Where have all the cowboys gone?

“This could be bloody. How’s your stomach?” asks Mike Rose, ranch manager of Quilchena Cattle Co. Ltd., as we approach the red bull corseted by a steel cage and three cowboys in fringed chaps, smeared with blood.

Cow boss Miles Kingdon clamps a wrench-like device around the bull’s testicles and muscles down on them while the other cowboys steady the squirming 270-kilogram yearling that somehow managed to avoid the typical one-month-old castration. With the placement of his testicles on a fence stump, alongside two others, the Hereford-Angus cross is now officially a steer. more...