Word: sheepmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sheepmen gathered at dusk outside the meeting hall in Mertzon, Texas. They wore cowboy hats (each hat distinctive, matching the weathered face) and belt buckles the size of a Roman's shield. They stood in dusty boots on the scrubby grass and drank strong black coffee out of plastic cups as the night came on. The ranchers bantered in the sidelong West Texas way, good-humored insult frisking and woofing just at the edges of the talk, like a sheepdog nipping at the fleecier pleasantries. But shadows moved across the landscape...
Something is happening to the state of Texas and the state of basketball, once as compatible as cattlemen and sheepmen in the West. Next to "Remember the Alamo," the most threadbare sampler this side of the Pecos must be retired College Publicist Jones Ramsey's familiar line, "There're only two sports in Texas--football and spring football." Former University of Texas Basketball Coach Abe Lemons laments, "You can lay a football down in a parking lot and draw a crowd," but college jump shooters have been a rougher sell in the Lone Star State. Historically, pro basketball has been...
Coyotes are small (about 30 lbs.), fast, clever and notably fond of mutton chops. For years U.S. sheepmen have trapped them, shot them from airplanes, and laid out wholesale poisons. But in 1972 the Nixon Administration banned the use of poison on federal grazing lands because it kills more than just coyotes. The scattered chemicals-usually a nerve drug called Compound 1080-also felled birds, including endangered species like the bald eagle, not to mention foxes, badgers, opossums, raccoons and pet dogs...
...coyotes are blamed for killing more than a million sheep a year, and sheepmen are clamoring for resumption of open chemical warfare. The U.S. Department of the Interior, meanwhile, has been experimenting with more specific anticoyote tactics. In one method, sheep are outfitted with a poison-filled collar; if a coyote takes a bite, it soon bites the dust. Another device, the so-called M-44, involves a spring-loaded tube covered with bait and planted in the ground. When a coyote begins tugging at the bait, the device fires a lethal dose of cyanide into its mouth...