NYT The American and Mexican governments are exploring “all options” to battle a deadly parasite threatening cattle and wildlife. Judy McCullough, a rancher in Wyoming, still remembers the blood sprayed on the barn walls, the smell of burning tar and the fear of finding a maggot nestled in the broken hide of a cow.
More than 70 years ago, when Ms. McCullough was a child on her grandfather’s cattle ranch, the new world screwworm was all but certain to incite dread. Feeding on the flesh of the live cattle, it laid eggs on open wounds, killing the animals if it went untreated.
Ranchers resorted to a number of preventative measures: spraying noxious pesticides, dehorning and castrating calves in colder months that screwworm larvae could not survive, and branding using a tar mixture to minimize open flesh.
“Nothing’s nastier than this maggot,” Ms. McCullough, 79, said, recalling the aftermath of a gory dehorning. She pointed to the care that people “took of wounds, even on themselves,” given that the fly could be equally deadly to humans.