By Caspar Dowdy
2013 was a hard year to be a farmer in Missouri. Land was parched by drought, and, that summer, some farmers in Southwest Missouri started to notice some of their cattle had gone missing.
Joann Pipkin and her husband, Jim, have owned Clearwater Farm, just outside Springfield, for the past 30 years. In 2013, while working with the Joplin Stockyards, she said she attended press briefings about livestock theft.
And then her own farm got caught up in a theft ring.
“I mean, as a producer, you never think it's going to happen to you. And then when it does, it really, really forces you to open your eyes a little bit more,” she said.
The early 2010s were the start of a meteoric rise in the price of beef, and in the cost to raise cattle. Now, more than a decade later, those prices are still climbing, and Pipkin said cases of theft are all the more devastating.
“All of those kinds of things that we depend on every single day to make our living, those inputs have gone up,” she said. “And so when we see sales of livestock also increase, but maybe not quite to the point to offset some of those costs, and then a theft occurs, that just sets us back that much farther”
Willie Clack is a senior lecturer at the University of South Africa, where he’s spent the last two decades studying livestock theft. He said livestock thefts can look different in different areas of the world, but they share some similarities where motivation is concerned.
“If you look at all the research done over the world, the motivation stays exactly the same. The modus operandi is a little bit different from place to place, but the motivating factors are normally greed and financial gain.”
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