Siringo's Ghost: Cattle Branding and Rustling in the Digital Age

In his classic 1885 memoir of cowboy life, A Texas Cowboy, Charles Siringo described what many would assume is a bygone era, when cowhands drove cattle along the Abilene Trail, branded cattle with hot irons, and occasionally "liberated" cattle belonging to unwary ranchers. Beef producers today may use the latest in technology, from ATVs to smartphone apps, but a number of recent reports indicate that Siringo's ghost would be right at home with two aspects of current U.S. cattle-raising: branding and rustling.

As a recent post by Jimmy Stamp on the "Design Decoded" blog at Smithsonian.com shows, the technology of marking cattle has changed remarkably little since Siringo's day.  Cattle ranchers still depend largely on hot branding irons (many of them now electric) to affix unique markings, which are recognized and regulated by state authorities from North Dakota to Texas and from Virginia to Hawaii.  DNA testing is certainly feasible, but far more time-consuming and costly to confirm ownership than a readily visible brand.

What makes branding an especially critical part of cattle-raising is the recent resurgence in cattle rustling across the Midwest and West, thanks to rising beef prices.  According to USA Today, the number of cattle and horses reported rustled to the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association increased from 7,600 in 2011 to more than 10,400 in 2012, and reports of missing or stolen cattle in California increased from 1,110 in 2011 to 1,225 in 2012.  So far in 2013, various news media have reported rustling incidents in Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Who's behind cattle rustling these days?  According to one Missouri country prosecutor, some of the people who work in legitimate cattle-raising. As he put it, "Odds are . . . that you'll be out at 1 a.m. facing two or three cowboys hopped up on meth[.]  They're doing the same thing they do during the day, but they're doing it at night. They work at large ranches or other livestock organizations and know what they're doing."  Other law enforcement representatives and ranchers agree.  One Missouri cattleman said, "You worry about the meth heads, but the organized thieves are the bigger problem."

Siringo's ghost also would nod knowingly if he were to read about some cattle-rustling techniques still in use, such as rebranding cattle to alter the true owner's brand and, if confronted by cattlemen while the rustling is in progress, exchanging gunfire to get away.

What's the solution?  Like other aspects of cattle-raising, mostly low-tech seasoned with a dash of high-tech.  Video cameras have been used successfully to record rustling in progress, but most of the measures that law enforcement and cattlemen advocate would have worked equally well in the 19th century:

• More extensive branding (for example, one Missouri op-ed noted that "only a few thousand of Missouri's 60,000 operations have registered brands");
• Neighborhood watches and other basic surveillance measures, such as counting cattle regularly; and
• Rewards, sometimes up to $1,000 per cow.

Beef producers can always hope that cattle theft will again become, in the words of one Illinois federal judge, "as rare as a cowboy or a buggy whip" (at least in Illinois) (Kirby v. Springfield Fire Insurance Co., 216 F.Supp. 121 (N.D. Ill. 1963).)  But it would be "nostalgic and unrealistic" (also the judge's words) to think so.  In fact, the problem is spreading in other parts of the world.  The Gambia, Ireland, Kenya, New Zealand, Nigeria, and Tanzania are also experiencing significant problems with cattle rustling, including the use of guns by armed rustlers in Kenya and Tanzania.  Even as Kenyan police are now urging the use of branding, Kenya and other nations may be interested in seeing how well the United States can do in devising effective solutions to its own rustling problem.