Eric Schwennesen - Horns

Take a look at any current livestock or cattlegrowers' magazine, and you will notice a surprising change from past years: those beefcake color photos of prime herd sires, have no horns! And that fact is being urged on us as a great advance for the beef industry. 

Now, some years ago I stopped to diesel up in Benson while hauling a trailer-load somewhere, and a young girl toddled over to look at the cows, wide-eyed and curious. She pointed as her mother hurried up, to announce the presence of COWS!! Mother, in that soothing tone of instructional motherhood, bent over her to correct: "No, dear, those are bulls! Cows don't have horns. That's how we tell them apart!"  I was forced to step in, of course, creating doubt and confusion among the suburban set from that day forward; but the point is that even small children recognize(d) that horns on bovines are normal.

...or used to be...

The beef industry in North America is finding itself regarded as "an Industry" these days, in the commodity-market perspective where uniformity and predictability are paramount; a way to generate Market Image. Gone, pushed aside, are the old virtues of individualism, character, local herd traits, and brand recognition that our fathers and grandfathers banked on. Forty years ago I could pick out a producer by the color of his cows; today many producers shudder at the slightest blemish from an imagined industry standard of all black, or at worst, all red. And no horns.

I freely admit to a science bias; and in this case, a paleontology bias: our modern beef cattle are direct, linear descendants of the aurochs of the Pleistocene epoch. They were very big, and probably very mean, and expanded onto a planet covered with ice which in places was miles thick; and some other critters expanded right along with them who were even bigger and meaner, and wanted to eat them. This is when growing some horns started to seem like a good idea; and there were probably some memorable battles; mammals could be a lot bigger back then. Try fighting off a sabertooth tiger with your ears, and you'd grow horns too!

We still get some memorable battles these days, at least in our herd, because we insist on providing our mother cows the same weaponry their ancestors had, for the same reasons; and they haven't forgotten how to use them. However, in modern parlance, ten million years of intense evolution has been dismissed as "inappropriate"; and up the beef market  chain we find puzzled frowns at animals (sorry, inventory,) that exhibit pointy things on their heads. Times have changed. What are ten million years of evolution compared to five years of market strategy, after all...?

It's discouraging to see one of the world's great primal advances (free-raising livestock) subverted by manipulation of market forces in the Here and Now. Our particular here and now isn't even an eye-blink in recent world history; yet we are pursuing a human strategy designed to eliminate one of the great advances of mammalian evolution, all for the convenience of artificial meat markets.

i understand that some states are working to have horns banned ! Excuse me, but I'll bet on my mother cows and their hard-fought instincts. Some of those industry marketers might need a little prodding. 

Eric Schwennesen is a commercial beef rancher in the Mogollon Rim country. He grew up in Belgium, cowboyed in Nevada, and helped Navajos and many African peoples with rangeland conflicts for over 35 years. He recently published "The Field Journals: Adventures in Pastoralism" about his experiences.