Colorado scraps effort on sheepherder wages

Looking for a great career?

Do you want a sheepherder’s job? Look for yourself and you can make a whopping $650 – $750 a month! No, that’s right now, not some time in the future like 1950!

Type in the word “sheepherder” on the Idaho Works job search page and see for yourself: https://labor.idaho.gov/idahoworks/es/jobsearch/default.aspx

It’s a career full of challenge! You get to work with dogs, sheep, and sometimes goats! You also get to work for people who have great connections with the Legislature in any given western state! Hell, you might even get to work FOR a legislator!………. A lot! Doesn’t it sound exciting?!!!

Not only to do you get to experience extremely remote areas for long amounts of time you may be exposed to interesting diseases like Q-fever or others!

To find out more read this!

Colo. scraps effort on sheepherder wages
By IVAN MORENO – Associated Press writer

“Immigrant advocacy groups complain that the workers, who come to the United States mostly from Peru and Chile on temporary work visas, are sometimes subjected to 90-hour work weeks for anywhere from $600 to $750 a month on ranches in the West, including Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and California.”

US citizens need not apply.

More livestock subsidies by the Federal Government

5-year “demonstration project” to compensate ranchers and fund proactive, non-lethal activities.

The USFWS has announced how it will disperse $1 million annually to the states with wolves for 5 years. This funding was approved in the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act of 2009 which created several wilderness areas such as the Owyhee Wilderness in southern Idaho.

The law specifies that equal amounts of the funding must be used “(1) to assist livestock producers in undertaking proactive, non-lethal activities to reduce the risk of livestock loss due to predation by wolves; and (2) to compensate livestock producers for livestock losses due to such predation.”

No doubt there will be pressure to change how the money is spent so that more of it will go towards compensation of ranchers rather than proactive, non-lethal activities.

U.S. grants $1 million for wolf project
Great Falls Tribune

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Announces $1 Million to States For Wolf Livestock Compensation Project
USFWS Press Release

State	Proposed Allocation
MN	$100,000
MI	$90,000
WI	$140,000
ID	$140,000
MT	$140,000
WY	$140,000
AZ	$60,000
NM	$60,000
OR	$15,000
WA	$15,000

A Western State of Mind

With Sarah Palin on the ticket, all the old myths about the West are out there, especially the beauty, adventure, independent streak, self-reliance. These are contradictory of course.

One very important competing myth that has actually been close to fact is the West as a ward of the federal government. It was largely true in the past for much of the Interior West, and three times true for Alaska, one reason why the same corrupt political elite has ruled the state for many years. They brought come “the bacon” from Washington, the earmarks. Palin says she defeated the “old boy” network. That’s partially true, but she didn’t change the rules about seeking federal projects any more than she killed the “bridge to nowhere.” She was just going to be more honest about it, or less corrupt, or something like that.

For years the group most intent on stripping away the federal subsidies from much of the West has been the conservationists who went after taxpayer subsidized below cost timber sales, excessive federal roadbuilding on the public lands, irrigation dams that never came close to repaying their cost with the new crops grown, scores of subsidies to livestock operators, from predator control, token grazing fees, to entire colleges of the land grant universities devoted to trying to make agriculture in the interior West profitable with subsidization.

Some western projects did pay their way.  The ward of the federal government myth is entirely true. Most importantly it doesn’t have the political backing that the anti-fed, rugged individual myth does. But think about it the latter next time you hear some self sufficient, rugged, outdoors wise person from Idaho, Montana or Wyoming say they are scared of wolves — lousy, rotten myth destroyer! 😉

Story in the New York Times on this subject. A Western State of Mind. By Katerine Roberts.