A billionaire’s fence is the latest fault line in a 150-year-old San Luis Valley land war

 SAN LUIS — For more than 150 years, going back to when this high desert of sandy arroyos and snow-capped peaks was ceded by Mexico, they have gone to “the mountain” as part of their survival.

Like their ancestors who settled in the San Luis Valley before it was even Colorado, the descendants still gather firewood and graze their livestock on what they call “La Sierra” — more than 100 square miles of juniper and piñon pine forest rising to a 20-mile stretch of the saw-toothed Sangre de Cristo range. 

That was the deal made when the valley was subdivided in the mid-1800s. The settlers each got a plot of desert with access to an acequia irrigation ditch, and they were allowed to go into the high country to harvest timber, hunt deer and elk, and graze their cattle and sheep. 

The arrangement for the heirs of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of 1844 has remained mostly in place even as a line of wealthy men have purchased the land — not always peacefully, but with court battles, armed security guards, suspected arson and even a shooting. 

Now, the battle line between the current billionaire landowner, who is the son of a Texas oil baron, and the few thousand descendants with a legal right to use the land is a fence...more 

The Largest Wild Hog Ever Caught in Texas

 

While a 300-pound hog is considered “large” in Texas , true monsters can tip the scales at 500 pounds. But “Boarzilla”, the largest wild hog ever caught in Texas, nearly broke the scale weighing in at an astonishing 790 pounds. For reference, that’s close to the size of an average grizzly bear !

Blaine Garcia and Wyatt Walton captured the behemoth boar in De Leon, TX on January 16, 2015. The two had started a business called “Boar Collector Feral Hog Removal” because of the large population of feral hogs running around Texas.

Although Garcia and Walton had hunted their fair share of wild hogs before, they’d never seen anything quite like the legendary Boarzilla. Garcia spotted the great animal and set off with two bulldogs, calling in his buddy Walton for backup. One of the dogs got a hold of the hog’s jaw, but according to Walton, it looked like a piece of hanging jewelry due to the pig’s enormous size.

Despite securing three of the hog’s legs it continued to fight, momentarily overpowering the two men, Finally, however, they managed to subdue the hog and move it to a temporary home...more

Mystik Dan wins 150th Kentucky Derby by a nose in the closest 3-horse photo finish since 1947

 

 

The 150th Kentucky Derby produced one of the most dramatic finishes in its storied history — three noses at the wire.

Mystik Dan desperately fought to hang on with two challengers coming to him in the closing strides. He did, too, after a delay of several minutes while the closest three-horse photo finish since 1947 was sorted out.

That year, Jet Pilot won by a head over Phalanx, who was another head in front of Faultless.

This one was much tighter.

Mystik Dan, an 18-1 shot, edged Sierra Leone by a nose, with Forever Young another nose back in third on Saturday. Sierra Leone was the most expensive horse in the race at $2.3 million...more

Florida bans lab-grown meat

 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill on Wednesday banning the sale of lab-grown meat in the state. The legislation is a clear handout to the state’s cattle industry: the state’s commissioner of agriculture said it was about protecting “our incredible farmers and the integrity of American agriculture.” But DeSantis’ statements make it clear that, like many of his other pet causes, the lab-grown meat ban is a culture war issue.

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a statement the day the bill was signed. A press release declared Florida was “taking action to stop the World Economic Forum’s goal of forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects,” hinting at a fringe conspiracy theory that has taken hold among some on the right.

In reality, lab-grown, or “cultivated,” meat isn’t even available to most consumers yet. Unlike meat alternatives, cultivated meat is made from animal cells. The Food and Drug Administration has only approved lab-grown meat from two companies — Upside Food and Good Meat — neither of which sell their products in stores...more 

The new era of global migration

 

JACUMBA HOT SPRINGS, Calif. — Shortly after dawn, in the desert east of San Diego, a group of migrants huddled around a campfire. They had come together on this desolate stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border from four different continents: Young men from India shared snacks with women from Nicaragua, while a man from Georgia stood next to a family from Brazil.

A volunteer with a local humanitarian group hauled over a beverage cooler filled with papers: legal information printed in 22 different languages. As he handed them out — in Gujarati, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian — he said, “Welcome to the United States.”

This is the new normal of migration to the southern border: What was once mostly a regional phenomenon has become truly global, with the share of migrants coming from the four closest countries dropping and the number from elsewhere around the world increasing.

An NBC News analysis of newly released data from the Department of Homeland Security shows a fundamental shift. Before the pandemic, roughly 9 in 10 migrants crossing the border illegally (that is, between ports of entry) came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — the four countries closest to the border. Those countries no longer hold the majority: As of 2023, for the first time since the U.S. has collected such data, half of all migrants who cross the border now come from elsewhere globally.

The greatest numbers have come from countries farther away in the Americas that have never before sent migrants to the border at this scale. In the 2019 fiscal year, for example, the number of Colombians apprehended illegally crossing the border was 400. In fiscal 2023, it exploded to 154,080 — a nearly four-hundred-fold increase.

But they come, too, from countries in Africa, Eastern Europe and every region in Asia. There have been dramatic increases in the number of migrants from the world’s most populous countries: Between fiscal 2019 and 2023, the number of migrants from China and India grew more than elevenfold and fivefold, respectively. And some countries that previously sent negligible numbers of migrants to the U.S. border have seen staggering increases. In fiscal 2019, the total number of people from the northwest African nation of Mauritania apprehended at the border was 20. Four years later, that number was 15,260. For migrants from Turkey, the number went from 60 to 15,430. The list goes on: More than 50 nationalities saw apprehensions multiplied by a hundred or more...more

41 ‘apex predators’ — that eat venomous snakes — released in north Florida. Here’s why.

 

Wildlife researchers trekked through the tall grass in north Florida, unbothered by the long, slithering “apex predator” species in their hands.

The researchers were at the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve on April 30 to deposit 41 of those creatures back into nature.

They’re eastern indigo snakes, the longest snake species in the U.S., and they play “a vital role in the circle of life here,” according to James Bogan Jr., the director of Central Florida Zoo’s Orianne Center for Indigo Conservation.

Eastern indigo snakes provide balance to the “now rare” ecosystem, eating venomous and nonvenomous snakes, as well as other wildlife, according to conservationists. They’re native to the southeast U.S., but their range has decreased in part due to habitat loss.

The federally threatened snake disappeared from the Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve after 1982, but scientists hope reintroduction efforts since 2017 will be good for both the snake species and the ecosystem as a whole...more