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An influential cattlemen’s group is trying to rescind a U.S. Interior Department big game migration route protection order that brought $3.2 million to Wyoming in the last three months.

The 121-year-old National Cattlemen’s Beef Association says stockmen and women haven’t been considered in the program spawned by former Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke’s Secretarial Order 3362. The year-old order seeks to improve habitat in Western big game migration routes and winter ranges and directs federal agencies to act accordingly.

Elements of Zine’s wildlife migration declaration “typically result in inappropriate restrictions on grazing and ranching activities,” the beef trade group’s resolution reads. The cumulative result is “prioritization of big-game habitat conservation and restoration,” and “inappropriate impacts to adjacent private lands.”
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Now New Mexico’s U.S. Sen. Tom Udall and Virginia’s U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, both Democrats, have acted at the national level, introducing the   Wildlife Corridors Conservation Act of 2018 in December. The bill sought to “protect and restore fish, wildlife and plant species,” across the country but died in the last congress.

“With roughly one in five animal and plant species in the U.S. at risk of extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation, one of the simplest yet most effective things we can do is to provide them ample opportunity to move across lands and waters,” Beyer said in a statement announcing the bill. Current law lacks requirements and incentives for decision-makers to connect habitat at a landscape level and across jurisdictions, a statement on Udall’s website reads.

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