Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Two-Thousand Dead Cattle in Kansas Feed Lot

The only thing I have seen that knocks down multiple animals at the same time is lightning. I saw a video once of lightning hitting a herd of elk and it killed something like 20 in an instant. If they were packed together it could kill a number of them but I doubt it would kill 2000.

Hey, Jell0 or Suckermore or Twerker wouldnt lie.

Yes the cattle deaths are heat related. You can't push cattle hard (feed them all they can eat) without shade when it's really hot. Cows make body heat digestii feed, that's what keeps them warm in the winter. And the really hot weather the feed yards are seeing put them over the edge. This happens every year and is just making the rounds this year.

Didnt they supposedly die at night?

They have made it here to 116 degrees

We quit working these yesterday at 96 degrees a 2:00.

Little 11 year old Christian about 4.5 ft tall amd 60 65 lbs dropping rope to get a calf that got through the gate.
Good times.
Branded 79.

Hold the straps, lean way back and stretch like heck on a smallish mare.








First real pain.




Pushing in the chutes.




Cut, vaxed and tagged with holding brand.

I heard this morning from a rancher that it was hot. They were in a feed lot bunched up. It rained. Got hot again. Steam and heat was just too much for them to take. It darned sure wasn't any climate change crap. They died from more stupidity and circumstance than anything else.

Aliens!!

Hard to say.

Yeah. I think they’re pretty bunched up in a feedlot and probably not a bunch of escape from the heat.

That’s some fancy pens

Cowvid?

^^^This.

Terrible, 2000 head weighing up to 1500 lbs. each, $1500 to $2000 each. Feed lots are in business to sell grain. Very often the animals are still owned by the farmer and he is paying them to bring the cattle up to slaughter weight. Wondering if the feed lot folks are financially responsible for not mitigating the problem with sprinklers or huge fans? Seems the heat went up and the wind died down.

I don't have a lot of cattle but the few black ones we have can't take the heat and insects near as well as the half brahmas, and we have plenty of heat and bugs in Louisiana.

You take a bit of a hit on price with 3/8 to 1/2 blood brahma but a live one is much easier to sell than a dead one.

Wonder if they all got a "hot shot" and got heat stressed from getting worked? A bad run of the wrong vax or wormer or steroid would do that to a herd,,,

What farmer still owns the feeders after he sells them? I’ve never heard of that but it may be true.

He pays the feed lot to finish them and then sends a truck or the feed lot arranges a truck to get to a packing plant. It is a good way to lose money. Some cattle owners around here went bust in the 1970s and 80s doing that. They had feeder calves they could have sold at a profit but retained ownership to the feed lot and sold at a $200 to $300 loss due to feeding expense coupled with a serious price drop.

My thought on this situation.

How many years have we been shoving fats into tight confinement? 100? 150?

How many times have those pens been exposed to similar weather conditions? 1000s upon 1000s.

If losses such as this have occurred in the past, solely due to summer temps, I would sure like to hear about it.

Now, if in fact this was a 2000 count loss from a 200,000 head operation, that is a different situation.

The story read as if it was a 100% loss.

2000 count would seem high to me even out of 200,000. When I was in High School, I worked an auction barn in West Texas in the dead of Summer. People would bring in highly stressed cattle, and some of them even diseased and sickly looking already. We'd pack hundreds of them into pens to sale off at the auction that lasted about 3 to 4 days a week. It was a huge sale barn... They would only lose maybe 5 head a week, but the pens were mostly shaded..

This just seems like stupidity on the part of the feed lot owners...Probably had no shade, or nothing to cool the cattle down, and probably had way to many of them packed in to tightly in areas..

Heat related cattle deaths in Iowa are estimated at 3,500 to 4,000 head, as recent hot weather takes toll.
Jul 31, 2011


https://www.farmprogress.com/story-heat-wave-has-killed-up-to-4000-iowa-cattle-9-51680

I was living in Kansas during the heat wave of 2011-2012 and don't remember thousands of cattle dying.

Yeah, I was living here then too and don't remember 'em dying but, to be fair, I don't remember "the heat wave of 2011-2012."