On the recordJuly 27, 2011
I thank the gentleman for yielding. Some on the other side may be thinking, well, what's a guy from a heavily residential suburban area in the Washington area and with no cattle in his district know? So I would have thought this would have been a perfectly fine amendment: What do you need to have restrictions for livestock moving from one place to another? But upon further investigation, what is not immediately apparent becomes very important. As the gentleman has said, we're talking about very wide swaths of land that are covered by these livestock movements, and they don't just take a few hours or a few days to cross. Sometimes they can take weeks. When you've got very large herds of cattle, you can cause quite a bit destruction to the soil, to the brush, to waterways, to any number of environmental resources in the process of major transfers from one area to another of very large herds of cattle. There can be very substantial environmental destruction. That's why those who are involved in this feel there ought to be a NEPA review. The National Environmental Policy Act will review it, it will tell us what the ramifications will be, what are the consequences, and then based upon that information it empowers those who have land or interests that would be adversely affected by large movements of cattle from one place to another.…
