Longhorns now often found in shows, rather than on the range

HOUSTON (AP) — As Bob Dube dropped off his Texas longhorn at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, he noticed the educational sign near its stall and proclaimed it incorrect.

Joshua Specht, a historian of cattle ranching and beef production, is a lecturer at Monash University in Australia, and has studied the breed.

In the words of folklorist J. Frank Dobie, the breed's literary champion, they were "iron-sinewed, wild-living cattle, creatures primordially harmonized to a nature that they at times defied."

Longhorns were feral descendants of escaped Spanish cattle, and after the Civil War, they roamed Texas' wide-open spaces in large numbers, an easy source of meat for dirt-poor hunters.

"Longhorns were the original cash cow," says Joe Paschal, a Corpus Christi-based livestock specialist with Texas A&M University's AgriLife Extension.

Once railways and barbed wire crisscrossed the West, the breed was discarded in favor of other meat options, and the open range it once roamed had disappeared.

In 1927, in an attempt to save them, federal forest rangers assembled a herd in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma.

Longhorns, he wrote, "generated cowboys, brought ranches into existence, gave character to the grazing world of America, and furnished material for political economy."

Bevo, the University of Texas mascot, inspired many alumni to purchase their own longhorns.

People view them as emblems of independence, of a time free of big business or government interference.

Sometimes big horns earn big checks, Fritsche says, but other factors are often more important — things such as cattle market values, pedigree, color and disposition.

People now raise longhorns for lots of reasons, he says, including their meat or unique personalities.

After castration, males' horns grow longer. These cattle were beautifully colored, with whites, browns and blacks blended together.