Open range

In the Western United States and Canada, open range is rangeland where cattle roam freely regardless of land ownership.

Land in open range that is designated as part of a "herd district" reverses liabilities, requiring an animal's owner to fence it in or otherwise keep it on the person's own property.

), open-range laws began to be challenged and were significantly curtailed, though they still exist in certain areas of most Western US states and Canadian provinces.

[3] Open-range management has also been practiced in other areas, including the Caribbean and some Eastern US states, such as South Carolina during the colonial period.

[citation needed] Unlike the Eastern United States, the Western prairies of the 19th century were vast, undeveloped, and uncultivated.

Various state statutes, as well as vigilantism during the so-called Fence Cutting Wars, tried to enforce or combat fence-building, with varying success.

[8] By the 1890s, barbed-wire fencing had become standard on the northern plains, railroads had expanded to cover most of the U.S., and meatpacking plants were being built closer to major ranching areas, making long cattle drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas unnecessary.

[2] On roadways within an open range area, in a cow-car collision on a roadway, the rancher was at one time not generally liable,[11] but recent law changes beginning in the 1980s gradually increased rancher liability, first requiring cattle be kept off federal highways, then other developed roads, and in some cases, limited open range grazing only to certain times of the year.

In some states, such as Montana, case law on the open range has, for all practical purposes, eliminated it altogether, though statutes may remain on the books.

In Montana, the Montana Supreme Court in the decision Larson-Murphy v. Steiner, for a short time effectively eliminated some aspects of the open range doctrine altogether, though stating that it still applied in other cases, and required legislative action to update the state's statutes to ameliorate some inconsistent provisions of the decision.

The Montana legislature then amended the statutes governing the open range to impose liability on livestock owners to motorists only for negligence.