Sheep, Cattle, and Agricultural Science

I was looking through some of the movies I’ve purchased on Amazon recently. I don’t buy a lot of movies, but some are just a little harder to find and worth having on hand. Two of them are western comedies- A Million Ways to Die in the West and Rustlers’ Rhapsody.

What struck me is that both movies have the same core conflict: cattlemen versus sheepherders. It’s a trope that shows up a lot in Westerns, and it often plays like a joke—something about smelly sheep, or cattlemen just finding sheepherders annoying. But in some movies, it feels like there’s an underlying ethnic tension. In Rustlers’ Rhapsody and maybe a few others, the sheepherders seem to be coded as Eastern European, maybe Jewish. That’s an interesting layer, but at its heart, the cattleman-sheepherder rivalry has a real, practical foundation.

It’s agricultural science.

Sheep and cattle graze in the same places—grasslands. Grasslands are great because they’re a stable food source. You put cattle or sheep on a big open range, and they eat. Simple, right? Not quite. The problem is how they eat.

Cattle munch. They eat the blades of grass, chewing it down, but leaving the roots intact. The grass grows back quickly. Sheep, on the other hand, yank the whole thing up—roots and all. Over time, this destroys the grasslands. Eventually, the grass can grow back, but not fast enough for cattle to return within a reasonable time.

So when a cattleman sees a sheepherder moving in, it’s not just a personal grudge—it’s survival. If sheep go through an area, the land becomes unusable for cattle, maybe permanently. That’s the real reason you see this conflict show up again and again in Westerns. It’s not just about smell or stubbornness—it’s about the land itself.