A Cautionary Tale

Public-lands ranching on our 252 million acres of Western rangeland entrusted to the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is at best a precarious undertaking. There are places in the West--former bison habitat, for example--where carefully regulated grazing may make economic sense. In the third week of July, 1994 I was not in one of them.

FR&R had sent me to Gila National Forest in southwest New Mexico to inspect grazing damage to habitat of the Gila trout, our only endangered inland salmonid. In parts of the Midwest an acre of grassland can sustain 10 cows. In Gila country--specifically the 145,000-acre Diamond Bar Allotment--it takes 487 acres to sustain one cow. Or so averred the Forest Service--but only after being chastened by environmentalists.

Whatever the real figure may be, one has to ask: Why bother? All the public range in the West produces less than five percent of this nation's beef. With sufficient subsidies and manipulations of water resources, running cattle in semi-deserts such as the Gila National Forest is possible but insane--like raising pineapples in Alaska. It's a lose-lose-lose situation--for ranchers, for fish and wildlife, and for taxpayers who are called upon to underwrite: 1) the eradication of native predators; 2) the removal of native plant communities to make way for alien grasses favored by cattle but useless to wildlife; and 3) the purchase and installation of cattle guards, water troughs, water pipes and fences. On top of these services the Forest Service and BLM lease grazing rights on the public's land for about one-seventh fair-market value--what private landowners get for leasing the same acreage. According to the General Accounting Office, the federal government lost $123 million administering public-lands grazing in fiscal 2004.

Grazing rights on the Diamond Bar Allotment, in the Gila Wilderness (the nation's first designated wilderness) and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, had been leased to the Laney and Diamond Bar Cattle companies, owned by ranchers Kit Laney and his then wife, Sherry. Unlike other extractive industries, livestock ranching is permitted in federal wilderness, national wildlife refuges, and even national-park units, provided it has been deemed a "traditional use." The Laneys' cattle hadn't been responsible for all the damage I saw, but they had done their share.

When bovine teeth and hooves devegetate and dest-abilize floodplains, runoff doesn't seep, creep and renew; it slashes, setting off headcuts that race along stream channels and form waterfalls at the confluence of each tributary. The waterfalls, in turn, set off headcuts on the tributaries until the whole system unravels into a wide, dry latticework of cemented silt. The flow ceases; the water table plummets. Thus do cows pound trout streams into the bowels of the earth.

The giant cottonwoods that had shaded and cooled former Gila trout water had expired with the streams. Their sand-blasted corpses stood beside or lay across dry washes. Riparian grasses had been replaced by rabbitbrush, Western yarrow, thistle, pinon, juniper and other plants worthless to riparian fish and wildlife, and even livestock. I kept seeing the Laneys' ragged, bony cows standing in and around extinct trout streams. If a Yankee dairyman kept stock in this condition, he would be busted by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

In Black Canyon Creek, the last perennial stream in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, I finally encountered fish--desert suckers, speckled dace and Gila-rainbow hybrids. The Endangered Species Act required the federal government to get the cows out of the stream and restore pure Gilas; but, as usual, the bureaucracy was moving in slow motion. In the wide, eroded section through the Laneys' inholdings and allotment cows were standing in the stream, urinating, defecating and knocking down the banks. Where the sun hit the water, cow pies had blossomed into enormous gobs of green algae. When I stopped by the Mimbres ranger station to inquire why federal law was being flouted, I had to navigate around cow pies on the cement walkway.

Kit and Sherry Laneys' ranch and a good part of their allotment was in Catron County, epicenter of the general rancher malaise vaguely defined as the "county supremacy movement," but otherwise indistinguishable from property-rights zealotry. The Laneys were angry in 1994, but not as angry as they would become over the course of the next 10 years. "Hungry and Out of Work?" inquired the bumper sticker on their truck. "Eat an Environmentalist." Journalists, Kit informed me, are "big, shittin' jackasses," a harsh assessment considering all the fawning press he was getting and would get from livestock and property-rights publications and even mainstream newspapers.

According to the preferred alternative of the Forest Service's Environmental Impact Statement, cattle on the Diamond Bar needed to be reduced from 1,188 head to no more than 800 head. The document also alleged that, in order for even this many cattle to survive without further savaging the fish, wildlife and native plant communities of this desiccated land, the agency would have to build the Laneys up to 20 "stock tanks" (artificial ponds bulldozed out of wilderness seeps, springs and wet meadows that feed past and present Gila trout water). The proposed grazing reduction outraged the Laneys. "Buddy," Kit told me, "our business is over." But it wasn't.

The following year, 1995, the Forest Service announced its final decision: It would build the Laneys 15 stock tanks. This elicited an administrative appeal from environmentalists and the subsequent overturn of the decision by the agency's chief, Jack Ward Thomas, who observed that congressional grazing guidelines for wilderness don't include this kind of intensive manipulation.