Two Cows

A couple of my friends have recently posted a cutesy animation that purports to explain different economic systems by comparing simplistic stories of how they would treat two cows. The one that you should favor is "traditional capitalism. You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income."

That's a lot of bull. Any ranching operation that put 50% of its capital into bulls would fail to thrive. If you've got two cows, you don't sell one for a bull. You save milk money to pay stud fees for a quick visit from a bull, so your herd will grow twice as fast and you won't have to feed the bull year round. Furthermore, you use a different bull for each generation to avoid the pitfalls of inbreeding.

The point is that given the opportunity, cattle will thrive regardless if they are owned by an individual, a corporation, a collective, or the state. Any of these systems is equally likely to mismanage the cattle or run into the limitations of focusing upon a single species for food.

The cartoon gets worse as it makes eleven characterizations of corporations of different nationalities, including the implication that New Zealanders practice zoophilia and that Greeks got into trouble because they borrowed and overspent. Completely overlooked is the reality of multinational corporations. Nobody mentions that the USA went further into debt than the Greeks, or any other nation in history. I didn't find these trite stereotypes amusing.

But it got me thinking about some of my real experiences with cows.

Five Stars Cooperative in Chimanimani, Zimbabwe, had two cows. They milked them daily and used them to pull the plow through their fields. If they had been further north, they might have occasionally taken a bit of blood from the animals to make a more potent food without harming the cow. Cattle are indigenous to Africa and have been domesticated for a long time. For some tribes, the cow is still the primary medium of economic exchange. As one elder explained "we decided not to try to domesticate elephants, because we had our hands full with goats and cows."

I grew up in Montana cattle country, but cattle weren't indigenous there. They were trailed in from Texas, where they'd been imported by Spaniards. To make room for them, the indigenous ruminants, the bison, were systematically exterminated. Buffalo Bill earned his name by taking a job with the railroad, where he used a Gatling gun mounted on a railcar to kill as many bison as possible. Somewhere between 25 and 70 million Bison were wiped off the continent. The cattle have never replaced the bison, although their numbers have probably doubled the bison's. Managed by people with no sense of ecology, cattle have overgrazed sensitive areas, trampled wetlands, and generally undermined planetary health.

The beef industry pushes cattle through huge feedlots that can be smelled for miles. To prevent infection in these unhealthy places, they pump cattle full of antibiotics. This abuse has developed resistant strains of bacteria that have gotten into the human population. Cattle are crowded into trucks and railcars, executed en mass, and passed through processing plants that are rarely subjected to inspection any more. Meats are ground and mixed, plasticized, injected with dies and subjected to all sorts of untasteful influences on their way to Safeway or MacDonald's. Is it any wonder that the American diet causes so many illnesses?

Even with 100,000 cows in the USA on any given day, this country doesn't grow all the beef it consumes. In Central America, the subsistence farmers who were marginalized by the fruit plantations are being driven off the land entirely as plantations are converted to ranches with fewer employees. Rainforests are leveled and burned to make way for beef exporting operations. Meat from countries that have never had any form of health inspection is mixed into the market in the USA. It's enough to drive you vegan.

Finally, scientists announce a breakthrough. After studying the ecosystems that cattle have nearly wiped out, they now realize that the optimum management plan is communal. If all the cattle are combined into one big herd and moved across the grassland so that they stay a brief time in any one place, the total gains will be maximized with the least input. That's pretty much what the bison did. Can somebody please make a cartoon of that?