Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Cattle

Episode Date: August 5, 2020

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy podcaster, comedy writer, and secret bird Katie Goldin (Creature Feature, @ProBirdRights) for a look at why cattle are secretly incredibly fascinating.  This is one of two episodes released on our Super Double Premiere Day! Find the other episode (“U.S. Post Offices”) in this podcast feed.  Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episodes. 

Cattle. Known for milk, beef, famous for milk, beef, farts, I guess. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why cattle are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode. A podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. This week's special guest is comedy writer, podcaster, and bird person Katie Golden. And I hope you've already enjoyed the work of Katie Golden before. She writes all kinds of comedy. Her most public stuff is the actual funniest Twitter account in the entire world. It's at ProBirdWrites. And that's writes as in R-I-G-H-T-S, like fighting for our rights,

because the character is a bird demanding more rights for birds, and also demanding bagels and stuff, calls them bagels. Katie's account is so good and so famous that she is recognized as the coiner of the internet term birb by the Audubon Society, like the actual one. Also, Katie hosts a phenomenal podcast titled Creature Feature on iHeartRadio. It's all about animal behavior and human behavior and where those come together. So find that in your podcast app. Katie is today's guest. I am so excited about it. Also, I've gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Catawba,

Eno, and Shikori peoples, and acknowledge Katie recorded this on the traditional land of the Keech and Chumash peoples. That is a new practice for me, and I think that feels worth doing on each episode of this podcast. Also, as you'll hear in this episode, as with the first episode, these first two topics are particularly relevant to that kind of thing. This show is a lot less US-centric than the first one, but it's still very relevant. You'll also hear interesting research and amazing stories and joyful fun and a whole new way of looking at cattle. So please sit back or keep having fun with your rural friends. Just find something to do besides cow tipping.

It will not go like you hope. And either way, here's this double world premiere episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Katie Golden. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Katie Golden, thank you so much for doing this. We get to talk about cattle. Of course, I'm so excited.

Excited for cow's times. And with all these shows, I'm going to ask people at the top, what's your opinion of this topic going in? And also, what's your relationship to it? If any, it can be nothing. I mean, my opinion of cattle topic going in and also what's your relationship to it if any can be nothing i mean my opinion of cattle is good i like them i i yeah it's actually very interesting i think it ties into my overall interest in the history of domestication and artificial selection. I think it's very fascinating from that angle. I think it is our relationship to animals is always fascinates me. And, you know, sometimes it gets into this uncomfortable territory of like when we use animals for their products or for food. But I still think that's really interesting to kind of explore that connection and both the empathy we feel for animals and then the strangeness that happens when we

basically are using animals as a food source or a resource. Yeah, that's very cool that they are sort of animals. Yeah. Does that make sense? Like they're wild creatures and they're not people, but also we think of them as so domesticated and such a like load bearing part of human society that it's easy to forget that like, oh, they're these massive hooved animals that are like kind of wild, you know, pretty cool. And then personally, you know, I'm sort of a, I grew up in the suburbs. I don't have a huge amount of personal interaction with cows. Although I do remember when I would visit my grandparents' house in Ojai, California,

they had like, they bordered this, I guess, just big area of, all I remember is it covered in oak trees and there were these pointy, sharp oak leaves on the ground all the time. So if you try to walk out there barefoot, it hurt your feet. But these cows would sometimes just walk by. I suppose they belonged to someone in the area, but it was always really interesting because they were such huge animals, especially as a child, seeing them walk by. But they would walk by so quietly, just kind of gracefully tiptoeing.

And it was surprising to me as a kid to see how graceful they were. How does its legs work? It is one of those weird realizations where you're like, oh, this is not just a, this is not a cartoon animal. This is not just kind of a big pile of hamburgers shuffling around. This is an animal.

This is an organism. A big one. And that feels like a nice segue into the first segment of the show. Because on every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and fascinating statistics in a segment called comfortably numbers and uh so folks this is the the very first week of the show so that name was submitted by me but uh we're gonna have a new name for this segment every week submitted by listeners like you i want them to be worse than that like that, that was pretty bad, and I want them sillier, wackier, and worse. Submit your names for the numbers and statistics segment to SIFpod on Twitter or to SIFpod

at gmail.com. Oh, I'm doing that. Okay, so that's in my house. Get out of the way. Great. I was, you know, you probably have something that's not Pink Floyd related, and I would love to hear it from the listener. No, there's nothing that, have it all be Pink Floyd related, actually.

The opposite. I guess they have a whole album called Animals, don't they? Should he use that? Oh, well, press. So so yeah, just by the pure plain numbers, why cattle are secretly incredibly fascinating, just in terms of how many there are. There's an amazing site called Our World in Data by the people from Oxford. And in 2014, they said there are 1.47 billion cattle in the world. So that is about one cow per five people. So I have to get four friends of mine together for us to get one cow, is what you're saying. Oh, yeah, they're all earmarked for groups of five people. That's right. Yeah. But so if cows ever go to battle with humans, as they probably should,

I need groups of five people standing together to face one cow. Yeah. Right? Is this what you're saying? I'm glad we could get into this because when the war comes, I think we as people and as listeners to the show, you want to know that there's going to be about one cow per five people on your team in the cow wars.

So just get ready. Yeah. It's good to prepare for the cow flicked. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. And also in terms of where these cattle are, the country with the most cattle is India. They have over 301 million cattle in the country.

And then second most populous is Brazil. They have over 213 million cattle. Also, Brazil only has 2.7% of the world's population, but it has 14.4% of the cattle population. So if you're in Brazil, look out, the war will be very difficult for you. Yeah, so you are in big trouble when the conflict comes to Brazil. It's also Brazil, it turns out there are five countries in the world, and Brazil is one of them where there are more cattle than people, which I didn't even know could be a thing. And it's also Brazil, Australia, and Argentina have about the same numbers, but a few

more cattle. And then New Zealand has 2.17 cattle per person. And Uruguay, the leader in the world, 3.59 cattle per person. So I assume it's just a nation of cattle, and then you see a person once in a while. That's how I figure. I know this is erroneous because I know that with these countries, you have a lot of land that's not inhabited by humans. But just trying to think of millions of cattle around, it makes me think that there's... Remember Wallace and Gromit when he gets all the sheep and they're just kind of taking over his apartment? Yeah.

And that's what I think of. You just have too many cows. So you just have cows kind of wandering the streets, cows in a coffee shop. You're trying to read a newspaper and a cow just kind of the butt is near you and you're trying to shove the cow butt away so you can get your coffee. I know that is not correct, but that is how I visualize it. Yeah, like most tables or beds in your house in Uruguay are cattle. Right, right. And hopefully it stands still. Right. But enough about other countries. Let's talk about America. Yeah! USA!

Yeah, and good ol' America. According to NPR in 2017, the average American drank 18 gallons of cow's milk that year. So across the year, you, the average American drank 18 gallons of cow's milk that year. So across the year, you, the average American, drinks 18 gallons of milk. Good job. I don't know why that grosses me out, but it does. You probably hate bones. Yeah.

I'm thinking about it. Yeah, I do hate bones. They're spooky and I don't like them. I don't like that they're inside of us being spooky. But also just I'm thinking about chugging 18 gallons in one sitting. Milk dribbling everywhere. I know that's not, you know, I know it's distributed over a year, but I'm thinking of a super cut of just drinking milk after milk after milk. And it's disturbing me a little bit. What if it's what if December

31st is like tax day, like you have to get it all in before the deadline. Yeah. That would be bad for me. Cause I'm a procrastinator. It's like, well, gotta line myself a bunch of jugs of milk. Well, also, uh, another fun stat here. And in addition to like that delicious giant glass of milk, uh, USA Today said that in 2016, the average American ate 55.6 pounds of beef. Jesus. So almost 56 pounds of beef in a year. Also, apparently in the 1970s, the average American drank 30 gallons of milk and ate 80 pounds of beef annually. So we're way down on both milk and beef since the 70s. And then one more stat here.

This is coming from the CDC. Ah, the good old Centers for Disease Control. They also are working on cow murder because they have a statistic that said in 2014, an average of 22 U.S. deaths per year caused by cattle. Yeah, I actually sometimes use that fact on the show to talk about the relative danger and perceived danger of animals. the relative danger and perceived danger of animals. So, for instance, sharks seem a lot scarier than cows, but they only kill like four people a year in the whole world and only about one person in the U.S. every year. And whereas cows are going around just murdering 22 people

with their cow guns. Stop giving cows guns. No, I'm sorry. How do these cows actually, and do you know how the cows kill people? You know, apparently it's like in farming accidents, basically, because the stats that the CDC pulled were saying that agricultural workers are among the group at the greatest risk of what's called death by mammal, which is apparently a whole table of numbers they have that also lists cats and pigs and raccoons as the cause of death for various Americans. So watch your six, folks. Like every animal can accidentally get you somehow.

Yeah, no kidding. So cows don't kill people. People with cows kill people, but on accident. Yeah. Right. We need cow control is the point. Yeah. So don't be so afraid of sharks all the time, folks. They're okay. I think that's a warning for us not to domesticate and farm sharks, though. Can you imagine? Excuse me. I need to spit take my glass of shark milk are you kidding me i can't drink this anymore

yeah it's gonna mess up the studio all the spit did you know that americans don't drink 30 gallons of shark milk a year they absolutely don't the relevant number is zero yes Yes. One more number here. There are at least 250 recognized breeds of cattle in the world, which is probably a lot more than people think. And also the numbers vary depending on who you're looking at. Wikipedia told me it was more than a thousand, but I couldn't verify that anywhere. Yeah, I think this sometimes comes as a surprise to people with farm animals. sometimes comes as a surprise to people with farm animals. We see it with dogs, we see it with cats, and we are well acquainted with different breeds of sort of these pet animals, but farm animals

also can, through selective breeding, have so many breeds. And chickens, you can see these wild variations. You have curly feathered chickens. You have chickens that look like Muppets. It's quite incredible. And the same is true with cows. You can have curly haired cows. You can have, you know, this, it is pretty astounding what happens with selective breeding, how you can get these really wild variations. You can even have these cows with immense muscles that I hope I'm not, like, I don't know if you're going to talk about this, but, uh, this is all perfect. Yeah. Cows that have these huge, like double, doubling on their muscles due to selective breeding. That is, it's kind of, I mean, these are, they look like Schwarzenegger cows. And, you know, like with a curly haired cow, it's kind of cute.

But then when you start getting these huge, extremely muscular cows, it's like, oh, oh, we're doing that, huh? That is such a perfect component and lead in and everything for one of the big takeaways of this episode. Here we go with takeaway number one. There are more kinds of cows than you ever imagined. And I can imagine a lot of cows, Alex. I can imagine cows wearing little hats. I can imagine cows on just roller skates on each one of their hooves. So I don't know, Alex, you really think I can't

imagine this many cows because I can imagine a lot of cows. Listeners, I think I need to apologize right here for booking too creative of a guest. Simply too capable and imaginative. Yeah, the imaginative person who came up with the astounding joke, Cow Flicked, as a name for the cow war. Yes, my creativity knows no bounds. Well, there are a lot of amazing breeds of cows. Like we said, there are at least 250 recognized official ones.

Also, a lot of them are pretty visual, so we won't linger too much on that, but we'll linger on how these came about and also just surprising kinds. We have to paint a visual painting with these guys, though, Alex. Yeah. And one of them you mentioned is the incredibly super ripped breed of cow. It's called the Belgian Blue. But these are really, you have a picture here of the Highland cows. These are really, you have a picture here of the Highland cows. I love these so much. They're like emo cows.

Yeah, one more just plain you got to see it is called the Highland cow. It was bred for the islands of northern Scotland where it's incredibly cold and craggy and hard. So they're extremely shaggy. And then they have massive bangs hanging over the front of their faces. Kind of like that teenager in the comic strip Zitz is what I think. Like you just can't even see their eyes, but somehow they're getting around. It's great. It's such a mood.

Yeah. And then in terms of just cow size, I think like everybody kind of imagines just one size of cattle. Like it's just, oh, it's big and sort of rectangular and that's it. The cow unit, yes. Yeah. It turns out the world is full of a bunch of species of dwarf cows, and according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the shortest ever cow is named Manikyam, and it's a Vecher cow in Kerala region of India,

which is two feet and less than one inch long. So slightly over two feet long. Oh, this little schnookums. Yeah, she's wearing a necklace made out of flowers. I love her. I'm in love. And she looks, she just looks like you took a cow. It looks photoshopped because there's a man sitting next to the cow.

It's the cow is the size size of a chunky golden retriever. Yeah. And it just looks like you shrunk a cow down. Oh, yeah. Like it's some perspective trick. Yeah. You're right, Alex. I couldn't have imagined this.

Oh, the show is saved. And then one more just size thing is two different cows have bigger horns than you would ever just imagine possible, I think. And according to NPR, the cow with the longest horns in the entire world, it's a Texas longhorn, so not that surprising. But his name is Pancho Villa. He lives in Alabama, and he has horns that are 10 feet, 7.4 inches long from one end to the other. Oh, my God. We also have the record holder for the thickest cow horns, because it turns out they can be basically tree trunks.

We have a cow here whose name is C.T. Woody. Yeah. And it's from the Ankole Watusi breed, which is mostly a breed in Africa. But this one lives on a farm in Utah. And C.T. Woody's horns are three feet, four and three quarters inches thick. Oh my god, I'm getting a headache looking at this. Yeah, it looks like it's carrying timber or something, but the timber is its horns. Oh buddy, how? The horns are way bigger than its head.

They're like tree trunks growing out of a normal-sized cow. And also they're designed for a bunch of the cow's blood to go through the horns. And then while the blood is in the horns, that cools the blood like a radiator, sort of like elephant ears. But those are some of the weird cows, quote-unquote. And now let's talk about, quote-unquote, normal cows, especially if you're an American. Because one way cattle are fascinating is that in the U.S., we've kind of been trained to think of just two breeds of cattle as like the normal ones, like a dairy one and a beef one, and that's kind of it.

And we don't think much about it. But it's because of very specific actions by people. One of those two breeds is the Holstein Frisian breed. Most people just call them Holsteins. You know, it's like a white cow with black spots that you think of as a dairy cow, or like you see on basically every logo of a company that does milk or ice cream or anything else. Yeah, I call these moo cows. Yeah, a moo cow. That's exactly right. Holsteins are about 90% of U.S. dairy cows,

according to Michigan State University. Like as people, we know that there are at least a few other kinds of cows, but these white cows with black spots feel very universal. And it's because of a massive bioengineering project to the point where I don't want to call them clones, but they're almost all exactly the same cow nationwide. Yeah, I mean, that is one of the weird things about selective breeding is that you could start with just a very few sort of progenitor animals, and then huge amounts of descendants because we have artificially created this situation where they are all very close genetically if we are trying to achieve a certain effect with this selective breeding and then what you get is this almost this genetic bottleneck of very similar animals and it's not

always good yeah but in this case it has resulted in so many moo cows. Yeah, because the moo cow situation, with a lot of animals used in farming, breeders will, like you said, pick exactly amazing specimens and then let that specimen be the parent of a whole bunch of animals. And so in 2019, Penn State had a team that wanted to say, hey, because of this selective breeding, how much of a genetic bottleneck, how similar are these Holsteins at this point? And they found that more than 99% of Holsteins in the United States are descended from two bulls. There are two males, both born in the 1960s, that are the fathers of more than 99% of Holsteins.

Wow, that recently. Yeah. And so these two cow dads generated basically everybody, according to Chad Dechow, who's an associate professor of dairy cattle genetics. He says there's so much genetic similarity among US Holsteins, the affected population size is less than 50. Basically, all of them are the same as each other down to there is less than 50. Basically, all of them are the same as each other down to there being less than 50 distinct individuals genetically. And then Leslie B. Hansen is a Holstein expert and professor at the University of Minnesota and says,

quote, it's pretty much one big inbred family. Oh, boy. Yeah, that's moo cows for you. They're all like the same cow. And then the one other kind of breed besides the clone Holsteins is the black Angus breed of cattle, which is the most popular beef cow in the United States. And you, the listener, have probably heard of it in like hamburger ads or like steakhouse ads saying like, oh, we have Angus beef, so come here. And it seems to be like a good kind of beef and totally a thing. But also it's the result of a massive marketing project

because Angus cattle were brought to the U.S. in 1873, so long after we were a country of colonists and already kind of set up. And then from there, they were really aggressively marketed and put out as like, this is the beef cow. And starting in 1978, they rolled out certified angus beef branding that has since then created an entire company of 110 people who work full-time just on selling the brand of angus's beef cattle and in 2016 they sold 1 billion pounds of beef under that name so they yeah that that's like it's a good kind of beef and we've been talked

into it right so since that it's chicken and kind of beef and we've been talked into it. Right. So since it's chicken and egg, I don't know if they were the most popular and then they sold it or they sold it and then they were the most popular, but it's all like us just telling ourselves that's the best kind of beef. Just that they're, I don't know, such a bizarre thing that we, we just, we have this, these beef lobbyists that are specifically pushing out this one type of breed of beef as being the good type of beef. It's so strange.

Yeah, and there's a thing with Angus cattle, which are from Scotland originally, and then they were sort of codified in the United Kingdom and then brought here. There's a thing where they can be black or red, and it's pretty much the same cow except different color fur. And then the American Angus Association's members started pushing out the red Angus guys because they wanted just black Angus. And to this day, now there are separate associations for each kind of cow. And the Red Angus Folks website calls it severe discrimination. That's an actual quote about the 1917 event where black Angus breeders started pushing the red Angus breeders out. So it's also like a whole fight among cattle breeders to create this brand. I would love to just be a fly on the wall for some of those

conversations. The drama, I want to be on these forums, the cow breeder forums, and see the internet drama that results well yeah i almost feel like too you just start to believe in your own herd like once you own one kind you're like that's probably the best kind because i would be a dummy if i had the not good kind right right it's like the console wars but with cat cows castle wars yes that's right yes and so those are the two quote-unquote normal cows the product of uh basically cloning and basically uh some of the first like intensive advertising in the country and we've talked about weird cattle uh a few celebrity cattle to feature right here

because those exist too um there is mrs o'leary's cow who is kind of a chicago legend and we'll talk about that later old lady left her lantern in shed, and then the cow kicked it over. She winked her eye and said, it'll be a hot time in the big town tonight. Fire, fire, fire, water, water, water, water. Save my child, save my child. Jump, lady, jump. Ah, curse, Blatt. I did that for all the Girl Scouts out here.

So I should have been a Girl Scout, because there i was in chicago growing up uh hearing about mrs o'leary's cow and then nobody told me there's a whole song and dance i'm furious it's a whole girl scout song making fun of people dying in a large fire you'd be surprised there are actually a lot of girl scout songs that center around death that center around death yes oh okay yeah i i'm just gonna buy cookies and not ask any questions you better not trouble That center around death. That center around death? Yes. Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm just going to buy cookies and not ask any questions then. You better not. I don't want trouble. Yeah, so as Katie said, yes, Mrs. O'Leary's cow blamed for the Great Chicago Fire,

but we'll talk about that later because that's sort of a thing that is fascinatingly a myth. Also, there was a celebrity cow at one point named Elm Farm Ollie, nicknamed the sky queen because i'm sure everyone's wondering hey when's the first time a cow flew in a plane february of 1930 wow and it's this famous cow a lifelong dream has just been fulfilled to understand this she's like a charles lindbergh of cattle that's really like because i'm thinking of a plane, like to get a cow on a plane, I'm thinking about a big plane. And I don't feel like we had commercial airlines in 1930. So was it one?

Was it like a Spitfire plane? What kind of plane was this cow in? Yeah, we'll link to thedairyalliance.com because they have an article about great cows of American history. Oh, my God. And they have a picture of Elm Farm Alley boarding the plane, which looks like it's big enough for a cow, but not super big enough for a cow. You know what I mean? Yeah. I can see the side of it, and it doesn't look that large.

It's a cow wearing aviator goggles and a scarf and one of those hats, pilot hats. In my heart, it is. in one of those hats, pilot hats? In my heart it is. There's also a few other celebrity cows to mention because there were three cows that have been the pets of United States presidents. This is a thing that just happened in history

because also, like Katie, when you were talking at the top about not having much contact with cattle, I didn't really have that either growing up. And I think just in the past people did, like a lot. And so it was normal for the president to own a cow and just keep doing that. Of the three cows we've got, one of them was owned by William Henry Harrison. So now William Henry Harrison, who was only president for 31 days and then died, he has now an accomplishment where he had a cow. It was named Suki. It was a shorthorn cow. And then the other two cows we've got

were owned by William Howard Taft. Both of them. He had two Holsteins. One was named Moolie Woolie and then died. And then they replaced Moolie Woolie with Pauline. And both of the cows were used as working dairy cows

for the first family, especially Taft because he ate a lot. We've got pictures on the Patreon of Pauline grazing in front of the State Department because the White House lawn and the State Department were used for that. If you ask me to guess which presidents had a cow, William Howard Taft would be on my short list for sure. Yeah. Yeah. He's definitely the type. Yes.

Yes. my short list for sure yeah yeah yeah he's definitely the type yes yeah and so with there being more cattle types than anybody would imagine we've talked about weird ones and normal ones and celebrity ones the last time we have here is that there are dozens of other animals that qualify as cows surprise uh twist you've been you've been tricked listener oh oh oh dang it we've been using cows and cattle kind of interchangeably because that's how people talk. Yes. Cattle is the technical term for any animal of the genus boss, which includes basically all the things you think of as cows.

But cow is actually a pretty technical term. It really means a female. And with cattle, it specifically means a female that has given birth at least once. And a heifer is a female with no children. And then there's like a bunch of other cattle terminology, like a bull is a male and an ox is a cattle bred for draft work and so on. And a steer is a castrated bull, right? Yeah, that's right. It's a bull that has been castrated to be made into beef. So a steer is a whole nother farming term. A springer is a heifer that's going to give birth pretty soon. And then also there's that thing where, I don't know if people have seen like those books of names for groups of animals or like funny specific animal terminology that is the official term, but nobody

uses it. In English, there are a ton of animal species where cow and bull are the names for an individual female and male of the species. So if you're talking about whales, dolphins, or manatees, a female is a cow. Same with bison, buffaloes, moose, elephants, hippos, rhinos, giraffes, alligators, crocodiles, and plant-eating dinosaurs. Yeah. So dinosaurs are cows. Yeah. Didn't even know that.

Well, not all dinosaurs, but yes, the herbivorous ones. Well, not all dinosaurs, but yes, the herbivorous ones. I think most of these also, their offspring are called calves, except for maybe the offspring of the alligators and crocodiles whose offspring are called hatchlings. Hatchlings. Yeah, and calves is like a baby of cattle as well. That's what we think of as an actual calf. But it also can be like a whale, you know, or a dinosaur. Just freaky. So that's like a short rundown of all the different kinds of cattle

that you never would expect. And let's move on to takeaway number two. Almost all common knowledge about cattle bodies is a myth, is wrong, is made up. And by bodies, we mean their anatomy, physiology, intelligence, like everything about cattle. I think a lot of people think they know several things about cattle's bodies, and then they're almost all made up, which is surprising. So they don't wear roller skates is what you're saying?

I don't believe that. When you crank their tails, the milk doesn't come out? Alex, be serious. But there's a sort of belief out there that cows fart. And I think people would be surprised to learn that cows like almost don't fart. They do have a mechanism to fart to release gas. But what they really do is constantly burp and constantly poop. Right. Like when cows are generating methane, which is a gas that increases the rate of climate change, it's all coming out of their mouths and coming out of their piles of poop. Yeah, doesn't that, it has something to do with the way that they are ruminants, meaning that they have a rumen, which it sort of double digests food.

So a lot of this digestion that for non-ruminants is happening in the lower intestine actually happens earlier so like they have a lot of burps yeah but yeah they that like produce a lot of methane but they also yeah they they can release gas but it's mostly coming out when the poop is coming out or comes out from the poop. Yeah, that's right. And you're exactly right, because also another thing people think is that cows have four stomachs when actually they have one stomach that has four different pouches in it. And then the first two are an area that like takes food in initially and then pushes it back up for them to chew on it more.

Right, called the cud. Yeah, the cudUD, yeah. And cow farting has come up in a lot of talk around the Green New Deal, which is a potential policy the United States could do. And there was a working draft of how it could work that had an unfortunate joke about getting rid of farting cows in airplanes. And so then everyone latched on to, oh, they want to get rid of all the cows in airplanes, which is not true.

And the cows in airplanes. Right, the Sky Queen. The Sky Queen. Oh, no. The Sky Queen got canceled. Cancel culture's gone too far. Fly away from here, Sky Queen. You'll be safe.

Take to the skies. The laws can't reach you there. and uh and so then because the political discourse started talking about cow farts uh organizations like the associated press had to start doing fact checks where they talked to people like christopher field at the stanford woods institute for the environment so like all these organizations and experts and things had to get together and say that no cows almost don't fart uh the ap the AP asked Dr. Field and he said that the classic quote from the technical literature is the following quote of the methane produced by enteric formation in the fore stomach, 95% was excreted by erectation or burps. And then the

methane produced in the hind gut, 89% was found to be excreted through the breath. So, you know, about 90 to 95% of cow methane comes out of their burps and breathing. And the farting, like, they do have farts come out of themselves, but it's not important for our climate purposes. So putting, like, a diaper on them that stops them from the farts getting out, like, is not going to work. No like it's not gonna work no it's not yeah no matter how much i chase them around yeah so my idea for put balloons on the cow butts to trap the farts not a good one back to the drawing board there's also stuff that is not it's not just the methane from the cows it's also runoff from farms where

basically their their poop and excrement get run off into the oceans and this can cause a big release of this this basically like fertilizer into the ocean which causes huge algae blooms, which then can cause coral to suffer and coral reefs to suffer due to the way that the algae basically blocks light and takes up resources from the coral reefs. So it's not always super intuitive how cattle impacts the environment. But yeah, it's very significant. Yeah, it's like everything but the farts. It's, it's very significant. Yeah. It's like everything, but the farts, everything,

but the farts, it's, it's the farts have been a red herring. And then also they are doing an enormous amount of pooping. According to the university of Illinois, an average Holstein dairy cow produces 115 pounds of manure per day. So one day, 115 pounds of poop.

And then that manure just releases methane into the air until it's processed. And it has to be done carefully. There's also a story from Mother Jones that in 2014, a barn in Rostorf, Germany, burst into flames because there was manure from 90 cows in it, and they just hadn't dealt with it and hadn't ventilated it and boom, an immediate fire from all the gas. And also there's some like interesting frontier of cow methane and poop stuff going on. For one thing, a study by the University of Vienna in 2018 found that cow manure and elephant manure could be really good raw material for paper and for water filters and for other products that are

made of cellulose because uh the cows leave a bunch of cellulose in their manure and it's already been broken down a bit by the cow and it's a really good resource i have a notebook that i treasure that is made out of elephant poop oh that's fantastic yeah yeah it's just this uh it's paper doesn't smell bad i will say the texture of the paper is interesting because it was a little bit like you could see a lot of of the sort of natural fibers in it, which I think kind of looks neat. But yeah, I think it's one of those things where we're going to have to kind of get over ourselves and embrace the poop paper because, you know, come on. Yeah.

Grow up. It's just poop. Grow up, you guys. And also there's recent studies done at the University of California, Davis, that found that if we mix a little bit of seaweed into cow feed, it massively cuts down the methane coming out of their burps. That's really interesting. If you make their diet 0.5% seaweed, so less than 1%, you get a 26% decrease in methane.

And if you ramp up to 1% seaweed, that is a 67 percent decrease in methane and if you ramp up to one percent seaweed that is a 67 percent decrease in methane it's just a few initial studies but apparently this is a huge way we can impact uh what cattle are doing to the environment if we just give them a little like seaweed treat right trey joe's seaweed treat right so you can just give them a little a little california roll every once in a while. Yeah. All right. Off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess.

This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience,

one you have no choice but to embrace, because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Another myth here, and this is this may be a rural thing. Have you ever heard of cow tipping? Is that is that a Southern California? I've heard of it. I've never done it or known anyone who's actually done it. It seems a little bit apocryphal.

But yeah, I've definitely heard of it. Yeah, and I'd heard of it with my Illinois and Iowa upbringing. Cow tipping is a practice where people find cows that are sleeping standing up and then tip them over for fun. It's like a fun prank. is a practice where people find cows that are sleeping standing up and then tip them over for fun. That's like a fun prank. But it's also like just kind of an urban legend or rural legend, I guess, because cows, for one thing, they sleep laying down. Like that's horses that sleep standing up. Cows have the sense to like put themselves down to sleep.

Horses, on the other hand, are dumb. Right. I realized I put a value judgment on the horses. Yeah. Stupid idiots, those horses. But so cows, they sleep laying down, you can't go tip them over. And also they weigh more than 1000 pounds in most cases. And so a team at the University of British Columbia, a student named Tracy Beckler, and then doctor of zoology Margot Lilly, they ran the numbers on like the physics of if a cow was standing up, how hard would it be to tip it over? And they found that it would take probably at least two people if the cow didn't

resist, but the cow will resist and then you need five to six people. Yeah. But yeah, that's interesting. So you need five to six people. We've already established that there are about five people per cow. The math's all working out for the cow uprising. We're going to need five people to take down a single cow. Yeah. We need to produce more people. We're barely ahead, these guys.

And then finally, I think there's a myth out there that um cows are dumb the cattle are like stupid and sure they're animals but also it's even though it's hard to measure cattle seem to show pretty good intelligence i mean we're animals alex oh no we're all animals i am stupid now there have been a lot of different studies trying to look into just how much intelligence and abilities cattle have mentally. And they've generally found that cattle display long-term memory and spatial memory, can recognize individual cattle by their faces. You can tell a cow's mood by its ear posture, like it'll kind of show you. And then also there was a very fun study at Newcastle University where they found that happy cows produce more milk. Yeah.

Specifically that if you treat them affectionately and give them names, cows in this study increased milk production by more than 68 gallons annually. Yeah. Out of an average of about 2,000 gallons. So it's a small increase, but it's something. Yeah, I think it's really important to think about the welfare of animals, even if we eventually use them for meat, because they aren't mindless automatons that just stand around waiting for death. They are living, feeling animals. You know, in my opinion, that's important from an ethical standpoint, but it's also important from a standpoint of making farms function better.

I know that, I think there are these things called like cow rubbing machines. Fantastic. You know how in a car wash, those big roller brushes? Yeah. They have those, but for the cows, and the cows can just come up to them

and get this big roller brush that brushes them and massages them and they love it. And that it's, it's good, you know, it's, it's healthy for them to have that kind of, you know, the, the enrichment and the comfort that they get from these. And it actually, you know, I'm sure that probably makes them more happy and probably helps them produce milk. There's also, there are ways that you could potentially have a dairy farm that's a lot more comfortable and less stressful for the cow. Like there are these machines that basically you can train, like you can train a cow to get into a machine. So when a cow has a full udder, normally that milk would go to the calf. And if you're taking away the calf and using that milk for human consumption, the cow needs

the relief from basically getting that relief of the calf suckling the milk. So if you have an automated machine that the cow can basically walk up to, have the machine, you know, relieve the cow of the milk and basically you're milking it, then that can give the cow more autonomy, allow the cow to roam around when it's not needing to be milked and then just like come up of its own volition and get milked because it actually feels good for the cow to get that relief from like the swollen udders. So I just I don't buy that we have to have I don't think we have to go full vegan. But I think that we can definitely improve things for cows. I think we can actually have systems that improve things for cows and improve things for farms and farmers.

And anyways, that's my soapbox, my cow soapbox. It does seem like everybody wins if we view, not to, if we view cows as fascinating. The show's doing a good job. No, but like if we see cattle as interesting and as animals rather than just robots that we pull milk out of, maybe everybody wins. Like there's the developed practices of getting it out that they are happier with and that apparently generate more milk. Because when cows are sad, they produce a hormone called cortisol

that inhibits milk production. So if you make them happy, you get more milk. It's a good thing. Yeah, and so maybe this would actually improve the function of farms. Maybe in this case there wouldn't be a cost trade-off in terms of treating cows better. Yeah, it can be whatever we decide it is. Exactly.

That's how I got this glass of shark milk. We can milk anything, folks. That's not true. The frontier is limitless. That's not true. I don't know what that is, but it's it ain't milk. Well, moving on from my beverage. I think we have one more big takeaway for the episode, and it is takeaway number three.

Mid to late 1800s America was full of cow-based conflicts and disasters. Uh-oh. Cowflicks. Cowflicks, yeah. It turns out there were whole Civil War battles fought over people wanting access to cows. And one of them is the Beefsteak Raid in September of 1864, which is when an army of 3,000 Confederate troops rode 100 miles to steal Union cattle. Oh, jeez.

Like, they just wanted the beef. That was the entire purpose of the thing. And then they got in a fight with Union troops and there was an entire battle over it. Yeah, it is. I mean, when you think about it, cows are resources. And in war, there are a lot of bloody battles over resources. So when it was also it was toward the end of the war and it was like Robert E. Lee's army was kind of surrounded in Richmond and Petersburg.

And so they were just running low on food. So they sent an entire like cavalry army to steal more than 2000 Union cattle. They brought them back. And then the joke was on the Confederates because they didn't have any food for the cattle. So they just had to eat them all really really fast instead of like keeping them going so they ended up eating like way too much beef in a way that was unpleasant probably oh geez yeah so confederates i like to think like the cows made it like especially difficult for them just to stick it to them like oh you're not gonna like me i'm real sinewy. Take that, you racists.

Cow just high-fives Lincoln. Like, yeah, got him. Oh, and this was also this beefsteak raid was like big news and like a relatively large event in the war because it prolonged the siege a bit, but also Ulysses S. Grant bothered to write about it in his memoirs, and he called it, quote, a fair capture. And he noted that the cattle were, quote, sufficiently needed by the Confederates. So in his memoirs, he was almost like, well, you know, fair's fair.

Like they did a good job taking the cattle. That's so bizarre, though. Like fair's fair. They stole our cattle, but they did steal it. So, you know, they were they deserve props for successfully stealing cattle like what yeah because also reportedly like it was brought up to abraham lincoln and he reportedly said it was quote the slickest piece of cattle stealing he had ever heard of which is like these guys are just sitting around talking about cattle in the middle of a

major war for the country it's crazy it is kind of strange when you when you hear these old-timey people talking about war and this kind of like weird politeness when there's violent slavery and people killing each other going on it's like oh you stole our cattle that's a that's a fair cop very strange yeah yeah all the the the priorities and the decisions very odd yeah there was also there were apparently a lot of union missions to land troops in florida and steal confederate cattle there as this is going the other way too and so uh the state of florida the confederate state formed a first Florida special cavalry battalion, which was nicknamed the cow cavalry. And their entire job was to prevent the theft of cattle. I see.

And that was like all they did the whole war. Did none of these people know how to fish? Like eat a vegetable, you guys. Jesus Christ. Wow. War is terrible, isn't it?

It's very bad. And, and also there were further conflicts later on in the 1800s called range wars and we won't get into too much of the details of them but basically throughout the american west there was constant small-scale violence between different cattle ranchers and also farmers who didn't want cattle on their land and the worst one was the johnson county war which is 1889 all the way to 1893. For four years, a county in Wyoming just tore itself apart with rich ranchers hiring gunmen to fight smaller cattlemen.

Dozens of people were killed, and it ended in U.S. President Benjamin Harrison calling in the United States Army to break up this conflict between cattle ranchers in the frontier because there were like no laws and they were just shooting each other. Right, right. Just these outlaw cows going around, committing cow crimes. Oh, no, it was the people, Katie. The people were doing the crimes. Oh, okay.

Oh, I thought we were talking about cow bandits, but, you know, committing cow larceny. Yeah. Stealing lots of hay. Yeah, I think it sounds kind of silly when it's like, oh, they're doing all these fights about cows. But, yeah, again, they are considered a resource, and a lot of violence against people are is committed in the fight for resources and you know yeah that's kind of there's actually there's a terminology fact uh that we didn't touch on earlier but the word cattle it has its word origin in the lat capital, which is like capital, like value. And so what we even call these cows is based on the idea of money and wealth. And so like, they're basically an avatar

of money people are fighting over for all of human history. And also, there's a great book that we'll link to. It's called In Meat We Trust. It's by Maureen Ogle. And she talks about the history of meat in America. And one of the central things she gets at is that the colonization of North America and pushing people off their land and doing a lot of terrible things, a lot of it was kind of a giant eat more meat project. Like in colonial times, a European person who wasn't a king was lucky if they got to eat meat one or two times a week. And then as soon as there were colonies in America, the average person there was eating 200 pounds of meat per year. Basically every day they got to have meat.

And really ever since, we've been a country that loves to have things like cattle around because they let us be wealthy in dairy and meat and live like, you know, Louis XVI or something. It really makes you think. I don't have a joke there. It's just making me think. The millennia of greed is not funny? Come on, bits. Yeah. Bits, humor.

Waka waka. It's utterly bad. Utterly gets it. Yeah, there we go. One final cow-based difficult situation in the 1800s. Cow-based sin. This one is a myth because there was a real great Chicago fire in 1871. It started on the night of Sunday, October 8th. It was out by Tuesday morning, but it had destroyed $200 million worth

of property. 300 people died. 100,000 people, which was a third of Chicago's population, was suddenly homeless. And the whole thing, as I was kind of taught as a child, and as you were taught in song, you know, the Chicagoland Girl Scouts, you learn about this. It was all blamed on Mrs. O'Leary's cow. that was kind of the story and that was the story immediately even though there is no evidence that she or her cow had anything to do with burning down chicago it's all kind of a myth yeah do you think there was a little bit of like anti-irish sentiment mixed in there or anti-lower class kind of mixed in there yeah they're uh extremely uh because also mrs o'Leary was born Catherine Donegan

in Ireland in 1827, married Patrick O'Leary, had five kids. And then in Chicago, they had a home, and then they had a barn with five milking cows in it. And Mrs. O'Leary went to bed that night, and then was awoken of news of a fire involving her barn. But also a bunch of the neighbors had thrown a drunken party and people were stumbling around. Even before the fire died out, the Chicago Evening Journal was reporting that Mrs. O'Leary's property was involved and it was caused by a cow kicking over a lantern, even though it was just something kids told the reporter and they had no evidence of it. And then there was a Chicago Times report at the time describing Mrs. O'Leary as, quote, an old Irish woman. That's almost double with the weight of many years of toil, trouble and privation.

The old hag swore she would be revenged on a city that would deny her a bit of wood or a pound of bacon. End quote. Apparently. That sounds completely made up. Yeah. Newspapers were just like evil until very recently. They could just say anything. And so the city just went after it.

Wait, they can't just say anything now? But at the time, basically immediately everyone in town blamed Mrs. O'Leary because they wanted. And it was also a convenient thing where they could be like, oh, we're really blaming the cow. And it was also a convenient thing where they could be like, oh, we're really blaming the cow, but they were indirectly blaming the Irish lady because that was somebody they could discriminate against. society for this this uh this disaster when you know often it is not either not true or there are like you can see that there are other problems like infrastructure problems that really are the reason that these things happen but yeah it is a classic classic move because also with with any fire like this usually an actual investigation happens. Yeah. And even in the crazy chaotic 1871, the city of Chicago did like a police and fire commission board investigation. They spent nine days questioning 50 people.

They compiled more than 1,100 pages of handwritten evidence. And in the end, they said there was no conclusive evidence of any particular thing causing the Great Chicago Fire. Right. They said, quote, whether it originated from a spark blown from a chimney on that windy night or was set on fire by human agency, we are unable to determine, end quote. So she really didn't do it or else she did it and there's absolutely no trace of it being her. Yeah, like you can't just say, oh, it's because you left a lantern there with no evidence. Yeah. And just assume that's true.

Yeah, yeah. Once again, Girl Scouts perpetuating age-old lies. But there you go. Yeah, no, it is interesting to see these stories of how we scapegoat people and then it becomes these you know part of our sort of folklore and yeah but it definitely has that dark side of can you imagine being just this woman trying to make it in as an immigrant in a country and you're just you're doing farm work you're just trying to make it and then suddenly like every yellow journalism like uh pt barnum kind of guy comes knocking on your

door calling you a hag just and you've done nothing it's yeah yeah yeah and and folks katie mentioned pt barnum there because we have a sm have a Smithsonian article we're drawn on for a lot of this. And P.T. Barnum came to her place and asked Mrs. O'Leary to tour with his circus. And reportedly she chased him away with a broomstick. It's good for her. That's gross. She's not a circus act. Yeah, if she did, if she did it, which we don't know because, again, all of these newspapers lied at the time.

But yeah, if she did it, I hope she got him. I hope she walloped him. No matter how many circus henchmen he has helping him out. I assume rich guys are surrounded by henchmen at all times. Like a little clown car pulls up and henchman after henchman comes out. Clown humor. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to Katie Golden for helping me sort out my, you know, beverage situation. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

If you support this show on patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic, cow tools, as in a 1982 The Farside comic strip that made the world stand still. Visit SIFpod.fun to hear that show and back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring cattle with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, there are more kinds of cows than you ever imagined. Takeaway number two, almost all common knowledge about cattle bodies is a myth. And takeaway number three, mid to late 1800s America was full of cow-based conflicts and disasters.

Those are the takeaways. There you go. Also, please follow our guest. Be sure to check out Katie Golden's comedy writing, such as at ProBirdWrites on Twitter, and also at Katie Golden on Twitter, out of character. And that is Golden spelled G-O-L-D-I-N. And of course, look up Katie's incredible podcast creature feature in your podcast app, where you are right now. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article all about Holsteins, titled From Two Bulls, Nine Million Dairy Cows,

written by Maureen O'Hagan for Scientific American. A great book titled In Meat We Trust, An Unexpected History of Carnivore America, written by historian Maureen Ogle. Find those and more sources, many of them by authors not named Maureen O. You know, it's funny that worked that way. Those sources are at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the one and only Budos Band. Get more Budos into your life by visiting daptonerecords.com. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. See more of Burt's fantastic art on Instagram at Burt Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Special exploratory guesting thanks to Katie Golden, because here's a little treat since you listened this far. This is the second episode, but it is the very first one that was ever taped. So that's a big leap for a guest. It's a big leap for a host. I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, but anyway, Katie Golden deserves extra special thanks for plunging with me into finding out what this can be. And of course, extra, extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all of our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.