It seems that Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and domesticated sheep don't go well together. According to this article, the domesticated sheep seem to carry diseases that kill bighorn. Thus, grazing one is incompatible with grazing the other, necessitating stricter controls on sheep grazing where bighorn roam, or other measures to keep the two apart -- such as shooting bighorn that stray near grazing sheep herds, as one agency proposed. Neither land use -- sheep grazing or providing bighorn habitat -- is necessarily the "proper" use of any given plot of land. Both are reasonable uses of land, but the conflict endures in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest .

Given that the land in question is politically managed, rather than privately owned, competing interests -- environmentalists who like bighorn and sheep ranchers -- must resort to the political process to resolve the dispute. Clearer rights to the lands in question, in either group's hands, would seem to resolve the problem. It would also encourage the development of alternative "fencing" or monitoring techniques to reduce the costs of trying to reconcile the two competing uses. The problem here is not that ranchers want to graze sheep, or that environmentalists want to protect bighorn (as a wildlife-loving meat eater, I'm in favor of both), but that the institutional mechanism with which we address such conflicts -- political management of land -- is not particularly well-suited to resolving disputes in a productive manner.