Former Cattle Owner in Kansas Explains Freak Heat Incident That Killed Thousands of Cattle

A former cattle owner in Kansas recently shed some light on the causes behind the sudden deaths of thousands of cattle in Midwestern America.

Reports out of Kansas say that as many as 10,000 cattle may have died while temperatures reached into the triple digits.

Clay Scott is a former cattle owner and resident of Kansas, and recently sat down with Daily Wire to discuss the incident, calling it a “freak of nature thing.” Scott said that this was an uncommon, but not unprecedented, occurrence.

Scott said it happens “every twenty years or so” when the weather rapidly increases temperature. In the days before the cattle died, the Midwest had been experiencing record triple digit heat, meaning that the cattle had a hard time cooling off. Additionally, because of unusually cold temperatures in May, the cattle had yet to shed their winter coats, only adding to the difficulty for them.

“[It] was really hot, it was really humid, there was no breeze. We had a heat downburst,” which is “a rare but not uncommon spike in temperatures in the morning.”

Scott also pointed out that, while thousands of cattle seems like a huge number, there are several million cattle in that part of the country alone. While it is definitely still a tragic incident, the number of deaths isn’t quite so massive when put in the context of the area.

Scott said that perhaps the people most hurt are those who raise the animals. It’s “more than just a paycheck. They don’t like to see it because they work so hard. And you work with animals every day. You want to see ’em do the best they can. You don’t want to see anybody suffer. So I know several of those guys are a little dejected. … It’s kind of like a flood or a fire, you know, it wasn’t anything they could control, but yet they suffer the consequences of it.”

Additionally, Scott doesn’t believe theories that the cattle were victims of something malicious, saying that if that were the case, the cattle’s owners would be “up in arms.” 

“It’s pretty evident that we got some really good people taking care of our cattle supply,” he said. “They’re really working hard to make sure it’s right.”