Free Republic

Gov. Jared Polis is facing backlash for comments he made during the winter conference of Colorado counties, when he blamed ranchers for the cost of the wolf reintroduction program this year. The topic of wolves at the Colorado Counties, Inc. conference arose in response to Polis' comments about an ever-tightening state budget. The association represents 63 of the state's 64 counties. State economists have estimated that the 2025-26 state budget will be short about $1 billion due to lowering inflation and the end of billions in one-time federal money tied to the pandemic. "I've tried to bite my tongue and...

Momentum is building among Democrats to oust their ailing leader on the House Agriculture Committee, part of the party's generational shake-up on Capitol Hill in the wake of their demoralizing losses in November. Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) — the committee’s current ranking member — faces a challenge from fellow Democratics Reps. Jim Costa of California and Angie Craig of Minnesota for the post in the next Congress. And, according to more than two dozen House Democratic lawmakers and aides granted anonymity to discuss the matter, Scott is poised to lose the vote if he doesn’t step aside before then. “The...

Hidden deep within the new omnibus bill is a secret provision to allow the federal government to electronically track all cattle in the United States. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) warned about the hidden provision on X, stating that lobbyists will receive $15 million in taxpayer funds to unleash the electronic tracking grid on the nation’s meat-producing cows and bison. As stated directly from the omnibus, the agreement “directs the Department to continue to provide the tags and related infrastructure needed to comply with the Federal Animal Disease Traceability rule (9 CFR 86), including no less than $15,000,000 for electronic identification...

Hogzilla or Jaws? More humans are killed annually by wild pigs than by sharks, a startling new study reveals. By slice, puncture, hook, and gouge, the global number of fatalities from wild pig attacks is rising by the decade. Between 2014 and 2023, the average yearly number of fatal shark attacks worldwide was 5.8, while the average number of fatal wild pig attacks was 19.7. In 2024 alone, there have already been seven deaths from wild pig incidents. According to groundbreaking research published in 2023, the number of humans killed by wild pig attacks steadily climbed from 2000 to 2019,...

On April 17 and 18, Colorado Parks and Wildlife received reports of livestock depredation by wolves in Grand County. The agency confirmed that four cattle were killed... Four yearling cattle have been killed by a wolf or wolves in Grand County. Colorado Parks and Wildlife believes the depredation occurred between Monday night and Tuesday morning. In an email to Sky-Hi News, Parks and Wildlife officials stated that they responded to a possible livestock depredation incident on Wednesday morning and then again on Thursday morning. Both incidents occurred on the same property. On Wednesday, the agency investigated three yearling cattle that...

The Biden administration's plan to relocate grizzly bear populations to rural parts of Washington State will have a devastating impact on agriculture and livestock in the region while posing a significant danger to local communities, a fifth generation cattle producer warned. Residents of Washington State are doubling down on their concerns surrounding the federal government's plan to translocate grizzly bears, an apex predator, to the federally-managed North Cascades National Park, after the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the strategy their preferred plan for grizzly bear management in the region. The North Cascades National Park borders...

Chinese scientists have developed a cost-effective method of converting coal into protein, which they say could feed livestock much more efficiently than natural plants, while using a tiny fraction of the land. According to Our World in Data, grazing land for livestock and farming land for animal feed production combine to take up an astonishing 40 million square kilometers (15.4 million square miles) of land. That's well over a quarter of the Earth's entire dry land area, and nearly 40% of the land defined as "habitable." This is one of the reasons the meat-heavy Western diet is under fire as...

Vladimir Putin has been mocked by Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko over Russia’s shortage of eggs. Mr Putin’s ally confronted him over the skyrocketing prices of the kitchen staple, with the entire exchange caught on camera at the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council session in St Petersburg. At the event Mr Putin, 71, was also spotted bizarrely stretching his feet as he waited to greet several fellow ex-Soviet republic leaders, including Mr Lukashenko, 69. Former farm boss Mr Lukashenko teased the Russian leader that Belarus’s agricultural industry was in better shape than Russia’s. He said: ‘We have achieved a high level of...

The Asian longhorned tick is rapidly gaining a foothold in the United States and “poses a serious threat to livestock” according to the USDA. Since its discovery and proper identification in 2017, the coverage area of the tick has spread to 19 U.S. states, the USDA reported. The deadly consequence of their expansion was shared by Ohio State University researchers in the Journal of Medical Entomology: Two cows and one large bull died from exsanguination by the ticks, meaning drained of blood to the point of death. Each unfortunate cow likely endured tens of thousands of bites. While only the...

Robert Louis Stevenson in New Arabian Nights wrote the famous line, “I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.” When it comes to the paradoxical relationship between the plans and actions of the United Nations and medical health agencies on the one hand, and the strong evidence that contradicts the benefits of their plans, the quote is more than apt. On September 20th, government officials and their representatives assembled at the UN, and approved a political declaration on pandemic preparedness, prevention, and response, and a lengthy call to action of its members. The declaration will privilege the WHO...

A 9-year-old backed out of a deal to sell her pet goat for slaughter. Local officials and sheriff's deputies used the power of the state to force her to go through with it. A federal civil lawsuit alleges that sheriff's deputies from Shasta County, California, traveled across the state to seize a little girl's "beloved pet goat" for slaughter. New reporting details how they may have violated the law in doing so. According to the lawsuit, in June 2022, Jessica Long and her daughter, who was 9 years old and only referred to as E.L., attended the Shasta District Fair....

[H/T sweetiepiezer]The current (public) receipts are included in this essay, and more are on the wayRobert W Malone MD, MS 3 hr ago Before we can discus mRNA vaccines for livestock, pets and wildlife, we must first address the elephant in the room. That is, how come the public is able to access human clinical trial information, but is not able to do the same for clinical trials involving animal health?During the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the AIDS community demanded public access to clinical trials. In 1988, the U.S. Congress passed the Health Omnibus Programs Extension Act of...

Los Angeles Rams linebackers Bobby Wagner and Takkarist McKinley tackled an animal rights activist who disrupted the team’s game against the San Francisco 49ers during Monday Night Football. Just before halftime, a member of Direct Action Everywhere, an animal rights group, who were attending Monday night’s game ran across the 49ers Levi’s Stadium with a device releasing red and pink smoke to raise awareness about a massive pig factory farm allegedly hiding its abuses inside the facility. The nonprofit reports Allison Fluty and Alex Taylor were cited, with one still in police custody, after running onto the field at separate...

Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Kelly Susewind has authorized the killing of one wolf because of cattle attacks in northeast Washington. The Smackout wolf pack has attacked cattle on private and public land in Stevens and Pend Oreille counties, the Capital Press reported. The agency said non-lethal deterrents employed by several ranchers have not stopped the predations. The wolf pack crossed the line for the department to consider lethal control when it killed two calves and injured two others during the last two weeks in August.

The leftist government is using climate change to implement what amounts to slow-motion communism. The beauty of climate change, if you’re a wannabe totalitarian, is that, because carbon is one of the building blocks of life, if you control carbon, you control everything. To understand how this works, you must pay attention to what is happening in the Netherlands, where the government is planning to seize 20% of livestock farms, all in the name of climate change. Holland was once a bastion of liberty on a continent that was subject to total monarchal control and riven by religious wars. It...

U.S. cattle producers are sending higher numbers of breeding stock to the sale barn, and some are liquidating their herds entirely, signaling a trend that analysts say will likely push already-elevated beef prices even higher in the not-too-distant future. The latest cattle report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows the market has contracted to levels not seen in years, with total inventory dropping 2% to 98.8 million head since July 2021. But it's not just the reduction in cattle overall that is of concern. It's what is getting sent to slaughter. There is a notable boost in calf-producing females...

Food and other consumer goods are no longer making their way from point A to point B in the United States, which faces crippling supply chain bottlenecks that threaten to cause mass starvation. The latest complaint comes from the livestock industry, which says it is just days away from an animal feed crisis if rail lines fail to get their act together, and quickly. According to reports, many feed users in California and other southwestern states are having to pay $3 more than the CBOT (Chicago Board of Trade) price to secure grain shipments by truck as rail bottlenecks are...

You won’t see it on any of the alphabet networks, but a protest movement is exploding in the Netherlands after the government moved to shut down farms in order to “fight” climate change. The contentious move, pushed by the World Economic Forum, was enacted as part of an EU agreement that seeks to limit the release of nitrogen. This is what becoming ungovernable looks like.🚨🚨⚠️⚠️The Dutch protesters are pouring manure on government offices, flooding streets, and becoming all together ungovernable. This uprising is in response to the WEF controlled government shutting down farms to "save the planet." You have to...

It's nationwide knowledge that in early May the Colonial Pipeline company suffered a severe cyberattack that shut down its pipeline connecting Texas to the East Coast. On June 1, JBS Foods suffered another crippling cyberattack. According to industry estimates, JBS controls 20 percent of the slaughtering capacity for American cattle and hogs. The JBS attack also generated headlines. The FBI and security officials believe two criminal organizations conducted the attacks. Their names sound a bit like those of the sinister super gangs found in James Bond novels. However, these gangs aren't fiction nor are their crimes. A crime group called...

I know that video clip going around looks awful, but let me give some context here. There has been extreme heat and humidity in Western Kansas and cattle have died. This is normal, and 10,000 head total statewide is not a “mass die-off that will cripple the beef supply.” Not even close. There are roughly six million cattle in Kansas. Of those, over two million are “on feed” in confinement feedlots in the western half of the state. In the former United States, something like 125,000 head of cattle are slaughtered per day, Monday through Friday, with a reduced kill...