When I started reaching out to Oklahoman ranchers about the February heat wave, I soon found myself listening to Richard Day, 80, describing something I’ve never thought much about — the finer details of a cow’s face.

“There will be a little dot,” he said, “where the hair changes and swirls around and changes direction.”

Day was talking to me just after bringing the mail into his home on the 500-acre Roff Ranch where he raises about 80 head of cattle. His voice is a bit reedy with age, but he’s lively and alert. Still, the next thing he said made me wonder if the stroke he suffered last year (Day’s distraught wife of 60 years called a young neighbor to come load him into the car to rush to the hospital) might have affected more than his balance.

If the hair swirl sits low on a cow’s face — beneath the eyes, he says — the cow will have a gentle disposition, which makes the rancher’s work easier, safer and more profitable. On the other hand, “if the swirl is above the eyes, they are absolute idiots,” he says, “stupid and crazy and wild. Which is bad because they become dark cutters.”

Dark cutters, he explains, are cows that, once slaughtered, prove to have deep maroon-colored flesh, rather than the pleasing cherry red we prefer to see on our plates.

When he told me that the placement of a cow’s hair swirl dictates whether it will be gentle or high-spirited, I filed it away in a mental bin of old wives’ tales — like slicing a persimmon seed in half to predict the weather, or looking at the dilation of a pregnant woman’s eyes to discover the gender of the unborn child.

Day’s bulls are descended from the bulls of former Oklahoma Gov. Roy Turner, who used to own the ranch next door. The land here, in South Central Oklahoma, will support a cow for every 8 acres, far more than the single acre it takes to feed a cow in lush Indiana, but far less than some areas of Texas, where it can take 30 acres or more.

When I asked Day about the February heat wave, he called it part of “the best winter we ever had.”

“It was just ideal for a rancher. You couldn’t ask for anything better. We did not have to put out heat lamps on water stalls around the barn the entire winter,” he enthused. “That’s never happened before.”

I asked Day whether he worried about climate change.

Just as I couldn’t quite swallow what Day was telling me about hair whorls, he wasn’t buying into climate change. To him, man-made global warming is not a reality, but a kind of product, sold to the American people by unctuous politicians and academics seeking ill-got profits.

“A lot of the people that push climate change do so because of government grants. They can twist the information,” Day said. “A lot of people like Al Gore have gotten filthy rich.”

Day’s disbelief in the science of climate change is widespread among the ranching communities in deep-red Oklahoma, where dire predictions about global warming are given about as much weight as the semi-regular warnings of an imminent doomsday. This is where, in 2011, Gov. Fallin responded to a punishing drought that killed thousands of cattle by urging the public to pray for rain; it’s also where, during the 2016 presidential election, Trump, who has referred to climate change as a hoax, carried every county, topping 75 percent of the vote in a majority of them.

Every time there’s an ice storm, people gathered in diners or at cattle auctions will invariably offer a deadpan “this global warming is killing us,” to a round of hearty chuckles.