Claire Strom 2009: Making catfish bait out of government boys: the fight against cattle ticks and the transformation of the yeoman south

Abstract

The first page records the killing in 1923 of an employee of the Bureau of Animal Industry. The man who fired the shotgun was reported at his trial (he was acquitted) to have earlier promised to make catfish bait out of the government boys. How could an agricultural adviser have engendered such belligerence? By page 75, the death toll is recorded as into double figures, and another hundred pages on the federal bureaucracy was employing ex-soldiers and providing them with pistols and machine guns. Arming them with the power to send people to court had early been proven insufficient. The answer is found indirectly amongst cattle ticks and the protozoans they transmitted to cattle and directly in the mandatory treatment of cattle to eradicate the tick from southern USA. These extraordinary events are described and analysed by Claire Strom, editor of Agricultural History, with the objectivity of a professional historian who has never been obliged to adopt the mindset of a public health bureaucracy run by central government and who has access to very detailed records on site. It is the conflict between the ways of operating and assumptions of the cattle tick eradicators and the economic needs and social constraints of yeoman farmers. In the context of cattle rearing in the tropics, the term yeoman can be translated as land-owning and small-holder farmers operating in the traditional economic sector. In the early to middle stages of the campaign to eradicate Boophilus annulatus and Boophilus microplus, from 1906 to its declared success in 1944, there was substantial opposition from these farmers for a potent combination of reasons. They had multiple farming means, and their scrub cattle were often a minor part that survived in semi-feral state on unfenced land. The cattle were resistant survivors of early exposure to Babesia and only rounded up twice a year, not twice a month as mandated for treatment in dip baths charged with arsenic compounds. The cattle were marketed in an economic system separate from the major cattle and meat-packing industry developing in the north. Thus, tick eradication was a severe burden of time, effort and cash to these farmers who saw any benefit as something reserved for well capitalized cattle ranchers. The yeoman farmers suspected, correctly, that the ticks could survive on deer, so they were highly sceptical of success of the scheme. The ticks still do survive on deer, in patches within the USA along the border with Mexico. That border is to this day patrolled by tick quarantiners, whose job is made harder by enthusiasts for game farming with their exotic deer and bovids. If this sounds familiar to those who have been involved with, or learnt about, other eradication or widescale control schemes, it is an indication of the great generic value of such historical analyses. Us ‘government boys’ with our book-learning, fancy equipTrop Anim Health Prod (2010) 42:1037–1038 DOI 10.1007/s11250-009-9493-6