What can be described of the Livestock Saboteur, without identifying him to authorities, is that he has a high school education, dresses shabbily, lives in squalor, is widely read and highly intelligent but also a vulgarian. He works odd jobs to survive, spends half the year in a tent, and loves the public lands of the West, those last wild places in a domesticated nation.
After years of correspondence, I’d gained his trust to the point that he let me tag along with him for three days last January, tent-camping in terrific cold in his stomping ground: the remote woodlands, canyons, and mesas of a national forest in Arizona where heavy grazing by cattle has come at a devastating ecological cost. I wanted to see if direct action by a rogue in the woods could amount to something meaningful. We were to take a look at places he’d already struck, but mostly his intention was to reconnoiter future targets.
It was four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration when we set out in his battered old vehicle, and he spent much of that first day shouting at me about our new president, whom he referred to as Diaper Don. “This is a grown man who shits himself. Trump wears diapers, man. Incontinence. All the drugs he did in the eighties. Fucked him up,” he told me. “But these Christian cowboys around here wanna suck his cock. He’s a savior. Diaper Don has got superpowers. He and Elon are gonna open up grazing on Mars. I hate that bastard so much I’m gonna get me a Trump mask and fuck a cow’s decapitated head with it on and put that shit on YouTube. I got plans! Here are some cows.” We were passing a small herd in a vast grassland bordered by distant sawtooth mountains toward which we were headed. “You bring your Trump mask?” I had not. “I tried to shoot a cow here not long ago with a bow. But it was a piece of shit. Got it for eighty bucks. The arrow was supposed to go 185 feet per second, but it bounced right off the cow’s hide at thirty feet.”
The Saboteur pondered things a moment. “I tell you, Republican cowboys will rub the shit from Trump’s diaper on their faces before they’d ever vote Democrat. That’s how dedicated these dumb motherfuckers are. You know that, right?” And so on. It was a long day.
Understand that the Saboteur, who put himself at considerable risk doing so, talked with me about cattle ranching’s ruination of Western public lands only because I had published a book on the subject titled This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West. He liked the book so much that it made him want to commit more acts of sabotage. It was his belief that I was one of the few people on Earth who hated livestock grazing as much as he.
Grazing is the most widespread single use of the Western public domain, occurring on 270 million acres of national forest and Bureau of Land Management lands—about 420,000 square miles, an area equivalent to almost three Californias. For more than 150 years, since the conquest of the last indigenous recalcitrants in the 1870s, the grazing regime in the West has been a slow-moving environmental catastrophe, and there’s no sign of let-up. Conservation biologists have called grazing the “most insidious and pervasive threat” to biodiversity on rangelands and the “major factor negatively affecting wildlife in the eleven western states.” A growing number of ecologists expert in the biomes of the western United States say that livestock grazing is the primary cause of species extinction, topsoil loss, and desertification across the region.
“A monkeywrencher caught in the act by stockmen may well wish he or she had never been born.”
For the Saboteur, these grim facts were inextricably linked to the capture by livestock interests of the government agencies that are supposed to act as a regulatory brake on ecological destruction. One of his milder pastimes, he alleged, was to cut down rancher’s signposts. (For the record, he committed no illegal acts in my presence.) Destroying signs does little economic damage. But it’s powerful as an act of psychological warfare. “My taking down their little monuments to themselves is just to remind these ranchers that they’re way too comfortable, gods of the public domain, their shitty angels the cows. The county sheriff practically works for them. The Forest Service certainly works for them. The Bureau of Land Management works for them. U.S. Fish and Wildlife kowtows to them. USDA and Wildlife Services are their hired killers, taking out predators like the wolf to keep ranchers happy. They got everyone at their beck and call. Think they own this land. But this is public, man! It’s ours, not fuckin’ theirs.”
It’s work, physically, to monkeywrench livestock operations in the arid Southwest—destroying property is laborious—and this has taken a toll on the Saboteur. He lives part of the year in grime in a drafty shack, stricken with a chronic cough, likely from the smoke of stoking campfires and inhabiting cabins warmed with wood stoves that leak. He coughed so badly that at one point in our time together I rushed to his side thinking he was dying. He told me that on an average night he awoke something like forty times thinking he was being suffocated. One cause of this condition, I believe, was his tremendous anxiety over what he was doing.
’Til the Cows Come Home
In his classic 1985 book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, the late Dave Foreman, founder of EarthFirst! and a vocal advocate of direct action and sabotage, lists some of the preferred ways to make trouble for profiteering exploiters of the natural world. Foreman’s radical vision of ecological defense involved stopping everything from ranching, logging, and mining to oil and gas drilling, roadbuilding, construction of powerlines and dams, off-road vehicle use, ski area development, and “cancerous” suburban sprawl, all of which he characterized as “the gears of the machine that is destroying natural diversity.” Donald Trump and his corporate-prostitute simpleton cadres would likely regard Foreman, who died in 2022, as a demonic creature, unrecognizable and irredeemable.
Foreman had a specific set of actions for monkeying with what he called the “welfare rancher,” who runs cattle on the public domain and receives enormous public largesse to pillage the landscape. Top of the list of actions, verbatim, from his book:
1. Moving salt blocks
2. Damaging water developments
3. Cutting fences
4. Spiking roads
5. Destroying ranching equipment and machinery
These acts were to be executed with great caution. “Security must be highly stressed for any anti-grazing activity,” Foreman wrote in Ecodefense. “Welfare ranchers in the West . . . generally control the politics of rural areas, most counties, and many states. Legal penalties are severe and date from the old days of the cattle/sheep wars and widespread rustling. A monkeywrencher caught in the act by stockmen may well wish he or she had never been born. Be careful. Damn careful!”
The Livestock Saboteur, in my view, took way too many risks. For example, he claimed he once cut out an entire gate and part of a fence and threw it in the back of a pickup truck he had borrowed for the occasion. He intended to haul it two or three miles and dump the load somewhere off in the woods where nobody would find it. “But then I thought there as I’m driving, I don’t want no Forest Service ranger friend of the rancher to see me with that shit in my pickup. ‘Oh, Mr. Rancher, I ain’t sucked your cock enough lately, but I did see your fence goin’ off thataway.’ I gotta be more careful, it’s true. They’ll fuck me up if I get caught. I don’t like to think about it too much.”
The reason for attacking fences and gates is the obvious one: cows will wander out of their assigned grazing allotment areas, forcing the ranchers to spend time and money to chase down their errant property across many miles of difficult terrain. The idea is to spread chaos and disorder that negatively affects their bottom lines, perhaps to drive them out of business altogether. If every hiker on public lands left fences open when crossing a cattle allotment, for example, it would do a lot to hamper stockmen. “Fences are what tamed the West for the livestock barons,” said Foreman, noting that barriers arbitrarily laid across open landscapes impede the movement of elk, pronghorn, mule deer, sage grouse, and many other species of native wildlife. Fence-breaking, in other words, can be a step toward rewilding.
The Saboteur made no mention of taking out salt licks, which are used across public lands as a mineral supplement for cows. Getting rid of a salt lick makes life harder for the animals—lousier nutrition means more health risks—and keeps the cows from gathering at the block and trampling the area around it. Otherwise, however, the Saboteur tried to follow Foreman’s playbook. In addition to cutting fences and damaging gates, he described attacking water troughs wherever he went, cutting holes in them with a reciprocating saw called the Sawzall. (He loved talking about the various types of Sawzall, the speed of their strokes per minute, the thickness of the metal and wood to be sliced, the capacity of the batteries to operate in inclement weather and foul conditions, etc.)
Foreman contended that attacking roads in the national forest system was also good and necessary. “Today’s welfare rancher,” he wrote in Ecodefense, “is soft and prefers a pickup truck to a horse. Take away his wheels and you take away his access to the range.” The Saboteur, by contrast, avowed that he would not dare attack a road. “That’s infrastructure,” he said. “Serious time if you’re caught.”
On our first day of reconnoiter, we passed a culvert on a winding dirt road in a mountain range and stopped to inspect the site. It was salutary to think about stuffing the culvert with rocks, brush, logs, and whatever else you might cram in it. Blocking the culvert increases the likelihood of a blowout during the next flood, as the rushing water finds no passage and instead crashes onto the road and tears it away. And once you take out that road, you’re not only taking away rancher access, you’re offering a reprieve to those wild creatures for whom a road of any kind is the bringer of death.
This is important to consider for those of us who think of roads as the common right of the footloose and free machine-borne carbon-burner. The very presence of a road, paved or unpaved, alters in minutely deranging fashion the environment around it. Roads create access corridors for invasive and parasitic species, including human industry. Where there are no roads, there can be no logging, no mining, no drilling, and, of course, no welfare ranching. Roads scare off cougars, wolves, and bears. Some animal species are so skittish they will not ever cross a road.
Among all the factors that contribute to habitat fragmentation—the leading threat to biodiversity in the American West—roads are at the top of the list. Reed Noss, one of the premier conservation biologists in the United States, writes that the cumulative effect of roads blazed in North America into previously unroaded ecosystems is “nothing short of catastrophic.” For the sake of wild things, Noss recommends that most existing roads on public lands “should be closed and obliterated. . . . The more inaccessible we can keep our remaining wild areas,” he writes, “the safer and healthier these areas will be.”
But, as I said, the Livestock Saboteur refused to hit roads. As for Foreman’s other suggested line of attack, targeting the machinery of not only ranching but the entire industrial apparatus for the taming of wildlands, the Saboteur was also cautious. Foreman urged monkeywrenchers to look for “the most pervasive tools of land rape.” His list of targets includes bulldozers, frontloaders, articulated loaders, road graders, wheeled tractors, trackhoes, backhoes, scrapers, hydraulic excavators, and power shovels. My edition of Ecodefense features a helpful page showing the various profiles of mechanized land rapers, akin to the warship silhouettes used by navies to identify the enemy.
In his recounting, the worst thing the Saboteur had done to machines, ranchers’ or otherwise, was to drill holes in the sidewalls of the tires of the trailers that the stockmen use for hauling water. There was modest satisfaction in doing this, because when you drill the sidewalls, the tire can never be fixed. It is a total loss.
Stand Next to Your Fire
In the late afternoon of our first day together, we arrived in the high country, above eight thousand feet of elevation, into a forest of towering ponderosa pines that swayed in the wind like the masts of ships in a gentle sea. The Saboteur typically spent an hour gathering wood for a fire before making camp. This being January in the high country, it was already below freezing by 5 p.m., and once the sun dropped behind the rims of the mountains and the dusklight shadows fell, the temperature plummeted. So we piled onto the fire pine and juniper and oak, and the flames roared and warmed us. Over it we cooked ground elk the Saboteur had hunted, sautéeing the bloody meat in one of his disgusting blackened pots that he never washed. He recalled an author he’d read recently—he boasted of reading a hundred books a year—who said that the hypnosis of a lively fire under an open sky produces brainwaves of great happiness in Homo sapiens. We stared at the flames in silence with our brains delighting.
“You know,” he said after a long while, “I really am gonna fuck that cow’s head in a Trump mask. Where do you think I can get me a mask?”
“Any old costume store, I guess. But there might be video surveillance in the store, or outside, and therefore a recording of you buying the thing. So if you publish the video on YouTube with that particular mask, might be traceable and all that.”
“You think there’s a traceable supply of Trump masks? Sonofabitch. The surveillance state. Can’t order it on Amazon, right?”
“No, even worse.”
“Shit. Whyn’t you buy me one back in New York?”
I told him I’d think about it.
“What do y’all think of Von Shitzinpantz there in New York?”
“Oh, we hate him. He’s the classic real estate parasite and con man who’s always fucking you on your rent and cheating you.”
“Hm,” said the Saboteur.
We stared at the dancing flames, at last ceasing our chatter, the night growing colder and colder. A breeze mounted in the cathedral heights of the ponderosas, which made that most ancient sound in the world, the sighing of the wind as it filters through pine needles, akin to the distant hush of the sea as Odysseus once heard it. The temperature dropped to 5 degrees that night, and the Saboteur and I awoke in our tents with ice in our beards, ice on the walls of the tents like a glittering magical powder, a fairy dust, and our fire cold as stone.
Riparian Repair
On our second day, we were looking for a riparian area where the cows had been removed. A happy riparian, as the Saboteur put it. A riparian, for those who don’t know, is the place where water runs. In the arid West, it is a holy place, especially for the ecologist but also for the animist, the shaman, the believer in the eternal soul in the life of plants and animals. To see a happy riparian, said the Saboteur, was profoundly important. On rare occasions, through the herculean efforts of environmental NGOs pressuring the corrupted land management agencies, cattle have been evicted from certain riparian areas, such as the one in which we now found ourselves, snug between the walls of a canyon under a canopy of winter-bare oaks and cottonwoods.
The erosion produced by overgrazing since the middle of the nineteenth century has been compared to a geological event.
This is a beautiful thing; for cows in the arid lands are a nightmare to springs, creeks, running water, and all the life that depends on and thrives in the riparian corridor. (In the arid lands, the riparian zones provide habitat for as much as 80 percent of wildlife.) When cattle congregate by streams, they crush the banks, destroying with their hungry mouths and pounding hooves the vegetation that holds the banks together. The streams widen and become shallow, and shallow streams tend to heat up faster, which harms fish and other aquatic creatures. Elsewhere in the riparian, there is widespread soil compaction from the heavily congregating cows, which worsens drought, as the compaction results in less water percolating into the soil. With wider streams and flattened soil, you get more rapid runoff, which leads to flash floods that tears the riparian to pieces, sending the precious soil of the West downstream to the ocean.
The erosion produced by overgrazing since the middle of the nineteenth century has been compared to a geological event. Environmental historian Philip Fradkin observed that “the impact of countless hooves and mouths over the years has done more to alter the type of vegetation and landforms of the West than all the water projects, strip mines, power plants, freeways, and subdivision developments combined.” One study of the Colorado Plateau reported that two centuries of grazing there catalyzed the most severe vegetation changes in the last 5,400 years.
These environmental costs bring few benefits in terms of food, jobs, or tax revenue. Less than 2 percent of U.S. beef derives from Western public lands. Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of every 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income. According to the Department of the Interior, elimination of all public land grazing would result in the loss of an estimated 0.1 percent of the West’s employment, and, for those concerned about their steaks and burgers, it would have almost no effect on beef availability or prices.
While they contribute little to society, welfare ranchers on public lands demand a lot in the form of subsidies whose scope is a testament to their outsize power and influence. It’s estimated the state and federal largesse to the industry amounts to between $500 million and $1 billion a year, all of it funded generously by the taxpayer. This includes below-market grazing fees for cows and sheep, fence construction, road building and maintenance, cattle guards, forage improvement and seeding programs, poisoning of unwanted vegetation, forest clearing, stream diversions, water projects such as dams, pipelines, aqueducts, stock ponds and troughs, the monitoring of livestock health, and control of predators and other mammalian and avian pests deemed a threat to the industry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture operates a specialized hunting and trapping unit—referred to by the Saboteur as “hired killers”—that slaughters tens of thousands of animals each year to aid public lands stockmen, including coyotes, beavers, and prairie dogs. Ranchers also receive generous federal and state tax write-offs for every cow they graze, along with reduced state property taxes for their private deeded lands. They are additionally “blow-jobbed,” as the Saboteur put it, by the very agencies that are supposed to be preventing their overstocking and overgrazing of public lands. The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are the primary culprits in this charade of regulation, in which it appears the cowboys run the show and the bureaucrats are their puppets.
The industry is thus provided all kinds of preferential treatment and survives on the dole because in the arid conditions of the West, where the climate conspires against cattle production, it cannot do otherwise. “Western cattlemen are nothing more than welfare parasites,” wrote author Edward Abbey, the literary father of the eco-sabotage movement in the United States, who also observed that cattlemen “survive by hiding behind the cheap mythology of the ‘Cowboy’: literally, a boy who looks after cows.” Abbey was hardly alone in coming to this conclusion. Conservative pundit George Will opined that an inner-city mother on public assistance was “the soul of self-reliance compared to a westerner who receives federally subsidized range privileges.”
The industry, naturally, wants ever more privilege. The primary advocacy group of ranchers who exploit the public domain is the Public Lands Council, which is funded and staffed by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a political and cultural giant in the annals of lobbying. Every few years, the Public Lands Council issues a policy document to outline priorities for Congress and the White House. Katie Fite, an ecologist with the nonprofit Wildlands Defense in Boise, calls it the “Welfare Rancher’s demand letter.”
“The Big Hats basically want super-duper extra special status for every welfare ranching permit holder,” she told me in an email, “because if you have herds of cows or sheep you are a Lord.” Among the common demands: the general annihilation of prairie dogs, a keystone species already 98 percent gone throughout the West but which ranchers still consider a pest; the stripping of Endangered Species Act protections for the trifling number of remaining grizzly bears and for “all species of wolves” in the United States; and rollbacks of key provisions of the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental impact assessments of all commercial activities on federal lands, including ranching operations. The Public Lands Council has also sought to amend the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act so that wild horses can be killed because they compete for forage with cows. “They want wild horses in the West pretty much GONE,” Fite wrote me. “The Endangered Species Act rendered meaningless/GONE. They want a free hand to grossly pollute water. They attack just about everything good or positive with public lands and the environment.”
Against this political juggernaut, the Saboteur is but a gnat, buzzing almost in futility. Still, he refuses to cease his efforts. “All it would take is fifty of me to really make a mess of things,” he said. “Fifty of me roaming the West with our Sawzalls. A really good Sawzall does three thousand strokes per minute, motherfucker! Imagine how much shit I can fuck up with that!”
In this stretch of happy riparian, relaxed at our camp, the Saboteur mellowed and stopped his ranting. Now all he could talk about were the trees and the grasses and the flowing of the clear stream with its intact banks. “There’s a certain solace here,” he said. “What it feels like to be emotionally repaired.” Look at those old ponderosas, he said, and those old Emory oaks, the “sacred tree of the Apaches.” Look at the thickness and uprightness of the blue grama grass, winter yellow, dormant, waiting for the return of warmth. Look at how it all comes together in perfection, he said.
Evict the Ungulates
Regardless of how lovely or interesting they are when awake, I dislike people who snore, and this descends into seething hatred on those nights when the snoring keeps me awake. So it was with the Saboteur, who snored like a sick pig and whose tent, pitched but a few feet from mine, acted as a megaphone in my ear. (I read this description to the Saboteur and he exploded in laughter: “That’s right! Sick pig! I’m-a git that tattooed on my neck! Sick pig! I’m a cretinous softie!”)
Well past midnight, with the mercury hovering around 8 degrees, I uprooted tent, sleeping bag, pad, stakes, and all and fled to the other side of the campground. It was my third night with the Saboteur, I was cold and tired and sleepless, and I’d had enough.
While they contribute little to society, welfare ranchers on public lands demand a lot in the form of subsidies.
We agreed to cut short the tour of targets, and the next day made the long slow drive out of the mountains back to his cabin in the high desert. Inauguration day was only twenty-four hours away. The promise of Trump II for the public lands is not dissimilar to Trump I: degrade them into extractivist free-for-alls, with more oil and gas drilling, mining, logging, and unregulated overgrazing, “a combination clear-cut [and] toxic waste dump,” as one conservationist policy analyst put it.
I asked the Saboteur if he had planned anything special to celebrate the arrival of Diaper Don into the White House. He was driving fast now on the open road of the desert. “I’m gonna get that American flag I’ve been storing with our gear, take four rocks and lay it out on the road, weighted so it don’t blow away, and take a nice shit on it. Just think about these cowboys coming up on that in one of their big dumb trucks. ‘Junior! Them thar’s a flag with shit on it, in the middle o’ the goddamn road!’ ‘Papa, what we gone do? Trump’ll fix it!’”
The Saboteur cracked himself up, laughing until his cough kicked in, and then it sounded like he was choking. A fine plan, I told him, but let’s get to the cabin and warm up first. “The cold is hard on you. I’m feeling it too,” he said. “Maybe I don’t have long for this work. I’m starting to get tired. Just need that new Sawzall. Man, not having a good Sawzall is like living without a dick.”
The cabin consisted of a single room heated by a wood stove, around which was an unholy mess of stacked books, strewn clothing, dirty dishes, and carpets speckled with dust, wood shards, and food leavings. The Saboteur melted into his couch, a filthy redoubt that looked as if it had absorbed seven years of spilled dinners, and soon he was wheezing in deep sleep. In peace and mercifully quiet at last. It may be hard work to be a Livestock Saboteur, but it’s also not easy spending time with someone who won’t shut up about it.
There should be other means than the Sawzall to go after grazing and cause trouble for ranchers. Perhaps what’s needed is a citizen uprising, one of Thoreauvian disobedience, a vocal mass of Americans standing up and declaring they care about the health and future well-being of the public lands and will stand no longer the pillaging by the big-hatted lords. Directly before Congress and the White House, amassed in numbers uncountable, the people would have to demand an end to the grazing regime. As I wrote in the conclusion to This Land and reiterate here, evicting millions of invasive ungulates from the vast commons of the national forests and the Bureau of Land Management domain would likely produce one of the greatest ecological recoveries in modern history.
Is there any sign on the horizon of a pro-public-lands revolt by the citizens of this country? Of course not—even as it’s needed more than ever. It’s our collective inaction in the face of ecological pillage that produces extremists like the Saboteur. A few days after we parted ways, I was back home in New York City. I did what obviously I needed to do and started looking for a good Trump mask.