[Dusty Road]

Went back and reread the article, while biased it does point out a few interesting points. The family had been leasing from the BLM long before he ever stopped his lease payments. Hard to prove you own the land when you have over 50 years of lease payments proving you don’t. While I think shutting it down for grazing over a tortoise is a pretty weak excuse it is what it is. When you crawl in bed with the Fed’s your gonna get screwed. The fact that he stopped his payments 5 years before they shut it down doesn’t help his argument.

We have a rather large ranch for this area and lease out about 80% of it to cattle operation. We control the lease amount and how many head are run per section, a violation of either of those or a non lease payment gets you shut down immediately. He would have been in violation of our rules and he and his cattle would have been removed.

[Scoutmaster]

The Bundy family does own a ranch, but it doesn't include the land in question. The land in question is open range, adjacent to the Bundy ranch, that was owned by the State of Nevada and then the federal government. Since the current Mr. Bundy refused to renew his family's grazing contract twenty years ago, he's been ordered by courts multiple times to move his cattle from the land that he doesn't own or contract to use. He's ignored those orders.

He ignored the last court order giving him a date to remove his cattle or face having them declared trespassing cattle subject to removal by the BLM.