Steak - Mark Schatzker [130]
Incest is a way of life in rural America. The word “incest” is rarely uttered, but what is happening—son on mother, uncle on niece, nephew on aunt—is incest. The term of choice is “linebreeding.” Only livestock do it. Most people have no idea it’s taking place, and those who do don’t think it’s a bad thing.
Linebreeding is when you take a heifer with, for example, a very full brisket, plump rump, and short legs and mate her to her uncle, who also has a very full brisket, plump rump, and short legs. The intent is to obtain offspring with those same desired qualities. If a farmer has a herd of cattle that possess favorable characteristics, he linebreeds them—with great care, mind you, putting much consideration into which uncle should be put with which niece—so none of those characteristics will be lost. Any outside genetic influence, after all, will change the herd. Robert Bakewell, the man who invented cattle breeds, is considered the father of linebreeding, but the practice likely dates back to the dawn of cattle, when tame aurochs were bred with their tame siblings to produce even tamer aurochs.
The Laramie Plains of Wyoming are a high, dry stretch of dusty, flat-as-a-bed rangeland, in the midst of which sits Flying Z Ranch—home to the kind of incestuously bred herd that makes Allen Williams spend nights in lousy hotels that serve terrible coffee. They are Herefords, a breed that was once the most famous in America. Back when Texas was overrun with longhorns, Herefords were brought in to “improve” them and reigned until feedlots started sprouting up all over the Midwest. All that corn made them too fat, so they were bred to be taller and more muscled. Breeders often accomplished this, Williams believes, by quietly crossing them with non-Hereford cattle—European breeds like Simmental, Charolais, and Chianina—and claiming nevertheless that the offspring were pure Hereford, thereby ruining Hereford genetics. The scheme doesn’t seem to have worked, however, because today no one has much time for Herefords.
But these Herefords were unique. They seemed to have just stepped out of some kind of time warp, and it was all thanks to a man named Bob Gietz, who has been deceased since 1962. An easterner by birth, Gietz was lured to Wyoming in 1919 to become a cattleman. By 1925 he presided over a herd of Herefords that he judged to be of such outstanding quality that they were, henceforth, never to be corrupted with the genetic influence of any other cow or bull. They have since enjoyed almost a century of controlled incest. Genetically speaking, they are the same now as they were the year Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf and Calvin Coolidge swore his oath of office.
Gietz’s daughter, Janet Talbott, greeted us in the driveway, and within a few minutes Williams was in the corral appraising her bovine anachronisms. The cattle were short, the way doorframes in very old houses are short. The tallest came up to my bottom rib. “Look at the moderate frame size,” Williams said in the same tone of voice he uses when in the presence of excellent forage. “They’re definitely older style.”
Beauty is only hide deep, however. Only weeks earlier, Williams had tried and failed to eat a roast from the Grand Champion Steer at the Dixie National Rodeo and Livestock Show. That steer, which looked better than hundreds of other contestants, was so tough and gristly as to be inedible. Williams asked Talbott to bring a few of the Herefords into the barn, because he wanted to take a look inside them—a task that called for neither rubber glove nor scalpel, but a high-tech device called an Aloka SSD-500 V, an ultrasound machine of the same type that obstetricians use to scan pregnant women to examine the fetus.
First up was a white-faced heifer with curly hair between her eyes. The area behind her left shoulder was shaved and rubbed with vegetable oil, and when