This election season, voters in Brazos County have a choice to make: should ranchers be allowed to let their animals roam free, or should they be required to fence them in?
Texas is an open range state, which means that cattle and other livestock can roam freely unless there’s a local law requiring they be fenced in. Brazos County voters will decide one proposition specifically about cattle, and another covering all other livestock. And these so-called “stock laws” could have a big impact on ranchers.
Tiffany Dowell Lashmet, author of the Texas Agriculture Law Blog as well as a professor and specialist in agricultural law for the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, spoke to Texas Standard about the state’s current range law landscape. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, I’ve certainly seen the cattle crossing signs out here in some parts of West Texas. But how common are counties in Texas that have no stock laws on their books? In other words, livestock roams freely?
Tiffany Dowell Lashmet: Sure. Great question. And it is, like you said, a county by county decision. And in some instances, it’s actually even precinct by precinct within a county.
And so I haven’t seen exact numbers, but I would guess over half of the counties in Texas do have a stock law. But that leaves a good number that don’t have any sort of stock law and they remain open range. So those certainly do still exist.
So let’s say, for example, that there’s an accident on the road and a truck driver runs into a cow. Both the driver and the owner of the cow have suffered damages. What might compensation for each party potentially look like in an open range county vs. a non-open range county?
In an open range county, what that means is there is no legal duty on that livestock owner to fence those cattle in. And so in that situation where you’ve got an open range county, there would be no liability on the livestock owner.
So even if the cattle were in the road, they could be hit by the truck driver, the truck driver severely injured. There’s no liability because there’s just no legal duty.
Now, flip that. If the same accident happened in a closed range county, now there is a duty on that livestock owner to keep those animals from running at large. And that’s where it becomes a fact-specific question.
I think it’s important for folks to understand, even in a closed range county, it doesn’t mean automatic liability for the livestock owner. But that’s where the court’s going to look at factual issues, things like what was the condition of the fences? Was the gate left open? Did the landowner have knowledge the cattle were out? How many times had they been out before?
So in that scenario, there is a chance the landowner could be liable if the factual situation show they had knowledge or that they permitted those animals to run at large.
Well, are there other costs that ranchers could incur as a result of their county requiring animals be fenced in?
So potentially, and it’s sort of an interesting question to look at.
From a legal perspective, if we want to be really technical, if you’re in a county that now requires you to fence your animals in, there certainly could be additional costs of building fences if you don’t already have those. I think practically speaking, though, especially when we’re looking at a county as urban as Brazos County, most animal owners are already fencing their livestock in because they don’t want them roaming at large. They don’t want them on the roadway, things like that.
So I think from a practical perspective, I’m not sure how much additional cost folks would actually face, although certainly if there was a situation where someone did not have a fence and then had to build one, I mean, fencing costs are pretty extreme right now. Somewhere in the neighborhood of about $3 a foot, which equates to around $15,000 a mile.
Well, you raise a good point. Have these kinds of debates become a bigger issue as more of Texas becomes urbanized, stretching into rural areas?
You know, I think that there’s a lot of interesting legal issues that come up when we see rural areas become more urbanized, have more folks that live there. It’s certainly a topic that we talk a lot about in the ag law realm as we see different types of laws and different types of legal issues come up.
I’m not sure that urbanization is a major push of the stock laws being changed. Certainly could be. But when you look at the list of counties that have them, some of those are very urban, some are very rural. So I’m not sure that that’s a driver of this specific issue.
