Glossy hides rippling with brindle stripes, handsome faces splashed with freckles, eyelids draped in feathery lashes and highlighted by lines of color. They’re beauty queens, all right. Bovine beauty queens.
Glossy hides rippling with brindle stripes, handsome faces splashed with freckles, eyelids draped in feathery lashes and highlighted by lines of color.
They’re beauty queens, all right.
Bovine beauty queens.
“To me, you can’t find six prettier cows than the ones you’re looking at right now,” says Ray Beadle.
He waves his hand at an attractive group of cows, lounging in a 350-acre pasture in the Hollister area south of San Juan Oaks Golf Club.
Unflinching, the lovely livestock stare back inquisitively like big, docile dogs.
Beadle adds, “That is, if you’re in to cows.”
Reared in the concrete streetscapes of Los Angeles, the now 71-year-old Texas Longhorn breeder became smitten with Western nostalgia at a young age. Admiring his cowboy uncles from the Midwest, an adolescent Beadle practiced roping on fire hydrants.
Now tending to 70 cows, 29 calves and four bulls, the white-haired rancher is an eclectic form of bovine enthusiast.
“I treat him with respect,” says Beadle, eyeballing a 1,600-pound male named Swampbuck from the opposite side of a barbed-wire fence.
Taunted by a fetching female in heat, the 3-year-old bull sporting 65-inch horns flapped his upper lip, making unsuccessful passes at a looker named Picasso.
“He’s like a 16-year-old kid with a six pack of beer and his mother’s car for the first time on a Friday night. You don’t turn your back on him, because he’s full of it,” says Beadle.
Representing the California, Hawaii and Nevada chapters of the Texas Longhorn Breeders Association of America founded in 1964, Beadle attends meetings and votes on the direction of the TLBAA, for which he sits on the board of directors. The organization strives to protect the Longhorn’s “unique heritage,” promoting the national legacy of a breed once considered more endangered than the buffalo in 1933.
Of the 80 Californian ranchers belonging to the association, Beadle says about 20 “extremely active” breeders keep herds of more than 20 to 25 Longhorns. In San Benito County and other South Valley communities, a number of residents maintain anywhere between 10 to 15 Longhorns for hobby or sporting purposes such as team roping, he says. In terms of raising registered Longhorns for pedigree and showmanship, however, Beadle’s herd is the largest out of half dozen ranchers in South Santa Clara and San Benito counties.
Although he “never saw it going this far,” Beadle has become something of a paternal cow shepherd since purchasing six Longhorns 15 years ago in Texas. He works in Gilroy, lives in Los Gatos and drives to Hollister five days a week to visit his cud-chewing family.
“Look at them come like that. Do most kids obey you like that?” he says, twisting around in the front seat of his white SUV, or “traveling office,” and peering out the driver’s window.
Anticipating food, the bulky creatures broke into a brisk trot as they pursued Beadle’s vehicle on an overcast weekday morning.
Classified as registered Butler Texas Longhorns, the dapper-looking herd descends from one of seven pure bloodlines originating in the early 1900s in Texas. The livestock roams the bucolic heart of Rancho San Justo, situated on the western border of the San Juan Oaks Golf Club in San Benito County.
“If they got out on that golf course, it would be the end of Ray Beadle,” he jokes.
Solid-colored calves are sold primarily as roping cattle. Beadle’s secondary market is meat, although he says longhorn beef is less fatty and not a substantial commodity in the food industry.
Raising longhorns isn’t so much of a moneymaking venture. Rather, Beadle’s uncommon hobby is fueled largely by enthusiasm for breeding stunning livestock with “curb appeal.” He says ranchers, doctors or lawyers who “just want something fancier grazing in their front yard,” often purchase his animals as living landscape ornaments. This includes locals with two to 10 acres who opt for an attractive form of weed abatement.
“Then one thing leads to another, they get a bull and pretty soon they got a calf and then they’re in the business,” he jokes.
See the full story in the Free Lance on Tuesday.
