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This dissertation seeks to understand how ranching communities in Wyoming, comprised of both humans and animals, sustain themselves during times of social disjuncture. This inquiry is positioned in the context of ranching during and after the COVID pandemic. The findings stem from 18 months of fieldwork from January 2021 to July 2022 in three counties of southeast Wyoming and relied heavily on in-person participant observation and semi-structured interviews. It asks the following questions: How do livestock producers in southeast Wyoming confront popular misunderstandings that denigrate animal agriculture as always already corporate, alienating, standardized, and unsustainable? In what ways are the strategies and alliances ranchers make with others, both human and non-human, in response to the increasing misrecognition by non-ranchers shaped by varying experiences of identity, kinship, and power? Through attention to the everyday experiences of a diverse range of ranchers and livestock, I explore how humans, non-human animals, and lands are nurtured and changed through embodied acts of care in the rangelands of the high plains, and why ranchers seek to establish or strengthen links between themselves and those who find ranching worthless if not outright harmful. As the following chapters highlight, for my interlocutors there is no other life worth living or life that is recognizable without their livestock and the rangelands which sustain them. While they are typically conceived of by non-ranchers as free, self-sufficient persons who care most about private property, ranchers are fully engaged in collective life. Thus, they have come to rely on a variety of strategies, material actions, and behaviors undertaken toward a goal that should be thought of as less individual choices and more as moves within a certain social field (Bourdieu 1977) to maintain their livelihoods. I argue that not only do prevalent portrayals of ranching not align with the experiences and understandings of ranchers but also that those popular misconceptions obscure the heterogeneity of life within ranching communities.