     Anonymous | Monday, March 26, 2001 - 02:16 pm
IT’S AS IF mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth pandemics could have been cooked up by Gary Larson, who was being whispered to by Michael Crichton: The crazy cows want to infect us all! They planned it all along! Now it’s crossing the oceans, the continents! The animals have turned against us!
Did you hear that? That sinister moo?
This had to happen. The way we blithely eat (and eat) in the first world, we were due a sort of twist on the “Soylent Green is people” moment. Something to make you put the fork down. Revenge was always lurking, on a planet where McDonald’s long ago gave up counting our consumption of fast-food hamburgers and just said, oh, heck, “billions and billions sold.” The cows knew. Of course they knew. And not just Elsie the Borden Cow, but potentially all our delicious, cloven-hoofed cartoon friends: the sheep we count at night to get some shut-eye, the prancing Bambis of our forests and suburbs, the porcines who sing songs and reveal a folksy (piggly?) wisdom to the entire barnyard. They’re killers. Viral, dirty things waiting to get back at us.
Think of all those strange news items from little towns, the ones about the farmer who has the heart attack while feeding the hogs and all that’s left is his hat. Or what about the global warming studies on what cow flatulence is doing to the Earth’s temperature?
PARADIGM SHIFT
What a fascinating paradigm shift for the advertising world’s cutesy-anthropomorphic animal kingdom: I’m your friend and I taste great! Cows are sweet. Cows are sacred. Consumers like the joke that cows aren’t as dumb as they look, that they talk to each other when we’re not looking. Cows are funny, like the cow-who-laughs on the French cheese, la vache qui rit. Two renegade cartoon cows paint “Eat Mor Chikn” across a billboard for Chick-Fil-A restaurants. Get it? The cows know more than they’re letting on.
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Cattle of pop lore have danced and sung for us, batted their eyelashes at us, jumped over moons for us, provided us the sunshiny breakfast table and vaunted celebrity milk mustache; the cheesy snacks, the ice cream social, the backyard barbecue. The bulls of lore have fulfilled our macho toreador longings — gamely giving chase at Pamplona, compliantly providing the Omaha slabs of steak. (“Free 72 oz. steak,” proclaims a billboard on Interstate 40, heading west to Amarillo — free, that is, if you can eat the whole thing. You can’t. But the cows know just how many of you tried. Just you wait, they said to themselves, dreaming of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, as we politely call mad cow disease nowadays.)
There are 5,000 or so cow-related items for sale on eBay. Old ladies like to start little cow collections. Salt-and-pepper shakers, kitchen clocks — that’s what mad cow disease used to be. Aunt Ramona went to Santa Fe and then redid her living room in bleached cow skulls and Navajo blankets. Certain hipsters — artists, fashion designers, Gateway computers — have an ongoing affair with the Holstein motif: If I put cow-pattern seat covers in the car, the reasoning goes, life will be that much wackier. If I carry a cow purse to the cocktail party, and wear the cow earring in one ear and the moon earring in the other ear, it says, hey, I’m a kooky gal.
PRIMAL WORRY
The animals are public enemy No. 1 now, because they’ve come to represent the latest chapter in our collective loss of control.
It’s time to rethink our relationship to the animals. Cows are out. Vegans, naturally, always think it’s time to stop eating the animals and wearing the animals, but this time it’s not about that. It’s about a more primal worry, sort of like worrying about terrorism. This airport? That federal building? My high school? It could happen. It could happen with the very next bite. There is nothing quite so dark as the idea that something is wrong with the food.
The animals are public enemy No. 1 now, because they’ve come to represent the latest chapter in our collective loss of control. In the last mad cow scare, the implicit lesson was that mankind had erred in feeding animal parts to animals. But we’re used to that: The singing and dancing hot dog walks out to the lobby to buy himself a hot dog. In other words, Soylent Green is animals.
Just when we think we’ve conquered the next frontier — the dot-com world, the Dow Jones, outer space — we stumble over something as ancient as herding, farming, tending. These malevolent cows have come home. |
