When Shane Pennington, a 56-year-old cattle farmer near Canadian, Texas, first saw flames from an enormous wildfire approaching the ranch he manages, his first concern wasn’t his home. It was his animals.
Pennington told CNN he returned to the ranch to find around 50 cattle dead, with nursing cows desperately searching for their lost calves.
As the flames tore through the ranch, they caused excruciating injuries, burning off some animals’ tails and rendering others blind. “It just burned all the hair off them,” he said. “Their feet are coming off. Their hooves, they’re bloody.”
Some of them are “cows that I raised right here,” he said. “It’s just hard to see them burn up.”
Pennington is one of many cattle farmers whose livelihoods have been devastated by the Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history, which has burned more than a million acres of land across the panhandle.
The state is home to about 4.1 million beef cattle, according to David P. Anderson, professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University. And more than 85% are in the panhandle, according to Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller.