Cows on Parade

I know that cows are not wonderful for the environment. Or actually, cows are fine, but we have too many of them. We have too many people, actually. That’s almost a chicken and egg thing, except that there’s no doubt that too many people brought on the problem of too many cows.

I was never a cow person before Foro (my stuffed cow), but while sheep and goats are horribly cute, too, have you ever seen lambs and goat kids feeding? It looks so painful for the mothers. They attack with force and seem to tearing at the teats. Young cows, however, are slow and gentle, and often finish feeding with the tiniest milk crust on their muzzles. It’s adorable.

Most cows are at worst a bit shy, but if they get used to humans being nice to them (which doesn’t happen very often) they can love being petted as much as any other human pet. They’re just really big and many have been bred in such a way that they have become clumsy. There are mean cows, sure, but most mean cows become like that after being mistreated. Naturally, on their own, most cows are just kind of big, and not so bright, the Lennie’s of the farm.

Cows were featured in my school on Tuesday, because we humans do a lot of bad things to the environment in order to have so many cows. Raising them is not a wonderful use of land and water, and cows belch out a fair amount of methane, which is a green house gas. I know all of this, but I also have come to love their gentleness, their big calm eyes, and feel worse and worse about how we treat them. So I’m a cow fan, I guess. As the kids in my school drew pictures of cows (among other things) that are not great for the environment, I went around and collected photos of all the drawings.

So here we go, cows on parade!