Editorial
Front Page - Friday, July 3, 2009
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An opinion on climate change and cow burps
Pettus L. Read
I have had the opportunity to write on many numerous items that some writers would never have thought about putting their wordsmithery abilities to use on. I have written about free-range chickens, moles in the yard, coon hounds howling on a winter night, what you call city water piped to the country and a sundry of other way-out-there subjects that you may never see grace the pages of this publication again. Each has been an opinion expressed by yours truly and I have often received reactions from my readers that implied just how way out the articles may have been.
If I didn’t express my opinion on the current hullabaloo over the amount of burping cows in this country are doing to cause damage to our climate, I would be guilty of not doing my job and failing to stand up for our bovine friends. Many climate change worrying do-gooders have forgotten what cows do for us and instead have pushed them to the social forefront concerning what comes naturally for a cow grazing in a field. They eat grass, and as they do so, they have to digest it. This is where the burping and the chewing of the cud comes in. For those of you who don’t understand what cud is, let me explain; cud is a portion of food that returns from a ruminant’s stomach to its mouth to be chewed for the second time. To be more accurate, Wikipedia says, “It is a bolus of semi-degraded food regurgitated from the reticulorumen of a ruminant. Cud is produced during the physical digestive process of rumination. The alimentary canal of ruminants, such as the cow, goat, sheep and antelope, is unable to produce the enzymes required to break down the cellulose and hemicellulose of plant matter. Accordingly, these animals have developed a symbiotic relationship with a wide range of microbes, that largely reside in the reticulorumen, and are able to synthesize the requisite enzymes. The reticulorumen thus hosts a microbial fermentation that yields products (mainly volatile fatty acids and microbial protein) the ruminant is able to digest and absorb.”
And that’s what is causing some folks to want regulations to be put on cows and other ruminant animals to prevent the release of methane, which they say causes 2 percent of all the U.S. emissions that contribute to climate change. I say our cows are getting a bum steer out of this whole thing and there are a lot of folks out there with a lot of time on their hands needing a life if they have nothing to do but count cow burps and other normal functions that produce methane from these creatures. Cows have been processing their food in the same manner since creation and their burps haven’t seemed to make the other generations before us overly concerned. There were millions of buffalo and you never heard the Native Americans complain about buffalo burps. And what about the dinosaurs? On second thought, let’s not go there. Their burps may have led to their demise.
To hear some reports, you would think cows only exist in the United States. In recent counts, there were around 995 million cows in the world, with India having 281 million of that number. Brazil is second, China is third and we come in fourth with less that 10 percent of the world counts. And I haven’t heard a single report of anyone running down to India with a boatload of giant Beano tablets.
Here in this country, they are attempting to get farmers to change the diet of our livestock so the cows can hold it in. Even if we do make our cows sociably acceptable, it would only be a drop in the bucket of what is needed worldwide.
In fact, scientists in Canada are even looking at the genes that cause methane production in a cow’s four stomachs so they can breed a more environmentally friendly cow. It has been suggested if farmers could reduce cow emissions by 12 percent, it would be equal to about a half a million cars being taken off the road. I’ve a better idea to reduce emissions. Why don’t we follow Will Rogers’s suggestion of passing a law that only paid-for cars are allowed to use the highways, which is about as logical as some of the ideas in this climate change debate?
I fear before all this talk is complete on climate change, the climate is going to change just like it always has. And it’s not going to happen, because old Daisy the cow burped either. Until other nations around this world have to share the burden to control carbon emissions, it shouldn’t be up to this nation and its cows to take all the blame. v
Pettus L. Read is editor of the Tennessee Farm Bureau News and director of Communications for the Tennessee Farm Bureau Federation. He may be contacted by e-mail at pread@tfbf.com
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