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Jasmine Entz, at her farm near Vulcan, Alta., poses with Beef, an eight-year-old Holstein that was recently declared by the Guinness Book of World Records to be the tallest living steer.LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
Jasmine Entz met him just moments after he was born, all fresh into this world and still covered with slime. She took a picture of him and sent it to one of her coworkers, saying: “This one’s really cute.”
He was really cute, a purebred, black-headed Holstein lying in the straw. But there was something else that set him apart from all the other Holsteins at the dairy she works at in Lethbridge.
“He just seemed to have an energy to him that he was always excited about life,” Ms. Entz recalls. “He was just a little go-getter right from the beginning.”
In fact, the more she fed the calf and got to know him, the more his character started to shine through. Cattle do have their own personalities, and he was calm and smart, always cuddly and excited to see her, wanting to lay his head in her lap.
She’d been looking for an animal to ride (yes, some people do ride cattle), and with his intelligence and gentle demeanour, this little black-headed fellow seemed like a perfect fit. He stayed at the dairy until he was weaned, then she brought him home to her hobby farm, to join her herd of 50 miniature goats. He was about three months old then, just a little guy, at least for a Holstein: 250 pounds and not yet up to her waist. She named him Beef.
She didn’t mean for him to get so big. She fed Beef just like she would have any other calf, grain at first to develop his digestion, then a standard adult diet of various hays, with the odd pumpkin from a neighbour or something from the garden as a treat.
But Beef started to grow.
And grow.
And grow.
And as the years went by, it eventually came to pass that Beef wasn’t just tall, but strikingly, remarkably, record-breakingly tall. The tallest steer alive in this whole wild world, in fact.
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Beef is now 6-foot-6 at the shoulder – and he’s still growing.LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
Beef was six years old when one of Ms. Entz’s friends shared a story about Tommy, a brown steer in Massachusetts who then held the Guinness World Record for tall steers. Tommy was obviously no slouch, standing a respectable 6-foot-1 at the withers. But even before she measured, Ms. Entz already knew her Beef was bigger.
She submitted proof of Beef’s height and health according to all the Guinness guidelines and rules, and Beef officially took the title and joined the record book this year. At the time he was measured, he was 6-foot-5.
“I was expecting him to get big,” Ms. Entz says. “I was not expecting him to get this big.”
Beef is actually now 6-foot-6 at the shoulder, having grown an inch since he set the record. That makes him almost as tall as a doorframe, as long as a small car, 2,500 pounds of pure Beef. At eight years old, he’s also still growing. Ms. Entz doesn’t know when he’ll stop.
“When you break it down and look at each individual part, it really kind of puts it into perspective,” says Ms. Entz. “He’s big in person. Much bigger than the pictures show.”
In just two more inches, he’ll overtake Fiorino, a chianina ox from Italy who died in 2007, to become the tallest steer ever recorded.
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Beef eats 100 pounds of hay a day and $400 worth of hay a month.LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
Outside the record, there’s not much tangible benefit to being the Tallest Living Steer in the World, or to being his person. Ms. Entz can’t even ride him anymore. Even though they both enjoyed it, he’s too big to fit her riding tack now, and, since she’s afraid of heights, she’d be sitting too high off the ground for her comfort.
Holsteins are big bovines by their genetics, but most steers don’t have a chance to grow to maturity because – well, you know why. But Beef, through a combination of luck and charm, will live out his days in comfort and companionship on Ms. Entz’s farm.
Beef is healthy and receives regular checkups with a vet – dairy cattle have a naturally leaner look to them, if you were thinking he looks thin – but, let’s face it, that’s a lot of meat to carry around on those legs. Beef also needs an extra-tall stock trailer, and eats 100 pounds of hay a day and $400 worth of hay a month, and poops accordingly.
Ms. Entz says the general consensus in cattle circles that, “it’s a little silly that I’m feeding a 6-foot-6, eight-year-old Holstein steer.”
“And I can’t disagree with it,” she laughs. “You know, obviously Beef is the exception, because he’s my baby and I’ve had him for eight years. Knowing what the cost of it is, no, I will not be getting another Holstein steer. That was a lesson learned.”
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LEAH HENNEL/The Globe and Mail
