Where Have All
the Cows Gone?
Ask Elsie what's
become of her life

by Peter Boritz
Free Press contributor

All cows really want is a grassy field to play and graze in. But industrialists want those fields in order to build factories and roads and places to dump their toxic wastes. So now, cows are forced to take jobs in cheese factories, or bottling plants, or worse yet, McDonalds.

Cow life has been reduced to herding off to work each day, so we can buy grass and pay taxes to the farmers who now own our favorite grazing spots. Life was easier when the environment was our home, and our home was the environment. My friend Elsie is simply tied down in one of the stalls in a big barnominium. Perhaps she is typically spending her evenings sitting in front of a television watching "milk does your body good" commercials or watching some sterilized and homogenized news report, until it is her time to go off to work the next day.

Elsie had more fun in life playing with her calves. But now her calves are herded off to school, where they are taught to grow up to be mature, respectable cows who are to work hard and always do as they are told. Elsie remembers. Give her a field of grass any day, and she'll gladly leave her stall behind in an instant. Elsie doesn't want her calves to grow up to be Big Macs, a veal shank, or "schnitzel". She wants her calves to grow up healthy and happy, without having to worry about being relegated to a career fate at McDonalds.

Elsie doesn't want her
calves to grow up to be
Big Macs, a veal shank,
or 'schnitzel'.
You can sell your soul or you can sell your body. They are not necessarily the same thing. Nobody can take your soul, unless you give it to them. But you can always sell your body to Burgerville at minimum wage, or perhaps make some real cash by selling it to the bulls for use as a pleasure droid.

I remember the days when life was truly a cow's paradise. Land is a gift from the heavens, and it is (or was) our home. Industrialists have taken it, and we have been ordained to a life of debt and servitude. It is the land that gives us life, and without which, we are constrained to being dependent animals. Give us back our land, and we will have our lives back, to play, to frolic and rejoice and make love in. We could be happy cows, once again.



The author, Peter Boritz, grazes in Kirkland and was the publisher of Northwest Network, an alternative monthly newspaper in the Seattle area in the early 1990s.



[Home] [This Issue's Directory] [WFP Index] [WFP Back Issues] [E-Mail WFP]

Contents this page were published in the November/December, 1997 edition of the Washington Free Press.
WFP, 1463 E. Republican #178, Seattle, WA -USA, 98112. -- WAfreepress@gmail.com
Copyright © 1997 WFP Collective, Inc.