Word: wire
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When Frank Lorenti of Minturn, a rustic little burg down the road from the villageopolis of Vail in the Colorado mountains, put barbed wire up to keep snowmobilers off his property last winter, the town council responded by outlawing the spiked fencing altogether. Police chief Lorenzo Martinez agreed. "Considering the damage it could do, people don't think barbed wire is appropriate," he reported. "There are a lot of other types of fences...
...type of fence, however, tells a better story about the changing American West than barbed wire, a tool as key to the region's settlement as the buffalo rifle, the railroad, the telegraph and the windmill...
Over the past few decades, the barbed-wire market has been shrinking because of falling demand, rising steel prices and the fact that almost 700 acres of Western sod are sectioned off, subdivided, annexed or paved over daily, according to the Colorado Cattlemen's Agricultural Land Trust. Strip malls, 35-acre "ranchettes," town houses, resorts, mini-mansions, water parks, you name it, are fast becoming the face of the West, much more so than rodeos, "Howdy, ma'am" manners and, well, barbed wire...
...erecting his small blockade, the fact that Minturn no longer buys into a sharp-fences-make-good-neighbors way of thinking left him slack-jawed. "No one ever got hurt," says the 13-year town resident. Still, figuring he was waging a losing battle, he took down the barbed wire in June, resigned to the return of the snowmobilers...
Several other Colorado communities--including Aspen, Craig and Pueblo--have also banned barbed wire. Even outside of residential areas, environmentalists are leading a charge to replace the fencing. It may be cheap and effective at keeping cattle in, but it can be lethal to wild animals like elk and antelope...