Old Navy Strikes its Colors

Word from the Ward Room of Old Navy is that it has given up.

Thats right. In a recent directive to its Store Managers it told them to no longer confront shoplifters.

The stated reason is that it's dangerous for the store employees as guns have been pulled on them and one employee has been stabbed. But this may not be the real reason.

Old Navy, like a lot of other retailers, has been lawsuit bait for years by lawyers seeking class-action solutions for overtime violations and other issues. Store managers in Old Navy and two other Chains I know have gotten from a few thousand to over $20,000 in settlements - in seperate lawsuits they did not even know were occurring. Employees have received money as well. And these were multiple lawsuits on multiple topics for reasons none of the employees knew or cared about - they were brought solely by lawyers.

Back to shoplifting. My source told me that Old Navy was sued by some shoplifters for emotional suffering as a result of being confronted!!! What I'd like to know - did Old Navy settle or did they go to court? And if so, who won? The likely reason for the policy shift had to do with lawsuits.

The decision by Old Navy to throw open the store to all shoplifters - to the looters - also reflects the current legal climate that allows lawyers to board the corporate ships and exact tribute. Allowing shoplifters free reign is just aligning corporate policy with the national policy of allowing trial lawyers free reign.

I have nothing against Old Navy. But somewhere there has to be a corporate LEADER with some balls to publicly and visibly take the fight to the trail lawyers who are no better than the shoplifters. The lawsuits and the permissive criminal environment that is fostered in their wake are a violation of all our rights and exact a huge cost on us economically - and worse - socially - by making each of less able to defend ourselves.

Cows Say - Shut Mor Dawgs (and Kats.)

Wisconsin may soon classify feral cats as nuisance species that can be shot on sight by any hunter. The hunters have support from scientific studies that show that cats eat millions of songbirds every year.

Predictably, there are those who are opposed to this. They claim that hunting will not change the feral cat population and that there are better ways of reducing the population, but they provide no specifics. They also claim that the two main studies in the CNN article are flawed. They are wrong on this.

The highly respected Audobon Society is firmly against feral cats and cites a lot of literature. The Texas Parks and Wildlife has studied this issue and has lots of data. And such hands-on conservation organizations such as the Nature Conservancy has wrestled with this issue - and the only solution is to REMOVE the cats.

Furthermore, hunters have been very successful in reducing or completely eliminating predator populations. Studies like this one show that predator removal increases survivability. Hunting eliminated wolves, bears, and other species from many states.

I think hunting feral cats is a great idea. I love putting my boots on right before dawn on my front porch while listening to the birds chirping and singing in the predawn light and seeing the flashes of blue or red as they fly around as I check stock. If we were overrun with cats, there would be no birds around here.

Its also an open secret of ranching that ranchers shoot feral cats and dogs on sight. Its a ranching ethic that is as set in stone as checking your gates.

Over the years I have seen "stray" dogs chase down and kill two of my calves in the pasture and kill sick calves in my pens. I have seen people in nice SUVs and ratty old cars dump off dogs behind my house. I have swerved to miss road-stupid dogs and run off the road. I have seen city people move out to the country and start collecting strays, only to have me shoot every single one when they packed up and chased my cows.

So one of my Rules of Ranching is "Shoot Any Dog In Your Pasture that you do not recognize and Shoot all dogs chasing stock."

I dont shoot coyotes. I have never seen a coyote chase a calf or cow nor have I found their tracks around a freshly killed calf. They will scour a calving pasture looking for afterbirth, but they give the cows a wide berth.

People who oppose the killing of dogs miss the horrible suffering of the calf and mother cow when a dog or pack of dogs chase and attack. Most dogs lack the knowledge to kill their prey cleanly and usually gnaw the calf to death. This can take hours. One dog will hold the nose and the others will chew on the calf, sometimes from the anus in, while the calf screams. Sick calves in the pens will be chased mercilessly until they are knocked down or collapse from the stress. This is very terrifying for them.

Those who don't see the cow's side of things are blindly choosing the dog's side. As I mentioned in another post, as a rancher you must empathize with your stock to take care of them well. I feel their terror as clearly as you would watching a movie about Freddy Kreuger chasing some Coed around a house. But its not funny and its not titillating, either.

I love cats - my barn cats are fat and sleek, but they are also fixed. My house cats sleep on me every night. However, feral cats hunt Quail and Dove and lots of songbirds. Most studies done in Texas show their tummies full of tweety bird. So now my Rule has added "and Cat" to the above.

Its life and death. So support your local cows and join them in saying "Shut Mor Dawgs" and Kats.

It takes 10,000 Days to Train a Rancher

Ranching is in crisis. Every study done by any university or private organizaton shows that most ranches do not break even. The average ownership rate for a ranch is seven years. Demographers tell us that counties dominated by ranching and with no nearby city are losing population and that the average age of rancher is now over 60. Neither the children of ranchers nor the bright, young entrepreneur are turning to ranching. Those who do buy ranches are mostly city slickers with limited operating knowledge of local ecology or livestock husbandry who lack the lifelong commitment to succeed – they are doomed to fail.

Imagine if instead of ranching we were discussing medicine. Imagine if I were to tell you that the average age of a phsycian was 65, that their numbers were in decline, that they could not break even, and basically no one wanted to be a doctor? What if I told you, who showed up with a liver ailment, that the specialty ( specialized local knowledge ) was no longer avialable? What would be the result in the human community? High infant mortality, decreasing lifespan, malnourisment, parasites – a human community ( ecosystem ) in collapse.

That is what we find across much of the Plains. Ecologically, the story is the same. Anyone with a basic knowledge of how healthy range looks who drives West from Fort Worth, Texas will become sickened by the mesquite choked landscape, or who drives North out of Oklahoma City, become angered by the Juniper thickets taking over the land. Visits to major Wildlife Refuges or Wildlife Management Areas in the region show that brush and trees and exotic invaders are choking out any remnants of native ecosystems. Processes that sustained grassland were in place up until recent time such as burning, herds of grazers, and communities based on harvesting grass are gone.

What has caused this? To answer this, consider Medicine again. To become a doctor, a person must succeeed academically and socially as a teenager, then get accepted into a good college. Good grades and demonstrated interest in the basics of science then allow them to proceed to medical school. A very tough courseload in theory weeds out the uncommitted and dimwitted. Later courses introduce the student to the practical side of medicine under the watchful eyes of seasoned operators. Upon graducation, interns must endure two to four years of hands on apprenticeship while operating under increasing, but still constrained independence. After they receive their MDs, the young Physicians then join an established practice or hospital and then they are still watched closely. Only after another ten years are they freely trusted. By this time they are often involved in the training of new doctors.

Lets compare ranching. The average rancher buys their ranch, some cattle, and they start ranching. There is no knowledge transfer of local conditions, no long apprenticeship under a proven operator, no testing of their commitment, no steady expansion of their skills, no testing of their skills, and no slow buildup of how things are done or the best way to do them. ( And it goes without saying that there is no testing of ideas or search for better procedures. ) Imagine if every doctor had to begin from scratch – discover and codify internal medicine, come up with and test treatments, etc. The trial and error discovery of what works is costly. Except the cost is borne in this case by the land as well as the bankrupt ranches.

The awful and painful truth of much of the landscape around us lies in the lack of knowledge of startup ranchers. I would put in this startup rancher group most of the wildlife and refuge management as well. Given that most ranches fail because they cannot get the knowledge and cannot become successful, means that the lanscape suffers.

The standard agricultural economist says that its SCALE that pays. It not scale that pays, but the knowledge of how to use the land. Most self-made ranchers these days will not even hire a “trained” agriculture graduate, preferring local cowboys or Mexican immigrants. Many graduates go into the Parks or into “agribusiness”. There are few if any granduates of modern A&M colleges that are worth hiring, with the exception of those raised on a ranch or those with a hunting background.

A lot of MBAs start up businesses or take over underperforming firms, yet how many ag grads go start up a ranch? In fact, the men and women starting up ranching successfully with an Ag Education background are professors with 30 or more years who have accumulated the knowledge and carefully picked their ground. 30 years is about 10,000 days.

Just about every successful rancher today will tell you that he or she had to rediscover the wheel while studying under the school of hard knocks. They had to LEARN. Learning means overcoming failure after failure, especially when there is no school, no mentor, no deep culture to back you up.

The German Army has a saying that it takes 10,000 dead to train a Major General. Ranching is the same way. All those silly ideas have to die and the one idea left standing after 10,000 days is the one that will work.

A Rancher's Heart

Ranching is not romantic. It’s a tough, dirty, lonesome, stressful and often heartbreaking job that never ends.

You get crap on your face, blood on your hands, and mud in your boots. Your truck gets stuck, your tractor gets stuck, your ATV gets stuck and your horse shies at a piece of trash and runs away while you are left rolling on your back with a broken leg and its two miles to the house.

Fence must be mended or cleared using handtools in either hot or cold conditions. Trees must be pulled off fences. Water gaps torn out by floods must be fixed, sometimes during the flooding. Smashed knuckles, broken bones, runaway equipment, psychotic livestock, crazy neighbors, and the incredibly variable weather all conspire to make life difficult.

Throw in low prices, rising costs, your bank under pressure from regulators, normal family squabbles, and sometimes its not worth it.

Then there is the livestock. You have to empathize with them to care for them, but they die! They die! Calves die. Moms die. Bulls die. They get up one day limping and you try to take care of them working every day for months and when you think they will make it, you go outide on a clear spring day and they are dead, all bloated up.

When you haul them away, the carcass breaks open and the wind shoves the stench onto you. And then the chain gets wound around them and you have to go dig in the muck and your own vomit to get the chain loose. Then the next day your favorite horse breaks a leg. Then the next night comes that knock on the door and someone telling you your whole herd is out on the highway.

Then that late March blizzard comes and two hundred calves must be thrown in the ossuary over the next week. Then you have to get up the next morning and do it again. Usually, by yourself, whether you are sick with the the flu or not, and have to go on.

You must crawl into a corral pen with one ton angry beasts whose horn is stuck under a gate. You must somehow get that calf out of the fence its tangled in while the mother, driven by her advanced genetics, tries to kill you. And when the day comes that you do get plowed, you will still have to drag yourself out and get the gate shut, make sure the stock has water, take a shower to clean your bone-deep lacerations, then drive yourself to the hospital.

Only in professional sports or in the military are men and women expected to play hurt, yet ranchers ranch hurt all the time. And the only purple heart you get is the badge of a permanently missing finger or crooked scar.

The toughest people on the planet are men in their late forties who have successfully farmed and ranched as owner-operators all their life. You can recognize them by the scars on their bodies, their missing fingers, their 2-percenter looks, the will to perservere, and the fact that they are still here. There is no tougher, harsher judge than the march of time. ( The pussies that have 100 acres or 25 cows or a bunch of hired studs don't count.) The only people that can come close are the First Sergeants and CSM's or Master Chiefs who have 20+ years in combat arms.

Your heart has to travel light. To survive you have to give up everything that you once thought important to make room for the will to perservere. All else is inconsequential.