It takes about three seconds to make a good brand on human flesh.
That’s what I thought when I read, during this year’s National Western Stock Show, that a “highly prized single-character brand” – the “Inverted T-Bone” – was to be auctioned off.
I remember, some years back, one of the young male college students I supervised had a raised welt, a large Greek letter, obviously branded on his shoulder. It represented the black fraternity to which he belonged. The brand was their lifelong pledge of brotherhood.
Did it hurt? “Not really,” he said; “you sort of space it out.”
But what about calves? Can they “space it out” for three long, agonizing seconds? By any standards, that’s a lot of pain.
Some, including me, might call it torture.
Imagine a TV chef holding his palm above a grill to gauge the heat level. Now imagine his hand suddenly thrust down and held onto the grill.
One … Mississippi.
Two … Mississippi.
Three … Mississippi.
In any land, that’s torture.
And what about calves? When they’re branded, they do feel pain; how much depends on how they get branded and for how long.
One study has shown that the number of “tail flicks” – an indicator of perceived pain in cattle – was lessened somewhat by using “freeze branding.” Freeze branding uses intense cold, like dry ice, and kills part of the hair follicles, leaving a white brand. It’s still painful, but for a shorter period of time.
Unfortunately, they didn’t have freeze branding in the Old West. What they had was cold-hearted cruelty.
As an 11-year-old in western Nebraska, I spent a rugged weekend on a working ranch (owned by a member of my father’s congregation). It was a perfect setting for a cowboy movie: the glow of the fire on the weathered faces of the ranch hands; the brands resting in the red-hot embers, waiting for the next hapless calf to be dragged in; the cowboys on horseback cursing and spitting and joking.
My brother and I were assigned the job of holding the calf down while the “cutting” and the branding took place. What I remember most vividly is the bawling of the calves as the glowing heat of the brand was applied. And the distinct, piquant smell of burnt calf-hide. The bawling, the utter terror when the red-hot brand was pressed into the calf’s flesh, was more intense, by ten-fold, than a human baby’s squall.
That’s torture, and should be stopped.
I can understand why the state’s Brand Inspection Division might be stuck on hot-iron branding. They’ve been registering brands since Colorado was just a territory. When you’ve been carrying on the cowboy tradition for that many years, the concept of unwarranted pain – torture – can easily get lost in the expedience of ranching.
And there’s that cow-town attitude peaking annually at the stock show.
I must admit, though, that I like the stock show parade; it has an unabashed charaderie I can appreciate. Stock and Schlock. Grand Guignol on a horse. However, my attitude toward the stock show itself is quite different.
These days, I associate the stock show with pain and suffering. Whenever I see a brand on a steer, I can flash back to the smell of searing skin and bawling calves.
I know the stock show is not intentionally about maiming and torturing. It’s about business, and pride, and family values, showmanship, competition – all those qualities that the newspaper writers must be thinking of when they call Denver a cow town. But we pride ourselves the rest of the year on being a “now town,” on our competitive positions in engineering and technology.
So why don’t we have some of our top minds figure out a method of painless branding? And make it worth their while. Create a million-dollar PETA Prize for Painless Branding.
And then, every year, right after the herd of longhorns, have a parade float that lets everyone know about the prizewinner – and the torturous pain it has eliminated.
It’s about time we did something, at the state level, about all that terrible cruelty.
One … Colorado.
Two … Colorado.
Three … Colorado.
Stephen Terence Gould is an independent scholar in Denver.
