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No Longer Kindred Souls in the Saddle
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On a recent tour of part of his 11,000 acre-ranch, Lynch-Staunton wrestled a newborn calf from under barbed wire, and then stopped to admire a line of wild elk silhouetted on a nearby ridge. Off in the distance is Chief Mountain in Montana; the yellow-and-green prairie spills toward it.
"This is why you do this," Lynch-Staunton said, taking in the expanse. "If you're here on a good-horse morning like this, and you're out checking your cows when the sun comes up. People who get rich in the oil business retire and try to buy this. I've had it every day."
Across the continental divide, through the snowy Rocky Mountains and down the spine of the continent into Montana, the Bakers see their lives in similar terms.
"I can't imagine doing anything else," said Kim Baker, 37, who shares five children, a clutch of dogs and the upkeep of 600 head of cattle with her husband on their ranch in Hot Springs.
Every time a cattle sale approaches, the Bakers listen for rumors. Like gamblers waiting for the dealer's card, they nervously tune in to the noon stock report and pray they don't hear the words "mad cow."
"Even the whisper of it sends the prices plummeting," said Jim Baker, 45, a mustachioed rancher whose ancestors homesteaded a century ago.
So far, the Bakers have come out ahead. Every report of a cow being tested in the state has turned out to have negative results, and the price the Bakers get for their Montana-raised beef has risen steadily.
But the Bakers worry that if Canadian beef crosses the border again, another animal will be found with mad cow -- clinically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) -- and consumers will balk at U.S. beef.
"We don't want to get BSE here. It would be catastrophic for us," Kim Baker said.
It would be a blow to price and pride for the Bakers. The cattle industry in Britain collapsed after discovery of the disease there in 1986. The neurological disease can spread to humans who eat infected beef, leading to a horrifying and inevitable death. In Europe, more than 100 people have died.
As two of her boys, 7 and 9, stormed full of energy into the farmhouse kitchen after school, Kim Baker recoiled at the prospect of causing a BSE-related death.
"If you sold a cow that made somebody sick, that would be horrendous," she said with a shudder.
