Sacred Cows

“Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” warn Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. It's excellent advice, at least for the few kids interested in keeping the moribund tradition of public-lands ranching alive. In the West running cattle is a brutal, draining, dirty business that couldn't survive without massive federal life support. Even with that support ranchers are feeling marginalized and unloved; they're angry, and they're getting out—but not fast enough to restore, or perhaps save, sage grouse, desert tortoises, native trout, prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, grassland birds, and the thousands of other species cattle destroy.

In the West the livestock industry is being devastated by drought, foreign beef imports, competition from eastern operations, and healthy-diet education; and ranchers are increasingly pressured by a public out and about on its land and water. Still, they like to imagine they are victims of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—their last best hope in that it requires protection and restoration of the grasslands that feed their stock. Public-lands ranching produces less than 5 percent of the nation's beef. Yet it monopolizes 252 million acres supposedly managed for “multiple use” by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Even national wildlife refuges, national park units, and federal wilderness areas—off-limits to virtually all other extractive industries—allow grazing where deemed a “traditional use.”

After the public gets finished paying for public-lands grazing in lost fish, wildlife, plants, soil, and water, it gets to pay for it again in dollars. According to the General Accounting Office, 10 federal agencies lost $123 million administering grazing in fiscal 2004. On average, an “animal unit month” (AUM)—the amount of forage a cow and her calf supposedly can consume in a month—costs ranchers $1.79 on public land and $13.30 on private land. Meanwhile, the public buys ranchers cattle guards, water troughs, water pipes, and wildlife-killing fences on its rangeland; it hires contractors to rip up its native plant communities and replace them with alien grasses favored by alien bovines but hurtful to its wildlife; it hires predator-control agents to shoot, trap, and poison its native mammals that might eat livestock; and it hires pest-control agents to poison its prairie dogs because ranchers imagine they “compete” with cattle. This bizarre system, known by its critics as “welfare ranching,” evokes the image of the Marlboro Man unhorsed and scrounging cigarette butts from hotel ashtrays.

While cattle and bison share a common Asian progenitor, that does not mean they are ecologically interchangeable. Cattle evolved in the damp forests and swampy lowlands of subtropical Asia, while bison were molded by the relatively dry steppe-tundra ecosystem of Europe and North America. As a result, bison require far less water and move around the upland landscape, giving grazed vegetation a chance to regenerate. The first thing a cow does is head for its natural habitat—a stream and its thin border of green. Unfortunately, about 80 percent of the fish and wildlife in the West depend on these riparian corridors.

Livestock are the main source of nonpoint water pollution in the West and the main reason 80 percent of the region's fishes and 90 percent of its grassland birds are declining. Although riparian corridors comprise only 1.5 percent of public land, 80 percent have been damaged by cattle. “Overgrazing is much too weak a term,” declared rangeland defender and author Edward Abbey. “Most of the public lands in the West are what you might call ‘cowburnt.' Almost anywhere and everywhere you go in the American West you find hordes of these ugly, clumsy, stupid, bawling, stinking, fly-covered, shit-smeared, disease-spreading brutes. They are a pest and a plague.”

The wetter parts of the West—most notably former bison range of the Great Plains—may be appropriate for carefully controlled livestock grazing. But running any cattle in arid regions, where native vegetation did not evolve the capacity to cope with large grazers, is economically and ecologically insane. In July 1994 I visited the Gila and Aldo Leopold wilderness areas in New Mexico's Gila National Forest to inspect the cattle-pounded, semi-desert streams that had once sustained North America's only endangered inland salmonid, the Gila trout. On the middle stretch of Diamond Creek I trudged down a dusty streambed, blown out by flash floods, and through a skeletonized riparian forest that resembled a World War I battlescape. Between sandblasted corpses of cottonwoods, standing and prone, marched western yarrow, juniper, rabbitbrush, thistle, piñon, and other plants worthless to riparian wildlife and even livestock.

Ninety percent of the banks of the Gila River's east fork were raw and bleeding. Black Canyon Creek—the last perennial stream in the Aldo Leopold wilderness—still sustained trout, though they were Gila–rainbow mongrels. The stream rises in the Continental Divide between juniper-topped hills, then hurries through ponderosa pines, giant cottonwoods, Gambel oaks, willows, and stands of Mexican elderberry. In rancher Kit Laney's allotment the channel widened between sloughing banks, and wherever the sunlight hit the water, cow pies had blossomed into enormous green gobs of algae. Cattle with ribs resembling Conestoga-wagon stays stood in the flow, defecating and urinating.

Public-lands ranching in places like the Gila and Aldo Leopold wilderness areas cannot be “reformed,” because it shouldn't happen in the first place. In the memorable words of the Sierra Club's Rose Strickland, “Reform is fine—except when that to be reformed is inherently impractical. Given enough hidden subsidization, special assistance, and publicized misinformation, banana plantations in Minnesota could be made to seem feasible.”

Part of the trouble is that most Americans have never seen the West in anything but cow-nuked condition. They don't understand that there was a time when it didn't look like a black-and-white John Wayne movie, that there were tallgrass prairies, shortgrass prairies, and rolling seas of wildflowers. They don't realize that this wasn't always a land of head cuts and dry washes; that in semi-desert the predominant ground cover shouldn't be vascular plants like the ones invading Diamond Creek but “biological crusts”—complex communities of tiny organisms such as lichens, mosses, algae, and cyanobacteria that aid germination by absorbing sunlight, prevent erosion, retain water, boost fertility by fixing atmospheric nitrogen and carbon, repel weeds, and die when stabbed by bovine hooves.

But grazing differs from other extractive industries in that the damage it causes is reversible—sometimes rapidly reversible. An eight-year grazing moratorium in Utah's Rich County resulted in a 350 percent increase in use by and diversity of small mammals, raptors, and passerine birds. And 12 years ago, when a smart, tough manager named Barry Reiswig kicked the cows off the Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge in southeast Oregon—touching off a political firestorm that got him reassigned—the refuge started doing what it was designed to do. Since then populations of sage grouse, plummeting almost everywhere else, have increased by 537 percent, and pronghorn populations by about 34 percent.