NIXON – There's no Big Texas-style entrance to Doug Havemann's cattle operation. It's just a hog panel fence at the end of a lane of modest homes and double-wide trailers in Nixon, a small town east of San Antonio where 22 percent of families live below the poverty line.
There, Havemann tends to his 12 head of cattle on 16 acres of systematically paddocked, carefully monitored grassland. By tending, he means scratching the chin of an affectionate 2,200-pound bull named Jack and letting a still-awkward calf named Sue learn to judge distance by rubbing up against his leg. There are no bags of feed grain, no pesticides or fertilizers for the pasture, no shots of antibiotics or castration to calm a future pubescent bull's hormones.
"I want them to have a great life with one bad day," he said, referring to the inevitable slaughter. "And I don't even want them to know that day is coming."
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