Earth haters could appeal after federal judge rules in Gila cattle case

All waterways in the US Mountain West are endangered and that cattle have been allowed into national forests and other public ground is a crime that needs to end. 

Whether it’s American Prairie’s bison grazing on Bureau of Land Management ground in Montana or the US Department of Agriculture killing cattle on the Gila National Forest or shooting wolves from helicopters or running over them with snowmobiles or bailing out ranchers after wildfires socialized grazing just isn’t enough to keep some Republicans happy. 

After the 2022 Black Fire erased 325,000 acres of the forage base for elk and other cervids on the Gila removing rampaging cattle became an imperative to protect wilderness so contractors with the US Department of Agriculture's Animal & Plant Health Inspection Service or APHIS shot some 84 invasive beeves in 2022 and 2023. Managers with the GNF knew there were still critters infesting public lands so officials took comments on another round of lethal removals but decided not to pursue those plans after the Forest Service found just twenty. 

In 2023 the Center for Biological Diversity sued the US Fish and Wildlife Service because of that agency's failure to better protect the Gila River from erosion caused by livestock and wild cattle. 

Earlier this year US District Court Judge for the District of New Mexico James O. Browning ruled that feral cattle on the Gila are not domestic livestock in a 241 page response to a lawsuit brought by the NM Cattle Growers' Association and other petitioners who graze livestock on public lands for pennies per head. The Cattle Growers’ Association is not known for accuracy or precision and an appeal of the decision had not been announced at post time.

The Forest Service contended in their response to the suit that the feral cattle in the Gila — descendants of a herd abandoned in the 1970s on the Redstone grazing allotment at the northern edge of the Silver City Ranger District — have not been raised or kept by humans for generations, so therefore do not qualify as livestock. The cattle, the Forest Service argued in the response, are destructive to the riparian areas of the Gila Wilderness and also pose a danger to hikers and others who go to the forest for recreation. [Cattle Growers skeptical of ruling in feral cow case]