Hailee is a 15-year old girl from Yuma, Arizona. She is not a normal teenage girl, though. She likes to raise farm animals and show them off at state fairs.

She says, “For about six years, I’ve raised animals at our home. We live in the country with a lot of space. When I was younger, I raised rabbits, then pigs, and now I also do steer, which are male cows raised to be slaughtered for beef. At the fair, the judges award ribbons to the biggest, strongest, and best-groomed steers.”

Her typical day includes waking up at 5 a.m. to go outside to rinse and feed the cows and pigs. She has to be to school by 7:30. She then gets home around 3 p.m. and does homework. After that, she has to take care of the animals for three or four more hours.

Her steer, Mully, won the top award at the Arizona State Fair this fall and she explains how she got him ready.

“It was a lot of work. I washed his hair and used a big hair dryer to blow it out. There are lots of products to help your steer look his best. There’s a hair spray-like substance for their legs, a conditioner that makes their hair look shiny, and even a black paint that can make their darker colors more even,” she says.

After the competition most of the steer are sold off in a beef auction and are slaughtered.

“He was sold at a beef auction, where people bid to buy steers for meat. Then we said goodbye. I told him, ‘I’ll miss you!’ The next day he was taken to a slaughterhouse. Knowing that is tough. It was a bad day when we had to say goodbye. My whole family didn’t want to lose Mully, but you really can’t keep a steer. Raising your first steer is something you’ll never forget.”

She still raises animals and is going to continue raising them and showing them off in the future.

“Now I have three pigs, a steer, and heifer, which is a female cow. In college, I’d like to study something related to agriculture,” she says.