Drugs, Illegal Aliens Not the Only Headaches for Border Ranchers (950,000 acres quarantined)

Illegal immigrants and drug traffickers aren’t the only incursions that border ranchers are battling in southeast Texas. A tiny interloper has brought the area’s cattle industry to its knees. It’s called the fever tick. Fever ticks can carry a parasite that causes babesiosis, commonly known as cattle fever, which can decimate a herd. The parasite attacks and destroys the animals’ red blood cells, causing acute anemia, high fever, and enlargement of the spleen and liver—ultimately killing 90 percent of a herd that hasn’t been previously exposed to the parasite, according to the Texas Animal Health Commission (TAHC). Cattle rancher Richard Guerra’s 9,000 acres have stood idle for four years, with not a cow in sight and feeder pens overrun by weeds. After being quarantined 22 times in the past 15 years, it has become cost-prohibitive for him to run cattle. At full capacity, he can run 1,000 cattle; now, he stays afloat by leasing his land during hunting season. Guerra’s ranch sits about a mile north of the U.S.–Mexico border, near Rio Grande City, Texas. The Rio Grande is the international boundary, and no fencing exists in the area. The border is ground zero for fever tick infestations, largely because of cattle and deer crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico and infecting U.S. herds. “Right now, one of our biggest problems, even though we do have some human trafficking, is the problem with fever tick. Fever tick comes from Mexico. Mexico does nothing to control it,” Guerra said on March 22. There is no cure or vaccine for the fever tick, and Guerra’s biggest hope now is for a border wall to be built, cutting access for the wildlife bringing the tick over the border. “It only takes one fever tick carrying babesiosis to infect a host animal, and it only takes one infected host animal to pass babesiosis to a fever tick,” said Callie Ward, communications director for the TAHC. Right now, 2,655 premises, totaling 950,500 acres, are under quarantine in Texas, according to TAHC’s February data. Texas was home to 16.4 percent of the nation’s beef cows in 2009, according to Texas A&M University. Once a fever tick is found on a cow, a ranch goes into quarantine for nine months, under USDA rules. During that time, the cattle must be dipped in a vat every 14 days. “As a consequence, we have to hire helicopters to do our work—to gather our cattle,” Guerra said. “That’s $350 an hour. Well, that gets pretty expensive. So the point being that by the time I get my cattle out of the ranch, out of a quarantine, I’ve already spent a lot of money. And it could be that, and it mostly is that, I’m not gonna make any money that year because of all these costs.”...MORE