Jobs were lost and thousands of cattle slaughtered.
By his own accounting, Mr. Ashcraft saved thousands of cattle and dozens of people across seven counties last week.
Here in the Texas panhandle, it wiped out ranches and farms and overtook four people, along with thousands of cattle.
Because thousands of cattle belonging to the local inhabitants were dependent on the lake for water, the drought caused much hardship.
At last count, more than five years after the disease was first detected, it had led to the death of tens of thousands of cattle.
Tens of thousands of cattle encroach in to the Reserve every night when visitors are safely out of sight – but when the likelihood of conflict with predators such as lions and hyenas is at its greatest.
In early October, a blizzard roared through the Black Hills of western South Dakota, burying tens of thousands of cattle under several feet of snow and leaving South Dakota's $7 billion cattle industry reeling.
In cattle, prions cause mad cow disease — they are responsible for the epidemic in Britain of the late '80s and '90s that required hundreds of thousands of cattle to be destroyed.
Drone footage and satellite images reveal how thousands of cattle are being kept at some sites in outdoor pens, known as corrals, sometimes surrounded by walls, fences or straw bales.
What began as welcomed rain after several years of crippling drought in Australia turned into a catastrophe after a record-breaking downpour flooded the northeastern coast, killing hundreds of thousands of cattle, wiping away the livelihood of many farming communities and threatening one of the country's vital industries.
In March, the minister's weak position was apparent when he issued a grovelling public apology to JBS after inspectors embargoed two meat-processing factories that were alleged to have bought tens of thousands of cattle from illegally deforested areas of the Amazon.
