The push back of private citizens to the federal government has come to New Mexico. Otero county has voted to defy the federal government and give a rancher’s cattle access to a watering hole fenced off by the Forest Service in the latest dispute over federal control of public land in the U.S. West.
Commissioners in Otero County voted 2-0 on Monday night to authorize Sheriff Benny House to open a gate allowing nearly 200 head of cattle into the 23-acre area despite Forest Service restrictions. A third commissioner was out of town for the vote.
“We are reacting to the infringement of the U.S. Forest Service on the water rights of our land-allotment owners,” Otero County Commissioner Tommie Herrell told Reuters. “People have been grazing there since 1956.”
But a U.S. Forest Service spokesman said the fence has also been there for decades, protecting a delicate ecosystem surrounding a natural spring as well as an endangered species of mouse from being trampled by cattle.
Here we go again. Just as the silvery minnow created an uproar years ago on water use in New Mexico, now a mouse must be protected by the government. This always makes me chuckle and a little angry too. Most environmentalists would describe themselves as evolutionists. Yet, the most basic belief of evolution is the survival of the fittest, but man does not qualify as the fittest. The environmentalist must put themselves in the place of God and protect animals from man.
Forest Service spokesman Mark Chavez said an old barbed-wire fence had recently been upgraded in cooperation with the rancher, and allowed room for a watering canal for the cattle without disturbing protected land.
He said the fence allows calves in and out of the area and there were other watering holes on the rancher’s 28,850-acre grazing allotment some 45 miles southeast of Alamogordo.
Herrell said the rancher involved had complained repeatedly to the commission about the fence.
Chavez said the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse was expected to be listed as an endangered species in June, which would mean those 23 acres would be considered a critical habitat.
“I’ve never seen one of these mice, and the Forest Service claims they caught one last year,” Herrell said.