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Cover Story

Trespassing cows: Lonely cowboy UN victim

by Judi McLeod

December 30, 2004

In the old days of the Wild West, there was always a gunslinger around to spring cowboys from jail cells.

Like the rangy sheriff from High Noon, Luther Wallace "Wally" Klump was on his own with the odds stacked cornstalk high against him.

Klump, sent to the slammer april 21, 2003 celebrated his 70th birthday there.

There was no sweet chorus of Happy Birthday sung by his grandchildren but only the convicts, some of whom took refuge in the Good Book when Klump found himself in their midst. The injustice of it was never lost on the convicts who presented the cattle rancher with a birthday card declaring, the "BLM sucks!"

BLM is the acronym for Klump’s nemesis, the Bureau of Land Management.

While the convicts were incarcerated for crimes like murder etc., Wally Klump’s crime was "trespassing cows" on Bureau of Land Management in arizona’s Dos Cabezos Mountains. Or as federal Judge John M. Roll put it, "for failing to follow the court’s order prohibiting the unauthorized grazing of cattle on government allotments."

There are no printed manuals to teach cows what land is government or private, or edicts that not all grass is approved cow cud.

Huge tracts of land everywhere are being lapped up by the United Nations. But rancher Wally Klump, released last year was a lone star choosing to remain in jail on principle. Blue skies and wide open land beckon him like some cowpokes are drawn to the nearest watering hole. Even fellow inmates knew that Wally Klump could have walked out of jail anytime by having his family remove the "criminal cows" from BLM lands in the Dos Cabezos area.

Now that he’s been returned to the bosom of his family and the land he loves, Wally Klump will be tailed by trouble for the rest of his days. Fines levied against him for illegal grazing exceed $300,000, and are growing like timothy grass.

The cattle rancher, whose father and grandfather worked the same land, wrote a letter to President George W. Bush.

… "I am 70 years and in good health," he wrote the President from prison. "I reckon that I will live to be 90. My cows will stay on the land and I will stay in prison until my property rights are restored, and the United States agrees to stop forcefully taking away any more of my property."

The president would have to take a crash course on environmental activism to even begin understanding the elderly rancher’s plight.

In his letter to Bush, Klump wrote "For over 10 years I have been in every court in the land trying to protect my property rights against the U.S. government, but the BLM is too big, and I have always lost."

The task of sorting through the tragedy of "criminal cows" is monumental given the environmental agenda of the day. Cows face far more than the environmental charge of flatulence by well-funded activists. They are now pitted against the jaguar, an endangered species. and as George Orwell predicted so many years ago, some animals are more important than others are.

The nature of the land that is Wally Klump’s daily environment is part of the problem. His widely scattered islands of private land in Cochise and Graham counties are situated on a long roundabout sequence of national forest, wildernesses, monuments, memorials and parks.

In her writings, J. Zane Walley has given a detailed map of the lands in question.

The Klump properties are strewn over a substantial area between, and bordering, the Coronado National Forest. Coronado National Memorial. Chiricahua National Monument, the Dos Cabezos and Chiroicahua Wildernesses.

Problem is that all these areas were somehow identified as United Nations Protected areas in 1997. If that wasn’t enough of a bureaucratic tangle of red tape, along came the Sky Island alliance (SIa), a hell-bent for leather gang of pro-wilderness, anti-ranching campaigners.

Hardly Boy Scout in nature, the SIa board of directors is represented by former Earthfirsters Rod Mondt and Nancy Zierenberg.

Mondt’s drift can easily be picked up in a 1998 speech to the New Mexico Quivira Coalition: "They (cattle) cause excessive damage to the land. They eat native flora that would otherwise be eaten by native fauna."

at the moment, SIa is active in attempting to "rewild" the entire Dos Cabezos.

In the environmental soupcon is also the Jaguar Conservation Team (JaGCT), a binational partnership of government agencies, private and non-governmental organizations which have identified Dos Cabezos as jaguar habitat with inter-connecting travel corridors.

These days the bovine has been cast into a politically correct challenged breed, with vegans of the world trying to drive beef off the menu.

and when it comes to grazing, it’s becomes untenable to teach cows table manners.

Meanwhile, for ranchers like Klump, the shuffle of prisoner’s footsteps can never replace the cries of the coyote.

Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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