Plan to shoot feral cattle from aircraft tabled

Update: some 67 invasive cattle have been eliminated so far.

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Update: court expedites removal, "Wildlife Services is killing the unbranded and unauthorized cows using suppressed firearms and non-toxic copper bullets."

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The Gila National Forest near the New Mexico-Arizona border has had a problem with feral cattle for years after a grazing permittee went bankrupt then left his herd and the country in the 1970s. 

Agents from the US Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service or APHIS had planned to reduce the population of some 250 invasive critters by shooting them from helicopters. But, Republican welfare ranchers who pay pennies a head per day to graze are concerned permitted cattle will be targeted so the US Forest Service has tabled the idea for now.

Early in 2020 the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Trump Organization's Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and its local representatives saying the agencies are allowing cattle in restricted areas along the Gila River and its tributaries in southwestern New Mexico and southeastern Arizona. Investigators from the Center discovered cattle on the Gila National Forest in excluded riparian zones in violation of a 1998 legal settlement. Because of pollution from cattle grazing American Rivers named the Gila the nation’s most endangered river in 2019. 

In 2020 Senate Bill 3670, the MH Dutch Salmon Greater Gila Wild and Scenic River Act was introduced by former Senator Tom Udall (D-NM). It would protect 450 miles and 23 segments of the Gila River and its tributaries in New Mexico under the 1968 National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. If passed the bill would also transfer 440 acres from the Gila National Forest within the US Department of Agriculture to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument within the US Park Service and the Department of Interior. The bill was reintroduced by Democratic New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich in 2021.

Just north of the US border with Mexico long-time environmental activist, Ted Turner has teamed up with the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the State of New Mexico to foster a pair of endangered Mexican gray wolves and their pups on his 243 square mile ranch near the Gila National Forest. Nearby, jaguars have been reintroduced.

Learn more at the Santa Fe New Mexican.