Here's an odd item that I found through a British newspaper:
Catholic Church can reduce carbon emissions by returning to meat-free Fridays, study suggests
Eh?
This found:
In 2011, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales called on congregations to return to foregoing meat on Fridays. Only around a quarter of Catholics changed their dietary habits—yet this has still saved over 55,000 tons of carbon a year, according to a new study led by the University of Cambridge.
FWIW, 10% of the British population remains or has returned to Catholicism (more Catholics go to services on Sunday than any other religion in Britain). England in particular was noted for its strong attachment to the Faith before King Henry VIII, and even after that, as it was not at first clear to people at the pew level that he'd severed ties with it. This gets into our recent discussion on the end of the Reformation.
Indeed, Great Britain's Catholic roots never really completed faded at any one time. Peasants rose up in 1549 over the Prayer Book, a good 30 years after Henry has severed from Rome. Catholic hold outs continued on, on the island, under various penalties of the law, some extremely severe. And the illogical position of the Church of England that it wasn't really Protestant, while not being able to rationally explain why then it wasn't that, or wasn't, if it wasn't that, schismatic, lead High Church Anglicans to continually flirt with returning to Rome. King Charles I was so High Church his position in regard to not joining the Church didn't make sense, something that his son, Charles II, ultimately did, in spite of his libertine lifestyle.The Oxford movement by Anglican churchmen in reaction to Catholic assertions that their Apostolic Succession was severed lead at least one famous Anglican cleric, John Henry Newman, into the Catholic Church, where he ultimately became a Cardinal. In recent years, notable British figures have converted to the Church, along with many regular people.
Abstaining from meat on all the Fridays in the year, which in Catholic terms doesn't include fish, was a long held Latin Rite tradition that fell in the wake, in some places, but not all, following the reforms of Vatican II. It was not part of Vatican II, as some improperly assume, but something that occurred in the spirit of that age. It was a penitential act, not an environmental one.
For a variety of reasons, I'm pretty skeptical of the "blame it on cows" part of the climate change discussion. But as a localist and killetarian, I am game with grow or capture it on your own. That isn't really what this is about, but it's worth noting that anything you buy at the grocery store, or wherever, has had a fair amount of fossil fuels associated with it. The Carbon reduction here would be because fish don't burp much, if at all, or fart much, if at all. But for that matter, neither do deer or rabbits, ducks or geese, or for that matter grass fed cattle.
Go out there, in other words, and get your own if you really want to save on the carbon.
For that matter, I might note, for those who are vegan, production agriculture is the huge killer of animal life. I always laugh to myself when vegans think they're saving animals, they're slaughtering them in droves. Anyone who is familiar with the agricultural logistical chain or how production agriculture works knows that.
I'm for growing it yourself as well, of course, although I've now been a hypocrite on that for years. I need to get back to it.
Anyhow, the "this would be a good thing for the Catholic Church to do globally in the name of the environment" might be true, or might not be, but it misses the overall point.
On this day in 1943, rationing in the US of meats, fat and cheese commenced, with Americans limited to two pounds per week of meat.
Poultry was not affected by the order.
This must have been a matter of interest in my family, engaged in the meat packing industry as they then were.
Contrary to popular memory, not everything the US did during the war met with universal approval back home, and this was one such example. Cheating and black marketing was pretty common, and there were very widespread efforts to avoid rationing. Farmers and ranchers helped people to avoid the system by direct sales to consumers, something the government intervened to stop and only recently has seen a large-scale return.
While wholesale inclusion of a prior item in a new one is bad form, here's something we earlier ran which is a topic that needs repeating here:
Indeed, a person's reasons to go hunting during World War Two, besides all the regular reasons (a connection with our primal, and truer, selves, being out in nature, doing something real) were perhaps stronger during the Second World War than they were in the First. During WWII the government rationed meat. During World War One it did not, although it sure put the social pressure on to conserve meat.
Indeed, the first appeals of any kind to conserve food in the United States came from the British in 1941, at which time the United States was not yet in the war. The British specifically appealed to Americans to conserve meat so that it could go to English fighting men. In the spring of 1942 rationing of all sorts of things began to come in as the Federal government worried about shortages developing in various areas. Meat and cheese was added to the ration list on March 29, 1943. As Sarah Sundin reports on her blog:
So in 1943 Americans found themselves subject to rationing on meat. As noted, poultry was exempt, so a Sunday chicken dinner was presumably not in danger, but almost every other kind of common meat was rationed. So, a good reason to go out in the field.
But World War Two was distinctly different in all sorts of ways from World War One, so hunting by that time was also different in many ways, and it was frankly impacted by the war in different ways.
For one thing, by 1941 automobiles had become a staple of American life. It's amazing to think of the degree to which this is true, as it happened so rapidly. By the late 1930s almost every American family had a car. Added to that, pickup trucks had come in between the wars in the early versions of what we have today, and they were obviously a vehicle that was highly suited to hunting, although early cars, because of the way they were configured and because they were often more utilitarian than current ones, were well suited as a rule. What was absent were 4x4s, which we've discussed earlier.
This meant that it was much, much easier for hunters to go hunting in a fashion that was less of an expedition. It became possible to pack up a car or pickup truck and travel early in the morning to a hunting location and be back that night, in other words.
Or at least it had been until World War Two. With the war came not only food rationing, but gasoline rationing as well. And not only gasoline rationing, but rationing that pertained to things related to automobiles as well
Indeed, the first thing to be rationed by the United States Government during World War Two was tires. Tires were rationed on December 11, 1941. This was due to anticipated shortages in rubber, which was a product that had been certainly in use during World War One, but not to the extent it was during World War Two. And tire rationing mattered.
People today are used to modern radial tires which are infinitely better, and longer lasting, than old bias ply tires were. People who drove before the 1980s and even on into the 80s were used to constantly having flat tires. I hear occasionally people lament the passing of bias ply tires for trucks, but I do not. Modern tires are much better and longer lasting. Back when we used bias ply tires it seemed like we were constantly buying tires and constantly having flat tires. Those tires would have been pretty similar to the tires of World War Two. Except by all accounts tires for civilians declined remarkably in quality during the war due to material shortages.
Gasoline rationing followed, and it was so strict that all forms of automobile racing, which had carried on unabated during World War One, were banned during World War Two. Sight seeing was also banned. So, rather obviously, the use of automobiles was fairly curtailed during the Second World War.
So, where as cars and trucks had brought mobility to all sorts of folks between the wars in a brand new way, rationing cut back on it, including for hunters, during the war.
Which doesn't mean that you couldn't go out, but it did mean that you had to save your gasoline ration if you were going far and generally plan wisely.
Ammunition was also hard to come by during the war.
It wasn't due to rationing, but something else that was simply a common fact of life during World War Two. Industry turned to fulfilling contracts for the war effort and stopped making things for civilians consumption.
Indeed, I've hit on this a bit before in a different fashion, that being how technology advanced considerably between the wars but that the Great Depression followed by the Second World War kept that technology, more specifically domestic technology, from getting to a lot of homes. Automobiles, in spite of the Depression, where the exception really. While I haven't dealt with it specifically, the material demands of the Second World War were so vast that industries simply could not make things for the service and the civilian market.
Some whole classes of products, such as automobiles, simply stopped being available for civilians. Ammunition was like that. With the services consuming vast quantities of small arms ammunition, ammunition for civilians became very hard to come by. People who might expect to get by with a box of shotgun shells for a day's hunt and to often make due with half of that. Brass cases were substituted for steel before that was common in the U.S., which was a problem for reloaders.
So, in short, the need and desire was likely there, but getting components were more difficult. And being able to get out was as well, which impacted a person to a greater or lesser extent depending where they were.
And, as previously noted, game populations are considerably higher today than they were then.
New Zealanders entered the Tunisian city of Gabès.
Hitler rejected the recommendations of the German Army to place V-2 rockets on mobile launchers and opted instead for them to have permanent launching installations at Peenemünde.
Life issued a special issue on the USSR.
Nevada joined those states, such as Wyoming, which would no longer recognize Common Law Marriage.
Chapter 122 - Marriage
NRS 122.010 - What constitutes marriage; no common-law marriages after March 29, 1943.
1. Marriage, so far as its validity in law is concerned, is a civil contract, to which the consent of the parties capable in law of contracting is essential. Consent alone will not constitute marriage; it must be followed by solemnization as authorized and provided by this chapter.
2. The provisions of subsection 1 requiring solemnization shall not invalidate any marriage contract in effect prior to March 29, 1943, to which the consent only of the parties capable in law of contracting the contract was essential.
John Major, British Prime Minister from 1990 to 1997, was born, as was English comedian Eric Idle.
And that statement was true once again for 2022, but for different reasons, a lot of which had nothing much to do with the hunting season itself.
That's because 2022 has been the year of the field of Medicine, or age, or perhaps lifestyle, or whatever, catching up with me.
Self portrait, and a bad one, turkey hunting. I was wearing a coat under this coat, and frankly I don't look like I was feeling particularly well when this photo was taken.
In the Spring I wasn't feeling well, which after much delay and finally responding to a demand from Long Suffering Spouse, caused me to go into the doctor's office, which lead in turn to a prescription for some medicine. I'll spare you the details, but like most medicines and me, I didn't really respond terribly well to them physically. They did their job, but they also made me a bit ill, and made me ill just in time for Spring Turkey Season. I hunted turkeys, as I always do, and I did see some, but I never got up on them (I tend to stalk them, rather than lure them in). I did get a turkey call, which I'd never had before, but that failed to bring any in.
A couple of weeks later, by which times things had warmed up enough to wear my Park Service dress campaign hat, the replacement for my long serving but now lost M1911 campaign hat. I miss the old hat.
I also had the joy, and I won't detail it, of being pretty sick while hunting. Something I rarely have experienced.
It was fun anyhow, but not something for a subsistence hunter to write home about.
That takes us to fishing season, and here too, for one reason or another, I just didn't get out over the summer as much as usual. Indeed, "didn't get out as much as usual" was the theme of the year.
I fished the river several times, and one of the mountain streams I fish. I attempted to take my daughter and her boyfriend down a significant local canyon, where I'm sure there are big fish, but we failed at that. I hadn't scouted the route, and ours was pretty impassable.
I did try something I have not for several years, however, which was fishing from a kayak.
The doctor's visit mentioned earlier lead to a colonoscopy, which I wasn't too quick to get set up. That ended up getting scheduled for early Fall. And that lead to a major surgery in October.
The North American Retriever getting a cool drink from a mountain stream while blue grouse hunting.
Prior to that, I got out for blue grouse, but failed to see a single one. I never made it out sage chicken hunting. I didn't draw antelope, but my son did, and I went out with him. None of us drew limited deer, but my daughter and I went out opening morning and nearly got a couple of really good deer in a general deer area until some fool blasted right by us in a truck, scaring them off. We went back out a couple of weeks later and my son got a nice deer in a very distant area. So at least that was a partial success.
I went out for antelope with my son, and he was successful.
I drew an elk tag, but I only got out twice, once before surgery, and once after.
Surgery put me out of action in a major way for well over a month. When I got back on my feet, only waterfowl was open.
It's been a pretty good waterfowl season, however. The weather has been right for it (lousy) and lots of waterfowl have been in the area. I've shot more geese this year than I ever have before.
I thought about closing this entry out with a quote from Kristin Lavransdottir about Lavran, when he last rode away, or the video clip from No Country For Old Men at the ending with the sheriff protagonist is recalling his father. Instead, I'm just going to note that I still don't really feel up to speed, but I'm putting in for everything.
The bill that may legalize corner cross, SF56, passed:
ORIGINAL SENATE
FILE NO. SF0056
ENROLLED ACT NO. 60, SENATE
SIXTY-SEVENTH LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WYOMING
2023 GENERAL SESSION
AN ACT relating to game and fish; expanding the prohibition for entering private property without permission for hunting purposes to also prohibit traveling through the private property; and providing for an effective date.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:
Section 1. W.S. 23‑3‑305(b) is amended to read:
23‑3‑305. Hunting from highway; entering or traveling through private property without permission; penalty; hunting at night without permission prohibited.
(b) No person shall enter upon, travel through or return across the private property of any person to take wildlife, hunt, fish, collect antlers or horns, or trap without the permission of the owner or person in charge of the property. Violation of this subsection constitutes a low misdemeanor punishable as provided in W.S. 23‑6‑202(a)(v). For purposes of this subsection "travel through or return across" requires physically touching or driving on the surface of the private property.
Section 2. This act is effective July 1, 2023.
Mountain lion chasing season was established, which I think was a poor idea.
House Bill 147 has passed, banning improper posting of public lands in an effort to deter hunters.
ENROLLED ACT NO. 18, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
SIXTY-SEVENTH LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WYOMING
2023 GENERAL SESSION
AN ACT relating to game and fish; amending the crime of interference with lawful taking of wildlife; prohibiting acts that restrict access to or use of state or federal land as specified; providing an exception; specifying applicability; and providing for effective dates.
Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Wyoming:
Section 1. W.S. 23‑3‑405(a) by creating a new paragraph (iii) and (g) by creating a new paragraph (iii) is amended to read:
23‑3‑405. Interference with lawful taking of wildlife prohibited; penalties; damages; injunction.
(a) No person shall with the intent to prevent or hinder the lawful taking of any wildlife:
(iii) Knowingly and without authorization post or maintain in place signs that restrict access to or use of state or federal land on which the lawful taking of or the process of lawfully taking any wildlife is permitted. For purposes of this subsection, "knowingly" means the person has received prior notice from a peace officer that the sign is located on state or federal land.
(g) This section shall:
(iii) Not interfere with any landowner's right to prevent trespass on the landowner's private property.
By we, I mean my son, his girlfriend, and the dog. We loaded up in the Dodge D3500, and we went waterfowl hunting
The highways were all closed, so I got there by going through a small farm belt here, hitting a rural road, and taking it to the river, the back way. We were the only vehicles on it.
Yes, this can be argued, and probably correctly driving out in a blizzard was not smart. But people wanted to go, and it looked like good waterfowl hunting weather, which in fact it was.
Out on the river, in fact, the weather wasn't nearly as bad as it was in town. It snowed lightly off and on, but it wasn't a blizzard. At some point, it had been, as the snow was quite deep.
And we had the river all to ourselves.
And has we headed back into town, the snowstorm cranked up again.
And yes, there were some spots on the road that were really bad. Only the fact that I was driving a very heavy, and powerful, diesel 4x4 allowed us to get there. Frankly, a 1/2 ton gasser probably wouldn't have. And yes, you ought to stay off the road in weather like that.
We were going to do this on Sunday, New Year's Day, but the blizzard made that impossible in town. It was also rendered impossible by the fact that the batteries on the diesel had given out the week prior, and I'd only learned that on Saturday when I was heading out, in advance of the storm, to hunt geese near Torrington. I changed, the batteries, in the blizzard, on Sunday after Mass, but only after nearly wrecking my very lightweight Jeep going to get the batteries.
The point.
Well, as follows.
I have a new neighbor across the street that I spoke to, two snowstorms ago. He's from Maryland and asked about the snow. I told him that it snowed all the way through April, as it does.
He apparently didn't believe me, as his next door neighbor, who was out while I was snow blowing when I got home yesterday, was stating that the same neighbor had asked him, that day, about the snow. He got the same information.
My prediction is that the new neighbor will leave.
Late last night, I got a text from a coworker. Should we close the office, today?
In fairness, the county has closed, and the school districts.
This is of interest as it's become, all of a sudden, a really common event. A couple of snowstorms ago, all of a sudden a coworker was asking if we should send people home early. It caught me completely off guard. It was very cold, and slightly snowy, but why would we do that? I vetoed it as I had stuff I had to go out, but this came after another similar event. Light snow, and we're sending people home. And we're not the only ones.
This is just an observation, really. Maybe it's a good thing that these events are taken more into consideration than they used to be. Or maybe we're really unprepared for them. Probably both. I'm glad they close the highways more than they used to, as they used to leave them open in horrible conditions. But I don't quite know what to make of the situation where people choose to move outside of town on a windblown flat, and then can't make it to work. It makes sense to me to close when weather is genuinely bad, but for regular in town operations, closing everything as a few folks might have trouble getting there, who should be given consideration for that, seems odd.
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Fr. Joseph Krupp.
Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.
I didn't take much time off last year. And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.
That's not really good.
I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself. And I do this every year.
Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.
All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%. You become less efficient, for one thing. And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.
Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way. We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch. That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality. It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.
This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing. I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there. Everyone was doing the same thing. I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years. Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.
Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead. Others have moved on long ago. New faces have come, of course.
Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off. If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.
This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off. We took, of course, Boxing Day off.
Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off. With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have. I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.
What was I thinking?
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off. And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much. On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon. I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.
On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting. Conditiond were great.
I should have had my limit of geese and ducks, but I shot like crap. It'll be part of an upcoming post, maybe, but my hunting season has been messed up due to surgery.
I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.
Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet. That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system. You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did. It's been great.
This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week. Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.
It turned out great. I should have taken a picture of the finished bird, but I didn't. Maybe one of the top two roasted geese I've ever had.
Anyhow, I should have taken this whole week off, but didn't. I may take some time later this week, however.
The property owner, let's not pretend he's a rancher as that would imply that he makes his money from chiefly from agriculture, who owns the Elk Mountain Ranch has claimed that allowing corner crossing would devalue the property by $3,100,000 to $7,000,000, or so newspaper reports hold. The press further reports that it was shown this information by a "confidential" source.
More likely his legal representation claimed that.
Okay, let's break this down.
This is the story, as we'll recall, of three out-of-state hunters who hunted on the Elk Mountain Ranch's leased public lands, with Elk Mountain Ranch owned by Iron Bar Holdings, and ended up being tried for trespassing in Carbon County. According to the Wyoming Secretary of State's website, Iron Bar Holdings is a North Carolina limited liability company registered to do business in Wyoming.
North Carolina?
Well, yes, that's where Fred Eshelman lives.
Eshelman is a pharmacist by training who has done very well, economically, in that field. So well that North Carolina's school of pharmacy, which he donates to, has named that school after him. His bio appears on their site:
Fred Eshelman, PharmD
Fred Eshelman is the founder of Eshelman Ventures LLC, an investment company primarily interested in private health-care companies. Previously he founded and served as CEO and executive chairman of Pharmaceutical Product Development (PPDI, NASDAQ) prior to the sale of the company to private equity interests.
After PPD he served as the founding chairman and largest shareholder of Furiex Pharmaceuticals (FURX, NASDAQ), a company which licensed and rapidly developed new medicines. Furiex was sold to Forest Labs/Actavis in July, 2014.
His career has also included positions as senior vice president (development) and board member of the former Glaxo, Inc., as well as various management positions with Beecham Laboratories and Boehringer Mannheim Pharmaceuticals.
Eshelman has served on the executive committee of the Medical Foundation of North Carolina, was on the board of trustees for UNC-W and in 2011 was appointed by the NC General Assembly to serve on the Board of Governors for the state’s multicampus university system as well as the NC Biotechnology Center. In addition, he chairs the board of visitors for the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the top pharmacy programs in the United States. In May 2008 the School was named for Eshelman in recognition of his many contributions to the school and the profession.
Eshelman has received many awards including the Davie and Distinguished Service Awards from UNC and Outstanding Alumnus from both the UNC and University of Cincinnati schools of pharmacy, as well as the N.C. Entrepreneur Hall of Fame Award. He earned a B.S. in pharmacy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, received his Doctor of Pharmacy from the University of Cincinnati, and completed a residency at Cincinnati General Hospital. He is a graduate of the Owner/President Management Program at Harvard Business School.
Indeed, the fact that Eshelman is very wealthy apparently was referenced by one of his employees in the initial confrontation with the Missouri hunters, which isn't a very wise thing to do as it looks bad. Indeed, it looks bad right away, and then again in court.
So, Iron Bar Holdings is Fred Eshelman, very wealthy pharmaceutical personality.
The Missouri hunters, by all accounts, went to great pains to avoid touching the ground on Elk Mountain. They brought ladders of some sort to step over the corners. They were detected by the ranch employees who called the authorities, who frankly weren't really sure what to do, and they declined to issue citations. Ultimately, this matter was somehow prosecuted in Carbon County, where the jury found there was no trespass.
During this time frame, a civil lawsuit was brought in the state's Second Judicial District. For reasons that aren't clear to me, as I wouldn't have filed it, the Missouri hunters had the case removed to Federal Court, no doubt on jurisdictional grounds. Also for reasons that aren't clear to me, as I would have thought Iron Bar would have preferred the case to be in Federal Court, Iron Bar sought to have that reversed, unsuccessfully, claiming the Federal Court lacked jurisdiction, a claim that seem pretty stretched given the pretty obvious diversity jurisdiction here.
I wonder if both sides regret their decisions now, given the results of the Carbon County jury trial. I have to think if the 2nd Judicial District in Rawlins had a jury that said "no trespass" once, they'd have that happen again.
Anyhow, it's in Federal Court. The docket sheet for the case reads as follows:
U.S. District Court District of Wyoming (Cheyenne) CIVIL DOCKET FOR CASE #: 2:22-cv-00067-SWS
Iron Bar Holdings LLC v. Cape et al Assigned to: Honorable Scott W Skavdahl Referred to: Honorable Kelly H Rankin
Case in other court:
Second Judicial District - Carbon County, Wyoming, Civil Act. No. 22-00034
Cause: 28:1441 Petition for Removal
Date Filed: 03/22/2022 Jury Demand: Both Nature of Suit: 890 Other Statutory Actions Jurisdiction: Federal Question
Plaintiff
Iron Bar Holdings LLC a North Carolina limited liability company registered to do business in Wyoming
represented by
M Gregory Weisz PENCE & MACMILLAN LLC 1720 Carey Avenue, Suite 600 PO Box 765 Cheyenne, WY 82003 307/638-0386 Fax: 307/634-0336 Email: gweisz@penceandmac.com LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Eric B Hanson KEKER, VAN NEST & PETERS 633 Battery St. San Francisco, CA 94111 415-676-2349 Email: ehanson@keker.com TERMINATED: 08/31/2022 LEAD ATTORNEY PRO HAC VICE
Patrick Lewallen CHAPMAN VALDEZ & LANSING 125 West 2nd Street PO Box 2710 Casper, WY 82601 307/237-1983 Email: plewallen@bslo.com TERMINATED: 08/31/2022 LEAD ATTORNEY
Trevor James Schenk CHAPMAN VALDEZ & LANSING 125 W. 2nd Street PO Box 2710 Casper, WY 82602 307-259-3797 Email: tschenk@bslo.com TERMINATED: 08/31/2022 LEAD ATTORNEY
V.
Defendant
Bradley H Cape
represented by
Ryan A Semerad THE FULLER LAW FIRM 242 South Grant Street Casper, WY 82609 307-265-3455 Fax: 307-265-2859 Email: semerad@thefullerlawyers.com ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Defendant
Zachary M Smith
represented by
Ryan A Semerad (See above for address) ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Defendant
Phillip G Yeomans
represented by
Ryan A Semerad (See above for address) ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Defendant
John W Slowensky
represented by
Ryan A Semerad (See above for address) ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Amicus
Wyoming Stockgrowers Association
represented by
Karen J Budd-Falen BUDD-FALEN LAW OFFICES 300 East 18th Street P O Box 346 Cheyenne, WY 82003 307/632-5105 Fax: 307/637-3891 Email: karen@buddfalen.com LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
Amicus
Wyoming Wool Growers Association
represented by
Karen J Budd-Falen (See above for address) LEAD ATTORNEY ATTORNEY TO BE NOTICED
What does this tell us?
Well, not much, really, other than that Back Country Hunters & Anglers tried to intervene in the action, no doubt in support of the Missouri hunters, but weren't allowed in. It also tells us that the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association and the Wyoming Wool Growers Association (which at one time were headed for a merger, but which must not have completed that process) are going to be allowed to file "friend of the court" briefs in this matter. Those briefs will no doubt be on the side of Iron Bar.1
Which presents our first historical observation.
The Wyoming Stockgrowers Association was instrumental in bringing about the Johnson County War and the assassination campaign that was associated with it. I'm not saying that they organized it, but they were pretty close to the large, and often foreign owned, cattleman part of the extra judicial war against the small ranchers of Natrona and Johnson Counties of the 1890s.
I'm also not saying that they're somehow involved in such efforts today.
I'm am noting that history rhymes, if not repeats, as they say.
So what did Iron Bar's lawsuit claim? Well, see for yourself:
In litigation, under a rule called FRCP 26, parties are required to disclose certain information, including their calculation of damages. Piecing the news stories together, and reading between the lines, what this probably means is that somehow a reporter got access to a FRCP "self executing" disclosure.
Normally, these aren't public, but they aren't secret either. I obviously don't know who this cat got out of the bag, but it was riding around with its head and front feet out of the bag anyhow, and at some point it was going to get out.
Further, what this really means is that Iron Bar is asserting that if corner crossing is allowed, it'll devalue the value of the property as he can't lock up the Federal domain.
Well, hopefully that's exactly what the court rules. I.e., you can cross the corners.
Before we go on, let's note that the argument here is deeply flawed. What's apparently being stated by the plaintiff is that if the court rules that corner crossing isn't illegal, the value of the land drops, as he can't lock people out and charge people for access.
But if it's illegal, he can't do that, and never could. Being wrong about the law doesn't entitle you to reimbursement.
You can't claim that you'll lose money as something is illegal. That's like arguing if I can't personally close the road and charge people tolls for using it, even though it isn't mine, I'll lose money. I had no right to do that in the first place. It doesn't matter if I thought I could.
On the other hand, if he's right, and he can close the corners, it's not like he's arguing that the value of crossing the corner is $3.1M to $7M.
You only get the actual reasonable trespassing fee, which traditionally has been the damage to the land.
Either way you look at it, the damages are pretty low.
This, by the way, is why I didn't vote for Rob Hendry, the ranching Natrona County Commissioner, in the last election.
A lot of other people didn't too, so he's on his way out, but my reason is probably unique. Some goons of his stopped my son and I and tossed us off public land, or more accuratley deterred us from going where we were going, claiming that if we trespassed there'd be a $10,000 fine.
That's bullshit.
Anyhow, we don't know what will come out of this litigation, and the results are far from guaranteed, but this gets into the topic of the Homestead Acts, the Taylor Grazing Act, and frankly Distributism and Localism.
What Iron Bar is doing here, shouldn't be allowed to do is to lock up public land that it doesn't own. That is what the hunters were accessing. How does that devalue the land? As noted, if there is no right, it doesn't. If the landowner does have that right, it doesn't devalue anything. The damages claimed here are out of whack.
Moreover, if the purpose of the original homestead acts and the Taylor Grazing Act are kept in mind, we shouldn't even be having this conversation.
The original homestead acts, which is likely how this ranch was started at some point, were intended to induce agriculturalists into lands that were regarded as poor prospects. The United States at that time, and indeed American culture at that time, regarded development as a good thing and had the concept that development only occurred where agriculture first entered. The very first homestead act was designed for farmers, and farmers alone, and had that express goal. As homesteaders moved into the West, however, livestock grazing became the common agricultural pursuit and the homestead act were modified to accommodate that. By this point, a different sort of development, much less intense than that East of the Mississippi was envisioned, which was cattle centric.
But the law always allowed for other uses of land. Miners actually had the superior use, their use being so extensive that they could come on land where the agriculturalist owned the surface, and the Federal Government the subsurface, and mine it anyway.
And on the Federal lands, what the agricultural user got was the right to use it, and nothing else whatsoever.
You could also buy Federal lands, of course, and you could simply run cattle on the public domain, free of charge until 1934. That fact came to be hugely significant and led directly to the Johnson County War. By that time a fairly formal, and extralegal, system of controlling the public lands had developed which favored large landowners, and which was administered by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association. Indeed, the WSGA did it partially under color of law.
And, as we know, it ultimately came to war, if private war. The large cattlemen felt the small ones were all rustler and thieves, and more than that, they were trespassing on an implied right of the large interests to control the land, title or not. The small cattlemen, on the other hand, were largely compliant with the law, had a right to homestead, and were trying just to get by.
The small cattlemen won the Johnson County War on the field, but weren't able to put the offenders behind bars, for reasons we'll deal with elsewhere. Their defense of their ground, however, did put an end to the threat of the large cattlemen snuffing out homesteading. It didn't completely end the violence, however, which went on, including in evolved forms with evolved causes, into the 20th Century. In southwestern Wyoming it effectively came to an end with the hanging of Tom Horn for the crime of killing Willie Nickell, and in central Wyoming it came to an end in 1909 with the prosecution of the killers of the Spring Creek Raid.
But some portions of the old contest remain, with all the questions that existed in some form still remaining. Some of them are existential.
To note a few, to what extent are the uberwealthy entitled to use ground at all, when their vast resources mean that the ranching aspect of ranch land is a mere incidental to their ownership?
To what extent is any human being entitled to keep others off land they aren't directly using at the time, or aren't using in a means that's contrary to the non owning entrants use?
Is it just that land that was acquired by a government agricultural land distribution program, a sort of social welfare for agriculturalist, is now owned by people who are not in that category in some fashion?
Isn't hunting more elemental than anything else, with accordingly superior rights in every existential and environmental fashion.
If you aren't touching the ground, are you really trespassing?
I'll note that I'm not saying that Fred Eschelman is a bad person. According to what little I've read on him, he's donated major conservation easements on lands he's held in Wyoming, which is a very good thing to do. Some of his statements make him appear to be a conservationist of the Nature Conservancy type. An argument can be made that, in 2022, but for people like Eschelman, large blocks of land would bet all chopped up.
An argument can also be made, however, that agricultural land ought not to be owned by people who do not have some sort of direct role, participation, or interest in agriculture, or at least in the community, which at Eschelman's economic level is pretty difficult to do. Having vast, vast amounts of money, more than the regular rich, so to speak, puts a person in a category all of its own and it's a problematic one. The fact that levels of wealth like that are allowed to even occur suggest a certain deficiency in our economy. And that deficiency allows a person to view people like the Missouri hunters differently than a regular rancher can, or even a regular wealthy local landowner can.
I'm also not saying that rich people shouldn't own land either. But there is the question of what is "rich", and what is super rich. It's one thing making money in your community and then entering agriculture, a story that's fairly common and has been for a long time. It's another making money far, far away, and then coming into the country you are not from, are not part of, and are not of, and buying that land up.
Indeed, an argument could be made that's a sort of colonialism.
I.e, if I had lots of money (I don't) and bought ranchland in my home state, well, I'm from there and have to live there and people can and will give me an earful at the gas station or cafe, or whatever. But if I made piles of money and then bought up farm ground in North Carolina, and hired people to run it for me, and stopped in from time to time, I wouldn't really have any signficant connection with the community where my ground was at all. Indeed, I don't know what people in North Carolina think, and by and large, on most days, I don't care all that much about it either. They aren't going to give me an earful at the gas station.
No wonder, therefore, the jury reacted the way it did in Carbon County. That jury didn't want to be told that they had to bow to somebody in North Carolina.
Footnotes:
1. This is a classic case of finding yourself in a fight in a time and place not of your choosing. This legal issue has been around for years, and has come up at least once before, but now its back in a major way, with the standard bearor for the agricultural organizations being an out of stater. The Stockgrowers and the Woolgrowers have to enter the contest or feel comfortable with no voice at all, but they sure wouldn't have wanted it to come up this way.
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