaining that wolves are coming to their farms and killing their livestock.
It is also not only in farming and ranching that the environmentalist agenda is harming. The push to switch to “green energy” has also had disastrous consequences.
The left has for years lobbied for a “green new deal” in order to combat climate change, but critics have argued that this will lead to an energy shortage and the widespread failure of the electrical system.
Meanwhile, there is also a push among the leftist for electric vehicles as a replacement for gas-powered ones — despite the fact that EVs are expensive and have shown themselves to be inefficient and unreliable.
The point is, the left has made the protection of the environment one of its core priorities, but at the same time, it has disregarded other important priorities in its quest.
There is no easy way to protect the environment, as any reasonable solution would need to take into account the need to preserve the lives and livelihoods of the people affected by these policies.
But the left is so ideologically driven, it would rather see people’s livelihoods ruined than compromise on its agenda.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
