IN FAVOR OF COWS

CONSIDERED OPINION

By : Mr. Theodore S. Wellstone, M.A., Director of Public Relations, Former Republicans for Less Money and a Better Life

Life is difficult in human societies. Although human beings possess highly advanced brains, we live in fear that our fellow man will rob, kill or swindle us. Human beings can communicate through language, making life more manageable. But all too often, human beings use language to hoodwink, mislead and defraud us. Throughout history, men have been their own worst enemies. They have made war on each other and persecuted one another because their perceived “foes” did not worship the correct God or committed some petty offense. Men torture and enslave one another. They also subdivide their societies, labeling some people better than others. They squabble incessantly over food, land and money. Life in human society is a constant struggle. At any moment, your fellow man could lose his temper, pick up a broken beer bottle and kill you.

But a cow would never do any of these things. That is why I categorically support cows. Cows are peaceful creatures. Cows do not cheat on their wives, defraud investors or decapitate prisoners with butter knives. In fact, cows do not possess the mental powers or opposable thumbs to do these things. Furthermore, cows do not possess the technology necessary to poison the population or cause a nuclear conflagration. Rather, cows simply walk around in closely-packed groups munching hay or grass. While munching, cows may slightly damage the land, but they never build toxic landfills or cut down whole forests. If anything, cows help the land by churning dung into the soil, fertilizing the fields. Put simply, cows never hurt anyone.

Cows do not have the capacity to hurt people. True, cows may have unintentionally killed a few men over the centuries in an odd cattle stampede, but these incidents have been few and far between. And it is not fair to call a cow a killer simply because she started running in one direction along with all her calves and relatives. Cows are not killers by nature. They do not own property. They do not get envious. They have no reason to want to kill their own kind. Although they moo at one another once in a while, they do not go to gun stores, register pistols and wait for their estranged wives to get home so they can shoot them in the head. Furthermore, cows and bulls enjoy sex in a natural, unthreatening way: For reproduction. Unlike humans, they do not rape, molest or sexually humiliate each other. They do not become jealous when they see former sexual partners with other cows. In fact, they do not even know what it means to be “sexually moral.” They simply graze, eat and reproduce when nature calls.

Human beings claim that they have achieved much more than cows. They say that they live clean, civilized lives. They also say that they have mastered electricity, powered flight and computers. They say that cows have done none of these things. Rather, these critics allege that cows are stupid, stinking herd creatures that eat shrubs, defecate, then rechew food they have already eaten. These things are true. Cows do smell. But cows have not used electricity to deliberately kill people, nor have they used powered flight to deliver atomic weapons onto defenseless cities. Additionally, cows do not use computers to commit identity theft, steal financial information or to spy on their neighbors. Instead, cows peacefully coexist with their own species. While they do not have technology, they do not abuse it, either.

Human beings pride themselves on their intricate social structures. In human societies, there are “influential” people and there are “unimportant” people. Influential people have property, money and power. They control information in order to keep unimportant people in ignorance. Unimportant people live in poverty and do what they are told so they do not starve to death. There is constant tension between those with power and those without it. These tensions sometimes boil over into civil discontent, civil wars and revolution. And they always inspire long-lasting resentment.

By contrast, all cows are equal. Cows reject class structures. Although some cows have more powerful udders than others, they do not declare themselves “better” because they have strong udders. Rather, both strong and weak-uddered cows live together in relative harmony. Strong-uddered cows do not attempt to profit from their strength, nor do they tyrannize weak-uddered cows with fees, taxes, levies, unfair contracts or interest charges. They simply look at each other, wag their tails, nurture their young and move on. Additionally, cows with red coats do not discriminate against cows with red spots. White cows do not look with contempt upon black cows; and white cows certainly do not kill black cows because they are black. On the other hand, human beings do kill their fellow men because they have different colors. To that extent, cows are far more tolerant than human beings.

Cows do not possess reason. Human beings fault cows because they cannot think critically. Human beings believe that their reason sets them apart from all other species, allowing them to create self-sufficient societies where people can focus on matters beyond mere survival. But human beings overstate the case. There are plenty of human beings who do not think critically. Before criticizing cows, human beings should look in the mirror to see whether they actually practice the things about which they find fault in cows. True, cows may not use reason to think through problems. But neither do many human beings. And human beings have no real excuse when they act unreasonably. Cows do: They do not have reason. To that extent, human beings should not derive too much pride from their reasoning capacities. All too often, they act like savage beasts themselves. In those moments, their “reason” means nothing.

That gives me even greater confidence in my support for cows. Human beings possess reason, intelligence, language and technology, yet they still act like savage, untamed creatures. Cows, on the other hand, are always calm, gentle and forgiving. They do not have reason, but they are not wild, violent monsters, either. In man’s passionate moments, he can maim, torture, kill, massacre, slaughter and even take pleasure in inflicting pain. Cows would never even conceive such activities, reason or no reason. The fact that human beings actually have the capacity to reason makes their “animalistic” outbursts even more contemptible. If human beings are so grand, why do they still hack each others’ limbs off while smoking cigars and laughing? Reason may have given man all his technology and self-proclaimed power, but in the end he still acts like an animal.

Cows do not even attempt to delude themselves into thinking they are something they are not. Cows are honest about who they are. They do not strive for power, nor do they engage in competition with their neighbors for social status. While they might compete for the first bite at fresh grass or mulch, they do not hatch nefarious plans to outdo political rivals or business foes. Cows do not lose control. They do not whine when they “lose” a competition or fail at a task. They do not trouble their minds with the way in which others perceive them. They are free from judgment. They just go on meandering through the fields, sometimes chewing, sometimes mooing; other times, they squat down on the grass with their calves and lick their heads. They do not worry about test scores, job offers, promotions, salaries or evaluations. In the end, they do not hurt anybody, whether through violence or competition for limited resources. And they do not arrogantly believe that they are advanced creatures. Cows are honest about who they are.

If my own safety were at stake, I would choose to be with a cow, not a man. All things considered, a man is far more likely to injure me in life than a cow. A man might cheat me, steal from me, insult me, hurt me, swindle me, mock me, condescend toward me or even stab me to death over money or a woman. But a cow would just stand there and look at me with those big, round eyes. A cow might decide to sit down or moo once in a while, but she would never decide to yell at me or call me an incompetent loser. Put simply, a cow would not damage my self-esteem. A man, by contrast, could very well make me feel like garbage. He might also make me feel inferior because he has a bigger house than I do, or a better job, or a prettier wife. A man could make me feel so bad about myself that I would want to commit suicide. Yet a cow would do none of these things. Although a man might bring me a joy if he acts the way I would like him to act, I am not prepared to trust my happiness to something as changeable as a man. Cows do not change. They do not get moody or cranky, nor do they become bitter, vengeful or spiteful. In that light, a cow is far less likely to hurt me than a man.

All in all, I support cows because they have done less harm to the world than men. Stupid they may be, but at least they have never invaded countries, pillaged cities, committed war crimes, burned criminals at the stake, wrongly imprisoned innocent people, invented biological terror weapons, or perpetrated massive financial frauds on the public. No cow has ever intentionally harmed a human being, while human beings intentionally harm each other every day. Cows will not hurt you. They cannot promote you or pay you, but they will not doublecross or emasculate you, either. Cows will not say one thing and do another, nor will they betray your trust. You will always know what a cow is doing at a given moment: Grazing, sitting, eating or mooing. They do not snoop around, backstab, gossip or slander. You can trust a cow.

Human beings say that cows are stupid. They claim superiority because they are more intelligent than cows. Yet I know many, many stupid people. And if human history is any mark of human intelligence, I venture that humans are not as smart as they think. That is why I categorically support cows. They are stupid and do not even pretend to be intelligent. I prefer an honestly stupid, gentle creature to a stupid, apish, violent and vain creature that claims intelligence, yet in every case reveals how moronic he really is.