By now, most everyone has read or heard about the Nevada rancher and his clash with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) which resulted in an armed standoff and the attempt to confiscate the rancher’s cattle. This incident has been the main topic of conversation in every feed store and rural coffee shop in the country for the past two weeks. While most of my neighbors seem to side with the rancher, there is another significant number who think he may not be completely in the right.
Over the past few days, I’ve read dozens of news reports, opinion articles and Internet blogs concerning the conflict and I’ll be danged if I can figure out who is right or wrong. But, while the neighbors argue over that matter, it was one line at the end of one of the news reports that had me scratching my head. The BLM hired a contractor to round up the approximately 500 cows and their calves, plus a few bulls, for the tidy sum of $966,000. I may have been born in the dark – but it wasn’t yesterday, and I can assure you that I know some really good cowboys who would have gathered the cattle for less than half that price.
Danny, Joe, Ron and Brandon show up at my place, like clockwork, every spring. It usually takes about two days for them to gather every head I own, from atop a horse, and run them through the chute. We castrate the bull calves and then pour, vaccinate, tag and brand everything during that two day period. Granted, I don’t quite have 500 cows, but their price tag is quite a bit south of $966,000, too. They don’t have access to the helicopters and all-terrain vehicles that the BLM sub-contractors did, but I’ll bet they could have been just as efficient in their retrieval of the rangy critters. In addition to working the cattle, I always get a kick out of their stories and antics as they go about their job.
As a matter of fact, the cowboys will be here this Thursday and Friday and I am tempted to tell them how much they could make if they moved their operation out west, except for three good reasons.
First of all, I would hate to lose them working for me twice yearly (they also gather and sort the calves for selling each fall). They have become an integral part of my operation and I don’t know where I could find another group of cowboys that are as talented and dependable as those four. Secondly, I’m pretty sure that none of them would be interested in participating in confiscating any rancher’s cattle for the government, regardless of who was right or wrong. And thirdly, I also know these guys well enough to know that if they did work a big gig in Nevada, making hundreds of thousands of dollars, they would want to visit Las Vegas before they left. Guessing from the stories they tell, their skills at gambling don’t even come close to their abilities at working cattle, and at least two of them would end up having to pawn their saddles to make it back to Missouri.
