Settled Herds, Mobile Diseases | Notes from the Ordos Pastoral Region

Yet just as we neared Jirimutu’s home, the underpowered old car became stuck in the sand, unable to budge.

The edge of the Mu Us Desert stretches into the south-eastern part of S Banner’s pastureland, where patches of pale “bare sand dunes” can still be seen among the small poplar groves that herders have been planting for over a decade. In spring, the loose soil drifts with the wind, accumulating into drifts on the leeward side of stabilised dunes and leaving inexperienced drivers at a loss. I had no choice but to call Jirimutu for help. Later, the herders taught me how to drive through the sand: keep a firm grip on the steering wheel and build up speed from a distance to power through.

I sat on a seemingly pristine sand dune, waiting for rescue. The sun climbed higher, baking the earth, yet there was not a single place to seek shade around me, only scattered clumps of wild wormwood, their yellowed stems now sheathed in fresh, tender green shoots.

Nearly an hour later, Jirimutu arrived. Once we were back on the move, we found ourselves getting in and out of the vehicle fourteen times over a journey of less than eight kilometres to our destination, each time to open and shut wire gates.

II.

In 1983, the Inner Mongolia Regional Party Committee convened a meeting of secretaries from banner-level committees across the region. It was decided to gradually implement a responsibility system for livestock: “herds valued and allocated to households, repaid in instalments, privately owned and managed.”

After this “household livestock contracting” system had been in place for some time, the Autonomous Region revised and promulgated its Grassland Management Regulations. These introduced reforms to grassland ownership, stipulating that “the rights to use, manage, protect, develop and build grasslands would be contracted to grassroots production units or individual operators under a responsibility system, thereby linking grassland management responsibilities directly with livestock husbandry duties.” Underpinning these regulations, pasture boundaries were demarcated and usage rights assigned to individual households or groups. Optimal carrying capacities were established to match herd sizes to available forage—this framework became known as the “dual contracting of grasslands and livestock”.

Alongside the dual contracting system, wire fencing gradually “spread across” the pastures. The fences were constructed from thin wire and short posts, with five or six strands fastened side by side to each post at regular intervals. The spacing between posts, the number of wire strands, and the choice of post material—whether sturdy timber or concrete—all depended on a herder’s financial standing. Consequently, in the early years following the contracting of grazing lands, the presence and quality of wire fencing served as a clear indicator of the wealth disparity between herding households.

Nowadays, wire fences mark the boundaries of the pastures, and the gates along the rural tracks that must be continually opened and shut are the only means of travelling between the grazing lands of different herding families. During my time on the Ordos grasslands, I was frequently struck by a sense of claustrophobic confinement. The rare, flat stretches between the dunes were parceled out into patches by dense fencing and gate after gate.

This sense of “confinement” inspired a local herding poet to compose a poem titled “Forty-Four Fills”:

Fenced pastures (corkulens) pack the wilderness, haze smothers the city,

Debts crush the herders, gold and silver cram the pockets,

Wells carpet the river flats, roads pave over the grazing lands,

Ghosts crowd the apartment blocks, wire fences choke the grasslands,

Gates litter the tracks, wool snares the broom shrubs;

……

By noon, we finally arrived at Jirmutu’s house. Over lunch, I asked him about the recent condition of his neighbour and cousin Dalai’s herd.

On a spring day whipping with wind and sand, Dalai phoned Director De at the K Sumu Animal Quarantine Station. One of his sheep had been listless and refusing food and water for a full day. Although it was the height of the busy spring livestock health campaign, Director De managed to spare time to visit Dalai’s home alongside his colleague and veterinarian, Qinggê. Once there, the pair headed straight for the pen housing the sick animal.

Station Chief De retrieved a metal detector from the back seat of the state-issued Great Wall pickup truck. The handheld scanner in Chief De’s grip was identical to those used to screen passengers at train stations, airports and underground stations. Veterinarians typically use it to locate swallowed metal objects in cattle and sheep. However, if the ingested metal has passed further down the digestive tract into the deeper organs, the device becomes useless. Chief De ran the scanner over the ailing ewe from head to hoof twice over, but it remained silent. It was a two-year-old ewe with rather short legs, lying listlessly with its head drooping on the dark brown, sandy earth mingled with herd dung. Having quickly ruled out ingested metal, the vets suspected plastic might be to blame.

Unable to entirely rule out or confirm the presence of plastic, Chief De advised Dali to give the sheep a bottle of castor oil. Dali picked up a green beer bottle tucked into the pen’s fencing and headed towards the baixing—a Mongolian term widely used locally for the household dwelling—to fetch the oil.

After the castor oil was administered, the group waited outside the pen for around half an hour. The sheep showed no sign of passing stool, but it did rise to its feet, as if searching for food. The sight eased the tension on everyone’s faces. Once it can eat, it’s already halfway to recovery.

Dali invited us inside for some tea. Afterwards, he climbed into Chief De’s vehicle and joined us on the drive back to the sumu to pick up some oral anti-inflammatories from the veterinary pharmacy.

 

IV.

Early the next morning, I met Station Master De at the animal quarantine and inspection station. His brow furrowed the moment he took a phone call from Dalai. After making a few quick preparations, our group headed straight to Dalai’s home. The sheep, which had been able to stand and feed itself the day before, had grown considerably weaker. Lying beside it was another sheep, displaying the same symptoms. Station Master De stepped forward, lifted the sick animal’s eyelids, palpated its abdomen, and listened to its heartbeat, his expression remaining grim throughout. The diagnosis he had made two days prior—that it had accidentally ingested plastic—might well have been wrong. He now shifted his suspicion to the ingestion of wire. The swallowed wire had likely been pushed deeper into the digestive tract by peristalsis, beyond the range of a basic metal detector.

This time, Station Master De advised Dalai to perform a post-mortem on one of the sheep to pinpoint the cause. Dalai hesitated. Both sick sheep were young ewes in their prime breeding years. He decided to wait another day, administering anti-inflammatory medicine to ‘clear the fire’ (in Mongolian veterinary practice, ‘fire’ differs from the colloquial Chinese concept of internal heat and refers specifically to a feverish condition), hoping the veterinary drugs would work. Once the consultation was over, we skipped the customary invitation for tea inside and got straight back into the vehicle.

On the third day, I went to a veterinary supply shop run by Dayang, an animal health inspector and veterinarian, and his wife, to find Station Master De. When I arrived, I found Dalai already waiting there for him. I did not accompany Station Master De on his rounds that day. When I returned to the inspection station after a day’s work, Station Master De told me that Dalai had finally agreed to perform the post-mortem.

The results confirmed Station Master De’s second hypothesis: the sheep had indeed ingested wire.

Wire fragments moving through a sheep’s stomach compartments can abrade or even pierce the gastric lining. The honeycomb-like folds of the stomach often trap these pieces, leading to peritonitis, as well as lesions and weakness in other organs. Affected sheep typically display symptoms such as loss of appetite, weak limbs, slow rumination, and reduced faecal output. What began with just two sheep gradually spread throughout the entire flock, most of which were pregnant ewes.

5

It is clear that wire is now ubiquitous across the grasslands. Each year, towards the end of summer and the beginning of autumn, repairing and rebuilding wire fences becomes a major task in pastoral life. After enduring spring sandstorms, summer heat, and autumn and winter rains and snows, thin wire strands, often less than a few millimetres in diameter, easily weather and snap. The discarded and brittle pieces are then carried by the wind into various corners of the pasture.

At least until the 1950s, and continuing through the subsequent People’s Commune era, herders in Banner S practised nomadic grazing. Spring labour is arduous; although the weather generally trends towards warmth, sudden cold snaps still occur. Having endured a harsh winter, the livestock are in a period of severely weakened tarigu (a Mongolian term for body condition or fat reserves). The herd’s tarigu is directly tied to their temeer (Mongolian for vital energy or life force). Temeer, in turn, governs their resilience and immune function.

This period coincides with the lean months for forage. Winter silage supplies are nearly exhausted, while spring pastures will not yet have greened up, waiting for timely rain in warmer weather. Herders in Ordos traditionally reserve an ungrazed, sheltered patch of grassland near the winter range to serve as their spring pasture. A pasture rich in early-sprouting species such as willow mugwort, white mugwort, giant feather grass, alkali grass, and Leymus chinensis is considered ideal.

At this time, herders begin to use the enclosures at the spring pasture, moving away from the shelters they occupied throughout the winter along with their siig (a Mongolian term for the compacted mixture of sand, soil, and dung that accumulates in livestock pens). This move also makes it easier to fetch water from their permanent settlements and transport it to the spring grazing grounds.

With the erection of wire mesh fences, the radius for rotational grazing shrank, and nomadic practices were gradually replaced by a strategy of “settled residence without grazing”. The area of pasture allocated to each herding household under the contracting system is insufficient to support separate seasonal ranges. The better pastures are reserved for summer and autumn, when herds need to build up their fat reserves.

The settlements are no longer used solely in winter but have become year-round homes. Following this trend towards sedentarisation, herders have constructed ever-warmer, more weatherproof shelters. Confined to their owners’ fenced enclosures, the herds can no longer roam freely to access a wider variety of vegetation found further afield.

Through years of drought and increasingly frequent sandstorms, the livestock have worn numerous hoof-print trails along the fence lines. Their hungry bellies are now “filled” or “supplemented” with modern compound feeds, hay, and cultivated forage. The sturdy iron feed troughs, filled at set times each day with concentrate feed and dry hay, provide an ideal hiding place for wind-blown fragments of wire.

A young veterinarian told me, “We see a great many cases of wire-induced gastric perforation in both cattle and sheep every year, especially in spring.” In cattle, these perforations can usually be cured surgically, or prevented by placing a magnet in the reticulum to trap wire and other metals before they can “wander” through the digestive tract. However, for smaller sheep, the trauma of abdominal surgery to remove the wire often outweighs the condition itself.

Most of Dala’s flock exhibited only mild traumatic symptoms. Consequently, aside from treating the few critically ill sheep, the herders could only rely on the animals’ own temeer to see them through. Fortunately, as Jirumutu noted, Dala’s family only lost a few sheep; beyond that, the situation did not worsen, and they navigated the spring unscathed.

About the Author

Wuriyan

Born in Tongliao, Inner Mongolia. Holds a PhD in Anthropology.