Overbrook ? A 1,500-pound cow was pushed into the small ring before a crowd of prospective buyers Monday at the Overbrook Livestock Sale Barn and immediately turned cranky.

It pawed the ground menacingly. It mooed angrily. And it refused to exit the ring until a man on horseback forced it out.

“Now that,” said one man outside the ring, “is a mad cow.”

Nervous jokes were common Monday, the first livestock auction day in Overbrook since news of a U.S. case of mad cow disease was announced in late December.

Cattle auctions were canceled across the state last week, as cattle prices fell and buyers and sellers decided to wait out the mad cow scare. As in Overbrook, most planned to reopen this week.

The crowd at the barn about 25 miles southwest of Lawrence was smaller and the prices fetched were lower than they had been before the mad cow scare.

“It’s like everybody was on strike from selling cows,” said Gary Carbonneau, a rancher from Grantville. He sold a bull for 54 cents a pound Monday; he had expected a price of more than 60 cents per pound.

“We were here three weeks ago, and it was going 20 cents higher,” said Ava Carbonneau, Gary’s wife.

The auction, which often takes as long as four hours to finish, wrapped up in less than an hour Monday.

Ron Neilson, Lyndon, tries to block a calf's exit while separating cattle for auction at the Overbrook Livestock Sale Barn. Monday's auction had considerably fewer cattle than usual, with some farmers concerned about lower prices because of the effect of the mad cow case on the U.S. beef market.

Several of the ranchers and buyers in attendance had nothing to sell or buy, in fact — they were on hand to see how the prices would shake out after the mad cow news.

“We don’t have that big a sale this week,” said Joyce Dillon, co-owner of the sale barn. “John (Dillon, her husband and co-owner) told everybody to wait a week and see what happens to beef prices in the U.S.A.”

Federal officials say the first U.S. case of mad cow disease, discovered in a cow slaughtered Dec. 9, poses no threat to public safety.

Humans who eat brain or spinal matter from an infected cow can develop a brain-wasting illness, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. During a mad cow outbreak in the 1980s in Britain, about 150 people died of the disease.

As the nation’s No. 2 beef state behind Texas, Kansas stands to lose billions of dollars if concern over mad cow spreads to the dining table.

Beef futures were up the limit Monday at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, increasing 1.5 cents to 75.30 cents a pound for live cattle delivered in February, and to 81.52 cents a pound for March. Despite the increases, prices still are down significantly from the 90.67 cents per pound being paid Dec. 23, the day the mad cow case became public.

Ava Carbonneau said if representatives from countries where U.S. beef has been banned would visit Kansas feedlots and ranches, they would like what they saw.

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“We think people in Kansas raise better cattle,” she said. “We take pride in what we raise.”

Joyce Dillon said she was optimistic beef prices would rebound.

“We’re going to get back to where we were,” she said. “Prices will be stronger than ever.”