Cattle rustling...sign of the times?

Question

Many of you probably do not know this but cattle rustling still goes on. Infact it's becoming a bigger business than ever. An illegal multi-million dollar (possibly even billions) business.

It has become so bad in my area (Idaho) that ranchers are starting to brand DEAD newborn calves.

Why brand a calf that was born dead? To prevent the cattle rustlers from stealing the dead calf's body, and stealing a live un-branded, un-tagged calf and leaving the dead one behind.

Some farmers are not Johnny-on-the-spot with tagging and/or branding young calves. That makes them easy targets to leave a dead calf behind. The farmer thinks it was just his bad luck then, when he finds a dead calf. The Sheriff is never called. Ranchers have been catching onto this illegal dead/live calf swapping.

The higher grocery, and fuel prices rise, the more frequent the thefts of adult cattle and caves becomes.

Comments?

Answer 1

some ranchers in Calif are now implanting RFID tags in there cows to track them.

and have sensors on the roads of there property to track cattle leaving the property

Answer 2

Believe it or not I had a 500 pound purebred boar hog stolen about 4 months ago. (now who would do that? The meat would pretty much taste like.. sh--)A neighbor to the pasture it was in, saw some one loading it,(the hog was real tame) but didn't think anything of it... till we came around asking after our hog. Kind of put the hurting on our weaner pig business as it has taken us this long to find a new boar... and our sows didn't get bred in the fall.... now not being able to find a young boar hog is a sign of the times that is scary to me... that is... the unavailability of good local breeding stock. Used to be you could find back yard hog breeders -pretty easy- here in my neck of the woods... now I don't think there is anyone in a 50 mile radius besides us who is producing good, or even, any, hogs. We had to travel 150 miles to get a good boar hog, and it took us 4 months just to find one using all the usual routes... 4H clubs, web searches, Ag agent questioning and so on. Not only is stealing livestock making a come back, but purebred gene stock is becoming scarcer in rural communities.

Answer 3

I agree it's definitely sad when people are so h**l bent on stealing that they would try anything and everything.  Although, to the branding idea:  a real criminal would just cut the tags off and keep it moving.  So I don't know that anything short of a full scale monitoring system will work.  I have some ideas if anyone is interested.

Answer 4

I honestly believe that, if the prices of gas, food,price tags of cars and trucks,taxes,simple things like bread and butter keep going up, we will see alot more stealing. I saw on CNBC that we as america in whole are in a depression worst than the one durning WWII. I wasnt alive then, so i really dont know how that was, but for them to say that, it had to be noted in history. It used to be in the older days, 1860-1890's that the wild west for a haven for cattle thieves, for people like Billy the kid where stealing cattle and selling them due to the price for cattle jumped from $8.00 a head to $35.00 a head here in dodge city kansas. Todays market raises and falls so much it would be hard for my to plan on selling stolen cattle. But i am sure who ever is stealing them is making money.You need to find them and stetch their neck.

Answer 5

Nothing changes,things just get more sophisticated

In South Africa they came with large trucks and trailers to steal sheep

People may start shooting each other again for water soon ,

Answer 6

It is a sign of the times. Ethanol production from corn is being promoted by the government and heavily subsidized because it is a "renewable energy source". As more corn is used for fuel and less is available for cattle feed, the cost of feed corn has jumped. The result is that cattle prices are much higher so thieves are crawling out of the woodwork to steal cattle.

Corn based ethanol is a terrible idea. It requires as much energy to make it as you can get from burning it. There are better sources for ethanol such as sugar cane and switchgrass. I'm sure the thieves will start stealing hershey bars when sugar cain ethanol production drives up candy prices but we are need to lose some weight anyhow.