External Parasite

Abstract

The livestock industry is an interesting and very complex system. Oftentimes we lose sight of how complicated it really is. We have come a long way from our initial involvement in the cattle industry. Our ranchers many years ago ran cattle out on the open range, and spent most of their time on horseback. Now we use cellular phones and may round up cattle with a helicopter. Our industry has changed a lot. We've gone to more of a sohpisticated system. We now have beef factories, as we often call the feedlots. We have trucks that move these cattle around. This is one of the things that causes a great deal of concern in our parasite control program in the cattle industry. We seldom ever know the exact origin of the calf, where it came from nor how many places it has been before it becomes involved in our particular operation. We may have cattle come out of the southeast United States, come to the Texas panhandle on wheat, go to New Mexico or southern Oklahoma or the flint hills in Kansas for summer grass and end up in the feedlot from Texas to California.