River forests provide clean water and critical wildlife habitat despite making up only 1% of the arid southwest. They help prevent floods, filter sediments, and meter out water in times of drought. Healthy streamside woodlands are highly valued with cool shade, clean water, diverse wildlife, and scenery.

Streamside areas are also centers of biodiversity. 75% of all endangered southwestern wildlife depend upon healthy streams and remnant river forests. The Gila and Apache trout, the Southwest willow flycatcher and the Meadow jumping mouse are just a few of the southwest's endangered wildlife dependent upon healthy streams and stream side forests.

Because cattle consume 20 gallons of water daily they spend 90% of their time concentrated around streams, stripping away vegetation and trampling stream banks. The result: clean water is polluted, fish and wildlife habitat destroyed, and the ecosystems we need to live are damaged.

A 1988 General Accounting Office Report concluded that "poorly managed livestock grazing is the major cause of degraded riparian (streamside areas) habitat on federal lands."

Removing cattle is the first and vital step towards the restoration of damaged streamside ecosystems and the southwest in general.

UNGRAZED STREAMSIDE AREAS:

• stabilize stream banks, thereby reducing flood damage
• provide a renewable source of clean water by filtering sediments
• have diverse and healthy cottonwoods and willows providing habitat for 80% of all fish and wildlife species

GRAZED STREAMSIDE AREAS:

• pollute water directly with livestock wastes and indirectly by trampling steam banks and stripping away vegetation
• degrade aquatic habitat by removing vegetation which shades streams and filters sediments
• decrease biological diversity by degrading critical wildlife habitat

"There are still millions of acres of land and thousands of miles of stream courses that remain in an unsatisfactory condition. Riparian areas, instead of being lush green oases in the hot dry climate, are void of vegetation, eroding and, frequently as dry as the uplands."
--U.S. Forest Service Southwestern Region 1991 Watershed Report

Other effects being, the carrying of alien plant species into new regions which can replace native plant life causing ecosystem disruption/extinction with resulting diversity loss.
-Compaction of the soil from the heavy cattle also damages soil health and reduces plant life.
-Consumption of plant life, like native Oak seedlings, break the reproductive lifecycle of the trees, which some species are endangered.
-Ranchers kill wildlife to prevent cattle from being preyed upon or diseases from spreading.
-Ranchers put up barbed wire fences enclosing land which obstruct migrations and prevent access from all life. No one can own the earth and exclude others from it. The earth is a common treasury for all life. Such abominations are not to be tolerated.

Range Net the most comprehensive resource we know of on the effects of ranching, grazing, cows, etc.

Desert or Pasture? Cattle and the American Southwest
Center For Biological Diversity - Public Lands Grazing
Forest Guardians Fact Sheets on Grazing

There are a couple good books on the subject -- Waste of the West: Public Lands Ranching by Lynn Jacob's and Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West

What You Can Do-Action!

See Ecodefense for ideas.

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