A decade after Cliven Bundy and his supporters faced federal agents in an armed standoff over cattle grazing on public land in Nevada, his cattle are still roaming the range, according to a report.
A decades' long dispute between Bundy, a cattle rancher, and the Bureau of Land Management over at least $1 million in unpaid rent and fees led to a tense confrontation on April 12, 2014, before about 380 cattle that had been impounded were set free.
"Since then, we've relatively lived in peace," Ryan Bundy, eldest among 14 Bundy siblings, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview. "The BLM doesn't contact us, talk to us or bother us."
Asked about Bundy cattle still grazing in the Gold Butte National Monument area and the more than hefty rent, fees and penalties the BLM said Bundy owed in 2014, spokesman John Asselin responded that the BLM "does not have any comment on this subject."
Bundy, 77, told the wire service "we're still doing the same thing: ranching."
About 700 Bundy cattle still graze the 160-acre ranch and in the publicly owned Gold Buttle space, an area about half the size of Delaware. Ian Bartrum, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas, law professor who has studied the standoff and land policy, said the Bundys prevailed.
"I think we can safely say, 10 years later, the Bundys won that fight, and federal regulators don't seem at all eager to try again," he told the AP. "We have bigger problems than cattle on public land at this point."
