![]() One of those sold last March at an auction put on by Vasut’s group. “When we got into the industry there was one cow who tip to tip measured 90 inches,” Vasut says, “and looking today there’s 55 of them.” Chase Vasut raises longhorns in Elgin and is the director of operations at the Texas Longhorn Cattle Association. In a short period of time, horn size for registered longhorns has grown exponentially, and so has the money it takes to buy them. ![]() “All my cows are in the 70s or I don’t even have them anymore.” “When I got into this 10 years ago, if you had a cow in the 60s, tip-to-tip, it was a big deal,” he says. And today, if they’re not 60 by two, you throw them under the bus.” “When I got in,” Lowe says, “if you had a bull that had 60 inches of horn you were kicking butt. Take Dick Lowe of the Triple R Ranch in Horton, Michigan, or John Marshall, who raises longhorns at the Blue Ridge Ranch in Llano. If you ask him, or most anyone else in Fort Worth, how the industry has changed in that time, they’ll tell you the same thing. They’re very addictive, they’re beautiful animals, they’re very docile animals,” says auctioneer Joel Lemley. The buyers are mostly folks who got into this as hobby, but now are hooked. Today, the average lot sells for just under $4,500, with the top cattle bringing in over $10,000 apiece. These are registered longhorns, which means their bloodlines have carefully curated and logged. There are beefy chestnut-colored bulls, blue roan cows with parallel horns, fluffy, black-and-white calves with little spikes just starting to sprout. ![]() Here, there’s something different for everyone. And by and large, those look like a parade of the same animal over and over again.īut not the longhorns. There are lots of cattle auctions at the stock show – Herefords, Brahman, Santa Gertrudis. On auction day for longhorns at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo – one of the biggest sales of the year – 85 or so cows are coaxed into a half-circle sale pen in front of the buyers and sellers. They were built for survival, not show, which makes them quite different from their modern relatives. Dobie was unsparing in his description of the breed, calling them bony, thin-flanked, some even grotesquely narrow-hipped, but also uniquely suited for the Texas terrain. Frank Dobie published “The Longhorns” – the definitive book on the quintessential Lone Star State livestock.
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