L
IKE MANY OF TODAY’S WILDLIFE biologists, I was not raised on a ranch and had limited
personal experience with livestock. Many young wildlife biologists are in the same position I was in nearly 40 years ago — they have a college degree, but no practical experience on the land or with producers. It is intimidating for a city kid,
or a country kid with limited agri- cultural background, to begin work- ing with ranchers. We don’t know the language or the culture and we may not even be able to tell a heifer from a cow. Wildlife and conservation agen-
cies are sometimes full of folks with limited direct knowledge of live- stock or grazing. Most are not anti- livestock. They simply don’t know much about livestock or grazing management. Unfortunately, some do have an anti-grazing bias due to misinformation
or poor college training. At the university level, wildlife departments often place little emphasis on grazing management and sometimes students are left with a negative impression of livestock ranching. Universities that teach a narrow approach to wildlife science do a dis-
service to students if they fail to teach about ranching and livestock. In too many instances there has been distance and distrust between
livestock producers and wildlife biologists. Some of this is due to the few bad apples in each group who create suspicion about the other group. Some well-meaning but misinformed wildlife biologists automatically
recommend the removal of livestock as the primary wildlife management tool. The implied assumption is that livestock are detrimental to wildlife and watersheds.
Cow education I’m proud of my formal education at Texas Tech in the department of
range and wildlife management in the 1970s. I came to Tech from a small rural town, but had little interest in live-
stock. That quickly changed when I discovered that in Texas and the southwest, most wildlife lives on working livestock ranches. If someone wanted to manage wildlife they would, in most cases, be
working with livestock producers on private ranches. What I did not realize when I started college was that management of
the land was the key to wildlife conservation. Most successful wildlife biologists work with the land and with ranchers much more than we ac- tually work with wildlife. At that time, Texas Tech was widely recognized as one of the most
tscra.org July 2015 The Cattleman 75
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