The Bizarre History of Cattle Dipping
Until the 1960s, American ranchers were dipping their cows in Arsenic
In the late 1800s, a new challenger arose to threaten the booming American cattle industry; the “Texas Fever Tick”. Or more specifically, two species of cattle tick. Boophilus microplus and Boophilus annulatus were found to host a parasite that killed the beefy European cattle breeds favored in the United States. An infection caused massive red blood cell loss in the cows, who died less than two weeks after a bite. Northern states were lucky; hard frosts and snowfall killed off the ticks every fall and winter, keeping numbers low. But Southern state cattle herds were inundated year-round by the little buggers, causing a panic across the markets and an enormous federal quarantine line across the country.
It cannot be overstated how invested the US was in its cattle industry by 1880. Politics, economics, culture, and immigration were all intrinsically tied to the cattle market. Most political leaders had investments in the cattle industry, if they didn’t personally own cattle ranches, and entire states were being settled solely by ranchers. The Texas Fever Tick was public enemy number one. As one historian put it, “there was no greater obstacle in the way of developing a successful cattle industry than the cattle tick.”
In 1884 the United States Department of Agriculture created the Tick Eradication Program, the sole purpose of which was to save the cattle industry by completely removing cattle ticks from the entirety of the country. How could this possibly be accomplished?
From the late 1800s to the early 1910s, cattlemen in the south coated their cows in crude petroleum. Using mops, brushes, and hand-sprayers, ranch workers coated live animals in oil. It killed the ticks, but petroleum had is drawbacks. It was incredibly expensive to purchase, and barrels of crude oil were costly and dangerous to transport. Ranchers also reported their cattle literally burning in the summer heat after crude oil baths on hot days.
Enter arsenic. A 20% arsenical solution was much more cost-effective for ranchers, and soon 3,000-gallon dipping vats of arsenic solutions were a common sight on southern cattle operations. These “dipping vats” were constructed of wood or concrete and were essentially trenches which cattle were run through to soak their entire bodies in the tick-eradicating poison. Cattle dipping proved extremely effective and was soon a requirement in many Southern states. Ranchers were expected to dip their cattle every fourteen days.
The dipping laws were not just for ranchers who wanted to export their cattle to the stockyards and meat markets in the north. The laws covered entire states and did not benefit everyone. Smaller cattle operations were often for subsistence farming only and didn’t care about requirements for tick eradication to export cows. Many small-time ranchers in Southern states didn’t even have designer European cattle breeds, but instead had rangy desert breeds run up from Mexico, which were immune to Texas Fever infections. Why would these ranchers want to create, maintain, and use costly dipping vats on their properties or ship cattle to county dipping vats?
The government was not giving these smaller ranchers any wiggle room. Dipping requirements became widespread and federal inspectors roamed counties looking for noncompliance. For a successful eradication of a foe as widespread as the tick, the solution could only be scorched earth. As more and more jurisdictions passed laws requiring dipping, public outcry increased. In 1919, a rash of dipping vat bombings spread throughout Arkansas, Georgia, and Alabama. Over 70 Arkansas cattle dipping vats were bombed in less than two months in protest of dipping laws. In response, the USDA Tick Eradication Program began hiring veterans as private militia to protect public vats in contentious counties, shooting protestors on sight.
In the 1920s lawsuits began to pour in. Dairy farmers reported losses in milk production from dipped cows and cows producing bloody milk after their poison treatments. Ranchers complained of cattle being injured in the dipping vats or emerging with blistered skin. Nonetheless, dipping and quarantines continued. In 1946 DDT replaced arsenic as the chosen method of tick eradication for cattle. Since DDT could be sprayed, dipping vat requirements were phased out. It was much more cost effective to spray cattle with the toxin every two weeks than to run them through trenches filled with 3,000 gallons of arsenic solution, and protests died down.
In 1954 the Tick Eradication Program declared the Texas Fever Tick fully eradicated in the continental United States. All quarantines were lifted. After 70 years of requiring the United States’ meat and dairy cattle to be coated with toxins and dipping vats to be installed in the landscapes, the ticks were defeated. Dipping still continued in some areas, and spraying DDT was still the norm until the 1980s, when injectables and Ivermectin swept onto the scene.
No studies were carried on the effects that coating the nation’s meat and dairy cattle in arsenic, crude petroleum, and DDT had on the American consumer during the reign on the USDA Tick Eradication Program. To this day, arsenic levels around the remains of Southern dipping vats are high, but there are no state requirements for mitigation of sites. Since dipping vats were dumped and cleaned every 14 days during their use, arsenic likely leached deep into the groundwater in these areas. Entire books have been written about the devastating effects of DDT across the country. We will likely never know the true impact of the eradication campaign of the Texas Fever Tick, but we do know this; it saved the United States cattle industry. But at what cost?
REFERENCES
Texas Cattle Fever · USDA’s Contributions to Veterinary Parasitology ·
Cattle Dipping Vats (CDV) | Florida Department of Environmental Protection
