Grass: In Search of Human Habitat

13. The Trouble with Livestock

T H I R T E E N The Trouble with Livestock 106 Figure 13. Drifting before the Storm by Frederick Remington. Courtesy Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The project started innocently enough in the next-door yard. My wife noticed a few young men digging holes in the ground with what looked like a post auger, but she couldn’t see very well what was happening because a ragged hedge of shrubs separated us from them. Then came the steel pipes. When I first saw them, they had already been erected. They stood about fifteen feet high, two of them, maybe eight inches in diameter and ten feet apart. Judy explained the construction procedure: The fellows chained the pipes to a backhoe bucket and lifted them, setting the bottom ends into the holes and securing them with concrete. Then came the crosspiece, a substantial section of I-beam. Welded into place, it spanned the tops of the pipes. A heavy piece of chain looped around its middle and hung down a couple of feet. The whole apparatus looked like the arrangement I’d seen mechanics use to lift large motors from trucks, capable of supporting several tons. “What is it?” Judy asked the question with some apprehension. She didn’t want to ask those who were constructing it, because she didn’t know most of them and didn’t want to appear totally ignorant of rural ways. It had a practical application, we suspected. The people who built it— apparently friends of the neighbor’s son—almost certainly were not into monument art. Like the neighbor had been until his death a few years earlier , they seemed of ranching stock. A corral of historic vintage abutted the rusty-roofed shed. At unpredictable intervals, cattle arrived in a rattling trailer to bawl and raise dust on the two-acre grounds before they just as unpredictably left the same way. I guessed it to be the beginning of a repair station for heavy equipment. Despite the residential flavor of our neighborhood, where most houses sit on lots an acre or less in size, little zoning exists and small commercial enterprises come and go. Judy suggested a hanging scaffold to mete out frontier justice. One morning a few weeks later, a pistol shot boomed out next door. Then another. I went to the window of the building in which I worked and looked out. The reason for the shots merged with the purpose of the tower. Not target practice. Not another OK corral. A cattle butchering station. A short time later Judy came into my workplace. “They’re stringing up 107 the black cow,” she wailed. “They’re skinning her! Why don’t they do it somewhere out of sight?” The spectacle bothered me less. Having grown up in a family that butchered animals, I saw it more as a clash of cultures than a social outrage . And I had not made friends with the black cow. A few years later, after Judy’s planting of bamboo had grown up to screen the periodic killing of cattle next door, I helped another family butcher a goat. The Coates family seldom ate meat but kept goats for milking . Jim made excellent goat cheese, a type of food I’d seldom tasted before trying his. The pastoral heritage of my own family had come with a definite no-goats code. One reason the Coateses ate little meat came from their general aversion to killing animals unnecessarily. Yet they also felt compelled to limit the population increase of goats that came inevitably with the production of milk. So they occasionally killed a yearling. A look of general malaise tainted the family’s faces upon my arrival. Eleven-year-old Milagre began right away to recount details of the previous slaughter, which had taken place about a year before. “When it was over I cried,” she said with a short laugh. “We don’t have a gun,” explained Jim.” I killed the last one with a hammer blow to the head. It wasn’t a pretty sight—much thrashing about before it finally succumbed. Is there a better way?” Just in case, I’d brought a .22 caliber pistol with a few low-power “short” cartridges. Jim elected to use the gun. “Sound of a shot won’t bother our rancher neighbors,” he said. A well-placed...