Frontier justice. Catch men with your **branded **cattle and string them up from the handiest tree. Or take them to town for a trial and then hang them. Judge Isaac Parker was called the hanging judge for a reason.
Still legal in any U.S. state or Nation?
It was never a hanging offense to begin with, at least nowhere in the US. Hangings of rustlers and horse thieves by vigilantes was common and widely ignored by the authorities, but nobody was ever legally hanged for livestock theft in the US.
So, with that in mind, the Old West “livestock theft mixed with murder” tradition still lives on in East Africa: Cattle raiding in Kenya - Wikipedia
Oddly enough for the 21 first century, cattle rustling is again on the rise. I was wondering if the judges could still string these guys up. But, I’m not surprised that they can’t.
Really, it should be easily controlled at the markets. You can’t take someone elses branded cattle to a cattle auction. You can’t just show up at a beef packing plant with a load of cattle or dead ones that were skinned. It should be hard to sell them anywhere.
http://www.kxxv.com/story/23235614/cattle-rustling-up-40-in-texas
Well, according to Texas’s somewhat odd deadly force in protection of property laws, I believe you could use deadly force to stop rustlers from escaping with your horse or cow so long as they were rustling at night. I don’t know if stringing 'em up would be plausible as a means of merely preventing them from escaping with the stolen property, but you can still fill 'em full of lead. So long as it’s at night.
Well, firstly, a beef packing plant is hardly the only place to process a cow. You can do it in your garage if you really had to. Plenty of butcher shops would be happy to take it or else places that process wild game are also known for picking up illicit side business like that during the off season.
Otherwise, the typical rustler MO is some who works the cattle business themselves and the traditional way to do it is to steal the calves before they’re branded (they’re easier to steal then anyways) and add 'em to your own herd. I don’t know if that’s what’s going on with these supposed latter day meth-head rustlers since that seems a little far sighted. Although at least in my casual observation employment in the cattle industry and meth use are far from mutually exclusive.
From the Texas criminal code
We’ve got a right to pick a little fight with rustlers,
Somebody wants to pick a fight with us,
He’d better bite my ass!
In looking over the Espy file of legal executions in the U.S., I didn’t find any cattle rustlers who were hanged, but a few dozen people have been legally hanged for horse thieving. Contrary to what you might expect from watching Hollywood westerns, most such cases were from east of the Mississippi and before 1810. The most recent case that I turned up was from California in 1851. James “Mountain Jim” Wilson and “Dutch” Fred Salkman were hanged for stealing horses on November 28 in Stockton.