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Fences bad for wildlife on Public Lands- need to ban fences

Posted by on August 18, 2015

As you read this (below) think about how much worse it is for them when there is a wildfire!

How Bad are Fences for Wildlife?
http://www.backcountrychronicles.com/how-bad-are-fences-for-wildlife/

Study of Wildlife Mortality and Fences
I did some research and found a recent study (Harrington & Conover, 2006) published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin (Volume 34, Issue 5, pages 1295–1305, December 2006) of antelope, mule deer and elk mortality along an 600 miles of road (1,200 miles of fence) in Utah and Colorado. They found 0.25 mortalities per year per km of fence (0.11 antelope; 0.08 mule deer and 0.06 elk) , or one dead antelope every year per 5.6 miles of fence; one dead mule deer every year per 7.8 miles of fence and a dead elk every year for every 10.3 miles of fence.

In addition to animals found dead and tangled in a fence, they also found a dead ungulate lying next to a fence every 1.2 miles (every year), of which 90% were fawns that supposedly were separated from their mothers and were unable to cross the fence.

If the Harrington & Conover study found a dead animal tangled every 2.5 miles of fence every year and a dead animal next to a fence every 1.2 miles every year then over the two year study, they found over 1,900 dead animals in or next to fences in one study.

How many miles of fence are there?

The average BLM allotment is 7,476 acres. If the USFS allotments are about the same size, that would total 33,841 total allotments for both BLM and USFS. If each allotment was fenced with no cross fencing and each allotment was square, each allotment would have 13.67 miles of fence. Since many allotments would share common fences, if we assume that each allotment shares fencing on three sides with other allotments, at a minimum, there would be over 115,000 miles of fence.

If we assume the data from the Harrington & Conover study can be applied to our crude estimate of the amount of fences on BLM and USFS lands, then there could be over 92,500 animals killed annually (in 16 Western states) due to fences.

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