Word: rangeland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...predicting the end of all meat eating. Decades from now, cattle will still be raised, perhaps in patches of natural rangeland, for people inclined to eat and able to afford a porterhouse, while others will make exceptions in ceremonial meals on special days like Thanksgiving, which link us ritually to our evolutionary and cultural past. But the era of mass-produced animal flesh, and its unsustainable costs to human and environmental health, should be over before the next century...
...girl named Mercy, daughter of a preacher whose church has been taken over by religious zealots. "If rain had come, things might have turned out differently," she says. "That is what I think now. But there were children in Outer Maroo who had never seen rain." Into this withered rangeland came a drifter who dressed in white and called himself Oyster, a random alias he had adopted while working with an aquaculture firm. In his new manifestation he was a religious con man, a charismatic spellbinder who had learned the trick of looking for long seconds into a listener...
...host to fleas that sometimes carry the plague. (Prairie dogs have infected 24 people in the U.S. in the past 27 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) They are so unpopular that for decades the Federal Government has conducted poisoning campaigns to eradicate them from rangeland. Several rural communities even hold contests for "sport shooters," who find the animals stimulating targets because varmint-hunting cartridges disintegrate on impact, causing the dogs to explode into "red mist," a cloud of blood and vaporized rodent parts that offers hunters IVG, or instant visual gratification...
Sheep rancher Nick Theos, all of his 72 years in the rugged rangeland of Colorado and Utah written on his face, was not as restrained. "If that fee goes up to $2 or $3 we are broke, out of business," he said with the sweep of a giant, scarred hand. By the weekend, Theos was back out in his sheep camps and Dickinson was in a wind chill near zero with his two sisters, brother and parents, all getting ready for the new calves that will begin arriving in a couple of weeks. "That's one of the problems...
Descended from horses that escaped from Spanish herds, millions of mustangs roamed the prairie at the start of the 19th century. But as the wildness went out of the West and more and more rangeland was plowed for crops or fenced off ( for cattle, the number of mustangs dwindled. By 1970 only 17,000 were left, despite the passage of federal laws that banned the use of airplanes and motor vehicles to round them up for slaughter. In 1971 Congress responded to a massive letter-writing campaign by enacting the Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act, which assigned...