Lest you think cattle rustling, tracking down stray dogies and inspecting the brands on cattle are quaint remnants of Colorado’s wild West past, you should talk to Terry Florian.
While Florian’s job title of brand supervisor might hark to the late 1800s, it’s as modern as Colorado’s multi-billion-dollar livestock industry.
And Florian and his team of inspectors are crucial to keeping the wheels of commerce rolling at sales barns and, for the next several days, at the National Western Stock Show. These wheels would get stuck without the inspectors from the Colorado Department of Agriculture to check the brands or other identifying characteristics and make sure the people selling the calves, bulls, steers and heifers are the rightful owners.
Asked if the stock show could go on without the inspections, Florian, walking through the through the maze of pens in the livestock yards, said, “I suppose they could have it. They wouldn’t be able to sell anything.”
“If you just wanted to exhibit, you’d be fine,” added Chris Whitney, the state brand commissioner.
Florian and other inspectors from the region he oversees, which includes Denver and Greeley, park a trailer on the National Western grounds a few days before the start of the stock show. They’ll make the yards at the north-Denver site their office away from their usual office until a few days after the show closes Jan. 26.
Checking the brands and descriptions of the cattle on the block in about 18 sales and those changing hands in private deals sounds like a daunting task. For Florian, who’s been on the job for nearly 30 years, it helps to do homework. Thursday, he was reading through the catalogs advertising the next day’s sales so he knew what to look for in the pens. He estimates he and his team will check “a thousand or better” animals by the end of the stock show.
“It’s long. It’s a long time of year,” said Florian when asked to describe stock-show duty. “It’s OK. I’ll tell you what, the first couple of times I did it I was scared stiff. But after you kind of get your legs under you and you kind of get it figured out, it’s really do-able.”
And it is fun. “You meet some really interesting people here. You learn ranching deals from all over the country,” Florian said.
What’s your brand?
Long before “branding” became a goal for businesses and causes, brands were literal marks burned into an animal’s hide with a hot iron. The purpose was to make it clear who owned the cattle roaming on the range or the horses out in the pasture. The goal was to deter cattle rustlers and horse thieves, or at least make it easier to catch them.
Colorado ranchers banded together to hire brand inspectors in 1865, when Colorado was still a territory.
“The big boom in Colorado was feeding the gold and silver miners. We started to see a burgeoning ranching industry,” said Terry Fankhauser, executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association.
Along with the growth in ranching came a rise in thefts. Ranchers formed the livestock association and hired people to root out the rustlers. It turned out that ranchers were stealing from ranchers, said Fankhauser. The story is the culprits “disappeared from Colorado forever,” he said.
The state ag department took over brand inspections in 1903. The program became a division in the department in the 1970s.
Today, livestock brands serve much of the same purpose they did more than 150 years ago. Branding isn’t mandatory, but “99% of cattle owners” and about half of horse owners brand their animals, said Whitney, who has been the state brand commissioner for nine years.
Cattle owners typically mark their animals because Colorado is a “fence-out” state, Whitney said, meaning that cattle can go where they want. People who don’t want the animals on their property have to fence them out. Wayward cattle can be identified by the brand, often a mix of letters, numbers and symbols registered by the owners or ranch.
“Cattlemen will brand because we jokingly refer to a brand as the livestock’s return address,” Whitney said.
Under the law, livestock brands are treated as personal property and are recorded. There are about 32,000 registered brands in Colorado.
Ear tags, microchips and radio frequency identification tags aren’t replacements for brands. At this point, the digital IDs aren’t considered as effective in identifying livestock on the range because a person has to be close to the animal to read it, Whitney said. And sometimes a chip will migrate throughout a cow’s body.
“Beef cattlemen are always worried about someone biting into a (micro) chip in their hamburger,” Whitney said.
A lot of people don’t brand their horses because the animals usually aren’t allowed to roam like cattle do, Whitney said. Branded or not, horses and cattle must be inspected when ownership changes. Inspections are required when the animals are shipped farther than 75 miles within Colorado; shipped outside of Colorado; or transported to be sold or slaughtered.
Livestock includes sheep, mules and donkeys.
“I’ve had horsemen call me and say I’m going to sell my horse. I’m just checking. He’s not branded so I don’t need an inspection, right? No, you need an inspection to transfer ownership of livestock,” Whitney said. “I suspect if the legislation were written today, it wouldn’t be called a brand inspection. It would be called a livestock inspection because it confuses people.”
Inspectors write detailed descriptions of the animals and record them on a certificate. That’s in essence the animal’s registration papers, Whitney said.
Riding for the brands
There are 68 brand inspectors and supervisors across the state. They work in 10 different districts. In 2019, the state employees traveled roughly 1.1 million miles to conduct 4.5 million inspections, which include multiple looks at some animals. They inspect and license public livestock markets, license certified feedlots and administer the certified feedlot program.
Another task is licensing and inspecting alternative livestock facilities, including elk ranches.
The inspectors’ work is essential to Colorado’s livestock industry, a major part of the state economy. Cattle and calves account for the largest segment of the state’s agriculture industry, generating $4 billion in cash receipts in 2017 out of a total of $5.2 billion for agricultural products, according to the Colorado Department of Agriculture. Beef and various beef products make up the state’s No.1 food and agricultural export, totaling $1 billion in 2018.
And rounding up stray livestock and responding to reports of theft is also part of the job description. In 2019, 90 reports involving 420 missing and stolen animals were filed. Fifty-six head of cattle went missing from a site in Aurora in December 2018. A witness reported seeing the animals “being lead by a solo suspect on horseback.” The all-points bulletin included a description of the brand: a number and the shape of a heart.
All that work pays for itself. The brand program doesn’t get any state money. The fees people pay to register the brands and for the inspections produce the money to run the program. That includes fees from people who have no intention of branding livestock but want to put their mark on the gates into their property or just have a kind of Western coat of arms.
Whitney, who talks to different groups around Colorado, said the whole idea of livestock brands and brand inspectors isn’t on most people’s radar.
“Then when they hear about it, they’re generally fascinated about it. People are fascinated by the whole notion of cattle rustling, brand inspection and the lives of the brand inspectors,” Whitney said. “They recognize that it’s an unusual art form and you don’t find it very often. And the only place you find it is in the West. For a lot of people that’s an important part of Colorado’s culture and history.”
An art form
In the yards at the stock show, Florian walked along the pens to see where the cattle listed for sale were. Some of the animals had been sold and were waiting to be loaded and shipped out.
The tall, mustachioed Florian, wearing a black fleece vest and black cowboy hat, opened the gate to a pen of heifers. He walked in slowly, trying not to stir them up. He moved this way and that to get a look at the animals, who squirmed this way and that to avoid him. He held his clipboard low, waving it gently to coax the herd to move so he could get a better look.
Florian knows cattle can easily spook. In one incident, a cow charged after him and tore into his quadricep muscle. Being around so many people is a lot of stress for the cattle, he said.
“Terry would never say it so I’ll say it for him, reading a brand is really an art form. Some people can do it and some people can’t,” Whitney said.
Some brands are made with a hot iron and others are applied with a freezing iron soaked in nitrogen. The process kills the pigment and the hair grows back white. Some research suggests the freeze brands, which often show up better, don’t hurt as much when they’re applied. However, Florian conceded either procedure is “very uncomfortable.”
Colorado doesn’t specify where a brand has to go, so some owners put them on the animal’s jaw or spread the different elements of the brand across the animal. And some people are better at branding than others, so recognizing the mark can be a challenge.
It’s vital that brand inspectors can quickly size up the animals at sales and livestock auctions, Fankhauser of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association said.
“When we ship cows, we want the inspectors to be able to look at those animals at the speed of commerce,” Fankhauser said.
Ranchers also still need help deterring thefts that can take a big bite out of their profits, he added.
“There are still thefts that are reminiscent of 150 years ago,” Fankhauser said. “Literally, cattle will be stolen out of a pasture in the middle of the night and rushed to a border state and sold at market somewhere in order to turn a quick dollar.”
That’s actually more like anywhere from $1,000 for one calf to tens of thousands of dollars for a bull.
“It’s very similar to what happened in the old West,” Fankhauser said.
