To Protect a Mouse, Forest Service Cuts Off Water Access in New Mexico
by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
TheNewAmerican.com
Friday, 16 May 2014
Although it hasn’t reached Bundy levels of attention, leaders of a rural southern New Mexico county are bravely pushing back against a federal land grab of their own.
In Otero County, New Mexico, the federal Forest Service has fenced off a 23-acre section of land, preventing a rancher’s cattle from getting to a watering hole located on the tract.
Earlier this week, the county commission voted unanimously (with one commissioner absent) to empower the sheriff to open a gate, making a way for the cattle, some 200 in number, to get to the water. “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.”
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