NM Cattle Growers Disputing
Story That Downplays Eco Suits

ALBUQUERQUE — The New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association says a recent Wall Street Journal article contains comments that are inaccurate and misleading.

Caren Cowan, executive secretary of the New Mexico Cattle Growers' Association, says she's afraid the public will be misled by the article.

"The threat to livestock in the West is real and immediate," Cowan says.

She says the newspaper story contains comments from the national Public Lands Council that are inaccurate and misleading.

"There is ample documentation to prove that the Forest Guardians and others are using litigation against federal and state land management agencies to remove grazing from New Mexico and the West," Cowan insists.

During the summer of 1998, for example, former Forest Guardians Executive Director John Talbreth stated on KOB Radio in Albuquerque that cows are exotic pests that have no place in New Mexico.

In June 1999, John Horning told The Albuquerque Journal that the Forest Guardians suit to obtain personal financial information about Forest Service permittees was intended to destabilize the livestock industry and to drive lenders away from the industry.

On October 30, 2000, the Forest Guardians told The Wall Street Journal that their suit was designed to remove 50 percent of the livestock from forests in New Mexico and Arizona.

A coalition of 10 southwestern environmental, hunting and wildlife protection groups, led by the Forest Guardians and represented by Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, filed suit last June in U.S. District Court in Tucson, Ariz., against the U.S. Forest Service, challenging livestock grazing on national forests in New Mexico and Arizona. The organizations claim the Endangered Species Act was violated by allowing grazing to continue in areas of Mexican spotted owl habitat.

The suit asks for full implementation of standards, put into effect in 1996, that plaintiffs say require the Forest Service to monitor and protect the Mexican spotted owl's habitat from damage due to livestock grazing.

The suit asks the court to order the Forest Service to go back and begin a new consultation under the Endangered Species Act on its forest plans.

Other groups filing the suit include Gila Watch, White Mountain Conservation League, Carson Forest Watch, Maricopa Audubon Society, Animal Protection of New Mexico, Forest Conservation Council, Arizona Wildlife Federation, Southwest Environmental Center, and T&E Inc.

According to the plaintiffs, standards call for monitoring and limiting the amount of grass grazed by cattle, and recovering damaged stream systems. They also say Forest Service data indicates that more than 75 percent of grazing allotments in the Southwest are violating one or more of these standards.

The plaintiffs claim forest management plans were amended in 1996 to include accounting for Mexican spotted owl and other imperiled livestock habitat. They say the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published two biological opinions contending the Mexican spotted owl could only survive as a species on the condition that new forest plan standards were fully implemented.

Jason Campbell, executive director of the Public Lands Council, is quoted in the article as saying that the lawsuits are frustrating from the standpoint that they are the result of a government agency's inability to do what they are supposed to do.

From his standpoint, Campbell says in the article, he didn't see the lawsuits as an attempt to totally get rid of grazing. Instead, he thought the Forest Guardians suit was an attempt to get Forest Service to actually do monitoring of the grazing allotments that was part of the 1996 regulation changes.

In addition, Campbell says there would be some buffer time given before the most recent suit would move forward, due to some stipulations under Forest Service regulations that allow for time extensions in the case that allotment monitoring cannot be conducted due to extreme, catastrophic circumstances. This year, the fire and drouth situations in New Mexico and Arizona have left the Forest Service unable to monitor grazing within the mandated timeframes.

There is no legal basis for any buffer, Cowan says.

The government has 60 days from October 30 to answer the suit, then it will proceed through the legal channels.

"The article also states that it must be proven that the species are present on the allotments for the suit to be valid," Cowan says. "Although common sense would dictate that that should be the case, in the legal world that is not the case."

The Arizona Cattle Growers' Association has won two cases in federal district court that require that species be present for there to be harm; however, the government has appealed those cases to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

"There is no time line on when a decision will come out of that court," Cowan says. "If the Ninth Circuit supports the Arizona decisions, the case could still be appealed to the Supreme Court by the government, so it may be a long time before there is any legal precedent that can be applied to cases like these."