After moving to New Mexico a year ago, and doing quite a bit of hiking, I began to notice something strange. On many hikes in what seemed to be fairly remote wilderness areas, in thick pine forests, in the mountains, there were cows. Now I’m from the Midwest. I spent my summers on my grandparent’s dairy farm. I know cows. Cows are big, messy, clumsy beasts who live in open pastures and eat grass and suck down oceans of water and fill the land with cowpies. What they heck are they doing up at 9000 feet in the arid Southwest?
The short answer is that this is their summer pasture. Since Europeans came here hundreds of years ago, they have taken the cows up high where there is more water and forage. But cows definitely don’t belong in the high peaks. They are an invasive species that tramples delicate ecosystems, dirties the creeks, and deposits tons of manure. A fine book about New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo mountains, Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times Of a New Mexico Mountain Range, by William deBuys, describes how years of grazing and overgrazing have destroyed countless acres and permanently altered the face of the Sangres and other New Mexico mountains.
Today the Forest Service has succeeded in limiting the number of cows in the mountains (often through destructive practices like clear-cutting valuable piñons to turn the land into pasture). But local Spanish communities who cherish the cattle culture—and have little use for the Forest Service—continue to herd cows even when there is little economic payoff.
The more I’ve learned about cows, the more I’ve discovered that cows are the secret explanation for so much that has gone wrong in the West.
What killed the bison and the Indians? Cows. Cattlemen saw bison as competitors for rangeland. Ditto for Indians, who among other sins interfered with cattle drives, claimed valuable land, and had a tendency to rustle livestock.
What killed the great predators, the wolves and cougars and grizzlies that once adorned the West and kept its ecosystems in balance? Cows. Ranchers waged, and continue to wage, unthinking war on every animal seen as a threat to livestock, usually by enlisting the government to shoot, trap, and poison anything that moves. Further, the millions of miles of barbed wired fencing that ranchers require interferes with animal movement and migration.
Why is the West chronically short of water? Yup. Cows. More water is used for cattle than anything else, more than for agriculture or industry. Water is needed both directly to sustain stock, and indirectly to grow alfalfa and other feed. On average, a pound of beef requires 1800 gallons of water. The ongoing desertification of the West owes more to cows than anything else.
Why are so many plant and animal species disappearing? Cows again. Huge amounts of public lands—and most cattle in the West live on public lands—managed by the Bureau of Land Management have been overgrazed and decimated; BLM is largely controlled by ranching interests, so it charges nominal grazing fees and resists or overlooks rules designed to protect wildlife and public lands. Destruction of native grasses and shrubs reduces the ability of the land to hold water, contributes to erosion, and kills habitat for native birds and animals.
What adds insult to injury is that Western cattle are of so little value. Less than two percent of US beef comes from cattle on public land in the West. The livestock industry in 11 Western states accounts for only 0.5% of income. And the industry demands huge government subsidies for roads, fencing, predator control, water projects, and much more. Grazing fees on public lands are a fraction of those charged by private owners, and ranchers get generous write-offs. As Christopher Ketchum writes in This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West, “The industry, in other words, is provided all kinds of preferential treatments, and survives on the dole, probably irremediably, because in the arid conditions of the West, where the climate conspires against cattle production, it cannot do otherwise.”
Why, then, do we continue to put up with this bovine invasion? Incessant and coordinated political pressure is the answer. Ranching interests embedded at all levels of Western government rely on misplaced nostalgia for the cowboy way of life to deflect all attempts to deal rationally with anything seen as threatening the man-on-horseback. Today’s ‘ranchers’ are in any case likely to be New York bankers or Hollywood stars; the small independent rancher is a vanishing breed. But they are expert at lobbying and enlisting politicians who cannot resist the argument that we must keep cattle on the range to preserve that American icon, the cowboy.
Now, I have nothing against cowboys (though it must be acknowledged that the original cowboy legends were largely manufactured back East by dime-novelists and Teddy Roosevelt). But the notion that raising Western cattle is a noble calling undertaken by rugged Marlboro men overcoming duststorms, Injuns, ravening wolves, and evil bureaucrats is bunk. It has from the beginning been a destructive industry managed and bankrolled by rich and mostly absentee investors. The actual cowboys who—for a very brief period—moved big herds to the stockyards in Kansas and Nebraska were mostly poor slobs who were paid little and cast aside. The cowboy has long since taken on a life of his own due to Wild West Shows, movies, and TV. And more power to him. Go to rodeos. Wear the boots and hats. But please, give up the cows.
A dangerous development is that lately anti-government radicals have enlisted some of those same cowboy wannabes as the centerpiece of broader grievances against the hated Federal government. And it’s worked. Remember the Bundy’s, the ornery, racist clan that fought the government over access to grazing land in Nevada? The Feds tried to rein in the Bundy family’s penchant for violating the terms of its grazing permit by overstocking and threatening critical breeding grounds for the endangered Agassiz desert tortoise. Cliven Bundy ignored the BLM for almost two decades, and when finally faced with fines and the impounding of his herd, went into open revolt against the US government. Militia groups and government-haters sprang into action; confronted by hundreds of crazed and armed Bundy supporters, the government caved, returning his cattle and ignoring the $1.1 million in uncollected fees.
A few years later when Cliven’s son Ammon, spouting the same anti-government nonsense, occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, the feds eventually arrested him and his followers; but after a comically inept prosecution, Bundy was freed. BLM and Forest Service employees, meanwhile, were regularly threatened and harassed by Bundyites with no serious response from federal authorities. Federal workers who took their mission of protecting the land seriously were often hung out to dry by their superiors, afraid of retaliation from Congress. In short, the pro-cow government agencies failed to defend clear laws and regulations. It goes without saying that these tendencies have metastasized under the Trump administration.
The broader environmental and dietary problems with beef consumption are a separate issue. If you want your steaks and burgers, fine, just get them from cows that live somewhere else.