Bovine flatulence
The gases, my friend, are blowing in the wind
By Lois Carol Wheatley
Bovine flatulence: we can relax about that now. We can stop writing to our congressmen and we can give up on that T-shirt and bumper sticker campaign. If people come around collecting for this cause, we can just close the door real politely, and tell them it’s not a problem anymore.
Bovine eructation: that’s the problem.
Men of science invent these fancy terms so they can talk about these very serious subjects without anybody giggling. They’ve decided, after a lot of studies and all due and sober consideration, that cow belches are a whole heck of a lot worse than cow farts. The question is not, atmospherically speaking, whether a single cow belch is worse than a single cow fart. The question is, in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, how many times?
Cows belch every 40 to 90 seconds, depending on whose study you believe, and also depending on what the cows have been eating, drinking, or just chewing on. There are about 1.2 billion of these hooved vats of fermentation on this planet, each one of them cutting loose up to 400 liters of methane gas a day, one way or another. I’ll leave it to the math guys to multiply that out; the environmental science guys figure it might be just about enough to melt polar icecaps, screw up weather patterns and ocean currents, possibly kill off several species of fish, and maybe even invite down The Wrath of God in the form of droughts, floods and plagues.
Most American cows live in the Midwest, and this might account for all the twisters in Kansas. It’s no coincidence that Dorothy saw a cow sail by the window when her house was flying around, and there’s a chance that maybe this even partially explains the early origins of the San Andreas Fault. No doubt it was a couple of cow hands who first made this very important scientific discovery.
“Slim?”
“Yeah, Curley.”
“Know how them cows picked that whole pot of beans right off the campfire last night?”
“Yep.”
“Notice any peculiar tumbleweed activity around here today?”
We can laugh all we like, laugh in fact until the cows come home, but consider this: carbon dioxide is only about 60 percent responsible for the onset of the greenhouse effect. The other 40 percent is attributed to trace gases like methane. Deforestation multiples the problem exponentially, in two significant ways: first, land is cleared for pasturage to make way for more cattle and their multiple methane eruptions.
Second, deforestation destroys the vegetation that would have otherwise been more than happy to convert hostile carbon dioxide into friendly oxygen, and would do so without a lot of messy farting and belching.
As it turns out, the sacred cow, now a graven image worshipped above all else at the altar of the backyard barbecue, and highly celebrated in some trendy aprons and boxer shorts, is the hooved, horned, end-of-the-world icon of song and legend. Just before we all perish in an inferno of flame and a blast of gastrointestinal gas, the push now is on to build a better bovine. Not for environmental reasons, mind you; these motives are purely economic. Researchers estimate that six percent of what cows eat is wasted in the form of methane, and they are hard at work trying to reduce that loss and improve cattle efficiency.
Which is no simple matter. The essential charm and allure of your basic bovine lies in its innate ability to convert useless stuff like grass and hay into succulent burgers, and this is accomplished only through a whole lot of bacteria and various microbes churning away inside a walking leather fermentation vat, representing to date our best burger-making technology available.
Nevertheless, two noteworthy advances have been made. First, drugs called ionosphores have been developed and tested on volunteer steers at Colorado State University. Ionosphores chemically resemble antibiotics and, in much the same way, inhibit the growth of certain potentially eruptive microbes. Methane emissions reportedly have been reduced by anywhere from four percent to 25 percent. Keep your hopes up that ionosphores will soon be available at the check-out counter of a Mexican restaurant near you.
Second, and hang onto your saddle horns for this one, the bovine burpalyzer has been invented and, yes, patented. Contrary to popular rumor, this device does not involve forcing cattle to blow up balloons or touch their hooves to their cuds.
“Slim?”
“Yeah, Curley.”
“You see that fat and gassy fellow over there with the blood-shot eyes and the party hat stuck on one horn?”
“Yep.”
“I’d say it was high time we asked that one to step out of the pasture. Looks to me like he’s had enough.”
The bovine burpalyzer is something like an emissions inspection program, conceivably involving a renewal sticker or brand for those successfully mastering emission control. Using a two-canister arrangement, the burpalyzer consists of one canister releasing a consistent amount of tracer gas into the cow’s stomach (the cow must first be persuaded to swallow this), and another is hung around the neck to measure the mix of tracer gas and methane in the cow’s breath. One could well imagine that twice as much gas is being released into the atmosphere as a result of this effort to control gas emissions--a pattern readily identifiable as a government program.
While this ingenious invention originated at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, recent funding for the tests has been provided by none other than the Environmental Protection Agency, the same group of Washington bureaucrats that tests and controls our cars, homes, farms and hairsprays, by doing a whole heck of a lot of leaking, discharging and spraying.
So now they’re spending an undisclosed amount of tax dollars on cow belches. What will happen when some wild-eyed liberal journalist gets hold of this one. Holy cow.
