Wyoming ranchers face many threats to the cattle and other livestock, but perhaps none more unpredictable and unmanageable than lightning.
Evanston-area rancher Vance Broadbent said that when sudden death comes ripping down out of the clouds, there really isn’t anything ranchers can do besides hope that the casualties are minimal.
“It is a concern. There’s not much we can do about it. It’s not consistent, or frequent,” he told Cowboy State Daily.
“I think the last time we lost cattle (to lightning) we lost several. About four or five” killed right next to each other, he said.
Larry’s Fate Shared By Many Critters
Northern Colorado residents were stunned by the death of a local animal celebrity, Larry the camel, who was stuck and killed by lightning on July 4 in his pasture on the Chipeta Ranch.
Larry’s sudden demise might have seemed like a freak accident, but livestock deaths from lightning are more common than many people might think.
Estimates vary widely, and many lightning-related livestock deaths go unreported.
On the high end, it’s thought that as many as 100,000 farm and ranch across the country perish every year in lightning strikes, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Colorado Rancher, 34 Cows Killed In 2024 Strike
Lightning strikes frequently kill multiple animals at once, as lethal bolts of electricity travel through the ground or between animals.
In one of the most extreme cases ever documented, a lightning strike wiped out more than 300 reindeer in Norway in 2016.
Closer to home was the horrific case of rancher Mike Morgan in Jackson County, Colorado. In May 2024, a lightning strike killed Morgan, 51, along with 34 of his cows, according to news reports.
Another 100 or so cattle were bowled over by the strike but survived.
The most recent statistics into the phenomenon comes from a 2015 report from the USDA that goes into detail regarding cow and calf deaths from that year, from all causes, across the country.
Lightning isn’t parsed out specifically in the report.
“Weather related” events in total killed 157,400 cows and 261,000 calves that year, according to the report.
Random Chance
Wyoming Farm Bureau spokesman Brett Moline told Cowboy State Daily that he recalled cattle occasionally being killed by lightning when he was growing up on his family’s ranch.
“It was more of an oddity. I don’t recall it happening every year,” he said.
In Wyoming, snowstorms are the biggest weather-related fear for ranchers, particularly during spring calving season, he said.
Man or beast surviving a lightning strike seems to be up to random chance, Jim Magagna, executive vice president of the Wyoming Stockgrowers, told Cowboy State Daily.
He recalled that early or mid-1990s, part of his family’s sheep ranching operation was staked out on an open slope.
Four horses were tied to a wagon, three on one side, and one on the other.
Lightning struck the wagon, instantly killing the “three good saddle horses” on one side, but the horse on the other side survived, he said.
A nearby ranch hand “felt the effect” of the strike. The man was taken to a hospital and examined by doctors, but didn’t suffer any serious injuries, Magagna said.
Broadbent noted, with cattle in Wyoming and across the West spending most of their lives out in the wide open, losing some to lightning is always a possibility.
“There’s probably more that die from lightning that we don’t know about. They’re way out there grazing when they get hit, and we might come up to them a day or two later, and can’t tell for sure what killed them,” he said.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
