Who Puffs Out the Most Gas - Cows, Bureaucrats or Pseudo-Science?
Pierre du Lac, 11/24/95

A friend of mine is a kind of high-tech type nerd. He gets a real far-out magazine from time to time called Photonics Spectra. This nearly unintelligible collection of science stuff is aimed at the laser and high-end chemistry and crystal crowd. It is said some of these guys and gals can actually understand some of the ten dollar science words used in it. While most of this stuff is fit for rocket scientists there was in the November, 1995 issue on page 184 an article even a cowpoke could bend his common sense around.

Seems somebody thinks cows eating sweet grass belch a nasty gas called methane (same stuff as swamp gas coming up from the bogs and wet meadows) into the air and this gas is consider (by them) to be hurtful for all the rest of us. They think changing from this one type of grass to a single mixture (undefined) of feed grain stinks less after having passed through a cow. Do you suppose these highly educated science types are beginning to figure out that it is not necessarily a good experience to stand behind or downwind from a cow? Fourteen years of college to learn what any three year old cowpoke knows from experience?

What? Gas from a cow smells better if it eats feed grain rather than grass? What actually smells worse - a cow pasture or a feedlot? There is grass in one and grain in the other. Maybe there's a hidden message here to vacate the ranges and put all the cows in feed lots?

All of this so-called research is funded with our money we entrusted to our government to serve us. None of these guys or gals has bothered to measure the methane produced naturally from the swamps, bogs or wet meadows. Can't regulate nature I guess. But they can get the ranchers and their methane belching and backside gassing cows - for a tidy fine and regulatory fee. Therefore the issue is not quality of the inhaled or exhaled air but the fatness of the bump on their backside - their wallet.

This article goes on to say that measurements of the methane from these cows eating sweet grass, whatever that is, may not necessarily be a good thing because of its alleged and unproved effect on the unproved and unsubstantiated 'green house effect'. It does not take a rocket scientist to be aware that there are many many kinds of grasses. One is different from all others and no two act nor react the same in any cow who is also different from all other cows. Do you suppose they might base some stupid legislation on this study of one type of grass, eaten by one bunch of cows, in one pasture during a single period of study? Whose going say they can't?

Every cowpoke worth his pancakes knows that cows eat, belch, backside gas and make pies differently depending on what they have been munching. Don't take fourteen years of college to know that. Nor does it take umpteen zillion of our dollars to 'prove' it.

It is also said, in this article, that cows produce 1/6th of the world's total methane gas emissions. Can you believe this? One sixth? Where does the other 5/6ths come from? This issue is conveniently (for them) ignored. Perhaps it comes from bureaucrats and other passive ruminating consumers of our green stuff - money? Maybe they'd like no one raising cows and horses except in controlled and costly structures. Regulated, taxed and controlled by them of course - something like chickens in chicken factories. Maybe these high tech guys and gals should put their fancy meters up in halls of our government and see if they can detect where our money is going and for what. While they are at it they can test the quality of the hot air and gases and see if we are getting our money's worth. Probably not...