The tortoise is starving to death despite the fact that it eats less in one year than a cow eats in one day. Disappearance of lush native grasses and flowers, a critical component of tortoise diets, has weakened individuals making them more susceptible to a devastating respiratory disease. Many tortoises have also been trampled to death by cattle. Native to the temperate grasslands of south central Arizona and northern New Mexico, the Bobwhite was once thought to be extinct, the victim of wholesale overgrazing of its habitat. Prospects for successful restoration in the United States improved in 1986 when Congress established the 110,000 acre Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a cow-free sanctuary in Southeast Arizona.
Streams are the arteries of life in the arid Southwest.
75 percent of all our wildlife depend upon healthy streams and these disappearing forests. Most western grasslands did not evolve with large grazing mammals, and are ill-suited to alien livestock. By eliminating the most palatable perennial grasses, livestock have degraded forever a landscape where they never should have been in the first place.