Cattle rustling

Cattle raiding is the act of stealing cattle. In Australia, such stealing is often referred to as duffing, and the perpetrator as a duffer. In North America, especially in cowboy culture, cattle theft is dubbed rustling and an individual who engages in it is a rustler.

The act of cattle rustling is quite ancient. Historically, the first suspected raids occurred over seven thousand years ago.

Cattle raiding is one of the oldest known aspects of Proto-Indo-European culture with a modern legacy, being seen in inscriptions on artifacts such as the Norse Golden Horns of Gallehus.

Abduction of women and theft of livestock were and are practiced in many pastoral cultures. Cattle raids play an important part in Proto-Indo-European religion; see for example the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge ("Cattle Raid of Cooley"), the paṇis of the Rigveda and the Mahabharata cattle raids and cattle rescues (India), and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, who steals the cattle of Apollo (ancient Greece). These myths are often paired with myths of the abduction of women (compare Helen of Troy, Saranyu, Sita, and The Rape of the Sabine Women).

In the American frontier, rustling was considered a serious offense, and in some cases resulted in vigilantes hanging the thieves.

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