Things are so much nicer in Montana this spring. Here it is, the end of June, and I’ve only broken a sweat a few times. One was moments ago though, and I’m amazed I’m not still pouring like the proverbial pig, as I just got through shoeing horses (for the moment). And yes, I’ve been in front of this desk too much lately, and OK, maybe had too many potato chips and nuts and such but at least horse shoeing is…
Well no, it’s not a good workout. Not if you’ve lifted one too many pianos. But hey, it’s another of those “obsolete” tasks that’s kind of handy to know. Especially with shoeings running a C-note or so apiece! I’ll do my own this time of year, but take them to the MSU Horseshoing School in the fall. Some of the more anal horsey types I know question this practice, although I’ve only ever had a couple of their nailings come prematurely undone. Hmm, not too much different from my own long-term average.
No big surprise, I’d say it’s a top-notch program. In yet more small-world circumstances I met the guy who founded it, and shortly thereafter did the same thing in Oregon and ran that program for fifteen years or so. And ahem… yes, he’s kinda crippled up too. He was looking for a dead-calm but still high performance heading horse, and came out for a spin on Sonny. He was one of the first to disabuse me of the notion that Sonny is a $4000 horse, as for one thing he still has faint traces of testosterone it seems. He loves the ladies at least, and not just equine ones. His prior human was a rancher’s wife, and while he puts up with packtrips and elk hunting and such, he’d prefer to be doted upon.
But anyway the shoeing master (whose name has regrettably gotten away) and I kind of hit it off in spite of his not buying my overpriced horse, and it turns out we know some of the same people. So I didn’t take it as an insult when he assessed my shoeing skills by saying I was a “nailer onner”.
Oddly enough, some of the same people I’ve told this story to who’ve perhaps questioned shoeings by students, and also know how and occasionally shoe their own horses, they get a thoughtful expression at the “nailer onner” tag, and agree there’s worse things.
Like shoeing your horses and then not having time for a packtrip, for one thing! Maybe after haying…

Perhaps people who complain about no free time shouldn’t take on yet more ventures, but I can’t help it. We’ve started doing the Saturday Farmer’s Market in Bozeman. At last, we’ve come up with some decent packaging and labeling for our golden flax and sundry alternative crops, camelina oil, and then there's the buffalo robes & skulls. Turns out one of camelina oil’s best uses could be for skin therapy, massage, and cosmetic use. Plus if things get ugly you can burn it in your truck. And maybe someday the Montana Department of Agriculture will even approve it for consumption! After the election?

It’s moot for the moment anyway, and we’ll be expanding our “product line” a good bit in coming weeks, not to mention a dedicated website awaits but hey! I need to go scout at least one elk spot one of these days. At least do something other than work…
Which often turns out to be more work than “work”, but so it goes.

But then I was within, well… spotting scope distance at least of some of my elk hunting spots last week. Hardly a day “off”, though. No, it was a pretty intense meeting, although it could have been immeasurably more so, and we didn’t make any police reports that I know of.
Where to begin…? I’ve been participating in the Wildlife Committee of the Madison Ranchlands Group for… three or four years now. Just happened to show up at a memorable meeting when a community-based plan the landowners & others had been working on for a couple of years was summarily dismissed by FWP in favor of the new 5-week elk season and related aspects of the then-new Elk Management Plan. Or is it the outfitter management plan?
In any case, the feces hit the fan in a big way, and hasn’t let up much since!

More recently, FWP encountered vociferous resistance to the regulations proposed for ’09 in the Madison valley, among other places. In response they are giving the locals another shot at coming up with an alternative. So, several landowners (and/or their managers) have been meeting over the last few weeks. This meeting last week was the first “public” version, although opinions varied on that right up until, or so it appeared. But since sportsmen (via Safari Club International) are footing the bill for the new and extremely capable mediator Jenny Tribe, not to mention we got the ball rolling again when things were effectively stalemated in the Wildlife committee, plus the fact I hunt the Madison literally from one end to the other; I believe we’ve earned a seat at the table.
Especially since in my opinion, we have far more reasonable suggestions for dealing with the immense herds of (almost completely) cow elk, that increase the positives and reduce negatives for literally all stakeholders.
Or, we can just round ‘em all up and slaughter ‘em. Simple as that.
Well, we’ll test them for brucellosis first! So we have data.

Not if I can help it, you won’t. What was wrong with the data from a couple of years back, when elk seroprevalence was crowding the 7% threshold, but then every single one turned out to be false positives, and were yersinia instead?! Of course that was with the Western Blot Test, which “is not an approved test”. Well yeah… I can see why not!
Plus of course we are incredibly lacking in “data” for nearly half the positive cases in last summer’s Bridger, MT brucellosis discovery, which we belatedly learn were Corrientes. Mexican roping stock, as I noted on the blogs. This was greeted with howls of outrage that these cattle were in no sense from Mexico, dammit!!
I was using “Mexican roping stock” in the generic sense, because that’s what myself and most of the people I know call them; Mexican roping steers. Even though I know, they’re not all steers, and hell, they’re US citizens by now as far as I’m concerned! It remains many of them did come from Texas and Mexico in the not all that distant past, and brucellosis remains a known issue. So it’s nothing short of incredible in my view that APHIS failed to collect tissue samples from those animals last summer. Most recently it had something to do with the private property rights of the packing plant owner. Prior to that “the packing plant was closed that weekend” or somesuch.
Indeed. So we have no data. How convenient.
Farmers, poker players, and sundry other professional uncertains play the odds all the time, and I’m telling ‘ya… When Montana’s second brucellosis discovery turned out to be an animal in a completely Corriente ~50 head herd, the odds tipped off the scale in my view. But no, some are still screaming it has to be those damn elk!! Kill ‘em!!!
Well, let’s see, it’s not my hunting spot, but I understand the ~500 elk in the Bridger area aren’t stupid and do hang around in the corn and such at times. While there is undoubtedly some minor interchange with Yellowstone elk, I bet’cha their exposure rates are pretty low. In Wyoming and Idaho, it took intense feedline exposure between elk running very high infection rates due to those very feedlines, and cattle during the height of abortion season, and lunacy.
In Montana, we don’t have most of those, thank God! “Normal” interaction between elk and cattle, unless you’re talking sharing feedlines in late winter/early spring…
Or, we have an overwhelming preponderance of Corrientes.

I’m calling. As it stands, it appears to me we have precisely NO conclusive evidence fingering elk, much less buffalo!!
But we have these Corrientes. Lalalalalalala….

Call. Show ‘em.

Just like I thought.