In Wyoming, a Burnt Mark Still Proves Who Owns a Cow

Morning light was rising above the peaks outside a ranching community in western Wyoming as Mike Vickery steered toward two parked semis. About 150 cattle were set to load that day, and none could step onto a truck until he had put eyes on them.

Vickery, a Wyoming brand inspector for going on 38 years, pulled up to wooden corrals to meet a rancher he knew well. They had been roommates in college. Then they walked to an empty, muddy pen where dark cattle huddled together, their coats whitened by overnight cold.

The work is old-school inventory control for animals that wander the open range. Each ranch burns its own emblem of letters, numbers or shapes into an animal's hide. Vickery checks each mark before a sale to make sure the people selling or hauling the animals own them or have the right to move them. At one stop that fall, the herd changing hands was valued at nearly $500,000, a large sum for the meat market and for that rancher's income.

After some nudging, about fifteen animals rushed through the gate together. Vickery searched every animal for that ranch's M-E mark on the left flank, a job made harder by thick, fluffy winter hair. He finished all 150 animals in under thirty minutes. Then he tracked down the buyer, wrote down a health number showing a veterinarian had checked the herd for contagious disease, and typed the count and the names into his truck. A mini printer spat out the official paper trail.

He is one of only three inspectors serving that ranch-dense county, so autumn sale season keeps him on the road nearly every day. "That's the most important day of the year for the people shipping their cattle because that's the day they're getting paid," Vickery said.

The mark he reads cannot fall off. Some cattle also wear electronic tags on their ears, Vickery says, but those can tear away on brush or fencing. A brand is permanent. That mattered most in the 1800s, when stealing cattle was common, and it still matters when a cow wanders off and joins a neighbor's herd.

These days, Vickery said, a mix-up is usually an honest mistake, and he probably knows everyone involved. Vickery said, "We don't shoot people and we're not deputized, so to speak." When asked whether that meant he was not carrying a gun, he said he was carrying a gun, "but not because of that."

At his last stop, a couple of beef cows headed to slaughter belonged to rancher Gene Paul, who grew up next door to Vickery. Paul walked over with Peter, his two-year-old grandson, both in cowboy hats. Vickery's parents run a ranch down the road, under a brand made of an F and another F turned sideways. "There's a lot of pride with people when you go, you know, you drive through a herd of cattle and they have your brand on them," he said.

It was Vickery's last fall on the job. He is ready to spend more time with his own grandkids, leaving a state job with benefits that pairs well with ranching and that had not opened up in several decades.