Enviros team with APHIS to end NM cattle trespass

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. Because of pollution from cattle grazing American Rivers named the Gila the nation’s most endangered waterway in 2019. So, 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. Earlier this year contractors with the US Department of Agriculture's Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service or APHIS shot 65 unvaccinated feral cattle from helicopters on the Gila. 

Managers with the GNF believe there are still 150 cattle infesting the Gila so it's taking comments on another round of lethal removals. But, it's hardly an easy alliance between preservationists and an agency like APHIS that killed 1.75 million animals in 2021 including 400,000 native species like wolves, cougars, bears and bobcats. 

In October Caldera Action joined Santa Fe-based Wild Earth Guardians and the Western Watersheds Project with plans to sue the National Park Service for Trump Organization failures to control trespass cattle in endangered species habitat at the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Native bison, elk and deer have been hunted to near extinction in most of the Southwest or killed in collisions with motor vehicles so the US Forest Service has been scrambling to clear fuels Indigenous used to burn off every year. 

Pre-European Indigenous cultures in the Jemez Mountains and around the Valles Caldera raised turkeys, beans, squash and maize. That cattle have been allowed into national forests and other public ground for pennies a head is a crime that needs to end. But, in Montana, Republican welfare ranchers find great joy in slaughtering wolves from aircraft and the feds are killing feral goats in the Wyoming Tetons. 

As of October, 2022 the US Bureau of Land Management has removed over 19,000 horses and burros from public land and holds over 64,000 in confinement although the data clearly show livestock are far more destructive.

Democracy is messy business and it takes political courage to just say no to domestic livestock on public lands and pass legislation that compensates for depredation but bravery is a trait conspicuously absent in Congress right now.

ip image: the Valles Caldera in 2015.

WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, and Caldera Action have just taken action to try and put the chronic illegal trespassing of cattle into Valles Caldera National Preserve to an end once and for all. https://t.co/Ey1nlGTTa3

— John Horning (@JohnHorning_) October 20, 2022