UNITED STATES Cattle rustling: On the rise out West

One detective said there are actually 'organized rustling rings' at work.
WASHINGTON POST
ELDERWOOD, Calif. -- Kevin Bohl had just driven down a winding, lonesome stretch of country road called Mudsprings Gap when he slowed his dusty white pickup truck to a crawl. The lawman gazed out at the open range and saw easy pickings for thieves.
"See that one over there? That's what they're taking nowadays," Bohl said, pointing to a black calf chewing grass beside a fence in an empty meadow. "Getting that one wouldn't take but a few minutes, and not a soul is going to see or hear you out here late at night. It's like finding cash beside the road. It's real tough to stop."
There's new trouble in valleys such as this one, where vestiges of the Old West live on. Cattle rustling, a common crime in that bygone era, is staging a comeback.
What's to blame?
And from ranches here in the rustic Sierra Nevada foothills to grazing lands across the western plains, cowboys know exactly what's to blame: a diet craze.
The growing national popularity of high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets has kept beef prices high, even after the threat of mad-cow disease arose in the Pacific Northwest late last year.
But law enforcement officials say that Americans' new eating habits also appear to be inspiring a new generation of rustlers to steal and sell cattle, particularly newborn calves not yet seared with identifying brands, in illicit marketplaces for substantial profit.
Gone are the days when a gang of rustlers would saddle up their horses and try to swipe part of a herd rumbling across vast, untamed lands. That took work. Victimized cattlemen say today's thieves hardly break a sweat: They often drive up to ranches in the dead of night, tackle and rope calves that are standing near roadsides, then load them into the back of pickup trucks or into the trunks and back seats of cars.
"It's getting worse," said Frank Swiggart, a detective for the Merced County Sheriff's Office in California's San Joaquin Valley, which is filled with cattle ranches and dairy farms. "The incentive is really there because of the beef prices. And it's not just a few random guys out there doing this. We're finding organized rustling rings."
How it's changed
Time was once that ranchers and local law enforcement relied on frontier justice to stop rustlers. "They would just hang 'em," said Bohl, who investigates agricultural crimes for the district attorney's office here in Tulare County.
Now, they are using all the tools of modern crime-fighting to try to catch cattle thieves, from stakeouts and video surveillance to informants and DNA testing. One rancher was jailed this year after genetic samples from cattle gave prosecutors conclusive evidence that he had stolen a neighbor's cow and used it to breed with one of his bulls.
Some ranchers are fighting the problem by installing lights and more fences on their property, while others are hiring overnight security guards and moving their cattle pens away from roadsides.
Scott Magneson, whose family has been raising cattle in the San Joaquin Valley for more than a century, has had several of his calves stolen in the past year. "They took them before we even had a chance to brand them," he said.
Since then, Magneson has installed surveillance cameras on his land at a cost of $6,000 and has posted a sign telling rustlers not to bother with his herd because he is branding calves just after they are born.
Before the thefts, he had only been tagging the ears of newborn calves, but that was hardly a deterrent. "The first thing rustlers do is cut those tags off," he said.
Bill Yashimoto, a Tulare County prosecutor who specializes in agricultural crime, said that about 350 cattle valued at $220,000 were reported stolen across the San Joaquin Valley last year, and that rustlers have struck nearly 70 times this year.
More prevalent
Rustling has never disappeared from the range, he said, but is growing more prevalent because thieves can earn several hundred dollars for every calf they steal. "It's becoming quite profitable," Yashimoto said.
According to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, consumer demand for beef has increased by 15 percent over the past five years and has not subsided much even after reports of mad cow disease in Washington state last December. That scare sent beef prices tumbling from the record peaks they reached last year, and prompted some countries to ban or restrict U.S. imports, but the beef industry is still doing well.