Aside from animal rights groups attacks against facilities that use animals for medical testing and their vicious campaigns against producers of meat products, another way environmentalists attack meat consumption is their war against ranchers. In New Mexico, a debate has sprouted up about wether ranchers enjoy special privileges by using federal lands for grazing cattle that is later slaughtered.

The debate has gotten new life resulting from the US Fish & Wildlife Service recently classifying the meadow jumping mouse on the endangered species list. According to New Mexico Watchdog the mouse is a creature most visitors to state lands have never seen. As a result, the US Forest and Wildlife Service has erected barriers at certain sites in the Santa Fe National Forest that, essentially, prevent ranchers from using the land to graze their cattle.

The group supporting the effort to block ranchers, WildEarth Guardians, state (albeit falsely) that ranchers get a discount on the grazing fees that result in taxpayers subsidizing the difference. They also further state that grazing on federal lands degrades so many valuable things. Never mind that people love to eat meat and that the meat industry employs hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. To groups like WildEarth Guardians it’s all about what they can do to make life miserable for humans.

I get the impression that most environmentalists are vegetarians. If so, I wonder how they feel about killing plant life in order to feed themselves. It was also recently reported that vegetarian diets affect a person’s sperm count. This being the case, I guess the most comfort I can get out of news like this is that as a result of their diets and even efforts to voluntarily sterilize themselves, environmentalists will eventually die out due to lack of reproduction.