"Go, gallop up and guard the middle of the left side of the herd," instructs my aunt. "Go: ‘Woo! Woo! Woo! ... Woo! Woo! Woo!'" I try it, but the cows, presumably bemused by my English accent, stare blankly back in that particularly bovine way. It is not until I gallop right up to them and gain confidence in my whooping that they move. 

What first starts to grate on your nerves about cattle ranching is the incessant, deafening mooing that pierces your skull. You have to shout to the person next to you as you stand in the giant corral, ready to ride through the herd of several hundred and separate out 20 cows at a time and chase them to the cowboys on foot, who then separate them into pens according to the colour of the ear-tags that identify their owner. One horse knows his task so well he nips the cows on their buttocks to get them to move faster toward the second set of gates leading to their pens. 

After the driving, corralling and penning comes the segregation of cows and calves ahead of the veterinary inspections. It is not easy to run counter to nature, separating mothers from their clinging young, so we have to work the system of gates quickly to capture them as they charge us. I then "cowboy up" and remount my horse, Sig, to chase the recalcitrant cows down "the chute", towards the end trap that snaps in around their necks and behind their legs, holding them still for the vet. The vet sprays them for parasites, vaccinates them and checks them for pregnancies, which is where the brutality of cattle-ranching sinks in: they'll keep the pregnant cows and send the sterile ones to slaughter, for they are not worth feeding through the winter. 

I am dressed in a medical smock, a long plastic sleeve pinned to the shoulder, and latex gloves. "Deeper," says the vet, as I put my arm in to feel my first bovine fetus. I reach in through one chamber, find another opening, through the next chamber and another opening, until I feel the bone. Then I angle my hand down into the uterus and feel the head of the foetus: about the size and shape of a lemon, it bounces back up when you press down on it. "Bouncy!" I say. The foetus is about three months along, I'm told. With a four-month-old foetus, I can reach below the head and feel the tiny front hooves: they're like little buttons. Just as I feel them, the cow defecates all over me, while my arm is still inside her. After the cows come the calves — inspected, vaccinated and then released back to be reunited with their waiting mothers, who offer them a celebratory suckle at their teats. 

So far, so jolly, but it is after this point in the annual ranching cycle that the business gets messy. The cows sold to stockers and feedlots face one of two imminent futures until their slaughter. One is in grassy sloping fields with good drainage. The other is up to their knees in mud and excrement and the rotting carcasses of other cows, that are
often mashed up and fed back to them. The result is mad cow disease. Though feeding back dead cows to the living is now illegal, no one can be certain what really happens on these farms. Whether meat is "organic" or not apparently hinges on this point — the conditions of the stockers and feedlots between the rancher that raises the cows and the slaughterhouse that marks the end of their days. The Pullmans recently changed the buyer they do business with, because they want their cows to have more humane treatment after they leave the farm. Beyond that, the rancher has little control. 

Spending the day driving, corralling, penning, segregating and inspecting cattle has a strange effect. Far from developing empathy for cattle, you view them as part of a larger life-cycle linking human and animal, and farming them as perfectly natural. "You'll crave a steak afterwards," I'd been warned. "Cows are remarkably stupid, much dumber than horses." They were right — after cattle ranching from dawn to dusk, we went to historic La Hood Park for a giant, sizzling steak.