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I have a hard time believing that the BLM has been conspiring since the early 90's to set aside this land for oil and gas drilling technology that is just now taking off.

It sounds like this rancher's original beef (pun intended) was that he felt his grazing fees weren't being used to his benefit. His mistake was diverging from that legal argument and going down a path of challenging BLM's statutory authority to administer those lands. That is a losing argument.

The family has done a good job of framing the argument as the poor rancher trying to fight the evil government, but that will only last so long.

Read Post #63, as it addresses some of the water rights that may be lost by Bundy Ranch...??

The conspiracy, in my view, is the government not taking Bundy’s payments years ago, as a plan to get him off the land completely.... eventually, and not about the oil leases. The state would not take the payments, so he did the maintenance the BLM would not do. The BLM waited until the lease money owed had accumulated to a large enough sum to warrant doing away with his grazing agreement.

Who knows what is in the mind of environmentalists, government control freaks, or BLM officials.

In other news>>>>>>>>

What the hell is the Federal Guv in far away Washington DC doing owning so much land in Nevada? The state of Nevada and various counties should be owning and administering this land. The huge Fed Guv percentage of ownership of Alaskan and Western states lands is thievery

The version of the story I've heard is that Bundy was paying his grazing fees, per his lease, to the BLM until 1993. In 1993, the BLM reduced his grazing allotment, i.e., the total amount of acreage he could use for grazing, as part of an effort to preserve habitat for this desert tortoise. So Bundy quits paying the BLM altogether because he figures he needs all the acreage he originally had to graze his herd.

Now, I don't think it's unreasonable for Bundy to be miffed because out in southern Nevada, it takes about 320 acres to sustain a single head of cattle. Less acreage for grazing means raising fewer cattle, unless you're feeding them at your own expense. But he still owed grazing fees on the acreage he was able to retain, and he didn't pay those to the BLM. Says he tried to pay the grazing fees to Clark County and the State of Nevada, but since he's leasing federal lands for his cattle, not state or county lands, he was paying his rental to the wrong agencies.

Why Bundy didn't reduce his herd back in 1993 or try to find rangeland that didn't have other wildlife issues is something that Bundy hasn't explained. If he had taken either action, he probably wouldn't have the BLM rounding up his cattle today.

I don't want to see this guy go out of business, but he *is* grazing his cattle on federal lands, after all, and if he is doing that, he's subjecting himself to federal rules. Gotta play by the rules. Like one poster stated above...if you don't pay your grazing fees, the owner of the land is likely to tell you to move your cattle somewhere else.

“I have a hard time believing that the BLM has been conspiring since the early 90’s to set aside this land for oil and gas drilling technology that is just now taking off.
It sounds like this rancher’s original beef (pun intended) was that he felt his grazing fees weren’t being used to his benefit. His mistake was diverging from that legal argument and going down a path of challenging BLM’s statutory authority to administer those lands. That is a losing argument.

The family has done a good job of framing the argument as the poor rancher trying to fight the evil government, but that will only last so long.”

Thank you for that 100% accurate burst of clarity. It is disappointing to see him supported just because he has a dispute with the federal gov’t. He doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on and if anything, the gov’t has been generous to him by letting him continue to use public resources without compensation for decades.