O.K., so finding out who is buying what, is more complicated than it first appears. The person I spoke with (at an Alberta stockyards) said that, because of order buyers, it can be hard to know for whom the cattle are being purchased. He said that all of a sudden, somebody will have a few million dollars to spend at the sale(s) and there is no way of really finding out where the money came from. Therefore, when those cattle go into a feed yard, the feeder might not even know who the real owner is.

And if an r-calfer owns them, does anybody expect that they are going to stand up and announce it?