Cattle raiding

[3] In North America, especially in the Wild West cowboy culture, cattle theft is dubbed rustling, while an individual who engages in it is a rustler.

In his childhood, the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur and a small band of followers raided travelers for goods, especially animals such as sheep, horses, and cattle.

Cattle raiding and selling protection against theft continued by Irish clan chiefs and rapparees, particularly against the estates of Anglo-Irish landlords, well into the 18th century in Ireland.

[citation needed] The transition from open range to fenced grazing gradually reduced the practice of rustling in North America.

Several indigenous groups and outlaws, such as the Boroano and Ranquel peoples, and the Pincheira brothers, ravaged the southern frontier of Argentina in search of cattle.

To prevent the cattle raiding, the Argentine government built a system of trenches called Zanja de Alsina in the 1870s.

Most cattle raids ended after the military campaigns of the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s, and the following partition of Patagonia established by the Boundary Treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina.

This led to opportunities for bandits and veterans-turned-bandits to immigrate to the newly opened Araucanía territory,[14][15] leading to sudden rise in violence and in a region that was recovering from Chilean-Mapuche warfare.

[25] Most of the stolen livestock is taken to the West Bank, quickly slaughtered and then smuggled back into Israel, where it is sold by butchers to unsuspecting customers.