Beefalo raising is a hard but rewarding task, but nearly unusable in public and dedicated servers. Pets (while they don't really DO anything as of yet) vanish with their player when they log off. Beefalos do not have a player, domesticity of the beefalo works for all players. While this allows players to have a group of ridable beefs to share in cooperative play, it can also leave a small group of players with a large amount of responsibility when players log off. This can also leave beefalos completely unattended in dedicated servers, letting them undomesticate over time (without the copious use of salt licks, and even then they don't always work) wander off to get killed/undomesticated, or stolen by unscrupulous players for food or the hard work put into it by someone else.
Either way, this ruins hours of hard work through nearly unpreventable or completely unpreventable events.
I suggest some method of linking a beefalo to a player be implemented.
One idea would be "Branding" the beefalo. Adding in a branding item allowing players to link their beef to theirselves so that they vanish with them upon logging off. The branding link would, of course, go away upon undomestication.
"Branding" Pros: Gets the job done and still allows community riding beefalos. Reflects a real life practice of branding one's live stock to prevent theft and confusion between other people's live stock (Basically the animal version of writing your name on it).
"Branding" Cons: Allows the permanent theft of community riding beefalos on public servers.
Possible solution for con: Only allow the one that did the most/first feeding to brand a beefalo?
Another idea would be simply having the beef linked upon the first feeding, making the beefalo its player's soul responsibility.
Pro: Theft is impossible
con: Disallows community beefalo rides, prevents cooperative beefalo raising, and basically goes against the main point of Don't Starve Together.