US 'Tick Rider' Agents Guard Against Mexican Cows
Date: 17-Mar-04
Country: USA
Author: Deborah Tedford
De Yonge is not looking for illegal immigrants who swim the river dividing Mexico and the United States in search of jobs, or drug couriers who ferry marijuana across on rafts.
Instead, this modern cowboy scans the open range for Mexican livestock that are smuggled, or stray, into Texas carrying ticks infected with a deadly bovine disease.
From the mouth of the Rio Grande to the border town of Del Rio, Texas, some 65 of these special border agents, called "tick riders," are the U.S. cattle industry's first line of defense against bovine piroplasmosis, also known as cattle fever, or Texas fever.
The disease kills red blood cells of infected animals causing anemia and weight loss, decreases in milk production and worse.
"The ramifications are 90 percent deaths in susceptible cattle," says Ed Bowers, chief of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Tick Eradication Program in the border town of Laredo, Texas. "Losses could be in the billions, if we walked off and left."
In December, officials identified the first known case of mad cow disease in the United States. Mexico banned the entry of U.S. beef imports shortly thereafter, and while it lifted most of the prohibition this month, live U.S. cattle are still prevented from entering Mexican territory.
The impact on the U.S. cattle industry would be no less dramatic if Boophilus ticks that carry the disease infected livestock, Bowers said. "Tick fever would hit the food source drastically," he said.
CATTLE 'WETBACKS'
"Mexican cattle on the border graze in vast expanses that often become sparse of grass," said veterinary scientist Hugo Fragoso Sanchez at the Mexican government's animal health agency.
"They look across the river, see the grass and cross as wetbacks."
Fragoso said Mexico originally launched a campaign in 1974 to eradicate the Boophilus ticks, but that it was abandoned in 1984 as government funds dried up amid a currency crisis.
He said there are tick-free regions in Mexico and that cattle in some tropical states are usually bitten by the ticks at a young age and are able to develop immunity to the disease they carry.
Texas has been a bovine piroplasmosis hot zone for a century.
The famed Texas cattle drives of the 1800s ended because the state's longhorns were infected with the diseased ticks, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
Although the longhorns appeared healthy, Midwestern herds became sick and died when they mixed with Texas cattle. Midwestern states began to restrict their travel or ban them outright.
The U.S. government began a tick-eradication program in 1906, and the disease was all but eliminated by 1943 by killing the ticks and their larvae. To do this, livestock are dipped in vats containing a pesticide, and infected pastures are quarantined for as long as six months to starve the ticks.
The disease has been contained within a narrow quarantine zone that runs along most of the Texas-Mexico border.
It's the tick riders' job to make certain that such livestock never leave the quarantine zone without being checked for the ticks and dipped into a pesticide solution.
DANGEROUS WORK
Tick riding can be dangerous work.
"It's not uncommon to have a horse fall on you. Because of the rough terrain, your horse can slip, or step in a hole," supervisor Jack Gilpin said.
Last summer, one tick rider suffered a ruptured disk when his horse slipped and fell on top of him. The horse then panicked and stomped the rider, as well.
Another inspector drowned when his horse slipped on some rocks as they tried to head off a bull that was crossing the river.
Veteran Eddie Dillard says just about every inspector has witnessed drug trafficking and illegal immigration. They carry guns and badges, but they do not make arrests. If they spot anything suspicious, they radio the border patrol.
Yet, several years ago an agent was murdered while working at a remote campsite in