Solution: Steering Committee

As implied by “steer” in the title, each row clues a breed of cattle. The cows are clued in alphabetical order. An audio symbol implies that a homophone should be used; otherwise, images clue substrings that can be directly concatenated.

After identifying the cows, one may notice that each cow is from a different country. Match the language of the numbers with the language spoken in the country of origin of each cow. Finally, using the given order of the numbers, use the numbers to index into the cow to get the final answer.

Solvers are meant to use the cows' countries of origins to disambiguate between numbers that can appear in multiple languages; for example, 五 works for both Japanese and Chinese, but there is no Chinese cow breed listed. In some cases, the languages are spoken in more than one country, and several countries that have multiple official languages. For the most part, the language should directly match up to the name of the country. We avoided choosing cows from countries where there might be an overlap in the language used for the index. In some cases, such as Zulu, we chose an official language that was unambiguously related to the country, and wouldn't be mixed up with another country on the list.

While some may think that we must have had a long running dream to write a cow puzzle, we actually saw the BOVINE AUCTION answer first and let it inspire us. We learned a lot about cows along the way.

A few nights before Huntinality III, we discovered that the List of cattle breeds and Wagyu wikipedia pages have a surprisingly frequent edit history, and in particular, Wagyu had been removed from the list of breeds. We spent a night debating whether to engage in Wikipedia wars to get it re-listed.

Luckily, during the hunt, it seemed that teams were unfazed by the lack of wagyu on wikipedia. Phew.