WEBVTT
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(door sliding)
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(footsteps)
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- You didn\'t notice if
that horse was lame?
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Coming in, was he good?
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Um, and he looked fine.
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Good, good.
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Hey, old fella.
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Whoa, boy, whoa.
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I\'m Miles Anderson.
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I ranch, like, south of
Fir Mountain, I guess,
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in Saskatchewan.
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Mainly I run cattle.
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We have run horses
and sheep, and that\'s
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how we make our living.
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And we do it on somewhat more
than 20,000 acres, I guess.
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Our family came in 1910,
and they homesteaded in 1911.
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I haven\'t been anywhere else.
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I went to college for a couple
of years, and other than that,
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I\'ve spent my entire life here.
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♪ ♪
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Well, the challenges
are, I mean it\'s,
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it takes a lot of acres
to run and feed cows.
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Oh, there\'s so many
thing that can happen that
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determines the amount of
grass that grows, like,
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there\'s hailstorms,
grasshoppers,
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fire and then drought.
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It\'s heartbreaking to, to have
it happen, but I mean it does.
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Our summer range is
in the middle of the
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Grasslands National
Park in the east block.
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We are on three sides
surrounded by grasslands,
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and then on the other
side is the US border.
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This is our side and
that side is the Parks.
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It\'s not as painful as it once
was having cows get out there.
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They aren\'t the
scourge the once were.
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Well, come on, buddy, come on.
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You can ride them but
you can\'t lead \'em.
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(wind blowing)
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When the wind is blowing
you have no bugs.
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Well, today will be a
good day for moving cows.
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Well, we\'re gonna go down and
gather about a hundred head of
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cow calf pairs.
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They\'re, like, 2 1/2
miles south of here,
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and we\'ll move \'em back up
towards here and move them into
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Grasslands Park.
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You get dealt a set of cards
and you got to play \'em, and,
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and I don\'t really want
to go anywhere else,
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and the hand that I\'ve been
dealt is to learn to deal with
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folks that maybe care more about
sage-grouse than they do about
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cows, or me making
a living from cows.
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See, there\'s all kinds of signs,
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that\'s fresh
sage-grouse droppings.
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Like, I can\'t believe
we can pop some out yet.
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They could be walking
around, watching us, too.
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Well, what the cattle do is they
remove the tall grass from in
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between the sagebrush plants.
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But you can see the
patchwork grazing there.
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There\'s places that\'s
grazed off short,
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which allows in the spring for
the forbs to get sunlight and
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heat to grow early, so that
would feed the chicks when
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they\'re first hatched.
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So, if they don\'t have
forbs and insects, they die.
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On our side of the fence
with the sage-grouse,
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the chick survivability was a
whole lot better on my side than
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it was on the Park side.
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They decided that for the sake
of the sage-grouse that they
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maybe ought to put
some cattle in there,
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or have some grazing
of some kind.
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(mooing)
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(mooing)
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By working together,
it can be better for both us,
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both us, the sage-grouse, the
people that care for them,
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and for me and my family as
far as raising livestock.
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(mooing)
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Well, I feel
pretty bad if we let the
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sage-grouse
disappear, I mean why,
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what gives us the
right to decide?
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♪ ♪
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I don\'t know, I mean whether
it\'ll be the next Dodo bird,
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or passenger pigeon, I
don\'t know, like, they\'re,
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like, right on the edge, so.
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A lot of people say
that they don\'t
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have much of a chance here.
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I can\'t really see
\'em disappearing,
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but I guess maybe that\'s
what they thought about the
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passenger pigeon, too.
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(wings fluttering)
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(birdsong)
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♪ ♪
