“Cows? I hate cows worse than coppers.”
I might have laughed, but I also cringed when George “Babyface” Nelson shot up a beef steer during the police chase in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). I’ve seen plenty of cattle die, as well as having grown up hunting, but something about bullet holes in the side of a bovine made me flinch.
The last few years, ranchers in New Mexico have felt the same.
Since 2021, the Gila National Forest has been the center of controversy regarding a herd of wild cattle that live there. In the 1950s, the New Mexico woods – the sixth-largest national forest in the U.S. – devoted some of its land for grazing. According to the United States Forest Service (USFS), several decades later, cattle were abandoned by a rancher on a section of land called the Redstone Allotment. In the ’90s, another permit was granted to a rancher with the agreement that he would “address the feral cattle situation.” That rancher’s permit was suspended in 1996 for noncompliance and then revoked in 1998. The rancher removed several hundred cattle from ’96 to ’98, but enough remained for the population to continue in the wilderness.
The USFS is concerned that the wild herd is damaging the ecology of the forest. Their feces sometimes pollute the river basin, jeopardizing several species of endangered fish, and they denude banks by trampling on plants and consuming vegetation, leading to erosion. Additionally, by eating shoots and saplings, the cattle are interrupting the regeneration of the woods. As such, they have been labeled an “exotic and evasive species.”
Between 1998 and 2021, the USFS issued nine “gather contracts” to allow the cattle to be rounded up, reportedly removing 211 head during this time. In 2021, however, the USFS looked to other means to extinguish the wild herd.
By some accounts, the Gila National Forest was turned into a bad Vietnam movie.
The USFS authorized specialized members from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) – essentially a USDA SWAT team – to exterminate the cattle from helicopters, as well as some ground operations. APHIS has claimed to have killed 154 head since 2021 by these means, although they only shot 19 cows during their last flight maneuvers last spring.
The New Mexico Cattle Growers Association (NMCGA), as well as many local ranchers, are not happy with these tactics. They fear that some of the cattle shot may not be feral, but instead their own, as a high elk population sometimes makes it hard to maintain fences. It can be difficult to verify branding from inside a helicopter. Additionally, it is also hard to ensure the cattle die, and in a humane manner. Shooters often cannot confirm they have killed an animal, and instead may have left it injured. Because the deposed cattle are left to rot, it is a waste of meat. Finally, helicopters are notoriously expensive to operate.
NMCGA has offered several alternatives to the aerial assault. They have asked the USFS to continue to allow them to wrangle and capture the wild cattle. Ranchers who do so can buy them from the Growers Association at a cheap price, ensuring that even after inspection costs, they can profit from the endeavor. It is not an easy task, often being a 15-mile trip on horseback back to a ranch, during which the rounded-up cattle experience high mortality along the way, but a method that NMCGA says is preferable to the present methods. They have also asked for funding to build fencing structures to try to trap the cattle with salt blocks and feed. They insist this would be a better use of taxpayers’ money than helicopter campaigns.
As is often the case of invasive animal termination, the removal of wild cattle from the Gila National Forest has garnered vocal opinions on both sides of the issue. NMCGA has attempted, unsuccessfully, to legally challenge the USFS’s efforts, while the governor of New Mexico has labeled the use of aerial extermination an example of federal government overreach. The USFS defends its actions, stating that the current methods are safer than trying to remove the wild animals manually in the difficult terrain.
Most people, including the NMCGA, agree that something needs to be done about the wild cattle in the Gila National Forest. How to make that happen, however, has put them at loggerheads with a national agency. The only thing that has become clear in the last three years is that there are no easy answers. Regardless, even though farmers and ranchers are no strangers to dead livestock, there’s something uncomfortable in seeing cattle killed this way.
Maybe even Babyface Nelson would have flinched to hear about it.
