Mark Heinz

4 days ago | cowboystatedaily.com | Mark Heinz

For Clint Snook, the vexing mystery facing a Colorado ranch family is eerily familiar. Like them, he’s had cattle die suddenly and mysteriously. “We never did figure out exactly what it was,” Snook, who ranches near Devils Tower, told Cowboy State Daily. During two summers several years back, he had cattle bafflingly fall over dead in a particular pasture. Roughly 20 cows died each time, he said. That mirrors what the Higgs family of Fremont County, Colorado, is going through.

4 days ago | cowboystatedaily.com | Mark Heinz

Goliath and Blue Zeus are two huge mustang stallions who lived hardscrabble lives on the Wyoming range but now enjoy freedom and plentiful forage on a 9,000-acre horse and burro sanctuary in Oregon. They are of stately ages for horses – Blue Zeus is 24, and Goliath is 33. They live at Skydog Sanctuary for wild horses and burros near Bend, Oregon. Clare Staples founded the sanctuary and also manages an 11-acre ranch for horses and burros near Malibu, California.

4 days ago | cowboystatedaily.com | Mark Heinz

The “hard hazing” of a popular Grand Teton grizzly and her three yearling cubs led to two of the cubs being killed and cannibalized by a large male grizzly, a prominent wildlife photographer said. In May, Grizzly 1063 and her cubs were being hazed away from residential areas at Colter Bay in Grand Teton National Park, according to the National Park Service (NPS).  Two of her yearling cubs were apparently killed and partially eaten by a male grizzly on May 13.

5 days ago | cowboystatedaily.com | Mark Heinz

More than three weeks after 15 of their cattle fell over, suffered seizures and died in a single day on a Colorado ranch, the cattle’s owners remain completely baffled as to the cause. “It’s just the strangest thing. My husband has been a cowboy his entire life and he said he’s never seen anything like it,” Kerri Higgs told Cowboy State Daily. “At first it was devastating. Now, I’m just angry.

6 days ago | cowboystatedaily.com | Mark Heinz

Given their massive size and cantankerous attitudes, Wyoming’s moose might seem practically indestructible, but if enough ticks pile onto the large animal, they can kill it. It’s a miserable way to go through blood drainage, horrific skin irritation and the loss of huge patches of hair as moose can be infested with ticks by the tens of thousands. There have been documented cases in Eastern states of a single moose overwhelmed by nearly 50,000 ticks.