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COPYRIGHT 1997 Albuquerque Journal
Byline: Fritz Thompson Journal Staff Writer
Diamond Bar's cattle move is culmination of long, bitter battle over water rights and grazing on federal land in the Gila high country
ON THE DIAMOND BAR -- A Brangus bull is grazing the green grass of the creek bottom, up the road and through the gate to the isolated Diamond Bar ranch house. Kit Laney is in the kitchen, still wearing spurs with small rowels and brewing a pot of his "high test" coffee.
He's talking cattle.
He says the bull and a smattering of nearby cows -- the last of his livestock -- will be driven off the ranch in the coming days, in keeping with a court order. It will be the culmination to what might be the longest and most bitter argument in recent New Mexico ranching history.
The Diamond Bar Ranch, in the heart of Gila and Aldo Leopold wilderness northeast of Silver City, is out of business.
Its demise is seen by New Mexico cattlemen as a reflection of the changing attitudes toward agriculture in general and ranching in particular. They say an increasingly urban population is less attuned to traditional uses of land and water.
The conversation with Kit Laney was three days before the June 15 deadline for getting the cattle off the ranch. The cows, calves and bulls are gone now, driven down from the mountains over some five days with one casualty -- a horse, gored to death by a bull.
In final measure, the Laney cattle were moved because they were damaging streamsides. And Laney had found himself in an untenable situation.
Down off the mountains in Silver City, Susan Schock, head of an environmental organization called Gila Watch, has realized success in her six-year campaign to end overgrazing of the Gila high country and to stymie efforts by the Diamond Bar to build earthen stock tanks in federally...
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