It's one of the ironies of the West, one certainly not lost on ranchers, that although raising cattle remains the region's signature commercial activity, most westerners live in big cities and hardly know a steer from a heifer.

But it doesn't take a rural background to understand the loss of millions of dollars to Montana's economy -- and that such a threat that's getting more real every day.

The issue is brucellosis, a disease now thought to have been spread by elk to a single Montana ranch near Yellowstone National Park. That puts Montana on probation -- if there's another outbreak within the next two years, the state could lose its valuable brucellosis-free status.

But a more immediate deadline has stockgrowers worried these days. It turns out that Montana also could lose its brucellosis-free status unless the infected ranch slaughters its 600-head herd by July 17, 60 days after the disease was discovered. With the rancher and the federal Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service still haggling over the price of the animals, fears are growing that the deadline will be missed.

Losing the state's hard-won brucellosis-free designation would be a very big deal, costing the cattle industry sales outside Montana and saddling stockgrowers with the huge cost of testing their livestock.

We're no experts on the pricing of cattle, but we certainly can understand that a rancher would want to be reimbursed enough for the slaughter of his herd to buy replacements.

But in any event, an entire state's cattle industry should not be so severely penalized simply because negotiations between a rancher and the federal government are stretching perilously close to an artificial deadline. That would be stunningly unfair.