Choice gleanings from 45-plus years of Unregistered Bull.

"All this talk about a law to keep packers from feeding their own livestock," said John, "makes me sort of uneasy. It brings up a question that ought to be settled one way or the other, I guess; but it's gonna take a lot of awful careful thinking on somebody's part to get it settled right.

"There's no doubt about sheep and cattle feeders having lost plenty of money lately. And there's no doubt that packers have fed out a lot of stock themselves, which may have enabled them to put some extra squeeze on the slaughter livestock market.

"However, I'm a little bit hazy as to whether the packers are morally wrong when they put big bunches of livestock in feedlots for their own use. I remember when I was a kid, I went through the usual smart-Alec phase in which I could argue till midnight that the capitalistic form of government was all wet. I could quote one or two smarter smart-Alecs who had written books to prove that every time anybody makes a dollar under the capitalistic system, he keeps somebody else from making one. I thought I was a shade on the socialistic side and didn't lose any opportunity to brag about it. Now I'm an individualist, though not very rugged.

"What I'm getting at is this: If livestock producers and feeders get together and promote a law to prohibit packers from feeding their own stock, what next? What about the man who feeds 10,000 head? If cattle feeders in general can put the packer out of the feeding business, couldn’t the little feeders who are in the majority, put the clamps on the man who competes against them so powerfully by feeding cattle by the thousands?

"I'll take a paralyzed oath that I don't have any reason to be especially sympathetic toward packers. But I say if they want to step out and get in the market for feeder cattle or lambs to put in their own feedlots, let 'em go. Instead of running to the judiciary for protection against packer competition, I'd rather see individual feeders get together and put up their own packing plants. Or, maybe feeders and ranchers to boot could get together and try to whip the packers at their own game.

"When you come right down to it, I've heard feeders complain about the arrogance of ranchers, and vice versa. If feeders get a law to protect themselves from packers, why couldn't they go ahead then and get another law to make ranchers a little easier to do business with?

"It looks to me like the last year or so should prove that the biggest man doesn't always make the most money. The bigger the individual cattle feeder was in 1952, the more money he lost; the same goes for a lot of ranchers. And I'd guess that packers haven't made such a killing off their own feedlots, either, because there are too many packers that don't feed their own stock to let the ones that do control the market entirely.

"A really smart American said, a long time ago, that the least governed are the best governed. I claim that so long as we have laws to prevent packers from swindling the public, that's enough. Let 'em feed all the stock their pocketbooks can stand. Public demand for meat and existence of so many thousand small packers in competition with the handful of big ones should make for a reasonable amount of competition for feeder stock off the range.

And if the packers are potent enough to take over the feeding business entirely, they're going to have to buy an awful lot of feed. Many a Corn Belt feeder would have been better off in the past year to sell his feed to somebody else than to feed it to his own livestock, anyway.

"There's a certain amount of risk in feeding cattle, also in raising 'em or killing 'em. It's risky to try to make money doing anything. When you remove the gamble, you eliminate the chance to make a profit. Any time we get the government to guarantee us a cinch, we give up our chance to make enough money to winter in Florida or summer in Colorado in our old age — unless we go to one of those places and work for wages.

"Naw, I don't want to see the packers limited to feeding only a handful of stock. I might get a chance to feed a large string of cattle sometime myself. If so, I wouldn't want some government official on a $100 a-week pension to come along and tell me I was too big for my britches." — (S.F. 02/12/53)