Cattle grazing in the Alps

[william williams]

Very, Very Good and very politely put Manfred. but now for a bit of trivia but did you know there is defiantly a front side and a rear side of a tree. Now you wish to know the difference I presume. Well do you go to toilet in the front of the tree

bill the old battler

[Stephen Whiteside]

Yes, that's the answer, Manfred. I have to pick up after my dogs. We should at the very least insist that the cattlemen pick up after their cattle!

[Kym]

That's a good idea Stephen, at least then the pretty city people wouldn't get poop under their shoes! And when the cattlemen pick up all that nasty poop, they can put it in the trash cans near the shopping centres, because all rubbish that gets put there doesn't damage the environment ...

[Neville Briggs]

Very good Manfred. After that dissertation you can consider yourself a professor of scatology,
or DSh.

[Bob Pacey]

Was not the original ban to allow the flora and fauna to regenerate after the bush fires ? This alone would indicate that the cattle were not effective in keeping the parks clear. The new introduction is as far as I can ascertain is a six year trail to see if they can do the job again and was part of the local members committment that got him elected. ? The system Bill speaks of sounds like a workable format without the red tape but I doubt if the pollies will use local knowledge to get the mix right. The grazing season ends in April so I reckon the proof will be in the puddin.

[Bellobazza]

G'day
Some useful hints on hues and tints...

Black and white
start to fight,
there's no ground in between.
"See things MY way...
no shades of grey.
and, most definitely, NOT GREEN!"

Will

[Trisha Patterson]

Oouch!!! Not sure it's safe to enter this debate... Sorry Stephen, but I do tend to agree with the logic of Marty, Maureen, Kym & Bill. I think if modern day conservationists took a few pages out of the "old blokes books" and not just advice from the so-called experts who spend all day in their high-rise offices, we might find a workable balance! (Nice poem too Manfred... Good timing!)
Trish

[william williams]

Thank you Trish Maybe common sense Is prevailing by the marjority

Bill the old battler

[Maureen K Clifford]

Just as an aside to this - and it may be of interest. During the drought I used to take my sheep all 1000 head of them more or less out on to the road for 3 to 4 hours every 3rd day. It allowed them to get a bit of feed when our paddocks were down to dust and rock, and also kept the road side grass down which also eliminated the fire risk from idiots throwing cigarette buts out of car windows. I had a stretch of road where I could block them from getting past me. Put out signs saying - Caution sheep on road - please slow down and used an area about 1 mile long between our road grid and the start of the neighbours paddocks. The roadside area was quite deep so there was a fair bit of good pick there and a creek crossed the road. All in all a good spot.

They would follow the car out just by me rattling the corn tin loudly outside the window and calling the leaders names out (this is where giving your sheep names comes in handy) - which they all recognized and a repeat performance to get them home with just one dog to chase up the stragglers. I could always rely on Hitler, Girlie, Bones, Hornless and Harley to get them moving.

Then for reasons best known to themselves - quoting a menace to traffic as the reason - the local council decided that one needed a permit to do this and they would charge an amount from memory of around 70 cents per animal a week to let you do this. Here we were 6 years into a drought, hand feeding, wool prices down, and now a bill of this magnitude. Was not going to happen ... so unfortunately careless people sometimes left paddock gates open and one had no recourse other than to load the dogs into the car and go and get them once one realized the little B's had escaped - again and must have been gone for a couple of hours at least . The road was so busy. Postman Pat came 3 days a week and if you saw one car a day go down the road - ' today busy day' my Korean WWOOFers would comment.

The idiocy of this which I am trying to point out - was that the council was quite willing to rent out to you for the sum of $150 a day their spray rig, complete with herbicide, so that you could spray the roadside verges along the front of your property and other areas of noxious weeds, thus eliminating risk of bushfire and weed infestation, and indeed had sent a circular out to all property owners advising us of their magnanimous gesture of supplying the herbicide at cost price.

Our sheep hungry as they were did an admirable job all on their own with no poisons involved. The down side was a lot of VM in their wool, mainly dreaded cobblers pegs but as the alternative was sheep dead from starvation it seemed a fair price to pay at the time.

[william williams]

Thank you Maureen.
I gather There are many People in this country that have never seen a Ewes Fleece that is freshly shorn that weighs normally about 13 to 15 lbs but then again they would have never seen Ewes that weighed 13 to 18 lbs live weight that are just skin and bones their eyes pleading for a bullet that costs 20 cents that’s a drought.
Nor have they seen wild animals, cattle, sheep, burnt half alive waiting for a bullet to quickly end their lives mostly because of human stupidity and greed.
In a very pristine forest there is a dense canopy cover over head and as such not very much under growth occurs. In open country and that includes semi tundra country E.G high country as we know it in Australia. Now fires came through those regions every few years to remove the trash and so the country was regenerated very regular.
Know one likes a bush fire especially as a regular occurrence. W.A does not nor does ACT nor Victoria nor NSW and Queensland in fact no body does yet you lock up the land to an exclusive few and exclude the grazing of cattle to remove that undergrowth and yet you cry shame when a fire erupts. To me many, many people are hypocrites led by people who believe not what is proven but what they perceive as hypothetical truth and bull crap.

and I am not ashamed of what I have done to aleviate suffering of other creatures but I am ashamed of a lot of my fellow People

William George Williams