Mustang Lover Roils the Range

Wall Street Journal

By JIM CARLTON

GOSHUTE VALLEY, Nev.—Nevada cattle ranchers, having long battled the land's harsh elements, now find themselves up against a new force of nature: Madeleine Pickens.

Jim Carlton has the story of why ranchers in Nevada are up in arms over a fence that the wife of billionaire T. Boone Pickens wants to erect on her property.

Mrs. Pickens, wife of Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, caused an uproar when she proposed the Bureau of Land Management let her fence off more than 500,000 acres of federal land to create a sanctuary for wild horses near a 14,000-acre ranch she bought in October.
Her proposal for the bureau to designate a "mustang monument" on those acres isn't sitting well in Nevada cattle country, where ranchers worry Mrs. Pickens's plan threatens to force them off the range. Nevada's estimated 450,000 cattle graze mostly on federally owned lands in a practice dating from the 19th century.   MORE...