Old Forest Service Hand Sees
Range Issues From Both Sides

By David Bowser

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Fred Galley has seen the public range controversy from both sides now — and he still doesn't have an answer.

Galley was one of the first Range Conservation Officers with the U.S. Forest Service in the 1950s. Today, he ranches in New Mexico.

He has lived the problems of grazing public lands for most of his life, first as a government official and now as a private citizen.

"I'm not sure there is common ground," he says. "Everybody is totally distrustful of each other at this point."

Galley says there has always been resentment on the part of the ranchers for anybody in the federal government who has tried to impose controls on public lands.

"From the very beginning when the forests were first reserved for public domain and the Forest Service was given charge of this, one of the things they were given charge of was to get numbers of cattle under a permit and under some kind of control," Galley says. "That procedure went on for a long time."

Earlier programs had a different focus, and the two opposing aims laid the groundwork for the current conflict.

Laws passed back in the late 19th century established the public domain and encouraged the westward expansion of cattlemen and farmers. There were various homestead laws and stock laws that allowed parties to gain what was called "patents" on properties, the right to use those properties.

"One of those stock laws allowed ranchers to patent the areas around water and develop the area around water," Galley explains.

The patents were different sizes. They could be 40 acres or 100 acres or just about any other size depending upon the area and the use required.

"The terminology of the law was that they were to have use of that public domain grazing land for their efforts of settling the country and developing these waters," Galley says. "Their control would be that they could patent the areas around the water so they would control the water, and that would give them use of grazing on the public domain."

It is these laws that are providing the basis for some of the lawsuits now working their way through the court system.

"All the way back through the Forest Service's history, stockmen at various times have tried to file water rights on public domain," Galley says. "The Forest Service has resisted it and said it wasn't legal. I think it still remains to be determined by the courts whether it's legal or not.

"It's not legal to acquire water rights after the forest was reserved from the public domain. That's very definite that you cannot establish any rights on the forest reserve because of the language in those reservations, but if those rights were established while those lands were still in the public domain, which most of these western ranchers had done, then that right was not canceled when it when into reserve from the public domain."

Galley explains that in many instances the ranching families were established on the public range before the Forest Service.

As the system developed, it was to the advantage of the rancher to graze as many cattle as he could on these lands. The early laws were written to encourage production rather than conservation. As a result, many of the lands were overgrazed.

That led the Forest Service to initiate a program to oversee grazing.

Galley and another fellow, Clarence Kerns, graduated from Texas A&M to become the first two range conservationists hired by the Forest Service.

"We were the original two," Galley says.

The grazing manual for allotment analysis and evaluation was still in draft form.

"They hired us, and we went to work down on the Coronado National Forest and started doing range allotment analysis work and working with ranchers," Galley says. "That's what I did for the first 10 years or so of my career with the Forest Service."

Later, he was district ranger at Glenwood on the Gila.

"I enjoyed that very much," Galley says. "I got along very well with the ranchers down there."

They did a lot of stock water development and established a lot of grazing plans.

One of the areas where Galley had problems, however, was trying to get grazing numbers down.

Traditionally, the ranchers had usually kept what was called the "natural increase" in their herds.

"They would have a permit that would be for 500 head of mother cows plus the calves," Galley says. "Then it was understood that whatever increase from last year they could carry over to yearlings, so they'd carry their entire calf crop over the following year and sell them as yearlings."

The Forest Service wanted to reduce and eliminate that "natural increase."

"They saw that as a way to bring carrying capacity into line and eliminate some overgrazing problems," Galley explains. "I think I had the last three 'natural increase' permits from the whole region in my district."

Galley grew up northeast of Dallas and went to college at Texas A&M.

"I had a desire to go to work for the Forest Service," Galley says. "I did not have a ranching or farming background at all."

Texas A&M offered a degree in what they called at that time "range and forestry."

"It was primarily a range management degree," Galley says. "Forestry and wildlife were included in that."

After graduating in 1956, Galley went to work for the Forest Service. After a 29-year career with the Forest Service, Galley took early retirement to go into the real estate business in Albuquerque. About a year or two ago, he joined with a friend from Illinois to acquire a ranch in Catron County, N.M.

"That's always been a dream of mine, my entire life, ever since I got out of A&M," Galley says.

Located southeast of Reserve, N.M., it has 400 acres of private land strung out along Negrito Creek, a small trout stream, for about 10 miles.

"We've got about 55,000 acres of national forest permit," Galley says. "We've got a 480-head permit on the national forest."

They are running right now about 400 head in their cow-calf operation. They've been running Red Angus bulls on crossbred cows for the past eight or 10 years, but are in the process of changing to Brangus.

Besides the ranching operation, they are involved with wildlife outfitting and elk hunting.

"My partner raises elk commercially," Galley says. "That's one of the reasons that drew us to the ranch. We're both interested in the wildlife aspects as well as the cattle aspects of it."

He says the deer population, like most of New Mexico, is dropping because of an explosion of predators throughout the West. For the most part, that is a direct result of public policy which seems to discourage predator control.

"The public has gotten into the love of animals and the protection of animals," Galley says. "As a result, we've seen a lot of resistance to predator control in the western United States. Laws have been passed to prohibit various kinds of controls."

Galley says that for decades, dating back to before he was in school, wildlife courses taught that predators were not a problem. They had little impact on wildlife control.

"We all grew up in the era when predator control was very, very strong, and you didn't have very many predators," Galley says.

That has all changed and could lead to a new understanding of the impact of predators on wildlife.

"Nobody that's around today has ever really experienced what predators can do when their population is allowed to increase," Galley says. "Some of this is starting to surface now. People are starting to question this because a lot of your animal rights people have gone to that old theory that predators don't have any impact."

Various wildlife departments maintain that predators are still not a problem, although the real numbers may offer a differing view.

"Even though we've been taught that predators aren't a problem, we've also been taught that mountain lions' primary food source is deer," Galley says. "A mountain lion will kill a deer every week."

A recent report indicates that in the state of Wyoming, there are 3000 to 3500 mountain lions. If they eat a deer every week, that's about 150,000 deer a year that the mountain lions are taking.

"You've got a further problem that we're finding in Southwest New Mexico," Galley says. "Our coyote population has gotten totally out of hand because we have no controls."

Now, Galley maintains, when a mountain lion kills a deer, the lion consumes a quarter of the deer and hides the rest to feed on later. Coyotes find the deer carcass and eat it, so the mountain lion has to kill another deer.

"They're starting to find now that a mountain lion is really killing one and a half to two deer a week to survive," Galley notes.

Galley says that when he and his partner bought their ranch, they didn't realize the coyote problem that existed there.

They had bought more than 100 young Angus first-calf pregnant heifers and put them on a 500 acre pasture on the ranch. A neighbor who was watching the heifers for Galley and his partner told them he came over to spread out some range cubes one day when he passed one that was just starting to have her calf. He went on to get the feed, thinking he'd check on her later, but when he reached the barn a quarter mile away, he looked back to see two coyotes standing on their hind legs eating the calf before it hit the ground.

"The coyotes came in there on those calves, and we lost somewhere between 40 and 50 calves to coyotes," Galley says.

Grazing numbers and predator control are just a few of the problems facing ranchers who use public lands. Galley readily admits that most of the problems are complex, and there are no easy answers that will satisfy everyone.

Perhaps the biggest problem is there doesn't seem to be an answer that will satisfy anyone.

Not only is there conflict between the ranchers and the government, there are conflicts between governments: state, federal and local, and between agencies within each level of government. Add to that animal rights advocates and an increasingly radical environmental activist community, and the nation's forests and public lands seem to be sown with conflict more than trees or forage.

"There's resentment all the way around right now," Galley says.

And there doesn't seem to be a way to end it.