A tiny northeast Iowa community has been struck by domestic terrorism. The Des Moines Register is calling it “cow chaos,” which, with all due respect, doesn’t sound quite as impressive. The issue currently plaguing the town of Elma, population 512, in Howard County is the age-old conflict between farmers and free-range cattle ranchers. Specifically, cattle owned by Michael Hastings have been allowed to wander into neighbor’s fields, eating their corn and soy beans and posing a hazard on country roads.
If you think deer are dangerous, try running into a 1,500-pound bull on a gravel road after dark. A 63-year-old Elma woman did just that last month, totaling her SUV. She said, big as it was, she didn’t see the black bovine until it was too late. Luckily, she escaped serious injury.
Hastings’ bulls have grown wild and have been known to threaten anybody attempting to shoo them off their property. Neighbors are reluctant to allow their children to play outside for fear of being attacked. Over the past nine years, the Howard County sheriff’s department has received over 150 complaints about the straying livestock. A few neighbors even resorted to shooting bulls that menaced their families. But authorities point out this is illegal and offenders are liable for damages. Last year, county officials were finally fed up with the situation and hired a contractor to fence in the cattle at a cost of $63,765 which they are charging to Hastings’ property tax. The problem is, this was only enough to build two sides of the fence—which was about as effective as a bucket with no bottom.
You can’t blame the cattle for being hungry and thirsty. Neighbors claim Hastings’ cattle are not being adequately fed and watered and are forced to forage where they can. A cow requires at least ten gallons of water a day. Hastings says his 30 head of cattle normally drink from a small creek on the property. But in the winter, it freezes over. Hastings explain that his cattle then quench their thirst by eating snow. Or he carries buckets of water for them to drink. That would be 300 gallons of water a day. By hand. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile in Vaughn, Mont., Arthur Schubarth, 80, has been illegally cloning gigantic big horn sheep, through in vitro fertilization, hoping wealthy trophy hunters would pay big bucks to shoot them. He is accused of smuggling genetic tissue out of Kyrgyzstan from Marco Polo sheep, the largest breed in the world. How large, you ask? A normal big horn weighs around 150 pounds. A Marco Polo tips the scales at 300 pounds with horns five feet across! In 2019, Donald Trump Jr. drew outrage from animal rights groups when he traveled to Mongolia to kill one of these endangered, protected sheep with a laser-sighted high-powered rifle.
Schubarth sent the smuggled genetic material to an unnamed lab to create 165 sheep embryos. (Or, as they say in Alabama, “sheep babies”.) He now faces five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
It seems to me Schubarth’s plan was all backwards. Instead of cloning huge, scary sheep, he should have created little one-foot-high sheep—the size of a miniature Schnauzer and turned his 215-acre ranch into a petting zoo—instead of a shooting gallery. He could have sold some of the cute little critters to Mr. Hastings, replacing his rampaging cattle. The neighbors would be delighted to get visits from his Schnauzer sheep. And even if they occasionally nibbled some soy beans, it wouldn’t be all that, um, ba-a-a-d.