The Modern Day Range Rider
By Tom Mallon
John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Roy Rogers; for many people, these actors evoke images of the classic western rider—permanent fixtures on horseback donning wide-brimmed hats, galloping across unimaginably expansive landscapes of sagebrush and mountain prairie as they drive their cattle into a paintbrush sunset. While these relics of Hollywood are romanticized in certain ways to fit the screen, they do represent a contingent of folks who historically worked as cattle hands and ranchers. In parts of the American West, cowboys and cowgirls are still very much real people who earn their livelihoods through hard work, expert stockmanship, and a deep reverence and understanding for the land on which they ride. They are some of the last people who still ride horses to work, who spend their days immersed in nature, and who live truly authentic western lifestyles.
“Range riders” is a term of art in regions with large carnivore presence today, and their role is becoming more prominent. While livestock riders have been around for decades to check on cattle and tend to sick or injured stock, the role of a range rider is to serve as a human presence on the open range to make cattle less vulnerable to carnivore depredations. They proactively manage livestock, collect data and information about predators, and utilize regenerative grazing techniques to simultaneously reduce livestock-carnivore conflicts and improve overall rangeland health, making them important tools for bridging the gap between the conservation and agricultural worlds.
Carnivore interactions with ranching operations can be a divisive issue in the west. Range riders provide ranchers with nonlethal tools for the deterrence of predators and help to alleviate some of the tension that the presence of carnivores can generate. Range riders demonstrate that carnivore coexistence is possible and help to gain public acceptance for allowing wild carnivores to roam shared landscapes while maintaining profitable ranching and farming operations.
How it works
In conventional grazing, cattle are scattered across the open range, often tens of thousands of acres, as it once was widely accepted that increasing grazing distribution was beneficial to grasslands and soil composition.
More contemporary theories recognize that scattered grazing without restricting cattle from revisiting the same areas repeatedly may actually be detrimental to rangeland health. Many ranchers are now moving to herding systems in which cattle are concentrated and then moved to a new area (without revisiting already-grazed areas in the same year). This approach prevents the overgrazing of certain areas and increases soil and plant health. In areas with large carnivore presence, this method also takes advantage of the natural behavior of grazing animals: herding up for safety in numbers.
The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 gave agency to the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to lease federal lands to ranchers and allow their cattle to graze openly. Today, about 229,000,000 acres in the United States are designated as public grazing lands spread out over 21,000 allotments. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management administer about 24,000 permits each year to ranchers in 29 states. More than 2 million cattle and sheep were permitted to graze federal lands in 2016.
In parts of the Rocky Mountain West, large carnivores roam freely across these public lands and are expanding their range into areas where they have been absent for more than a century. Ranchers in these areas have become accustomed to operating without carnivores in their backyard, so their practices don’t always account for dealing with the native wildlife.
The primary objective of the range rider is to reduce predation and minimize conflicts with carnivores. They quickly find and treat sick animals, which are easy prey for grizzly bears, wolves, and cougars. Some range riders also use telemetry to track the locations of collared wolves or bears. They are a critical information source, spending so much time in remote areas. The information range riders provide to ranchers and agencies can lead to better, more informed decisions with regard to both livestock and wildlife management. They give agencies and ranchers the ability to respond appropriately when predators are in the area and help to make the unknown known, and thus less threatening.
Range riders are valuable to protecting livestock and wild carnivores, and to increasing the overall health of the rangeland. They increase the communication within communities and help to increase the awareness about native wildlife that we share the landscape with, as well as improving the quality of life for cattle on the open range, which in turn translates to better and more sustainable business practices. The fewer livestock-carnivore conflicts there are, the stronger our communities will be.
Watch our short film about range riders and herding: