Cattle

AZTEC, N.M. - Linn Blancett has given a lot to ranching, including his right ring finger, lost in a steer-roping accident years ago. The 60-year-old's family has been raising cattle among the otherworldly sandstone canyons of the Animas River valley for six generations, stretching back to 1878, before New Mexico was a state. His great-great-grandfather was the first county commission chairman here. And Blancett has buried two sons in these arid hills. But now, he says, the growth of drilling is forcing him to move.

ROSE, Neb. - An hour before sunup, under the wide prairie sky, the Shovel Dot Ranch is still. The hills are draped in shadow. Then, a rumble. Distant pounding. The cattle come surging over a rise, bulky, bellowing, the calves unsure, their mamas, panicked, pushing them forward. Cowboys in the saddle thunder beside, yelling "hey," yelling "yep, yep, yep," driving the herd toward the corral. The horses snort, the cattle low, and they all barrel in. The gate swings shut. The noise swells, thick as the dust.

GRANADA, COLO. -- The snow curled up before the massive plow blade fitted to the front of one of John Duvall's tractors. The 58-year-old rancher clenched his jaw as the vehicle trembled and then stalled. There were still a hundred yards of snowed-in road he had to clear before he could haul hay to the starving herd of cattle clustered in a small clearing. "This is [what] you put up with every day," Duvall said. "You're working your butt off, and looking at your livelihood go down the drain."

Dwight Ganzel, one of the last remaining seagoing cowboys, is 81 now, his hair whitened and his back slightly stooped. He has seen the world, but he has never seen this before - the majestic red barn on the old Roop family farm in Carroll County. "Golly!" Ganzel says, standing at the edge of the barn this past weekend. "Look at the size of that thing." This is where the cows came, starting in the summer of 1945 and continuing for three years. Four thousand, in all, would pass through the Roop farm, where they were inoculated, bred and dehorned before being loaded on ships at the port of Baltimore and sent to farms across war-ravaged Europe.

The hundred buyers and the hundred sellers eyed each other. Auctioneer Nevin Tasto, microphone at the ready, stood between them and literally bales of merchandise -- bales of fragrant hay in shades of green and gold auctioned in Westminster every Tuesday. "Thirty dollars! Thirty dollars!" Tasto said, standing next to a giant roll of orchard grass, which was the first offering of the day at the longest-running event of its kind in Maryland. No one in the crowd responded with a nod or a tilt of the head.

COCHIN, India - As a Hindu, Anil Kumar is expected to revere cows, not eat them, and his taste for beef defies one of Hindu nationalism's most fervent causes. Cows are treated as goddesses by most in the Hindu majority. But Kumar has been free to eat beef since he was young - his mother thought it would make him stronger - because he lives in southern India's Kerala state, where leftist governments have long defended the slaughter of cattle as a fundamental freedom. In the name of religious tolerance, Indian governments have long resisted pressure to impose a nationwide ban on cattle butchering, because millions of Indian Muslims and Christians - and even many Hindus - happily eat beef.

Have you heard the one about the Orthodox rabbi, the Mormon and the Latino cattle rancher?It's no joke, says the rabbi, Baltimore's Mayer Kurcfeld.It's the cast of characters in "Kosher Valley," a film chronicling Kurcfeld's journey to southern Colorado's San Luis Valley to teach kosher butchering to a group of mostly Latino ranchers who were looking for new markets for their meat.The film has its Baltimore premiere at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Park Heights Jewish Community Center. Admission is $4."

It's still dark when Bob Bishop rises shortly after 6 a.m., awakened by the familiar clatter as his wife, Betty, readies breakfast in the kitchen of the white clapboard farmhouse they've shared for 45 years.Outside, a lush coat of dew covers the grass. The cattle are quiet in the barnyard and the hogs snore gently in their pen as Bishop walks up the lane for the morning paper.As the sun slowly climbs over his Gettysburg, Pa., farm, Bishop greets the day the way he has most of his 73 years: doing the morning chores.

SALIQUELLO, Argentina - Daniel Belot has seen his share of dead cows. As a veterinarian in the heart of the cow-full pampas, Belot has written off bovine deaths to causes as diverse as foot-and-mouth disease, bloat, lightning, killer bees and cattle thieves who butcher their loot in place, a crime that has become increasingly common as Argentina's economic crisis has extended to the countryside. Then, in April, he discovered a case that stumped him. A rancher had found a nearly 1,000-pound Aberdeen Angus lying on its belly "like a rabbit," in Belot's words.

Good morning -- Cattle -- Tough break on that NBA ball decision.