Ranch Owners Research Articles

Influence of alumni careers and students' educational pathways on animal science undergraduate teaching programs.

In an attempt to aid the planning of courses and curricula in animal science, a survey instrument concerning careers, opinions and suggestions regarding education received was sent to 1,398 alumni who had graduated during the years 1956 to 1987. Longitudinal studies of 1972-82 entering animal science students, and a telephone survey of students who entered as freshmen in 1985-86, provided information concerning student profiles and educational interests. Fifty-two percent of alumni were women, 61% had obtained advanced degrees, about 50% were veterinarians, laboratory or medical scientists, business owners or managers, only 8% were ranch owners or managers, and the rest were engaged in a multiplicity of careers. Undergraduate experiences judged most important by alumni were obtaining academic skills, followed by advanced biology courses, animal science courses, work experience and developing the ability to continue learning. Alumni suggestions for change gave priority to offering more practical subject matter and business and economics in the animal science program, followed by more general education, research, science and theory, or no change. Approximately 30% of entering freshmen students graduated in the animal science major. Fifteen percent expressed interest in livestock, 23% in horses, 29% in companion animals, and the rest in a wide variety of animals.

The Thin Mountain Air by Paul Horgan

84 Western American Literature conservation and reclamation; here Gressley draws upon materials at hand pertaining to Arthur Powell Davis and his work in these areas. More details on subsurface probing for energy, and the need for conservation of oil, are found in his essay on George Otis Smith, chairman of the Federal Power Commission and former director of the United States Geological Survey, a man whose ideas, as set forth in the 1920s, are of much interest today. Of national scope also are the essays about Wyoming’s senior senator, Joseph C. O’Mahoney, and Thurman Arnold, a Wyoming boy who later made it big in Washington, particularly in his role as head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department during early New Deal years. Perceptive readers of this fine volume will find that what Gene Gressley has to say about the earlier years of this century is highly applicable to current western and national issues, and if they read with care they will understand environmental and energy problems much more thoroughly. Even better, they will have enjoyed the learning process enormously in this very well written, finely drawn piece of scholarship. ROBERT G. ATHEARN, University of Colorado The Thin Mountain Air. By Paul Horgan. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977. 312 pages, $8.95.) The Thin .Mountain Air, Paul Horgan’s new novel, may remind one of any number of initiation stories. “Richard” (the Richard of Things as They are and Everything to Live For) has reached manhood in the East. He accepts the New England code of duty and service that his father follows. But when his family moves to Albuquerque, New Mexico, because of his father’s health, he is separated from his people and he undergoes an initiation experience on a New Mexico sheep ranch. The ranch is an anti-pastoral experience. Against ironic quotes from Virgil’s Georgies, Richard learns to shear sheep whose wool is matted with filth. And one of his fellow shepherds, Buz Rennison, demonstrates the art of pursuing shepherdesses, when he engages to win Concha, the wife of the elderly ranch owner, Don Elizario Wenzel. Through the violent conse­ quences of Buz’s actions Richard learns about the world of will and unrestricted desire, and in the conclusion to the book rejects it for his father’s world of duty. But the initiation story is not as familiar as it might seem. Richard’s most heroic act, the rescue of a young boy named Christopher from Niagara Falls, takes place at the first of the novel, not after the initiation as it tradi­ Reviews 85 tionally should. Like the pastoral that becomes antipastoral, the traditional initiation story has been turned upside down. The book concludes with Richard dutifully fighting in the Second World War, in which Christopher has already died. The book ends on a hopeful note, however, for Richard has named his own son Christopher. MARY WASHINGTON, Utah State University The Genuine Article. By A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. 180 pages, $7.95.) A. B. Guthrie’s latest book, The Genuine Article, raises more questions about the author’s development as a Western writer and the evolution of the Western novel. Ostensibly, The Genuine Article is a “novel of suspense” (according to the subtitle) and a continuation of Wild Pitch (1973) and the life and adventures of would-be baseball player Jason Beard who, with his pitching arm gone and almost twenty-one, is now officially able to track down another murderer — this time not as adolescent flunky but as Sheriff Chick Charleston’s deputy. In typical suspense fashion, Sheriff Charleston, deputies Jase Beard and Jimmy Connon, town Marshal Halvor Amussen, Inspector Gewald from the state attorney general’s office, and the sleuthful reader play the “Who done it?” game. Aside from motive, what almost everyone is looking for is the murder weapon, the “genuine article,” as it comes to be called, which crushes in several places the skulls of two victims. The first one murdered is F. Y. Grimsley, local rancher, Indian hater, and general bastard whose initials Guthrie humorously says stand for words appropriate to Grimsley’s low regard with the townspeople...

JOSEPH D’ARBAUD, POET OF THE CAMARGUE

1974 marks the centenary of the birth of an important Proven~al author, Joseph D'Arbaud, who not only wrote in Proven9al but himself 'translated' his own work into Modem French (which he also spoke and wrote as a native tongue). Like Mistral, who wrote a foreword in 1913 to D'Arbaud's volume of verse Le Laurier d'Arles, D'Arbaud lived and wrote all his life in terms of Proven~al values: he was a 'Majoral' of the Felibrige, son of a well-known Proven~al poetess, Marie D' Arbaud, and editor, with Emile Sicard, of a long-lived local review, Le Fleu. What is even more interesting, and quite characteristic of the man, is that, though born in the sunny Durance valley at Meyrargues and educated at A vignon and Aix-en-Provence, he deliberately turned his back on conventional city living to go and settle, for quite a number of years, as a manadier or cattle ranch owner, near Fos, in the Camargue, the vast, flat, salty reach of country that makes up the Rhone delta. And it is the Camargue that is the basic inspiration of his work. Today's Camargue is on the way to becoming a rice-bowl. In D' Arb aud's time, not so very long ago, it remained, and in the western reaches still is, a blistered, wind-scorched tract, a home for herds of horses and bulls, a haunt of flamingoes and herons and sea-gulls. Landscape here is a long horizon of reeds, tamarisks and stunted trees, topped by a huge architecture of scudding clouds driven by the unceasing winds. For this area is the homeland of the winds: there is nothing to stop them. They rage in from the Rhone valley or the Atlantic or Mediterranean, whip the great etangs into spindrift, flatten the reeds and thickets into prostrate obedience and parch the cracked soil into salty barrenness. The herdsmen's cabanes, thatched and squat, present their rounded roofs to the blast and weather the storms. The birds have the shelter of marsh grasses and stunted shrubs, or of canal banks, but the stallions and bulls, come wind, come weather, seem to be quite hardened to the wildest of wild elements, and to be themselves just as wild. They roam and pasture freely over a far-extending, unfenced wilderness, and their only restraint is the periodical round-up by the herdsmen or gardians, armed with their tridents and mounted on the fast, white horses, tireless and alert, which are the special glory of the Camargue. It is no country for weaklings:

Raintrap Performance on the Fishlake National Forest

Many such developments have been organized mainly for division and sale to other speculator-buyers with little or no developmental work other than land surveys and tract boundary markers. The whither bound aspect of the present stock ranch price and value situation is something on which I choose not to guess. The answers lie to a considerable degree in a number of national economic forces, trends, and administrative actions, and there is no way to forecast these for any appreciable time period. They include such factors as continued regional shifts in population, the continued availability of large amounts of land credit, the continuation of a high level of economic activity and income, and the continued inflation of the general price level. Whatever the future trends may be, the ranch manager of today faces a situation full of hazards. I hardly need add that the ranch owner and operator who must pay interest upon any substantial part of today's ranch values has an uphill job in making an adequate familyliving income from a ranching enterprise. What appears to have been happening is that in the ranch credit or budgeting for the annual funds, the possible future capital value growth of the ranch has been anticipated in the provisions made in the annual funds for family living.

American Heritage

The future is but a series of tomorrows. To prepare for tomorrow, we listen to what is being said today. What is being said today about range managers is a response to their effectiveness as they presently perform their duties with the benefit of yesterday’s university training. Thus, Fociety will determine educational objectives if we are wise enough to respond to reactions of our past efforts. In facing the future in range education, we must recognize changing objectives of society and the development of new situations in agriculture. We might consider how the following develonments may influence curriculum planning, content of courses, and teaching methods: (1) acceptance by the United States of responsibility in assisting other nations develop their agricultural potential; (2) increasing number of ranching corporations and absentee ranch owners requiring ranch managers; (3) intensification of management of both public and private grazing lands; (4) the demand for greater application of basic sciences in range research; and (5) multiple-use management of public and private lands formerly assigned a single use. Questions on how range educators should face the future were posed to my colleagues who teach range management; their answers provided a cross-section

British Chinchilla Industry Survey

Abstract— A report is presented of a survey conducted over a 5‐month period amongst chinchilla ranch owners in the British Isles. Data is provided on the birth rates and litter sizes for paired and polygamous units. Death rates and causes are reviewed together with the diseases reported; alimentary diseases were indicated as the most serious cause of loss and malocclusion was also found to show a high incidence.

The Powers-Yonkee Bison Trap

Site 24 PR5 lies on the Fred Yonkee ranch in Powder River County, Montana, and was reported by Mrs, Margaret Powers, president of Sheridan Chapter of the Wyoming Archaeological Society. This site has a history of being pot-hunted by artifact collectors for at least 35 years. The Sheridan Chapter, with the kind per mission of the ranch owners, decided to conduct an investigation of this site while there was yet undisturbed soil. The bulk of the site had already been destroyed and hundreds of projectile points taken away. In July and August of 1961 a concrete datum post was placed; a survey made of the immediate and surrounding area; an examination made by two competent geolo gists (Dr. Frank Koucky, Professor of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, and Dr. Wilton Melhorn, Professor of Geology at Purdue University); and a camp set up at the site. Fourteen members worked a total of 39 man-days in exca vating 3 different locations on the site, and approximately 25 cubic yards of material was moved, all by hand labor and a wheelbarrow. Geologically, the site lies on a high terrace (elevation about 3600 feet above sea level) of pleistocene origin and con sisting of residual ridges and cones sup ported by sandstone or clinker beds, (Fig. 1). The present change rate is slow. The last period of heavy precipi tation (Little Ice Age) was probably about 3500 years ago, with heavy gully cutting. Since then there had been increasing dry ness and stabilization of gullies. The terrain consists of Fort Union or Wasatch beds, 40 to 60 million years old, with a contmuing sequence sandstone to shale to coal to limey-bed with fossils, follow ed by a repetition of this same sequence . The present surface is predominately heavy gumbo soil with outcroppings of red shale. Prairie grasses and sagebrush are the predominant vegetation, with Ponderosa pine and Colorado juniper scattered along ridges and arroyos . Mule deer and antelope are plentiful in the area, with considerable numbers of sage grouse, jackrabbits, cottontails, badgers, porcupines, and some raccoons. The country is quite arid, and the tem perature was extremely hot with the sun beating down mercilessly during the ex cavation period. The cultural area lies mostly along the north bank of a small arroyo which drains from east to west, emptying into a larger arroyo which drains to the north into a broad, rather flat valley. It appears that ancient man probably drove the bison from the broad valley or collecting basin into the large, north-south arroyo; then, with the aid of a barricade, shunted them into the smaller, east-west arroyo, which at that time probably had more or less verti cal walls. In the east or upper end of this arroyo, the bison were helplessly trapped, and it was an easy matter for the hunters to slay them at practically point-blank range with their stone-tipped projectiles. The rib cage was apparently the favorite target area on the bison, because the majority of the points were found in asso ciation with rib bones. It was decided to excavate at three differ ent locations on the site where surface evidence gave assurance of the presence of a cultural zone with undisturbed soil. The first location, which is called Site #1, was a small, loaf-shaped ridge lying at the head of the arroyo with a steep gully on either side. Some pot-hunting had been done here and much bone was evident in the disturbed dirt. A vertical profile was cut at right angles through the end of the ridge and in undisturbed soil, (Fig. 2). This revealed a cultural layer averaging