Ranchers Feeling the Heat

An hour before sunup, under the wide prairie sky, the Shovel Dot Ranch is still. The hills are draped in shadow. Then, a rumble. Distant pounding.

The cattle come surging over a rise, bulky, bellowing, the calves unsure, their mamas, panicked, pushing them forward. Cowboys in the saddle thunder beside, yelling “hey,” yelling “yep, yep, yep,” driving the herd toward the corral. The horses snort, the cattle low, and they all barrel in. The gate swings shut. The noise swells, thick as the dust.

It’s branding day at Shovel Dot.

Over the next eight hours, with the help of their neighbors, brothers Larry and Homer Buell will burn their ranch’s insignia into the rumps of 800 calves.

Swapping stories, swatting sweat, the ranchers fall into a routine: Lasso a calf. Drag it from the corral. Wrestle it onto its back. Vaccinate. Castrate, if it’s a male. Then press a red-hot branding iron to its left hip. Hold it, smoking, for three long seconds, as the smell of singed hair rises. Let go. Rope another.

The routine has changed little since great-grandfather Benjamin Franklin Buell staked out the Shovel Dot in the Sand Hills of north-central Nebraska in 1883. Counting 6-year-old Ashly, who rode out on the roundup in her red cowboy boots, six generations of Buells have worked to the same timeless rhythm each spring.

The family treasures the tradition. But the tradition is under threat.

Pressured by animal rights advocates who call branding barbaric, major restaurant and grocery chains will meet this summer to consider a ban on buying beef from cattle that have been branded. Burger King already has urged its suppliers to stop branding. This fall, the chain will consider making the request mandatory.

In response, researchers are scrambling to come up with alternative IDs that the cattle industry will accept.

So far, they have tried everything from microchip implants to retinal scans to ear tags imprinted with bar codes--only to run into resistance from ranchers who find the devices impractical, or government regulators wary that they could contaminate beef.

Perhaps the most promising devices on the market are microchips that are clipped to an ear tag or injected into the first chamber of a cow’s stomach.

They can carry an animal’s complete health records, updated by hand-held computer at each treatment. They also can track each cow’s location as it moves from pasture to feedlot to slaughter. And the information can be stored online.

Intrigued by the potential to trace and contain disease outbreaks through such databases, the U.S. Department of Agriculture soon will begin studying how to standardize several competing technologies.

So, many in cattle country suspect that it’s only a matter of time--years, not decades--before branding becomes a museum exhibit, like spinning wool or forging horseshoes.

Here on the Shovel Dot Ranch, that does not go over well.

Co-owners Homer and Larry Buell brand their herd for practical reasons. They believe it’s the only permanent, tamper-proof, affordable way to identify the 1,400 heifers--and all the calves--they run on 30,000 acres.

But the decision to brand is not wholly economic. There’s an emotional tug to it too.

Branding day is the capstone of the spring--a chance to mark, quite literally, a job well done, a new calf brought into the herd. There’s pride in seeing that Shovel Dot logo--a stylized shovel with a dot in the center--on so many animals.

After months of lonely labor--helping cows give birth at midnight, feeding a wobbly newborn at 3 a.m.--branding day is a rare opportunity to connect with neighbors, to pull on a beer, to shoot the breeze.

The kids turn out in their Wranglers and leather chaps. It’s a chance to teach them what’s already in their blood, to watch as the 11-year-old ropes his first calf, as the second-grader, grunting, pins a 250-pound Hereford to the ground.

It’s a chance to ride hard across the range. A chance to put aside the all-terrain vehicles and the spreadsheets, the genetics charts and the online market updates--a chance to feel, for a grungy, gritty morning, like a cowboy.

Larry Buell’s daughter Devon Nelson, 23, smiles at her little girl in the red boots and says she hopes Ashly will be pressing the Shovel Dot brand into calves when she is grown.

“It’s our heritage,” she explains. “This keeps you in touch with the way things were.”

Little Sign of Trauma

The cattle moan when they’re branded. They roll their eyes. They flinch. Their tongues hang out. They jerk.

Most are just 2 to 4 weeks old; a few still trail the dried-up remnants of their umbilical cords. Smoke curls up as the iron is applied.

Sometimes, flames shoot out. The musty odor of burned hair hangs heavy.

The branding iron burns a scar in their hides the reddish-brown color of saddle leather. The scar may remain inflamed for months.

Still, the calves show little sign of trauma. As soon as they’re released, they head for their mothers--gimpy for a few steps, then trotting. Within minutes, they’re poking around the pasture, placid as ever.

Homer Buell knows that ranchers sometimes miss signs of livestock suffering. “When you’re born on a ranch and raised on a ranch, you can become hardened.”

So, with a cautious respect, he listens to outsiders.

Years back, he stopped using “hot shots”--electric cattle prods--when activists pointed out they were cruel. He has stopped hitting cows to get them moving. Instead, he just slows down. “We do things a little better now because of the push for humane treatment,” he says.

But branding? It’s how he keeps track of his assets. How he markets them too: When his cattle march through the auction ring with livestock from dozens of competing ranches, buyers study the brands before bidding. They know what quality to expect from each ranch.

“You’ve essentially signed your name to the cattle,” auctioneer Bim Nelson says.

Buell doesn’t see any reason to stop.

After all, hot-iron body branding has become a chic new form of tattoo art. People pay $150 an hour to sear away the skin on their chest, arms or buttocks with the same technique used on cattle.

They describe the process as euphoric, addictive--”a really intense, wonderful, ecstatic experience,” branding artist Meg Mass says. So ranchers are a bit scornful of the notion that it’s vicious to calves.

“It’s easy to say, ‘We should never brand animals, it’s inhumane,’ when you’re sipping wine in Los Angeles--and your 18-year-old has tattoos all up and down his arm and a nose ring too,” says Don Reeves, a curator at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

“We’ve tried hard to listen to what [the animal rights activists] have to say,” Nelson adds. “But when it comes to branding, we have to draw the line.”

“You never say never,” Buell says. “[But] I really can’t see how any other form of identification would work as well.”

Letters of the Law

Branding is used mostly in the vast rangeland west of the Missouri River. Several states--including Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming--require that all cattle grazed on open range be branded. That’s the law in western Nebraska as well.

Out here, where the stocky Sand Hills run unbroken to the horizon, ranchers complain that using microchips or bar codes is impractical. With brands, they can keep track of their animals from a distance, scanning a herd from a pickup.

The high-tech IDs, however, can be read only at close range. To sort through a herd, a rancher would have to drive the cattle miles to the nearest corral and run them through a chute. Some assert that’s more traumatic to the livestock than one quick brand. It also takes a lot more time.

Another big concern is theft. It’s easy, in this expanse, for a rustler to pull up to a remote pasture and load livestock onto his trailer.

All told, Nebraska brand inspectors last year returned 799 stolen or lost cattle--worth nearly $1.2 million--to their rightful owners.

Without brands as safeguards, “it will be open season on our livestock,” inspector Steven Stanec says.

He and others worry that it’s too easy to tamper with the new IDs--to pull out ear tags and crush microchips.

Devices implanted in stomachs or legs are much harder to destroy. But slaughterhouses refuse to process cattle that have internal IDs, for fear the glass-encased implants will get mixed up in someone’s hamburger or sausage.

Then there’s the issue of price: Branding costs little more than the labor, but the new IDs run $2 to $7 per animal.

For the moment, “we don’t have a reasonable system to replace branding,” says Janice Swanson, an animal sciences professor at Kansas State University. Still, she and others don’t doubt that the technology is coming.

“Today, we can make the case that it’s not practical to use alternatives to branding. Five years from now, it will be harder to make that case,” says Nebraska rancher Allen Bright, who chairs a national cattlemen’s committee concerning the issue.

The shift can’t come quickly enough for animal rights activist Bruce Friedrich, with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

“I don’t think the only question we should be asking is what’s easiest for the rancher,” he says. “We should be asking, is branding animal abuse? And there’s no question that it is.”

An Ancient Custom

Egyptian tomb paintings, 4,000 years old, show oxen being stamped with hieroglyphics. Ancient Greeks and Romans branded their livestock--and their slaves.

It was Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez who first brought the custom to the Americas, marking cattle with his signature triple cross.

Now branding stands as a symbol of the Old West.

City slickers longing for an authentic cowboy experience pay to help brand at dude ranches in Kansas and New Mexico. Or they buy their own decorative branding irons. Bobby Blanton, a Texas craftsman, sells plenty, at $170 apiece.

“Everybody has a bit of cowboy in them,” he says. “Even if you don’t have a herd, it looks good on the fireplace.”

On a working ranch, of course, nostalgia is supposed to take a back seat to profit and convenience.

“The old romance of the chuck wagon as the center of a cowboy’s life got thrown out the window as soon as motorized vehicles gave them a means to get back to the bunkhouse quickly,” says Byron Price, a historian of the American West at the University of Oklahoma.

“Anything that makes ranching easier and the margin of profit greater,” Price says, “is going to win out, in the end, over tradition.”

And yet, at Shovel Dot on this crisp spring morning, there’s a clear allegiance to tradition.

The branding irons are heating inside homemade propane stoves instead of over a fire fueled by buffalo manure. There are a few baseball caps amid the Stetsons. Otherwise, things look as they might have a century ago.

Two dozen neighbors work in easy friendship, while their kids chuck dried manure clots at each other in fits of giggles. Fresh-cut calf testicles, a delicacy, sizzle on top of the propane stoves. Back at the house, there are endless crock pots of chili and homemade strawberry pies.

The Buells used to do their branding themselves, immobilizing the calves with a special table. But they returned years ago to the old-fashioned rope-and-wrestle approach, which requires the loan of a good many strong backs and quick hands.

“This is more fun,” explains Homer Buell, 52.

“It feels neighborly,” adds 51-year-old Larry Buell.

In exchange for the help they get at Shovel Dot, the Buells figure they spend at least 300 hours each spring branding for neighbors. It may not pencil out as profitable, but they think of these branding days as an investment in community. An investment in tradition.

“It’s a way of life,” neighbor Trevor Smith says.

Smith, 23, is studying animal sciences at the University of Nebraska and is helping his father raise Angus. He has heard much about the microchip IDs, and he’s enthusiastic about their promise for tracking health records.

But Smith looks around at the controlled chaos on Shovel Dot--calves bellowing, irons smoking, ropes twirling, dirt flying every which way--and says he can’t ever see quitting branding. “This is just the way it is.”