If a cow ever got the chance...

The Wisconsin visit has a nominal purpose other than to buy a case of Jim Beam rye whiskey--Chuck and I are going to visit my family, who I will write more about shortly. They have a farm in central Wisconsin, two miles outside of Dalton (population about 300 and falling). They used to raise beef cattle until it became completely unprofitable, and now they just have various crops, such as alfalfa, corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. My parents have about 300 acres, and combined with my uncles' land, the Family Farm is about a thousand acres. To city people (which is what I have become, very quickly), this sounds like half the state and evokes images of my dad calling the ranch hands into the stable to hand out their paychecks... actually, it is a mid-sized farm that manages to stay profitable because my dad, his three brothers, and my own brother work twelve hours a day...

I used to show beef cattle in 4-H, which is directly responsible for my becoming a vegetarian (and on-and-off vegan). You'd buy new steers (castrated male calves, more docile and predictable than bull calves) each fall when they were four or five months old, work on them in the winter to tame them, and train them in the spring and summer before taking them to cattle shows (mostly County Fair for us but if you were a true 'steer jockey' you'd go to shows all over the state...) There is a hell of a lot I could write about this--I tend to corner acquaintances periodically to tell them cattle stories until their eyes glaze over. Basically what you learn when you spend that much time with cattle is that each of them has an individual personality. Some are scared by everything; some are inquisitive; some are mean; some are Really Fucking Smart. They all tend to make friends very easily with other cattle (sometimes with people as well) and eating is their favorite pastime. It's hard to generalize, but most tend to be very gentle and happy creatures. I truly don't think I'm anthropomorphizing, although my family would disagree.

All my steers (and we're talking about four or five a year for ten years) came to know me and trust me to some degree. Mars, who had obviously been badly beaten at some point as a calf, would start quaking and try to kick me every time he saw a show stick (five-foot-long stick of wood or metal, used to rap the steer's nose if he gets out of line, also used to help place his feet squarely underneath him in competition, thereby displaying his muscling to best advantage). Most were much less twitchy. Cy was approximately 1600 pounds and so tame that my sister, who was three or four at the time, would lead him around the yard and sit down by his hooves.

Anyway--I digress into cattle stories. My point is that these steers came to trust me, to feed them and brush their coats and see them twice a day, to know that in my company no harm would come to them. So guess what happens in August or September, after the shows are over and you have a rapidly 'aging' fat yearling steer? You sell him, whether he is the Northeast Regional Grand Champion or just another feedlot inhabitant, you lead him onto the slaughterhouse trailer and he goes willingly because you are the one leading him, then you stand on the tailgate to pat his neck through the bars and they take off his rope halter and hand it to you because he will never need it again and halters cost like 20 bucks, and your pretty calf will die among strangers with cattle prods in a matter of hours. That's why I'm a vegetarian. I just didn't feel like being part of it anymore.

And I still miss my steers, all of them.

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