I have never felt too bad about being a meatatarian because I have long maintained that cows are kind of stupid. OK, not kind of. We use the term “herd mentality” for a reason.
I only bring this up because of a news article a couple days ago about some cows in Colorado. It seems a few of them had wandered off from the herd accidentally. I’m not really sure how they do this, since I’ve never really encountered rogue cows, except for the one that came charging out of my woods when I was a kid and I’m still not sure where it ever came from, being that I lived in a pretty cow-free part of Renton.
As the cows were hiking the trails of the Rockies, a snowstorm rolled in. I guess that’s not surprising in the winter time, but the cows didn’t seem to understand that this was indeed winter because, hey, they are cows.
I have to hand it to the cows. They just didn’t stand their waiting to freeze to death. They sought shelter. In fact, they found an old ranger’s cabin way out there in the middle of nowhere. There was only one slight problem. There were 29 cows and only room enough at the inn for six. I’m not sure how they decided who got the cabin and who stayed outside, but it couldn’t have been easy to do, given that cows have no fingers to draw straws, play rock, scissors or high numbers like we would, when facing almost certain death.
Given this shortage of fingers, I’m sure that they all decided to do the democratic cow thing and take turns. Six of them would go in the cabin, warm up a bit, then take their turn outside.
There was only one problem with this plan. As I said, cows are not that smart and that’s why I don’t feel bad eating them. I do feel bad eating pigs on occasion, because at least they have some brain power, more brain power than some humans I know. However, I do like ham, so I live with the guilt.
Back to the cows. The first six went into the extremely small cabin. They quickly got lost. Yes, lost. In a one room cabin with only one entrance. This seems like a sad little joke with a punchline but I’m sure it wasn’t funny to any of the cows.
I’m sure the cows outside heard them mooing something about the fact that they were lost. I’m not sure if the cows outside either had a good laugh or thought the cabin cows were just feigning the whole lost thing because they were living it up by the fire in the cabin and were milking the situation by claiming they were “lost.”
To make a long story short, the cows outside froze to death and so did the ones inside the cabin.
Fast forward to spring thaw and a couple of snow-shoers who happened upon the cabin. Imagine their surprise when they stepped into a meat locker full of frozen bovine that is beginning to thaw.
What to do, what to do. The obvious answer is to take a couple chain saws up and chop them up into manageable steaks and cart them off by snowmobile. That would be what a female park ranger would think of immediately.
But the boy rangers? They decided that they needed to blow the cows up. “Concerned” about contaminating the ground water with rotting cow, they determined that it was necessary to blow the bovines to smithereens along with, I suppose, the cabin itself.
Now, let me get this straight. Instead of carting the carcasses out leaving no residual cow behind, they are going to blow them up instead, spreading cow far and wide.
I seem to recall another time when blowing up dead animals was tried. If you don’t remember the incident, I take you to Florence, Oregon in 1970. On the beach is an eight-ton sperm whale that had washed ashore.
Rather than chopping the whale up or burying it on the beach, they decided they should blow it up too. As we know, when boys are involved, the more the better. They kept upping the amount of dynamite needed until they had packed a thousand pounds under and into the whale.
If you’ve ever been to Florence then you know that blowing up a whale must have been quite the draw for the town. Everyone showed up for the big event, including Walter Umenhofer, who had been a military explosives expert. When he heard that they were going to use 20 cases of dynamite, he said that it was too much – only 20 sticks would be needed. But no one listened.
At the appointed moment, the charge was detonated. The whale blew sky high, literally. For a moment it looked as everything had worked according to plan. That is, until whale blubber started to rain down from the sky. People ran for their lives. One particularly large blob of blubber landed on Umenhofer’s new car, flattening it.
I could guess the rangers in Colorado never took history when they were in ranger class, but I know better.
We’re talking about boys here. Boys with explosives. Just like the Coast Guard using their deck guns to sink the Japanese fishing boat let loose by the tsunami or the state highway officials who talked the Army into giving them a surplus howitzer to rack off rounds at avalanches, the rangers of Colorado will not be deterred from getting to play with large and momentarily legal firecrackers.
And I’m sure that one ranger will say to another, “You think that’s enough?” and the other will respond, “Maybe one or two more sticks just to be sure.”
They may be onto something. Like Cow Tipping in the 1960s and Cow Patty Tossing competitions in the 1970s, perhaps a new craze will sweep the nation, Bovine Blowing. The winner gets a year’s supply of ground beef, or beef on the ground.
In the Emerald City, and yes I have a big beef about this,
– Robb